Iron Hands - A New Resolve: On Gaudinia Prime, the Iron Hands had survived a deadly trap, yet it had taken its toll. Lost manpower could be recouped over time, lost vehicles repaired or replaced, yet the psychological wounds the Chapter had suffered might yet prove fatal. Nearly a third of the Iron Council had fallen into the daemon's trap and been lost to Chaos corruption, along with many of their Battle-Brothers. Should this revelation ever reach the Inquisition, it would be disastrous. The Iron Hands found themselves forced to question the very principles upon which they based their existence.The Kristosians had held absolutely to the tenets of the Tempering, their literal interpretation but an expression of the direction in which the Chapter had been moving for thousands of years. Iron over flesh; logic over emotion; the merciless, relentless purge of those weaknesses that threatened ruin. Yet what if this very obsession with emotional excision and the perfection of the machine was a weakness in its own right? Much reduced, reeling in the wake of the revelations they had been forced to confront, the Iron Council threatened to disintegrate. In an emergency session of the council, panic bubbled beneath the surface as dozens of theories, arguments and proposals were aired and dismissed. How could the Chapter continue, voices asked, if everything they did, everything they stood for, was tainted by the very weakness they had striven against for so long? It was in this moment that Kardan Stronos came to the fore.Rising from his throne, Stronos unplugged himself and addressed his brothers with his unalloyed, natural voice. The Chapter had been given a gift, he announced. Though their foes tried to lay them low and corrupt their purpose, the Iron Hands had instead seen the potential for darkness within themselves, and had overcome it. It was at the booming culmination of this speech that he delivered his immortal words, a quote that would be enshrined upon Ironglass plaques across Medusa and beyond from that day forth. "With steel we are stronger, but without a soul we are nothing."This would be the first day in ten thousand standard years that the Eye of Medusa had rung to the sound of applause. Despite disquiet from the few remaining Kristosians and the Voice of Mars, Kardan Stronos was elected the Chapter's war leader that same day, and has been reelected at every opportunity since. The words of Kardan Stronos had not affected an instantaneous change in the Iron Hands. One speech could not reverse thousands of years of indoctrination, even had every last Iron Hand been open to its message. Yet it was the beginning of something -- a slow but palpable shift in attitude that would take centuries, beginning with the Iron Council and filtering outward into the broader Chapter as the years rolled by.Following Epistolary Lydriik and Iron Chaplain Shulgaar's elevation as Iron Fathers, the number of the Chapter's Librarians and Iron Chaplains accorded this honour steadily grew. Logic still drove the Iron Council's calculations, yet they were always on guard against the dangers of heresy, and efforts were made to curb the most inhuman of their impulses. Most importantly, on the battlefield, the Iron Hands tempered mechanical logic with an edge of their Primarch's wrath. They would never reject the steel in their hearts, yet many Battle-Brothers now forged it anew in the fires of their rekindled souls.