Feirocarne

### **Aliases**

the Threefold Horror, the Great Abomination, The Steelfleshed, Master of Melded Ones

### **Language(s)**

High Gothic, the Cant Mechanicus, the Dark Tongue of Chaos

## Biographical Data

### **Species**

Human (formerly)Astartes (formerly) Lesser Chaos Deity (Refers to itself as an Accursed Oneness)

### **Homeworld**

Vektonaan (Formerly) New Vektonaan (Present)

## Physical Description

### **Skin colour**

Grey and Black Flesh-metal

Feirocarne, once named Æthunrel Feirocarne, more commonly known as the Steelfleshed and the Threefold Horror is an immensely powerful entity created during experiments of the forces of Chaos Space Marine Legions and the Dark Mechanicum to better bind flesh, and daemonic essence to machine. It is the being at the epicentre of the Cult of the Accursed Oneness who leads the warbands such as the Melded Ones as a god-like figure heralding a new age with a new humanity for this cult. For millennia members of both the Adeptus Astartes and Hereteks to the Cult Mechanicus have

## History

### Early Life

#### An Intrigue Three Generations in the Making

There is a shockingly vast amount of information on Feirocarne's history and early life before its "Second Apotheosis" in spite of the sheer magnitude of its power in the Warp and its ancient origin. However, seldom few outside the upper eschelons of the Ordo Malleus know the truth that this individual and the being now known only as Feirocarne are in fact the same entity. Feirocarne originally born as a human noble by the name of Exlandre Æthunrel to the Imperial Knight House of Æthunrel. However, young Exlandre was born out of wedlock in a love affair between the eldest of the High King's daughters, Kaya and the adoptive son of his Kingsward. According to a report to the High Lords of Terra, Exlandre's presumed father was murdered by an Imperial assassin of the Callidus Temple at the request of his grandfather and the body swiftly disposed of in order to prevent genetic testing. The entirety of the House of Æthunrel was lied to and told that Exlandre was the son of newly wedded husband of the princess, Gaius Marne. This could not be further from the truth, and the upper eschelons of the royal court spoke of such in hushed tones. When the princess was to be married off to solidify an alliance with another house Gaius, the son they put forth, was handsome and very fit, but the princess saw no attraction to him as a match, when they were brought close to one another she fell immediately ill and was taken to the medical bay of their cruiser for analysis. For twenty years the High king had been able to hide his daughter's psychic abilities and keep her safe from the Blackships but the secret was seeping out, her betrothed was a very mild psychic blank, and she wretched from the presence that his black spot made in the Immaterium. It was very clear to the husband that his wife was a psyker, but he kept her secret, however he took to drinking, prostitution, and gambling to vent his pains. He was very surprised to hear a few months after their marriage that his wife was pregnant as he could not recall any time lying with her. This was because the princess lured him to sleep by means of drink any time he made an advance in order to limit her exposure to his psychic negating effects and the pain they caused.
The Kingsward was livid at the death of his son and the claiming of his grandson away from his bloodline. Left heirless and without hope he confided in the child's wet nurse Ellaria the truth. Ellaria had suspected as much and had been in unrequitted love with the Kingsward's son for some time. She requested to act as the boy's nurse in order to be close enough to him that when the time came he could be kept safe from his step-father's assassination attempts. By the time that the Crown Prince Consort realized that Exlandre had psychic abilities, and was not his son and planned to have him killed the boy was already five years old, and was on course to be gifted to a member of the Iron Hands seconded to the Deathwatch that the child might be placed in the hands of the chapter as an aspirant. Gaius legitimized one of his bastard sons who was the adopted son of the governor of a nearby systema few years later in place of Kaya's as a means of spiting the High King and his believed adulterous wife. In his mind they had stripped him of his right to a son and so he would strip the High king of his true succession by blood. In doing so he established the Diarchy of Vektunaan Systems, and tasked some of his vassals to track down the boy and kill him.

### First Apotheosis

The Iron Hands chapter at the time did not have enough Technomancy wielding Librarians after losing two in a previous battle and felt that it was the logical course of action to take a psyker compatible with the gene-seed of Ferrus Manus from any source they could get one. This meant that over the course of the next few years, young Exlandre was trained in the arts of the Iron Hands Chapter and was made a Lexicanium of the Chapter the very same day he was initiated as a battle-brother, being renamed Æthunrel Feirocarne upon the replacement of his hand with a bionic. In spite of the brainwashing and psychic wiping by the process of hypno-indoctrination used by the Chapter something stirred the young Librarians dreams. In the sleep cycles of his Catalepsean something occured which is still debated among Warp scholars in the upper echelons of the Inquisition. Whether it was the Four Great Chaos Gods, one of the Daemon Primarchs Undivided Lorgar and Perturabo, or the influence of his own subconscious in his psychic abilities, Feirocarne had seen throughout his training the morphed memories of his past. He saw himself melding flesh and bone mind and body with a towering machine that looked like a man. Feirocarne saw this as a vision of a way to cut away the weakness and lack of conviction in flesh through machinery without losing the adaptability and humanity of an organic body, a unity that is both fully living and fully mechanical. He sought the power to do this desperately, combing the vast archives of the Chapter for the ability to do such a thing, and in his obsession his mentor, Iron Chaplain Duravan Meielys revealed to him the truth about his birth and that the dream that he sought was likely an underlying element of his mind trying to convince him to have his consciousness reside between machine and flesh when sitting on a Throne Mechanicum. Feirocarne begged of his master to allow him to begin the process of changing paths in his military career, seeking to become an Iron Father by studying as a Techmarine under the Cult Mechanicus on Mars before learning under Duravan himself. After a year of plying, Duravan obliged him.

## Treachery

### The Seeds of Betrayal

While studying on Mars Æthunrel became enamored with Knights and Titans. He studied their maintenance and repairs as fervently as he studied the required rites of the Cult in doing so he caught the attention of a member of the Adeptus Mechanicus, an Archmagos named Trestinollon. Trestinollon was in fact a secretive member of the Dark Mechanicus and was secretly attempting to find Space Marine recruits for an experimental project. He eventually uncovered the reasons for Æthunrel's fixation and a stroke of providence in this specimen. He told Æthunrel that together they could take revenge upon his stepfather and reclaim the worlds of the Diarchy for themselves to use as a seed lab for the creation of Æthunrel's dream. This was an offer that Æthunrel could not refuse, and he began the necessary preparations to do so. Æthunrel called together a ragtag kill-squad from ten of his Techmarine trainee colleagues born of Iron Hands successors which he met from his study in the Cult Mechanicus.

### The Investigation

In order to take over this place Feirocarne would need to understand the world and its inhabitants, he attempted to find away onto a planet and did successfully find a potential avenue, a rogue trader by the name of Serrine Velurn whom, after a small measure of psychic persuasion to amplify wants, agreed to take him to the planet and anywhere he wished to examine in exchange for sexual favors. Serrine had him disquised as a vat-grown servitor by stripping off a variety of the armour parts from his suit and replacing them with sensors and large hydraulics and he wore a large visor over his face. During the arrival process he and the crew were having a discussion about the Diarchy and Feirocarne pondered the nature of his continued existence. If it was the case that he was the bastard of House Æthunrel's line, he would hold a bloodline claim to the entire realm. if this was the case why was he not tracked down or assassinated, he bore the name Æthunrel still, surely a High King of a combined empire of two Knight Houses could have easily afforded capable enough tracker or assassin to have found and killed him. He could have bribed his or her way through to the Adeptus Mechanicus to have the young Lexicanium killed in a suicide mission. Perhaps most easily an Inquisitor could be bribed and an allegation of heresy made that would result in his execution. Still no man was ever sent, no mission ever given, no heresy trial ever posed. He asked of himself why he was still alive. While Serrina did business with the locals and made an agreement with the rulers it was very clear the answer to that question, Gaius was not ruling the planet or this little vassal kingdom of the Imperium anymore. When Feirocarne made it to the throne room he did not find Gaius Marne, High King of the Vektunaan Diarchy, but Kaya and her new husband, Iulus Æthunrel-Marne. The set of systems was a Triarchy and was ruled by his mother who had married her stepson to retain power after murdering Gaius in order to establish a joint regime of the House Æthunrel-Marne. The last missing shards of his dreams came forth in his mind and his entire pre-Astartes life flashed before his eyes in a shock and awe inducing fashion. Feirocarne did his best to remain cold and stern to look like a semi-active servitor but it was apparent to the palace guards that something was suspicious.

#### A Coup Planned

Feirocarne had realized that his mother had absolutely zero concern for the life of her firstborn son, the son of her first love, and saw her destruction as a logical step in consolidating the power of the Adeptus Astartes of his gene-sire over the Imperial Knights of this part of space. Both were psycho-indoctrinated to defend their planet and the Imperium of Man but only one was psychoindoctrinated from early childhood to not value personal glory or biological succession over the needs of the Imperium. Æthunrel Feirocarne decided that he was acting rationally and mechanically as his Chapter had taught him, but was in fact very emotionally charged by his trauma in deciding that his mother must die by his own hands. He created a plan that would establish a potential means of taking down the Triarchy's leadership. The fastest way to take down any of the Knight House is to sow artificial, solvable discord among the Houses' higher ranking Knights and Barons both within and outside of their respective ranks. This forces every armiger and bondsmen of the House to have their Knight shutdown by their master's throne mechanicum and those in the upper echelons to seek a swift and unifying solution. Installing a biological claimant on the throne of the High King is the most immediate method to do this. Feirocarne would be a perfect fit if not for the fact that he as an Astartes could not father children. However Feirocarne would also most likely not die of old age and so long as he stayed within the Knight and so he could convince the vassals of the consistency of his reign. Feirocarne planned to lay a trap for the High Queen, not to kill her, but to force her to reveal that she was an unsanctioned psyker, while simultaneously paralyzing her heir from the waist down so that this second born son could not father children. During this time Serrina would bribe the aristocrats and goad them along until she established factions and was in relative capacity to keep tabs on both sides of the conflict.

### The Transformation

Trestinollon gathered the necessary minds allied to Abaddon which could perform the rituals of his experiment. He gathered a Butcher-Surgeon of the World Eaters trained in the creation of Eightbound, eight Word Bearers Masters of Possession who had the knowledge of a large number of the true names of Daemons, and a Warpsmith of the Iron Warriors trained in the creation of both Obliterators and Daemon Engines to perform each of their specific tasks. The Butcher-Surgeon began constructing an iron "eightcage" around the Throne Mechanicum of the Cerastus knight and feeding probes and needles into Feirocarne's cranial implants in a similar fashion to how he might embed them in the Butcher's Nails of a Khorne Berzerker. As this was happening the Iron Warriors' Warpsmith began injecting contaminated materials to infect Feirocarne's cells with the Obliterator technovirus. The Word Bearers' Masters of Possession each ritually called upon a Daemon, two of Khorne, two of Slaanesh, two of Nurgle, and two of Tzeentch, guiding their power into the probes and needles rather than calling upon Khorne directly to place eight Khornate Daemons in the trials. Feirocarne's mind was plunged into the Warp but was fully integrated with his ancestors echoes and the Knight which amplified the power of his mind and allowed him to defend against the immense challenges of an Eightbound. The Daemons were also far more prone to fighting against one another as they were not all from Khorne. While his mind was in the Warp his body was inside the Knight, and the makers of this monstrosity began their next phase. They used the True Names of the Daemons inside of Feirocarne to bind them to the Knight using a modified Daemon engine ritual as his body and his Knight merged from his infection with the technovirus. A pact was made coercively with the Daemons prior to this that they would be granted both his body and knight if they used their power to stymie the maddening effects of the Obliterator virus. When Feirocarne awoke the Word Bearers sorcerer's embedded the True Names of these Daemons in his mind so that he could use their power against the Daemons, conquering them and being a Chaos Undivided equivalent to an Exalted Eightbound. The final transformation erupted with corruptive energies and changed him swiftly.

Feirocarne had, like an Exalted Eightbound, conquered and fused with the Daemons possessing his body, but at the same time, these Daemons were bound as a sort of combined Daemon Engine tether to the Knight, breaking down and processing the echoes of his ancestors, and the machine spirits of the equipment which maddened Obliterators. Feirocarne was also fully attached to his Knight and contaminated with the technovirus, meaning as an Obliterator his entire body fused with the Knight and the resulting structure was fully organic and yet also had the properties of machines. Feirocarne was permanently one body and soul with his Knight, was the Daemons that he was possesed by through merging, and drew upon the power and strengthened connection to his body of the Daemon Engines. In doing so he was essentially both a fully fledged Daemon as it was the merging of eight Daemons into it, but it also had his own, absorbed human nature. His body was essentially a massive Obliterator-Knight armor hybrid meaning that this flesh-metal could regenerate the parts of his armor as his body. He was fully Astartes, fully Daemon, and fully machine all merged solely into one so that no one aspect had power over the other, or was separate from the other. It was from then on that Feirocarne referred to his nature as a "Oneness Accursed by Inquisitor and Tech priest alike." from this description he and those in the surrounding area were bound together through this ritual, all of the humans working in the massive forge being corrupted physically or mentally by the powers of Chaos, or even contaminated with a daemonic substrain of mutative virus which behaved similarly to Obliterator virus, albeit at a much less potent scale, and was capable of corrupting regular human anatomy without maddening or outright killing the corrupted mortal. These men and women would become the first members of the Cult of the Accursed Oneness and would serve to be the founding bloodline and propogators of his worship. Feirocarne would continue to reside in a massive, abandoned Adeptus Mechanicus forge, repurposed by the Cult to hold their new god, but it would only be a matter of time before the psykers of the Ordo Malleus sensed his tremendous presence in the Warp or discovered the presence of the Cult's heretical actions.

## Description

Feirocarne is a massive daemon-like entity made of a metallic fleshy material and steely sinew `shaped similarly in body to a warlord titan, but looking far more organic with a daemonic head. It is noted as bearing two mutations from each of the Chaos Gods. These are all derived from the Daemons it was merged with. It is described as having a massive pair of vulture like wings with metallic feathers similar to the wings of a Lord of Change. It also has an extra pair of arms above those of its titan arms. These arms are of Slaaneshi origin, identical to its titan arms, but with a singular edged pincer jutting from the upper end of its wrists . Its second Slaanesh trait is a massive sickle bladed tail. Standing with its massive digitigrade legs ending in hooves flanked by talons on either side derived from a Khorne Daemon, Feirocarne is gigantic, towering over even Warlord Titans. .