The Iron Warriors Legion's Warsmith Forrix during the Horus Heresy
Forrix, known as "The Breaker," was a Warsmith who served as the First Captain of the 1st Grand Battalion of the Iron Warriors Legion during the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy in the late 30th and early 31st Millennia. He also served as a Triarch, a member of the inner circle of advisors of the Primarch [[Perturabo] that was collectively known as the Trident. Warsmith Forrix took part in the infamous Drop Site Massacre on Istvaan V and was primarily responsible for planning the Iron Warriors' attack on the marooned Imperial Fists' Retribution Fleet during the Battle of Phall. At the conclusion of the Horus Heresy it would be Forrix who led the retreat of the Iron Warriors Legion following their disastrous defeat at the Battle of Terra. Ten millennia later, Forrix had become disillusioned and jaded by the eternal Long War and was deemed an unworthy successor to the Iron Warrior Chaos Lord known only as The Warsmith. Forrix met his ultimate fate while fighting in the 13th Black Crusade in 999.M41, during the second siege of the Imperial world of Hydra Cordatus, where he was killed by an Imperial Warhound-class Titan.
History
Age of Darkness
Forrix, known as "The Breaker," was an Iron Warriors Warsmith and First Captain of the 1st Grand Battalion. During his time in the IV Legion, he rose to the honourary position of Triarch, a member of Perturabo's inner circle of advisors called the Trident. He was a formidable warrior and Imperial hero during the Great Crusade. In the midst of the cleansing of the Hrud Warrens on the world of Gugann, the IV Legion was notified of the rebellion of its homeworld. It was the Warmaster Horus himself who broke the news to Perturabo that his homeworld of Olympia had risen up in rebellion against the Imperium. His adoptive father Dammekos, the Tyrant of Lochos, had died and the Olympian population had taken up arms against the Imperium following years of relentless anti-Imperial propaganda by the dead Tyrant. Perturabo was by this time exhausted by what he saw as the need to repeatedly prove his worth to the Emperor, and the thought of being the Primarch of the only Space Marine Legion unable to hold its own homeworld deeply shamed him.
Perturabo’s anger was finally unleashed, and upon his return to his homeworld, the Primarch enacted such fearsome vengeance that countless innocents were slaughtered and entire cities burned. Perturabo and the Iron Warriors brutally suppressed the rebellion on the streets of the city-states of Olympia. No one was spared. It was the principle of surrender or no quarter, and the Iron Warriors had grown accustomed to granting no quarter. Perturabo watched as the Olympian fortifications in which he had once taken such pride were overcome. By the time the massacre was over, Olympia had been culled into slavery. Five million innocent civilians had been killed in the process.
As the pyres burned through the long Olympian night, the Iron Warriors slowly realised the extent of what they had done. One moment they had been humanity's heroes assaulting the hideous alien Hrud, and the next they were committing genocide against their own people. In the aftermath of his vengeance, Perturabo knew utter despair, barely able to comprehend the crimes he had committed in his rage. He knew that the Emperor could never forgive him for his crimes. Guilt also touched Forrix in his more private moments as he remembered the assault up the Kephalan Hill towards the last refuge of the self-appointed Tyrant of Olympia, fighting through fortifications incorporated into the palace by a youthful Perturabo. Defences that would have been virtually impregnable with Iron Warriors defending them were overcome in days, but the cost of that victory had ripped a terrible wound in the IV Legion's soul.
Before his Primarch could set about righting his terrible deed, word came of Horus' virus-bombing of the Traitor Legions' Loyalists remnants at Istvaan III, and the Iron Warriors were ordered by the Emperor to confront the Traitors and bring them to justice. The Iron Warriors also received news of the most inconceivable kind: Astartes had slain Astartes. That news would have been shattering under normal circumstances, but when heard amidst the ruins of a world that were thick with the stench and corpses of the dead, it was apocalyptic. Not long after, news arrived that Leman Russ had led his Space Wolves in an attack upon Magnus the Red and his Thousand Sons upon their homeworld of Prospero. The assault had been ordered as a result of Magnus' continued violation of the Imperial Edicts of Nikaea forbidding the use of psykers by the Legiones Astartes.
Drop Site Massacre
The Iron Warriors open fire upon the first wave of Loyalists during the Drop Site Massacre
In response to the treachery of Horus and his betrayal of the Loyalist Astartes in the Sons of Horus, Emperor's Children, World Eaters and Death Guard Legions at Istvaan III, the Primarch of the Imperial Fists Legion, Rogal Dorn, on the direction of the Emperor who had learned of Horus' actions from the Loyalist survivors aboard the Eisenstein, ordered 7 Loyalist Space Marine Legions to Horus' base on Istvaan V to challenge the Traitors. They would attack in two waves and fall under the supreme command of the Iron Hands' Primarch Ferrus Manus. The Legions comprising the first wave were the Iron Hands, Raven Guard and Salamanders. The Legions comprising the second were the Iron Warriors, Alpha Legion, Night Lords, and a large contingent of Word Bearers that their Primarch Lorgar had stationed in the star system. Unknown to Dorn and Ferrus Manus, the Night Lords, Alpha Legion, Iron Warriors and Word Bearers had all turned from their service to the Emperor and secretly pledged their loyalty to Horus. The Warmaster had instructed those Legions' Primarchs to keep their new allegiance to Chaos a secret.
The Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard were deployed in the first wave of the assault. After they secured the drop site, they were to have been followed by the arrival of the other four Legions. The first wave secured the drop site, known as the Urgall Depression, though at a heavy cost. Horus ordered his front line troops to fall back in a feint, tempting Ferrus Manus to overstretch his already thin lines. Against the advice of Corax and Vulkan, Manus led his Veterans against the fleeing Traitor Marines unsupported. Manus then brought his brother Fulgrim to combat. As the two Primarchs drew their weapons, the Raven Guard and Salamanders fell back to regroup and allow the second wave's Legions to advance and earn glory. The secret Traitor Legions mustered in the landing zone, armed and ready for battle, unbloodied and fresh. The Iron Warriors had claimed the highest ground, taking the Loyalist landing site with all the appearance of reinforcing it through the erection of prefabricated plasteel bunkers.
Both the Word Bearers and the Night Lords were to be the anvil, whilst the Iron Warriors would be the hammer yet to fall. The enemy would stagger back to them, exhausted, clutching empty Bolters and broken blades, believing their presence to be a reprieve. Though the Salamanders and the Raven Guard voxed hails requesting medical aid and re-supply, the line of Astartes atop the northern ridge remained grimly silent as the exhausted warriors of the Raven Guard and Salamanders came to within a hundred metres of their allies. It was then that Horus revealed his perfidy and sprung his lethal trap. Forrix willingly took part in this duplicitous slaughter of his former cousin Astartes. As Horus pressed the counterattack he managed to sandwich the Loyalists between the two Traitor forces, killing most of them. Meanwhile, the Iron Hands were cut off and slaughtered to a man -- the Veteran Morlock Terminators cut down and the Primarch Ferrus Manus beheaded by Fulgrim. Nearly two Legions had been all but wiped out in one fell swoop.
Battle of Phall
During the opening days of the Horus Heresy, at the command of Horus, a large Iron Warriors contingent was sent to halt the encroaching Imperial Fists fleet that had originally been sent to Istvaan III to reinforce the beleaguered Loyalists. Over three hundred warships were caught in a backwater system like fish in a whirlpool, cut off by raging Warp Storms that would not abate. The Traitors could not allow such a strong complement of Astartes to infiltrate their controlled area of space, for they could seriously disrupt preparations for the Traitors' attack on Terra.
Due to his superior organisational skills as well as being a meticulous and capable commander, the Warsmith Forrix was chosen to plan the Iron Warriors' assault on the hated Imperial Fists fleet at Phall. Commanding over twenty large warships, Perturabo led his fleet in a sudden and devastating void assault upon the Imperial Fists' fleet in what became known as the Battle of Phall. Over a dozen vessels were ripped apart by the brutal hail of fire from the Traitor vessels. The Imperial Fists fought back, devastating the lead ships of the Iron Warriors' fleet, tearing them apart in a vicious firestorm. The Loyalists gained the initiative in the battle and managed to repel the Traitors' surprise attack, despite severe losses at the start of the engagement. Launching a counterattack, the Imperial Fists drove off the embattled Traitor fleet and managed to break orbit and manoeuvre to their jump points, to enter the Warp and make for Terra.
First Siege of Hyrdra Cordatus
Perturabo fighting against the hated Imperial Fists during the final assault of the Hydra Cordatus campaign
As Horus' rebellion ground on, the Iron Warriors took the time to humble their great enemies, the Imperial Fists, upon the isolated world of Hydra Cordatus that the Sons of Dorn had recently brought into Imperial Compliance. The Iron Warriors made planetfall in the wake of a saturation bombardment that reduced the valley where the Cadmean Citadel was situated and the agri-settlements filling its fertile deltas to ash. Magma bombs and mass drivers boiled away the rivers and reduced fecund earth to arid dust. The Cadmean Citadel was left untouched, and Cassander still found it difficult to believe that such a precise bombardment was possible. But the Iron Warriors had purposely done this in order to show the Imperial Fists that they were superior to them in every way. The technological cunning of the ancient fortress builders, married to the artfully wrought geography and the courage of the defenders, proceeded to keep the Iron Warriors at bay for almost three months.
Every day Cassander's warriors stayed alive kept the enemy from redeploying and bringing their strength to bear elsewhere against the Loyalists. Yet, when the Iron Warriors finally overcame the citadel’s ancient defences and broke open its walls they would run amok. They would slaughter the remaining Imperial Fists Legionaries, the heroic men and women of Hyrdra Cordatus that had chosen to stand with them, and the refugees from the devastated fields below the fortress. Fifty-two Imperial Fists and thirteen thousand men, women and children were crammed within the citadel’s walls. When the final assault came, Perturabo himself spearheaded an audacious attack upon the citadel's defenders, and slaughtered over thirty Imperial Fists Astartes himself in a span of only a few minutes. The rest of the Cadmean Citadel's defenders were slaughtered to a man and the surviving refugees were enslaved by the Iron Warriors before they moved on to their next objective. Hydra Cordatus was reduced to a barren desert world by the Traitor Legion's assault, and after the end of the Heresy was repopulated as an Adeptus Mechanicus research station and as a depository for the Imperial Fists Chapter's gene-seed.
Angel Exterminatus
Forrix would later take part in the joint expedition comprised of both the Iron Warriors and the Emperor's Children Traitor Legions into the Eye of Terror to seek out the forbidden xenos weapon known as the Angel Exterminatus. It had been hidden in the grave of its doom, a weapon of such power that the stars themselves turned upon it rather than allow it to escape its prison. The destination of the joint fleet of Iron Warriors and Emperor's Children vessels was the lost Eldar world of Iydris, a world said to have been favoured by the goddess Lileath. Iydris was one of the legendary Crone Worlds, which once formed the heart of the lost Eldar empire before they were consumed by the creation of the vast Warp Rift that was the Eye of Terror following the birth of the Chaos God Slaanesh in the early 30th Millennium. The lost world was located at the heart of the Eye of Terror, somehow remaining in a fixed position keeping it from destruction in the gravitational hellstorm of a supermassive black hole that lay at the centre of the eternal Warp Storm.
Their ultimate goal was within the Primarchs' grasp; the Sepulchre of Isha's Doom, which sat at the centre of the citadel of Amon ny-shak Kaelis. But Fulgrim had lied to his Perturabo, for in reality the reason they had come to the Crone World was so that the Emperor's Children Primarch could achieve apotheosis and become a Daemon Prince. During an epic climatic battle within the Sepulchre of Isha's Doom, Forrix fought against a multitude of Eldar Wraith constructs as well as their former comrades from the Emperor's Children. The Warsmith felt no regret at killing his cousin legionnaires. They had made their choice to stand against Perturabo and that was a death sentence, no matter to which Legion you owed your allegiance. Forrix was nearly killed during the final bombardment by the Stor-bezashk, the siege masters of the Iron Warriors Legion, a host of ordnance and heavy artillery specialists who commanded firepower like no other. He was only saved by the will of the Chaos Gods and his fellow Warsmith Soltarn Vull Bronn, "The Stonewrought" who pulled his badly injured form from beneath the rubble of the sepulchre.
Battle of Terra
Warsmith Forrix during the Battle of Terra
As the events of the Horus Heresy neared their tragic conclusion seven standard years after the fateful betrayal at Istvaan III, those Loyalist Legions not committed to the defence of Terra raced through the Warp, converging on the homeworld of Mankind. The Traitor Legions also massed above Terra to assault the Imperial Palace. The Battle of Terra was the final confrontation of the Horus Heresy that raged on Terra itself between the Forces of Chaos led by the Warmaster Horus and the Loyalist armies of the Imperium of Man led by the Emperor of Mankind himself. The Sons of Perturabo would at long last be able to test themselves against those of Rogal Dorn. The Loyalist forces ultimately proved victorious in their defence of the Imperial Palace, though only barely, and Horus was slain by the full psychic powers unleashed by the Emperor on the deck of the Arch-Traitor's massive flagship the Vengeful Spirit. But the Master of Mankind was mortally wounded during the fight and had to be interred within the cybernetic life support mechanisms of the advanced psychic augmentation technology known as the Golden Throne.
It cannot be known whether Dorn's masterfully constructed defences would have proved the undoing of the Iron Warriors, for the Warmaster was slain before the matter could be fully determined. The outcome of the Battle of Terra shaped the destiny of humanity for the next 10,000 standard years. The Traitor hosts began their fighting withdrawal, and in the anarchy and confusion Horus’ body was recovered by his Sons of Horus Legion from his flagship. Led by Warsmith Forrix, the IV Legion fought their way clear of the Sol System and fled for the Eye of Terror where they eventually established the daemonic Fortress World of Medrengard.
Second Siege of Hydra Cordatus
Over ten thousand standard years later, during Abaddon the Despoiler's 13th Black Crusade in 999.M41, the Iron Warriors, under the command of an unnamed Warsmith, attacked the Adeptus Mechanicus Forge World of Hydra Cordatus which supplied weapons and other war materiel to the Imperium of Man at large, and was one of the few locations in the galaxy where the Mechanicus secretly stored its tithes of Space Marine gene-seed. Alongside his chief rivals Forrix and Kroeger, of the 1st and 2nd Grand Companies, respectively, Honsou was one of three champions of the Chaos Lord known only as The Warsmith who laid siege to the large citadel and manufactorum complex called the Tor Christo. Deep within this formidable Imperial citadel lay the stasis vaults which contained the genetic material drawn from the Iron Warriors' most hated and ancient rivals, the Imperial Fists.
The Iron Warriors desperately needed the Loyalist Astartes' pure gene-seed to reconstitute their numbers as the corrupting power of Chaos tended to mutate their own gene-seed to the point that it was unusable to replenish their ranks with new Chaos Space Marines. Ten millennia after leading his Legion from disaster before the gates of the Imperial Palace, Forrix had become disillusioned and jaded from the constant fighting of the Long War and was deemed an unworthy successor to the Iron Warrior Chaos Lord that led his warband, who called himself only "The Warsmith." He had continued to tread the path of the Heretic simply because there was no other path left open to him. Despite the Imperial forces arrayed against them, including a large garrison of Imperial Guard troops and even a small detachment of Titans of the Legio Ignatum protecting the Tor Christo's precious contents, in the end the Iron Warriors emerged triumphant. They defeated the Imperial forces defending Tor Christo, as well as an entire company of Imperial Fists who had arrived as reinforcements to try and prevent the theft of their genetic legacy. Forrix, who by the end of the campaign had become uncharacteristically restless, almost died a first time in a firefight with an Imperial Warhound-class Titan, Jure Divinu, which he vowed to hunt down and slay like a beast. During the final battle for Hydra Cordatus, Forrix led his Terminators in an attack against the Warhound, eventually managing to climb on it and breach the Warhound's cockpit. However, Forrix' victory was cut short as the second Warhound of the pair, Defensor Fidei, opened up on his brother Titan to prevent it being desecrated by the enemy, obliterating Forrix in a hail of turbo-laser fire.
Sources
- Horus Heresy: Collected Visions, pg. 367
- Angel Exterminatus (Novel) by Graham McNeill, pp. 15-17, 26, 31-42, 45-51, 54-55, 81-82, 120-122, 124-125, 129-130, 139-141, 144, 146-147, 159-160, 168-170, 172-175, 183, 185-187, 193-201, 207-208, 216, 219-220, 231-233, 236-238, 240, 245-247, 251-252, 258, 283-284
- Shadows of Treachery (Anthology) edited by Christian Dunn and Nick Kyme, "The Crimson Fist" by John French, pp. 25-26, 38
- Storm of Iron (Novel) by Graham McNeill