Deep within the Iron Hands Legion's flagship, the Gloriana-class Battleship Fist of Iron, lay a hidden chamber far from the bustle of the bridge and the thunder of the Forge Temple.
There were no banners from the Hall of Glory here, no dim glow from the Meditation Chamber, only a stark, utterly functional desolation that bordered on the sepulchral.
The cold metal walls bore no decoration. Exposed conduits coiled overhead like dead blood vessels, and the only illumination came from a few solitary lamps casting a pallid light that sharpened every edge and turned the shadows ink-black.
The air carried the pungent smell of sterilizing agents, the faint sweetness of coolant, and a deeper scent belonging to metal itself and to silence. It was a carefully maintained silence, a silence that waited.
The Primarch Ferrus Manus stood in the center of the chamber like a statue cast from black iron and shadow.
His towering frame was encased in heavy Terminator Armour, but the armour that symbolized strength and craftsmanship offered no warmth now. Instead, it seemed to have absorbed all the cold in the room.
He wore no Helmet. His iron-hard face resembled metal tempered through countless hammer blows, cold, unyielding, and profound, every minute mark upon it a groove carved by a chisel.
His eyes, which had once blazed with the fires of the forge and an indomitable will, were now as still as two deep wells, reflecting the two silent ranks before him.
They were dozens of Astartes.
Or rather, they had once been.
They had been "Morok," Ferrus Manus's Primarch Guard, the supreme embodiment of steel joined with flesh, the Legion's sharpest spear and hardest shield.
Yet the brutal crucible of the Hrud Campaign had burned away too much.
Those standing here now were the survivors of