Kardan Stronos

Kardan Stronos is an Iron Father of the Iron Hands Space Marine Chapter and Head of the Iron Council, the body that governs the Chapter from Medusa. The Iron Hands do not appoint a permanent Chapter Master. Authority instead rests with the Iron Fathers, the Chapter’s senior technical and martial leaders, who sit together on the Iron Council. Stronos holds the chair of that Council by repeated reappointment, and this recurring renewal is the nearest the Chapter comes to conferring the standing of a Chapter Master on any single individual. His allegiance is to the Emperor and to the Iron Hands’ own traditions, and his significance in the wider galactic story lies in what he represents: the survival of a Chapter that governs itself by committee rather than by a single commander.

The circumstances behind this arrangement date to the Horus Heresy. At Isstvan V, the Iron Hands lost their Primarch, Ferrus Manus, together with the greater part of their Legion. The survivors reorganised around the Clan Companies, each led by its own Iron Father, and the Chapter has since declined to place a successor in the Primarch’s position. Stronos belongs to this tradition. The Iron Council deliberates at Medusa, the Chapter’s homeworld, and its decisions on the direction of the Chapter’s wars have repeatedly been brought back to him for resolution. Accounts differ on the exact course of his rise within the Council, and the detail of his individual campaigns is less firmly attested than his standing. He is best understood as an office-holder whose authority derives from the Council’s continued consent.

Stronos’s principal relationships are with the other Iron Fathers and Clan Companies, whose competing views on the Chapter’s course he is expected to reconcile. Ferrus Manus is no longer present to arbitrate, and the Clan Companies continue to dispute the direction the Chapter should take. Stronos is the officer able to bring such disputes to a conclusion in war rather than in schism. The Iron Hands’ doctrine treats weakness of the flesh with contempt and values mechanical austerity, and Stronos is recorded as embodying that doctrine rather than merely observing it. In the Orrery graph he is anchored to Medusa on the map and to the Iron Hands Chapter’s governance on the timeline. He remains active in the present era, and his office ties the Chapter’s Heresy-era losses to its continued service in the wars of the 41st millennium.

Stronos was born on Medusa and first served in Clan Vurgaan before transferring to Clan Garrsak on his promotion to sergeant. As Tenth Sergeant of Garrsak he fought in the pacification of Thennos, a rebel Mechanicus research world in Medusa’s own system, where the Iron Father Kristos almost killed him; his lungs were afterwards replaced with bionics and a metal tube took the place of his mouth and nose. He later served as Iron Captain of Clan Garrsak, trained as a Techmarine on Mars and rose to the Iron Council, where he opposed the Kristosian faction during the long Kristosian Conclave. In 460.M41 he and the Iron Father Verrox counselled caution before the assault on Gaudinia Prime, and when Kristos and his followers were corrupted there by Slaanesh in the Gaudinian Heresy, Stronos rallied the surviving Iron Hands and led their withdrawal. In the emergency council that followed at the Eye of Medusa he told his brothers that “with steel we are stronger, but without a soul we are nothing”, and he was elected war leader the same day, bearing the Axe of Medusa as the mark of the office.

His campaigns as war leader include the destruction of Waaagh! Grimfist in about 760.M41, when the Council reappointed him for the three hundredth consecutive year; the Fall of Bromoch in 765.M41, where he led Clan Raukaan into a Necron tomb beneath the drained seas; the Defence of Parathen City in 802.M41, where he beheaded the World Eaters’ champion Varlag the Butcher in single combat; and the Battle of Shemnoch in 900.M41, the culmination of the Crusade of Steel, where he led Clan Garrsak against the Necron Overlord known as the Crimson King. Under his leadership the Iron Hands also destroyed Waaagh! Drezgnod and the renegade Blood Heralds and purged Hive Fleet Moloch from the Regis System. He fought the Tyranids on Varasine, and in 998.M41 he led a strike force against the Farsight Enclaves on Fall’yth, after which he laid down his command and was at once reappointed to face Hive Fleet Leviathan. After the opening of the Great Rift he brought eight Clan Companies of the Iron Hands and two companies of the Brazen Claws to Vigilus in the War of Beasts, and he overrode the Magi Calculi to commit the Chapter to Roboute Guilliman’s Indomitus Crusade.