Iron Hands - Ferrus Manus: The Iron Hands were the Xth Legion of Space Marines, created from the gene-seed of the Primarch Ferrus Manus. At the dawn of the Imperium of Man, before the Great Crusade had begun, the 20 gene-children of the Emperor of Mankind, the Primarchs, were scattered across the known galaxy through the Warp in a mysterious accident due to the intervention of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos. The gestation capsules of all 20 Primarchs were stolen from the Emperor's secret gene-laboratory deep beneath the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains on Terra and were flung across thousands of light years, all eventually coming to rest on backwater Human colony planets.It was this first touch of Chaos before the Primarchs had even been born that may have corrupted so many of them and laid the foundation for the agonising tragedy of the Horus Heresy that was to come. One of these infant Primarchs turned up on the dark, geologically unstable Feral World of Medusa in the Segmentum Obscurus very near to the Eye of Terror, his gestation capsule burning a trail through the cloud-dominated sky as it impacted the highest mountain on the world, Karaashi, the Ice Pinnacle. The impact shattered the mountain top, burying Ferrus deep in the ice in a tremendous explosion of steam. The land shook under the impact which could be felt all over the world. Mountains were toppled and great chasms were formed as the planet rumbled under the coming of the Primarch. Medusa rumbled with such ferocity that the Medusans later said that many of the world's mountains simply shook themselves to pieces.Years later that special infant, named Ferrus Manus by the Medusans (literally "iron handed" in the ancient High Gothic tongue), walked unscathed and already fully grown from the uninhabited mountain ranges of the far northern wastes where the Ice Pinnacle lay. The legends of the roaming clans, taught from father to son throughout the ages, revolve around the early exploits of Ferrus, who came to be regarded as a great warrior amongst the nomadic clans of Medusa. No one could match his strength of arm, try as he might to find a worthy opponent. He sought out every physical challenge that he could, always returning victorious. According to one oft-recounted myth, Ferrus once challenged a storm giant to a competition of strength. The giant lifted a mountain between his hands and set it back down a mile away.The giant's laugh died when Ferrus lifted the entire mountain range on his back, carrying it to a neighbouring island. The poor, humbled giant was never seen again. Ferrus travelled the length and breadth of Medusa, becoming well-known by all the clans and coming to know the land itself as no one ever had. He travelled areas that any other man would have found inaccessible. He climbed the highest mountains, he swam the deepest oceans, always pushing his levels of endurance and strength to levels unfathomable to mortal men. His strength and fury made him renowned and feared amongst the people of the clans who valued such qualities highly in their harsh environment.Ferrus was eventually adopted by the Medusan clans as one of their own. He never interfered in the various clans' conflicts, believing that such competition was healthy for his people and should be allowed to thrive. Because of this impartiality, Ferrus was ultimately accepted universally as an honourary member of every Medusan clan, and great (often exaggerated) legends like the one above were told of his deeds.Much about the formative years of Ferrus Manus on Medusa remains unknown, not so much through any deliberate veil of secrecy perhaps, but because what was later retold by the Medusans themselves was filtered through the barbaric folk-memory of their culture, while the Gorgon himself was taciturn on the matter to any save the Emperor. There have been many who have studied the formative situations of the Primarchs who have drawn parallels between the conditions in which Vulkan found himself on Nocturne and Ferrus Manus encountered on Medusa; both were found on savage, barren worlds riven by hostile conditions and both were home to primitive cultures, long cut off from the rest of Mankind during the Age of Strife. But beyond these surface features, the two worlds and, in particular, those who dwelled upon them could not have been more different.If what can be gleaned from the Medusan folk tales holds true, it was not into the clan-ranges he first fell in blaze of light that sundered the grey, shrouding skies of the planet, but in the northern polar regions, shattering Karaashi, the Pinnacle of Black Ice. This locale was one of many places the Medusans considered the accursed abodes of the malign shades of the dead and slumbering iron-skinned monsters of legend. This set the scene for the Primarch's entrance into mythic history, and the Medusan legends teach of him wandering the northern realms, casting down hulking storm giants, performing superhuman feats of cunning and strength, and slaying monsters and murderous machine-creatures left relic beneath the black ice of Medusa from bygone ages of war and slaughter.One such legend was of the titanic battle between the primarch and Asirnoth, the Great Silver Wyrm. This tale is recounted in the Canticle of the Travels, an epic Medusan poem of unknown origin that is still taught to the children of the clans at their parents' knees. The Wyrm was said to possess a skin of living metal that was stronger than any armour. It was said that Ferrus spent many days tracking the beast through the legendary Land of Shadows, the fearful homeland of the ancients, a place of mystery and terror. This place, long since lost, was said to be a land forged of metal and stone relics of giant proportions, the remnants of a forgotten age in the galaxy's history. The ghost-spirits of the clans were said to roam there once they left the world of the living. Imperial academics now believe that the description of the Land of Shadows given in the Canticle makes it sound very much like the Necron ruins later encountered by the forces of the Imperium in the late 41st Millennium. As such, Asirnoth may actually have been a C'tan or Necron construct created from their Necrodermis material, which is known to act as a type of "living metal".Ferrus was unable to defeat the beast with raw strength alone, his punches and blows having no discernible effect. Ferrus was eventually able to slay the creature, drowning it in a river of molten lava despite the agonising pain this caused him, and he bore it stoically. When Ferrus removed his arms from the lava, the Great Silver Wyrm had been completely destroyed, and he discovered that his hands and forearms were covered in the same living metal as the Wyrm's skin, which had flowed across his own flesh, protecting it, even as Asirnoth had been destroyed (or dispersed) by the heat of the molten rock. This was a substance that was as flexible as flesh yet as strong and impervious as the hardest ceramite. It is known that myths involving Ferrus and his metal hands precede the writing of the Canticle of Travels, but only in the Canticle is this explanation given as to how the living metal came to be fused to his body. The alien metal also altered the Primarch's physiology, for following the battle his eyes turned silver and seemed to lose their pupils, indicating that the necrodermis, if that is what the substance was, had also entered deep within his body. The reigning hypothesis among Imperial scholars at present is that Asirnoth was a Necron construct, some kind of guardian creature placed on the planet to protect a possible Necron Tomb or even the resting place of a true C'tan Shard, made of the "living metal" alloy the Necrons called necrodermis. It is possible that Ferrus was in some way polluted or corrupted by the Necron technology in the process of slaying the Great Silver Wyrm.When the Gorgon, as he had become known, strode forth from the forbidden realms of sundered Medusa to batter the disparate clans of his world into submission to his overlordship, he was already thought of as a living god by its natives. But while he did not require of the Medusans worship and did nothing to encourage it, he demanded obedience to his will, and bloodily broke any who would contest his word. Nor did he quell conflict or bring peace upon the planet, but instead he gave the Iron Fathers -- the half Tech-priests, half-shamans who ministered to the clans' spiritual and technological needs -- the fruits of his own intervention in exchange for the technological secrets they had kept down the generations. Through the Gorgon's teachings the Medusan clans then forged better weapons and stronger machines with which to fight to prove their worth to survive.Ferrus returned to the Medusan clans after his travels, filled with new and wonderful ideas, which he taught to all who wished to learn. He was able to craft strange and powerful tools and objects out of metal, shaping them with his living metal hands without even the need for a hammer or forge. Under his tutelage, the clans of Medusa became much stronger than they had been before his arrival and became capable of wonders that they never could have imagined possible. It was a time of greatness for the people of Medusa -- the civilisation of the clans advanced at a tremendous pace and the Medusan people became strong and proud.Ferrus Manus also led the bravest warriors of the clans to delve into the frozen realms below, breaking open long-sealed vaults and intruding into ice-buried fragments of the great machine-works that had plunged from the skies in ancient days in search of salvage and strong metal. In the depths, the warrior-bands and the silver-eyed giant who led them fought degenerate mutants, living-dead cyborgs whose decayed flesh hung in tatters from corroded metal bodies, and subdued the dark-engines of the nightmare ages that had gone before to take their plunder. By the time the Emperor had come to claim him for the Great Crusade, Ferrus Manus was warlord, demi-god and sage to the people of Medusa, and it is said that he was waiting, and that he more than half-suspected the true purpose of his creation.