Fenris: The Death World of the Wolves

On the wild edge of the Segmentum Obscurus turns a world that should by all reason be uninhabitable, and yet from its ice and fire it forges some of the deadliest warriors in the galaxy. Fenris is the home of the Space Wolves, the most savage and independent Chapter of the Space Marines, and its brutal nature is the crucible in which their legend is made. Only the strong survive here, and only the strongest of those are ever raised to something more.

A World of Fire and Ice

Fenris follows a wildly eccentric orbit around its dim red sun, a star the natives call the Wolf's Eye, and a single circuit takes close to two Terran years to complete. This long passage is known as the Great Year, and it drags the planet through extremes that would annihilate any gentler world.

As Fenris swings close to its star the ice caps melt, volcanoes erupt, and the seas boil and heave, drowning the land in fire and flood. Then, as it recedes into the cold, the whole world freezes over until it resembles a single white ball of ice. New islands and continents rise and vanish with the seasons, so that the very geography of the planet is never the same from one Great Year to the next.

The People of the Ice

Against all odds, humans live upon Fenris, clinging to survival on the northern polar continent of Asaheim, the only landmass stable enough to endure the seasonal cataclysms. Here dwell the hardy tribes of Fenris, a people who have never known anything but hardship, raiding and warring among themselves for the precious scraps of habitable ground.

They are a fierce, sea-faring folk, sailing longships between the fjords, hunting monstrous beasts, and dying young in feuds and storms. Their world spawns horrors to match their ferocity: giant ice bears and shaggy mammoths, sea serpents the tribes name krakens, and stranger things still that haunt the glaciers. To reach adulthood on Fenris is itself a mark of exceptional strength, and it is from these tribes that the Space Wolves draw their recruits.

The Fang

Rising from the polar continent is the greatest mountain on the planet, and within it stands the Aett, the fortress the wider galaxy knows as the Fang. It is the fortress-monastery of the Space Wolves, a citadel driven so deep into the rock and thrust so high into the sky that it dwarfs the strongholds of almost any other Chapter.

From the Fang the Space Wolves keep watch over Fenris and the wider region of space around it. Within its halls lie forges, kennels for the great Fenrisian wolves that fight alongside the Chapter, feasting-halls fit for the warrior-culture the Space Wolves cherish, and the vaults where their gene-seed and their sagas are kept. It has weathered siege after siege and never once fallen to an enemy.

Forging the Sky Warriors

The tribes of Fenris know the Space Wolves as the Sky Warriors, believing them heroes carried off by the gods when they fall in battle. In truth they are watched by the Chapter's Wolf Priests, who observe the tribal wars and hunts for individuals of extraordinary courage and prowess, claiming the worthy at the very moment of their death.

Those chosen must survive a series of brutal trials before they can be remade. The greatest of these is the Test of Morkai, in which the aspirant is given his first taste of the Chapter's gene-seed and cast out into the frozen wilds; only those who master the change and return alive to the Fang are accepted. The transformation is completed when the initiate drinks the Canis Helix, the Spirit of the Wolf, from an ancient relic known as the Cup of Wulfen.

The Curse of the Wulfen

The gene-seed of the Space Wolves carries a flaw, a legacy of their primarch's own blood that no other Chapter must endure. Deep within every Space Wolf sleeps the Curse of the Wulfen, a bestial strain that can rise up and overwhelm a warrior's mind, twisting him into a snarling, half-wolf creature of tooth and claw.

Most Space Wolves master the beast within and channel its savagery into battle, and the youngest and most reckless of their number, the Blood Claws, are famed for hurling themselves into the fray with wild abandon. But some are consumed entirely, becoming the Wulfen, and the Chapter regards their fate with a mixture of pity and dread. It is the price of the ferocity that makes the Space Wolves what they are.

The Wolves of Fenris

Fenris asks a single question of everything that lives upon it: are you strong enough to survive? The world itself is the first and harshest teacher of the Space Wolves, instilling in them the fatalism, the courage, and the wild joy in battle that set them apart from their more disciplined cousins.

Long ago the Chapter's primarch, Leman Russ, was found and raised among these very tribes, and the warriors he sired have never forgotten their origins. Where other Space Marines are austere and remote, the sons of Fenris remain gloriously human in their appetites and their loyalties, bound to their icy home and to one another by ties as old as the ice itself. They are the wolves of Fenris, and while they endure, so too does the untamed spirit of their savage world.