Event · M30

Meeting at Mount Narodnya

Beneath Mount Narodnya in the Urals, Terra’s greatest forge, Ferrus Manus laboured in the early years of the Great Crusade alongside forge-masters once bound to the Terrawatt Clan, demonstrating the craft of his living-metal hands. There he was found by Fulgrim, primarch of the Emperor’s Children, who arrived with his Phoenix Guard and declared that he had come to forge the most perfect weapon to carry into the Crusade. Ferrus laughed and said no pale-handed swordsmith could match him; Fulgrim took up the challenge, and the two stripped to the waist and worked the forge without pause for some three months, while the artisans of the mountain prostrated themselves before them. Fulgrim raised the thunder hammer Forgebreaker; Ferrus wrought Fireblade, a golden sword that burned with the forge’s own fire. Each declared the other’s work the finer, and in token of this they exchanged their weapons, sealing a friendship that became one of the most celebrated of the age. Afterwards, at the Imperial Palace, where Sanguinius had lately brought gifts of Baalite statuary and gems, Ferrus dismissed such ornament as idle waste, prompting Fulgrim to call him a terrible gorgon — a name that endured. Some on Terra traced it to the Olympian legend of a creature whose gaze turned men to stone; those closest to Ferrus held that he relished it all the same. The bond between the Phoenician and the Gorgon remained renowned throughout the Crusade, until it ended at Isstvan V.

See where Meeting at Mount Narodnya occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.

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