Shadrak Meduson

When Isstvan V left the Iron Hands leaderless and their clans scattered, it was Shadrak Meduson who refused to let the Legion die with its primarch. A clan commander of no especially exalted rank before the massacre, Meduson rose in its aftermath through sheer refusal to yield, gathering the survivors of the Xth and of the other shattered loyalist Legions into a mobile campaign of vengeance against the traitors.

He rejected the blind, self-destructive grief that consumed so many of his brothers and forged it instead into strategy, hit-and-run raids, ambushes, and assassinations that struck at the traitor Legions where they were weakest and vanished before they could answer. Under his leadership the so-called Shattered Legions became a genuine thorn in the Warmaster's side, proof that the Iron Hands' iron had not all been spent at Isstvan. Meduson understood what his colder brothers could not, that vengeance is a weapon best wielded with a clear eye rather than a blind one. He became a symbol of endurance for a Legion that had lost everything, and in the shadow-war that followed the great betrayal, one of the traitors' most hunted and hated foes.