Honsou

Honsou's beginnings were an insult he could never escape. His gene-seed was a thing of contradiction, drawn from the flesh of a captured Imperial Fist and melded with that of a slain Iron Warriors Apothecary by the infamous Chaos vivisector Fabius Bile. An accident in Bile's laboratory defaced the vessel that held the raw material, leaving only two syllables legible upon it, and from that ruined label came the name Honsou. To carry within him the gene-stock of the hated Imperial Fists marked him forever, and his brothers scorned him as a half-breed unworthy of true kinship.

Contempt only sharpened his ambition. During the brutal siege of Hydra Cordatus, where the Iron Warriors stormed an Imperial citadel to seize a hoard of precious gene-seed, Honsou proved himself the equal of any full-blooded warrior. His success secured the prize and paved the way for his Warsmith's ascension to daemonhood, and as the sole surviving captain of the assault, Honsou was raised to the rank of Warsmith in his stead. The half-breed once mocked and belittled now commanded a grand company of the Legion, and had no intention of ever kneeling again.

Charged with returning the captured gene-seed to Medrengard, the Iron Warriors' daemon world in the Eye of Terror, Honsou gave most of it to Abaddon as demanded, but secretly kept a portion for himself. With that stolen genetic wealth he built a monstrous engine of creation, the Daemonculaba, a fusion of arcane craft and blasphemous flesh-work that birthed new Heretic Astartes to swell his ranks. It was a horror even by the grim standards of the Iron Warriors.

Of all the enemies Honsou made across his long, artificially prolonged life, one rose above the rest: Uriel Ventris of the Ultramarines. Their feud became a consuming obsession that he pursued with a spite beggaring belief. To wound a single hated foe he laid waste to a whole world, loosed a Daemon Prince from its bindings, and slew almost half the Ultramarines Chapter, counting the cost as nothing beside the pleasure of Ventris's suffering. From the Daemonculaba he even wrought the Newborn, a warp-touched creature cloned from Ventris's own flesh to torment its progenitor.

Honsou is the Iron Warriors distilled to their bitterest essence: pragmatic, merciless, and wholly without illusion. He wastes no love on gods or brothers, wielding the powers of Chaos as tools and trusting only in his own cunning and cruelty. Attended by murderous champions such as Cadaras Grendel, he carves his path by siege and slaughter, a self-made warlord who took the scorn of his kin and forged it into a weapon. Few among the Heretic Astartes are as relentless, or as inventively vicious, as he.