Ferrus Manus

Ferrus Manus, whose name is High Gothic for ‘Iron Hand’ and who was called the Gorgon, was primarch of the Iron Hands, the X Legion, and among the first primarchs recovered during the Great Crusade. He was created on Terra under the Emperor’s Primarch Project and, like his brothers, was scattered across the galaxy as an infant when the gestation chambers were broken apart. His capsule fell upon Medusa, a quake-riven world wrapped in perpetual cloud near the Eye of Terror, and was found amid the wastes roamed by its nomadic clans. Among the Medusans he was also known by other epithets, including the Cataclysm, the Hunter and the Finality.

He is said to have emerged from the northern wastes already grown to manhood, and to have sought trials by which to measure his strength against the world that had raised him. Greatest among these was his battle with Asirnoth, a wyrm of living silver metal, which he drowned by driving it into a flow of magma; the molten metal of its body, held by Imperial savants to have been necrodermis, cooled and fused to sheathe his hands and forearms. Accounts of his dealings with the clans differ: one holds that he taught them technology while refusing to take sides in their rivalries, another that he battered the clans into submission before trading knowledge with their Iron Fathers.

When the Emperor came to Medusa in search of his lost son, Ferrus met him in single combat, a contest said to have levelled mountains; he then accepted the Emperor as his father and took command of the X Legion, renamed the Iron Hands and made the core of the 52nd Expeditionary Fleet, with Medusa as its recruiting world and its Chapters reorganised as Clans. Soon after he reached Terra, Ferrus met Fulgrim, primarch of the Emperor’s Children, beneath Mount Narodnya; there the two forged weapons for one another, Fulgrim making the hammer Forgebreaker and Ferrus the sword Fireblade, and it was Fulgrim who named him Gorgon. Guilliman later numbered Ferrus among the “Dauntless Few”, with Dorn, Sanguinius and Russ.

Ferrus led his Legion in person across many campaigns. At the Fall of the Lords of Gardinaal in 869.M30 he took command after the 413th Expeditionary Fleet failed to secure compliance, refused the Lords’ surrender, razed their capital and broke the last Lords in person before sparing the survivors. During the Astranii Campaign, with Dorn and Horus, he and the Mechanicum demanded the destruction of the Astranii as hereteks, a dispute settled only by an honour duel Ferrus himself halted. At the Corollis Star he fought beside Fulgrim against the Diasporex, where his flagship Fist of Iron rescued Fulgrim’s stricken gunship. During the Compliance of One-Five-Four Four, called Caldera, with Vulkan and Mortarion, Eldar farseers drew him into a psychic labyrinth to warn him of his fate, a prophecy he rejected outright.

Ferrus was known for ruthless pragmatism and contempt for weakness, and for a close bond with the Mechanicum that shaped his Legion’s own distrust of the flesh; private writings attributed to him, the Neimerel Scrolls, record his resolve that once the Crusade was ended he would strip the silver from his hands and turn the Iron Hands from that distrust. When the Heresy broke, Fulgrim came to him in the Callinedes System aboard the Fist of Iron and sought to win him to Horus’s cause; Ferrus attacked him in fury, and Fulgrim left him unconscious, taking Forgebreaker, while the Emperor’s Children’s ships fired on the Iron Hands fleet as they fled. Ordered by Dorn to Isstvan V, Ferrus arrived ahead of the main force with his fastest ships and veterans, persuaded Vulkan and Corax to attack without delay, and led his Morlock Terminators into the Traitor centre; pursuing Fulgrim against counsel, he was beheaded by Fulgrim’s daemon-possessed Laer blade as the second wave turned. Fulgrim gave the head to Horus, who kept the skull and spoke to it. No body was recovered, and a legend that he was carried to Mars and restored is rejected by the Iron Hands; Clan Kaargul keeps a vigil for his return, and accounts tell of his skull being returned to the Legion by Guilliman and Dorn as part of a pact over the Codex Astartes, and of apparitions seen after his death. Ferrus Manus is recorded as having died in 006.M31.