Fang, The - Exterior of the Fang: Built during the Great Crusade, the fortress-citadel of the mighty VI Space Marine Legion is one of the greatest bastions of the Imperium, reckoned the mightiest beyond the Imperial Palace on Terra itself. Vast beyond imagining, a single peak rears up on the horizon, as if the core of the world of Fenris had been shoved through its mantle into a terrifying, unmatched pinnacle, a conical mountain-mass soaring up into the darkening sky. Its flanks are sheer and snow-clad on jagged shelves of rock, glossy with ancient, undisturbed ice. In every direction, lesser summits crowd the view, clustering close to the broken skyline in the shadow of the Great One, the Shoulder of the Allfather; the volda hamarrki, the World Spine. Against the gathering dark of the dwindling atmosphere, tiny lights shine at the distant summit. They mark the habitation of the Sky Warriors, the abode of the demigods, itself a tiny fraction of the bulk of that vast peak.The inhabitants of that place, whether kaerl (armed Chapter Serfs or Thralls as the Space Wolves call them) or Astartes, called it the Aett. To the rest of the galaxy, awe-struck by half-snatched legends of Leman Russ' fortress and never likely to see it, it was just The Fang. Many times during its long history it has stood inviolable whilst the forces of disorder dashed themselves against it. The Fang is clad in armour of immense thickness and strength and is cloaked by Void Shields more powerful than those found on even the most mighty of the Emperor's warships. Dark shafts cut miles into the mountainside conceal potent defence lasers that are capable of blasting apart even the most heavily armoured spacecraft. These huge weapons are as ancient as the Chapter itself, the geothermal reactors that power them testament to the precious technology from the distant past.The peaks closest to The Fang itself had entered the legends of the Vlka Fenryka, etched on their communal consciousness since the Allfather had led them there in the half-remembered twilight of the Chapter's Founding. To the south was Asfryk, white-sided and blunt, the Cloudtearer. To the east were soaring Friemiaki and Tror, the Brothers of Thunder. To the west was bleak Krakgard, the dark peak where heroes were burned, and to the north were Broddja and Ammagrimgul, the guardians of the Hunter’s Gate through which Space Wolves Aspirants passed to take the Trials of Passage. The ways between the peaks were treacherous and known only to those who had trodden the paths as Aspirants. All were scarred with precipitous drops and deep crevasses. Some hunt-ways were built on solid stone, whereas others were on bridges of ice that would crumble to nothing with the first application of weight. Some led true, taking the hunter from the clefts in the shadow of the summits down to the plains where the prey dwelt; others led nowhere but into darkness, to the caves that riddled the bowels of the ancient landscape, full of nothing but ice-gnawed bones and despair.The Fang possesses two external gates known as the Bloodfire Gate and Sunrising Gate which connect to the opposite ends of the internal region of the fortress known as the Hould. The two portals are high up the sheer sides of the mountain, and stand at the termination of massive ridges between the peaks, allowing movement up towards them from the surrounding highlands. The ridges run up to the citadel gates like huge causeways of stone, each kilometres wide and worn smooth by the endless gnawing of the winds. In the half-forgotten millennia past, the Allfather and Leman Russ had walked on that same stone, planning the construction of the Aett together, seeing how the tortured landscape of Asaheim could be made to house the greatest fortress outside Terra. Russ had made it so that the two Gates overlooked entirely bare approaches, such that any massed advance on them would provoke a slaughter. The Gates themselves were wide enough for a hundred men to walk through abreast. The colossal structure of Adamantium, granite and Ceramite bristles with linked Bolter turrets, rocket-launchers and static Plasma Cannons. The firepower collected there is vast, the kind of arsenal more suited to an Imperial Navy Battle Group than a land-bound citadel. Across the entire structure stretches the citadel's Void Shields, glistening faintly as the oblique sunlight slants through clouds of burning engine oil.