Canis Wolfborn

Canis Wolfborn is a Fenrisian champion of the Space Wolves, serving as the foremost fang of Harald Deathwolf’s Great Company. Before the Chapter found him, he ran with the wolf packs of the Fenrisian wilds, learning their hunting order and pack law long before he learned the tongue of the hall. It was Harald Deathwolf, prosecuting the Chapter’s duty to seek out strong blood on Fenris, who found the boy already possessed of instincts the Rout spends years teaching its aspirants, and who brought him back to the Great Company rather than leaving him to the mountains.

The Chapter made no attempt to remake him in the manner of an ordinary aspirant. He was given power armour and a Thunderwolf as a mount, and set loose to fight as the wild had shaped him rather than as the training cadres would have shaped another recruit. In this he stands apart from the Blood Claws and Grey Hunters who pass through the Chapter’s formal ranks under a Wolf Guard’s instruction: Canis answers to Harald Deathwolf alone, and takes no seat in the councils and rivalries that occupy the Great Company’s jarls. His place is at the front of the charge and the rear of the retreat, a role the Chapter has never asked him to relinquish for higher rank.

Among the Space Wolves he is spoken of as something closer to a spirit of the Fang than a battle-brother, a hunter who happened to be given a chainblade rather than a warrior taught to hunt. Canis does not encourage or dispute such talk. Fenris has always produced fighters who never fully leave the wild for the hall, even when the hall gives them a name and a place at Harald Deathwolf’s side, and he is counted among them. The Thunderwolves and the pack-kin of the Great Company recognise him as one of their own kind, a bond the Rout values without troubling to explain it to those outside the Chapter.

Canis Wolfborn remains active in Harald Deathwolf’s service, his standing measured less by rank than by his constancy at the Wolf Lord’s side in every campaign the Great Company has fought. Beyond his origin and his role as champion, little of his personal history is recorded; the Chapter’s accounts concern themselves with his deeds in Harald Deathwolf’s company rather than with the years he spent among the wolves before it began.