Legio IV: Steel Wardens

Legio IV: Steel Wardens

Primarch’s Name: Echelon
Homeworld: Hedon
Background: Thinker
Psychic Potential: Normal
Gene-seed: Stable
Talent: Technologist
Legio IV: Steel Wardens
Colors: Metallic/Steel Grey with White trim
Battle Cry: Destroy and Exterminate!

Primarch History

The capsule bearing young Echelon landed upon a world of Hedon, where the isolation of the Age of Strife gave rise to a technologically advanced yet insular and isolationistic culture practicing high levels of bionic and robotic augmentation. The Fourth Primarch was discovered by a group of researchers working on advanced technological project in a remote site, and was subsequently brought before the planet’s governing council, who decided to raise the clearly unusual youth in the ways of Hedon.

Unbeknownst to Echelon, his arrival has stirred a massive argument amongst Hedon’s elites, many of whom have previously considered their world to be the sole survivor of humanity’s empire from before the Old Night. The proof that there were other humans in the galaxy has galvanized the planet into a bitter debate on its isolationist stance, eventually spilling over into a brutal conflict between those who desired to seek reunification with their wayward brethren, now calling themselves the Reunifiers, and those who wished to remain hidden from the rest of the galaxy, who adopted the label of the Isolates.

All the while, the Fourth Primarch grew up to be the living symbol of the Reunifiers, quickly surpassing his teachers in the arts of government and technological acumen. As the Primarch took to the common Hedonian practice of replacing his body parts with cybernetics, he was able to refashion himself into a magnificent leader who was as comfortable on the battlefield as he was in the debating chambers arguing the fine points of policy and philosophy. Within ten years of his arrival, Echelon was deemed to be the sole hope of the Reunifiers to end the conflict decisively, and was given control of all Reunifier forces.

It was here that the young Primarch had made a decision that would set him on the course to last a lifetime. Instead of attempting to crush the Isolates once and for all, he reached out to the Isolate leaders, seeking an agreement between the two sides. His fiery rhetoric and impeccably logical arguments have convinced the former combatants to lay down arms and come to a negotiations table, where a compromise was reached – no longer would Hedon hide itself from the galaxy at large, but its unique ways and culture would be forever preserved through both new laws and the stewardship of Echelon’s and his former enemies’ forces, now renamed the Wardens of Hedon in recognition of their unique role.

The initial contact with the Imperium took place within twenty years of the truce, and once again Echelon’s skills in diplomacy were required to prevent bloodshed between such different cultures. Even then, only the Emperor’s arrival and mutual recognition of father and son had prevented hostilities from arising, instigated as they were by the Mechanicum contingent that considered Hedon’s ways to be abomination in the eyes of the Omnissiah. Promptly, Echelon had agreed to accept command of the Fourth Legion, now to be known as the Steel Wardens, in exchange for the Imperium guaranteeing protection of Hedon’s autonomy and way of life.

Legion Organization

The Fourth Legion is organized on fairly standard lines as far as the Legiones Astartes go – most of the Legion strength is divided into 1,000-strong Chapters led by Commanders, which are then subdivided into 100-strong Companies led by Captains, themselves divided into 10-man squads led by Sergeants. At the top of the Legion’s orderly hierarchy are the Primes, each responsible for ten Chapters and reporting to the Primarch directly. In addition to the Primes, the Legion’s inner council includes specialist commanders such as Master of the Librarium (responsible for the Legion’s record-keeping, psychic research and, surprisingly, naval assets), Master of Armor (responsible for the Legion’s mechanized assets, military production, infrastructure and technological research), Master of Investigation (responsible for the Legion’s network of covert operations, subterfuge, clandestine assets and, interestingly, diplomacy and relations with other Legions and Imperial factions) and Housecarl General, who is responsible for both Imperial Army formations attached to the Primarch’s retinue and for the specialist elite unit known as the Ghost Brigade. On several occasions, the Housecarl General was actually a Hedonian human, blurring the difference between the Legion’s warriors and the population of their homeworld.

The mechanized and elite formations tend to lie outside the normal Chapter command structure, and are often seconded to specific Chapters as the theatre and campaign requirements demand. Unlike most other Legions, the Steel Wardens’ mechanized formations form several distinct units answering to Master of Armor, and are often crewed by cybernetically augmented human volunteers. When the Legion’s warriors accept extreme levels of cybernetic augmentation, they form an elite shock unit known as the Ghost Brigade, capable of withstanding punishment even beyond Terminator-armored marines of other Legions while retaining the creativity and intellect of their augmented post-human bodies. Because of this, the Steel Wardens do not use Dreadnaughts, as the Legion views them as crude in comparison to creating mechanical bodies for their fallen brothers, so that the fallen Wardens may continue to serve in the Ghost Brigade. Some amongst the Mechanicum claim that the Wardens have committed the ultimate tech-heresy by converting some battle-brothers to be fully mechanical – the accusations that the Wardens themselves vehemently deny.

The Legion is also known for its extensive utilization of robotic cohorts and heavily modified vehicles. Due to the Wardens’ generally poor relations with the Mechanicum, most of their vehicles are produced on Hedon, and as such many have very little in common with their counterparts in the other Legions. The Legion’s robotic assets are considered a part of its mechanized warfare segment, and are therefore dispatched by the Master of Armor as he sees fit to assist Chapters and Companies in the field.

Combat Doctrine

The Steel Wardens specialize in tactically sound, logical warfare not hampered by excessive emotion or reliance on more specialist strategies. Most of the Legion’s victories are won through intelligent utilization of combined arms strategies, with robots and automated vehicles used to provide the numbers and weight of fire while the Wardens themselves serve as heavy shock troops. On the occasions when the situation calls for it, the Wardens may bring forth the super-heavy Ghost Brigade warriors as elite shock and assault troops who excel at breaking down fortifications and serving as a spearpoint of particularly difficult advances.

Legion Beliefs and Practices

Central to the Steel Wardens’ philosophy is the belief in the superiority of human intellect over the frailty of flesh. The goal of the Legion’s practice of cybernetization is to fully unlock the mind’s potential, no longer restricting it by physical constraints on the body – thus, many of the higher-ranking warriors have removed almost all of their flesh parts with the exception of brain, central nervous system and several other supporting organs in order to obtain greater degrees of physical freedom while maintaining their essential humanity. This belief is not only at odds with that of the Mechanicum, but also tends to be frequently misunderstood by those outside of the Legion as a pathological obsession with removing weaknesses of the flesh and becoming more machine-like.

In fact, the battle-brothers of the Steel Wardens tend to emphasize their human traits, and, when not on duty, are often seen mingling with the human crews of their great vessels. The Legion places great importance on its marines developing their minds as more and more of their flesh is removed, and it is customary for the Wardens to dedicate themselves to creating works of art, poetry, philosophy or music. The Legion’s battle-brothers believe that their genetic augmentation is but a first step in the process of freeing the human spirit from constraints imposed by flesh, and that cybernetic augmentation is simply the next step in human evolution for those willing – and ready to accept such a radical change.

Recruitment and Gene-Seed

The Steel Wardens recruit mostly from their home world of Hedon, although there have been several influxes of recruits from other like-minded technologically advanced worlds protected or defended by the Legion. The recruits are not allowed to obtain cybernetic enhancements barring to replace combat injuries until such time as they have proven their ability to live the Legion’s values, and certain levels of cybernetization are only allowed for veterans, sergeants and officers of the Legion. As a result, the ordinary battle-brothers of the Steel Wardens do not show much difference from the marines of other Legions, but at higher ranks, greater degree of customization and cybernetic modification are the norm.

The Fourth Legion’s gene-seed is noted for its stability, although several potentially redundant flaws in Belcher’s Gland and Melanochrome with no immediate effect on combat performance have been noticed by the Mechanicum. The Legion, already distrustful of the Mechanicum involvement, tends to disregard the reports, trusting in its own Apothecarium to keep its genetic heritage strong and pure.

Iron Dogs

After being brought into the Imperium, the people of Vashkal quickly took to the Hedonian practice of cybernetic augmentation. Though not as commonplace, the practice is especially popular among the clans who produce the great wardogs of that world. Not only are they used to enhance the beasts sent out with the legion's forces, but some have altered themselves to come closer to their treasured beasts.

Research and Reclamation Company

The legion is reluctant to allow valuable technologies to disappear into the vaults of Mars. These secretive units are sent to promising sites, often in the middle of combat, in order to recover technological artifacts - either ancient secrets or those recently developed on that world, and ship them back to Hedon for further research. The fog of war is an excellent cover for such activities, and to conveniently dispose of tech-priests quick to level accusations of heresy.

During Heresy

The Steel Wardens held the line against Iskanderos’ forces in Segmentum Solar, and enjoyed a fair degree of success against the forces of the Iconoclasts and the Iron Locusts. Though considered a Council-aligned Legion, the Wardens continued to operate independently, and chafed at the ever-increasing centralization of the Council’s powers which appeared to be destroying the very Imperium they tried to save.

The breaking point came during the campaign to hold the line in Segmentum Solar against the onslaught of the Imperial Redeemers, supplemented by the forces of the Iron Locusts. Though the Steel Wardens fought bravely, the Legion frequently found itself unsupported, unable to press the advantage against the rebels even after winning numerous victories. Some amongst the Fourth Legion began to consider that perhaps, the Council was not interested in letting them succeed at all, especially as the Grim Angels, the Lion Guard, and the Consecrators were yet to commit their forces in any significant amounts despite massing in numbers at Terra.

After months of negotiations and politicking, the Council had finally agreed to lend support to the Fourth Legion in the person of Nyxos and the Grim Angels. The resultant campaign threatened to swing the momentum of the rebel offensive, as Iskanderos found his position in Segmentum Solar to be somewhat precarious. Only through extreme coordination of forces, and the employ of Doom Reaver mercenaries, was the Arch-Heretic able to continue his advance toward Terra.

That, however, was part of Echelon’s plan to end the conflict once and for all. Over the forge world of Galen IV, the Imperial Redeemers would be drawn into a trap – between the hidden forces of the Steel Wardens, the heavy concentration of Mechanicum battle constructs, and the promised Lion Guard and Grim Angels reinforcements, the rebels would be forced to give a decisive battle while heavily outnumbered and outgunned.

At first, the battle seemed to go as planned. The scouting elements of the Imperial Redeemers made planetfall, eager to secure Galen IV’s bounty of rare technological artifacts and war machines for themselves. The planet-bound companies of the Steel Wardens, though distrustful of the Mechanicum stationed next to them, met the invaders in force, fighting a pitched battle and forcing Iskanderos to commit more and more of his forces. Once the Arch-Traitor was fully committed, lured by the presence of Echelon to deal with the Fourth Primarch personally, the trap would spring with the arrival of the Council reinforcements led by Nyxos and the full might of the Lion Guard.

The victory, however, was far from assured. Not only was Iskanderos the Imperium’s preeminent military mind, but he seemed to be able to accurately forecast the actions of his enemies to uncanny extent. When the invaders blanketed the sky of Galen IV with drop pods and assault craft, it was not the Imperial Redeemers, but their cousins, the Iconoclasts, suddenly recalled from their own campaign and disguised as the Sixth Legion through forbidden technology. Behind their lines, claves of Iron Locusts sought out Steel Wardens’ commanders and captains, sabotaging key efforts and making contacts with traitors among the Mechanicum.

The techno-magi, already uneasy at having to work with the Legion that often openly defied their kind, proved to be unreliable allies at best, and outright treasonous at worst when called upon by the Steel Wardens. Still, even without the support of the Martian tech-priesthood, the Fourth Legion was capably holdings its positions while whittling down the enemy forces when the disaster struck. Through some means unknown to science and only barely guessed at through sorcery, the rebels were able to guess the presence of Echelon’s primary body unknown even to most of Steel Wardens captains, mounting an all-out assault against him.

Though forced to contend with unnatural assassins, Echelon held out the hope that the promised reinforcements would arrive. Even if Iskanderos himself was absent, the prize of destroying an entire Traitor Legion should have been sufficient to warrant a full move by Nyxos and Hemri. As Echelon continued to maneuver through the decrepit manufactorums, seeking to evade his would-be assassins, he sent message after message on secret vox frequencies, imploring Nyxos to move in and to finish off the Iconoclasts.

It is not clear what happened next; though Echelon was a formidable warrior, and could use multiple finely crafted artificial bodies to augment his combat strength, at one point in the battle his life sign signal stopped transmitting, and no amount of effort by the Legion’s Techmarines could bring it back. Of the Primarch’s honor guard, there remained not a single survivor. Panic gripped the Steel Wardens as they fought through the ever-strengthening attacks. Did Echelon live? Did he die? Could he even die?

When Nyxos finally arrived with considerably fewer troops than he had promised, the flow of battle was firmly against the loyalists. Historians debate whether or not the Grim Angels could have changed the outcome, or if their actions were the final, brutal necessity, but there is no denying that the last hope of a conventional victory on Galen IV was destroyed when the Ninth Legion’s warships saturated the planet’s atmosphere with virus bombs.

In minutes, all life on the planet’s surface was extinguished. Even the Steel Wardens, who prided themselves on heavy degree of cybernetic augmentation, could not escape the attack without grievous casualties, though their enemies the Iconoclasts appeared to suffer even more. If there was any hope of recovering Echelon, it was now completely gone.

At the site of what should have been their greatest victory, the Steel Wardens were shattered. Only a quarter of the Legion’s Marines was sufficiently augmented or hidden to survive the virus bombing, and even when they did emerge from their hiding spots to witness the carnage, they encountered an unpleasant, deadly surprise. Far from being exterminated by the man-made plague, the Iconoclasts were barely touched by it, instead becoming twisted mockeries of the warriors they once were. 

Though the Steel Wardens managed to evacuate almost a tenth of their number from the Legion’s graveyard at Galen IV, their losses were grievous. Almost all of the Legion’s senior officers were gone, either to the blades of Iron Locust assassins, to virus bombing, or to the guns of monstrous abominations the Iconoclasts became. The Primarch himself was nowhere to be found; the Legion’s erstwhile allies had either left them for dead or betrayed them in cold blood. Many vessels split off from the escaping fleet in futile desire for vengeance, leaving the rest of the Legion even further diminished.

In a matter of days, the Steel Wardens fractured. Though the Primarch left a number of replicas of his body, programmed with his personality to serve as field commanders and emissaries, those were never intended to provide true leadership. Without the Primarch and any other mutually accepted authority, the Steel Wardens looked to these replicas for hints or guidance on the Legion’s direction, and found none. All the Legion got was a series of lower-level routines that provided tactical suggestions or limited analysis, but could never hope to fully grasp the complex political situation, or to even conceptualize the perilous event the Legion found itself in. Moreover, due to quirks in programming, imperfect copying techniques, or different data inputs, many of the replicas began to provide highly divergent suggestions – some going as far as to calculate the inevitability of the rebel success, while others blindly suggesting continuation of battle at Galen IV.

Though a number of commanders were eager to continue the war, opinions different vastly on who the enemy was. Even with Iskanderos at the gates, many Steel Wardens felt that the Council of Terra was the true enemy, and that the Legion had to avenge the loss of its Primarch. While many of the more belligerent captains took to the stars with anyone willing to heed their orders, launching often suicidal attacks against both Council and Iskanderos, the largest remaining nucleus in the Legion returned to Hedon. One side of the civil war offered them hideous abomination; the other side offered treason. Therefore, they reasoned, neither the Council nor the rebels deserved the allegiance of the Fourth.

Without a unifying force, even these meager fragments of the Steel Wardens soon went their own ways. As the captains who sought to avenge the Primarch’s death began to return to Hedon, sometimes in victory, but mostly on barely functioning starships with skeleton crews, it became clear that the Fourth Legion had no friends in the increasingly hostile galaxy. Though one of the last messages from Gideon before the Warp Storms cut off all long-range astropathic communications offered the Fourth a chance to join in with his own splinter empire, very few Steel Wardens took up the offer. Instead, most companies split from their homeworld, each seeking to preserve a fraction of what the Legion once was, yet unable to agree on what it should become.

Post-Heresy

The Steel Wardens do not exist as a unified Legion, though most recognize a degree of kinship with other companies and warbands sharing the same blood. The majority of surviving Warden operations after the Heresy are at a company level, though larger and smaller formations exist. Many such groups operate as essentially independent forces taking stewardship of human planets in the traditions of their Primarch, while others can be found as mercenaries plying their trade in the service of entities opposed to Chaos.

The events at Galen IV left a bitter taste in the memory of the Steel Wardens. Due to the Legion’s practice for cybernetic augmentation, it is not uncommon for the Legionaries to survive considerably longer than their non-tainted cousins, and to this day the Legion boasts a number of Marines who were recruited not long after the Fall of Terra, or who might have even been present at the massacre at Galen IV. With time, most of these warriors ascended to leadership positions, where they could instill their undying hatred of the Council of Terra and of Chaos into their charges.  As a result, raids of Steel Warden warbands were one of the earliest, and one of the most important, threats against Rogr Hemri’s Imperial Remnant, only tapering off after Nyxos’ ill-fated assault against the Topian Dominion and the Ninth Primarch’s subsequent death. In fact, it is almost certain that a number of Steel Wardens fought on Gideon’s side as either allies or highly enthusiastic mercenaries in that conflict.

Hedon, the Legion’s homeworld, remains the theoretical center of its operations and the prime recruitment grounds, however, in practice it serves as a neutral meeting spot for the warriors of Echelon’s bloodline. A small force of Steel Wardens makes its home there, however, they are not recognized as having any sort of primacy over the others of their kind, and the decay of pre-Heresy military-industrial complex ensures that one world is no longer sufficient for the Steel Wardens to be rebuilt as a Hedon-based Legion.

Some Wardens maintain digitized copies of Echelon’s personality, though it is very rare to find a copy that had not been partially corrupted after millennia of copying, decay of technological capabilities, influence of frequent warp travel, or makeshift maintenance with imperfect materials and diminishing technical skill. As a result, most Warden captains see these copies of their Primarch’s personality as a sacred guidance rather than as direct order, and many Wardens go on lengthy and dangerous quests at the mere mentions of intact copies supposedly left by Echelon to guide his sons in the turbulent future. Should such a copy be found, the consequences for the Legion would be profound, potentially bringing it back as a unified force for order…