Bjorn

Bjorn the Fell-Handed is a Space Wolf entombed in a Dreadnought sarcophagus and the oldest living member of his Chapter. He fought beside the primarch Leman Russ during the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy, and is the last of the Chapter to have done so. A warrior of Tra, the Legion’s Third Company, he later entered Russ’s Wolf Guard, and after Russ’s departure he became the first Great Wolf of the Space Wolves.

On the volcanic world of Gryth he fought the daemon Arvax the Arch-slaughterer. His pack was destroyed around him; he survived, drove the daemon from the field, and swore vengeance over the pyres of his kinsmen. Five years later he met Arvax again in a second battle whose location is not recorded, tore out the daemon’s throat, and earned the name Fell-Handed and a place in the Wolf Guard.

He fought in the Burning of Prospero against the Thousand Sons, and is reckoned to have lost his left arm there, though accounts differ on the precise circumstances. In the Alaxxes Nebula, after Prospero, he fought Alpha Legion boarders and, aboard Russ’s flagship Hrafnkel, counselled the Wolf King out of despair and toward a path of his own choosing. At the Battle of Yarant a wounded Russ gave him the Spear of Russ and temporary command; Corvus Corax then persuaded him to evacuate rather than die in a last stand.

When Russ left Fenris on his final Great Hunt in 211.M31, Bjorn alone of the Wolf Guard remained behind and later held the office of Great Wolf. During the Proxima Rebellion in 934.M31 he led a raid that freed Space Wolves trapped in the Dreadsun Fortress, but his wounds were beyond the Apothecaries’ art and he was interred in a Dreadnought; he abdicated as Great Wolf thereafter. For some five hundred years he still fought in the Chapter’s wars before longer and longer periods of stasis sleep became the rule.

He was awakened for the Battle of the Fang in M32, when Magnus the Red invaded Fenris, and under Jarl Greyloc helped hold the fortress-monastery. In the upper reaches of the Fang he duelled Magnus, wounding the daemon primarch before both of his own weapon-arms were destroyed; Harek Ironhelm’s intervention saved him from being cast into the abyss. He was not awakened for the First War for Armageddon, but during the Months of Shame that followed he was roused to meet the Inquisition’s siege of Fenris, refused surrender on the Fang’s high landing pad, and later ended the fighting by persuading both sides to stand down after Logan Grimnar killed Lord Inquisitor Ghesmei Kysnaros. In the Siege of the Fenris System at the close of M41, Wolf Lord Krom Dragongaze woke him for counsel, and he fought among the Dreadnoughts raised against the Thousand Sons and their daemons inside the Fang.

Between such wakings he rests in the Chapter’s vaults as both weapon and witness. The Space Wolves treat his return to sleep as a temporary absence rather than a loss, and when the Wolf Lords wake him the question they bring is still what Russ would have done.