Berossus

Berossus was a Warsmith of the Iron Warriors who fought through the Great Crusade before grievous wounds saw him entombed within a Dreadnought sarcophagus. From within that machine he continued, in later ages, to pursue the grievances of Perturabo, primarch of the Fourth Legion, from the Iron Warriors’ bastion-world of Medrengard. Confinement to a Dreadnought sarcophagus did not, in Iron Warriors tradition, mark the end of a commander’s authority; for a Legion that prized siegecraft and grudges kept beyond death, it was a continuation of rank by other means, and Berossus retained his Warsmith’s status among the Legion’s warbands.

Raised on Olympia and shaped by the Iron Warriors’ Great Crusade record of prolonged siege warfare, Berossus served the Warsmith of Khalan-Ghol on Medrengard, one of the Legion’s many fortified holdings on that daemon world. When the Warsmith of Khalan-Ghol’s authority lapsed, a succession dispute broke out among the stronghold’s claimants and widened into a civil war fought with siege engines and fortress artillery, in keeping with the Iron Warriors’ habitual mode of settling disputes. Out of that conflict rose Honsou, a commander of irregular origin whose eventual mastery of Khalan-Ghol marked a break from the Legion’s established hierarchies.

Berossus did not adapt to the changed order that Honsou represented. He answered the crisis as an Iron Warrior of the old pattern: by increasing his firepower, holding to the Legion’s established doctrine, and maintaining its long-standing contempt for those it judged unworthy of command, Honsou included. This rigidity placed him at odds with a warlord who valued usefulness over lineage, and it left Berossus isolated among Khalan-Ghol’s new order even as he retained his formal rank.

Honsou killed him. A Warsmith remained a rival regardless of the sarcophagus that housed him, and Honsou was not disposed to preserve rivals he could not put to use. Berossus’s end illustrates the treatment meted out to Medrengard’s senior commanders once Honsou’s ascendancy was secured: rank and past service counted for little against a new Warsmith’s judgment of present utility, a pattern that recurred among the Iron Warriors of Khalan-Ghol in the aftermath of the civil war.