Event · M30

Ferrus slays Asirnoth

The slaying of Asirnoth is the most celebrated legend of the youth of the primarch Ferrus Manus on Medusa, set before the Emperor of Mankind found him in the late thirtieth millennium. Medusa, a quake-torn, cloud-shrouded world of nomadic clans near the Eye of Terror, received his gestation capsule in its far northern wastes; one telling holds that the capsule’s fall shattered Karaashi, the Pinnacle of Black Ice. Medusan folklore, preserved chiefly in the Canticle of the Travels, describes the young Ferrus roaming forbidden northern regions, overthrowing storm giants and destroying ancient machine-monsters sealed beneath the ice, of which Asirnoth, a great silver wyrm, is the most celebrated. Accounts of the slaying differ. One, recorded in the Index Astartes, places the fight in the Land of Shadows, a region of gloom even by Medusan standards, littered with colossal ancient devices and reputedly haunted by clan ghost-spirits; there Ferrus is said to have stalked the wyrm for days, battered it without marking its hide, pursued it across land and sea, and finally forced it beneath a river of magma, holding it down with his own hands until it melted away, so that his hands emerged sheathed in its living metal, pliant as flesh yet hard as ceramite. Another account, given in Angel Exterminatus, tells instead that Ferrus, exploring a rune-marked chamber too precise to be natural, inadvertently freed the imprisoned wyrm, which shrugged off his blows and fled, whereupon he swore to destroy the creature he had unleashed. Imperial savants have since proposed that Asirnoth was a Necron construct and the metal necrodermis. Medusan clans named Ferrus the Hunter for loosing the beast, and the deed was afterwards borne upon his personal banner. The Neimerel Scrolls, attributed to Ferrus himself, record his disquiet at the silver hands, which he called “not mine” and a mark of an evil he had ended, vowing one day to strip the silver from them. His name, Ferrus Manus, means ‘Iron Hand’.

See where Ferrus slays Asirnoth occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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