Ferrus Manus

Hard as the metal that sheathed his hands and twice as unyielding, Ferrus Manus was the primarch who taught a whole Legion to despise its own flesh. He was raised on Medusa, a world of ash and tectonic fury, and legend held that he earned his silver, living-metal hands by wrestling a great drake into the planet's molten heart, a tale of strength and will that became the Legion's founding myth. Brilliant, impatient, and intolerant of any weakness in himself or others, he forged the Iron Hands to mirror his own certainties: that emotion is frailty, that flesh is treachery, and that only the machine can be truly trusted.

In the Heresy that unbending nature became both his glory and his doom. He led the loyalist assault at Isstvan V burning to punish the traitors, and above all his fallen brother Fulgrim, once his closest friend. The two primarchs met blade to blade amid the massacre, and in a moment of fury Ferrus overreached. Fulgrim struck the Gorgon's head from his shoulders, and the Xth Legion, watching their father fall, was broken in a way no wound to the body could equal. Ferrus Manus died as he had lived, iron-hard, unyielding, and unable at the last to bend.