Olympia

Olympia was a harsh and mountainous world of walled hill-cities and rocky highlands, its people locked in an endless cycle of feudal warfare between rival city-states. Generations of such conflict made siegecraft the highest art on Olympia, and its folk prized fortification, engineering, and grim endurance above all softer virtues, forever building walls and forever tearing down those of their neighbours.

Into this world of sieges fell the daemon primarch-to-be Perturabo, a mind of cold and matchless brilliance who rose to master one of the great city-states and then to dominate the whole world. When the Emperor came, Perturabo led the warriors of Olympia into the Iron Warriors, a Legion that would become the Imperium's supreme practitioners of siege warfare, breaking fortresses that no other force could crack.

Yet Perturabo's bond with his homeworld ended in atrocity. When Olympia rebelled during his absence among the stars, the primarch returned in a cold fury and crushed the uprising with genocidal thoroughness, slaughtering his own people by the hundreds of thousands. The shame of that massacre festered in him, one more grievance among the many that would drive him and his Legion toward treason.

When the Chaos Space Marines of the IV Legion turned against the Imperium, Olympia's fate was sealed, and in the retribution of later years the subjugated world was scoured and broken, left a bitter ruin. It stands, in memory, as a monument to the Iron Warriors themselves: a people who built walls for others but kept nothing for themselves, whose greatest works were siege-lines and whose deepest inheritance was resentment. Olympia asked its sons to conquer, and in the end they conquered it.