For the Iron Hands, this meeting by the lake at Hera Fortress was a violent shock to the soul, far more intense than any brutal battle they had ever endured.
The good news was that they had finally seen their Primarch, who had fallen more than a century ago. Though Ferrus existed in a form quite unlike what they had imagined, that was not what mattered.
Their loyalty and filial devotion to their Primarch, transcending life and death, easily shattered the shell of rationality they had so carefully built.
But the bad news was that the Primarch they had met expressed profound disappointment in them, bluntly declaring that the Legion's development since the Horus Heresy had wholly betrayed his will and expectations.
Ferrus's words were like an icy hammer, crushing the ideals they had taken such pride in.
To the Iron Hands, it might have meant no less than if they had all died in the Horus Heresy, with the Tenth Legion utterly extinguished and left without a single successor.
"Why? Why, Father? Why did you keep allowing it, guiding us to become this way, when you clearly never wanted us to?"
"I cannot accept this. The weakness of flesh is suffering; ascension through machinery is the true path."
"This was the only truth we reached through blood and sacrifice, through the great purge within the Legion—humanity's weak, chaotic, uncontrollable nature was the root cause of the Great Rebellion."
"If we are not to repeat the same mistakes, then we must cast aside those weaknesses."
What should have been a warm reunion between father and sons suddenly veered toward the edge of collapse.
Even as a Primarch, Ferrus could not overturn a century of ingrained thought patterns and extreme doctrines with a single sentence.
For at their root, the Tenth