Event · M30

Discovery of Ferrus Manus

Ferrus Manus, like his brother primarchs, was cast from Terra as an infant during the scattering and fell to Medusa, a cloud-wreathed, geologically restless world of nomadic clans in Segmentum Obscurus, near the Eye of Terror. Tradition holds that his gestation-capsule struck the uninhabited northern wastes, the region later called Karaashi or the Black Ice Pinnacle, with a shock felt across the planet. He is said to have emerged from those northern mountains already grown to manhood, and, unlike several of his brothers, he did not immediately take up with the clans but instead sought out trials of strength, the most celebrated being his contest with the wyrm Asirnoth, whose metal came to sheathe his hands. Medusan legend credits him with leading clan warriors into ice-sealed vaults and the ruins of fallen machine-works, salvaging ancient devices and fighting the mutants and cyborg remnants that infested them. Accounts of his rule over Medusa diverge. One tradition holds that he shared his knowledge of technology freely, allowing the clans to advance swiftly, while he himself declined to intervene in their rivalries, regarding their competition as wholesome. Another holds that he instead subdued the clans by force, demanding their obedience as overlord while leaving their internal wars unchecked, and that he traded knowledge with the Iron Fathers, enigmatic figures part tech-priest and part shaman, in exchange for their guarded secrets. It was to Medusa that the Emperor of Mankind came in person, and there, by most reckonings, that Ferrus Manus was among the earliest primarchs to be found, after Horus and Leman Russ. Father and son are said to have tested one another in combat of such ferocity that it laid waste to mountains; finding in the Emperor an equal, Ferrus Manus accepted him as master and assumed command of the X Legion. He subsequently reorganised the Legion in Medusa’s image, renaming its Chapters as Clans and displacing native clan leaders with Terran-born Space Marines, while Medusa itself became the Legion’s recruiting world; the Legion, renamed the Iron Hands, became the heart of the 52nd Expeditionary Fleet. From conquered worlds slow to submit, he is recorded as having exacted a tithe of youths to be raised and trained on Medusa.

See where Discovery of Ferrus Manus occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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