Rodricus Grytt

Rodricus Grytt is a Veteran of the Imperial Fists who chose the endless vigil of the Deathwatch over the highest honours his own Chapter could offer. When the captaincy of the Imperial Fists' Ninth Company was laid before him, Grytt refused it, judging that his talents were better spent on the front line with a weapon in his hands than behind the desk of command. In doing so he turned his back on a path many brothers would have killed to walk, and gave himself instead to the Long Watch and its war without end against the alien.

Within the Deathwatch, Grytt serves as a Devastator, a heavy-weapons specialist who wins his battles through the precise and overwhelming application of firepower. He harbours an abiding love of heavy weaponry of every kind, but it is the Frag Cannon that he holds dearest, a short-ranged and temperamental engine that spews clouds of armour-shredding shrapnel into the massed ranks of the foe. In his hands the capricious weapon becomes an instrument of grim certainty, each thunderous discharge carving bloody lanes through whatever xenos horde dares to close.

In the closing years of the 41st Millennium, Grytt was numbered among the heroes of Kill Team Cassius, the celebrated band assembled by the Ultramarines High Chaplain Ortan Cassius and seconded to the watch fortress of Talasa Prime. Drawn from many Chapters, its members were bound by a single purpose, and when Cassius led them to the mining world of Ghosar Quintus they uncovered a horror festering beneath its surface: a sprawling Genestealer Cult poised to deliver the world to a descending hive fleet.

Amid the honeycombed tunnels and industrial sprawl of Ghosar Quintus, Grytt's Frag Cannon came into its own. Where the cult's hybrids and purestrain Genestealers surged from the dark in overwhelming numbers, the Imperial Fist met them with a storm of shrapnel, holding chokepoints and shattering charges that would have engulfed a lesser warrior. His stand embodied the ideal for which he had forsaken his captaincy: a single Space Marine, perfectly placed and perfectly armed, standing as an unbreakable bulwark between the Imperium and the devouring hunger of the xenos.