Perturabo

Origin & Rediscovery

Olympia was a feudal world of marble city-states that warred with each other for the pleasure of warring, where every tyrant kept an engineer on retainer and treated a well-broken wall as a kind of poetry. Perturabo arrived on it as a gestation pod, was found by Tyrant Dammekos of Lochos, and was raised as the tyrant's heir — a brilliant child who could redesign a city's walls between courses of a meal and reduce a rival tyrant's fortress to rubble before the dessert course was finished.

He was a prodigy. He was also, even as a child, a man who took every slight personally and remembered every one of them. Dammekos was the closest thing he had to a father and the first man he failed to forgive.

When the Emperor descended on Olympia he looked at the IV Legion in his ledger and the brilliant engineer on the throne of Lochos and made the obvious match. Perturabo accepted. He resented every other primarch he met in the same hour.

The Unrewarded

The Iron Warriors did the grinding work of the Crusade. Where Dorn raised fortresses and was thanked for raising them, where Sanguinius won glories and was loved for winning them, Perturabo besieged the worlds no other Legion could crack and was rewarded with more sieges. The casualties mounted. The official thanks did not. He counted the dead and counted the snubs and entered both in a private ledger that, over a century of Crusade, grew very long.

His argument with Dorn became the public face of the resentment. They disagreed about the philosophy of defensive engineering — Dorn arguing for unbreakable construction, Perturabo arguing that no construction was unbreakable and that the failure to admit it was naïve. The argument was technically about architecture. It was actually about which of them the Emperor preferred. Neither of them said so.

If a thing can be broken, I will find the way. The walls of the Imperial Palace do not interest me; the cracks do.

— Attributed to Perturabo

Olympia Burns

While Perturabo was on Crusade, Olympia revolted against its absent overlord. He returned home to find statues toppled in the city squares and graffiti about him on the walls of Lochos.

He ordered the Iron Warriors to put down the revolt with no quarter. They obeyed. Most of the planet died. The cities he had been raised in — Lochos, the towers where Dammekos had taught him to read — burned, were taken house by house, and then razed when the last survivors refused to surrender. He razed his own homeworld and did not go back. He told himself the planet had betrayed him. The IV Legion was no longer certain it believed him; some of them stopped following at that moment in their heads, even if the desertions took years to actually arrive. The moral collapse that made his turn to Horus inevitable had already happened.

The Heresy

Perturabo led the Iron Warriors through every grinding siege of the Heresy — Phall, Tallarn (where he was tricked and pinned and lost more armour in a single battle than the Legion had ever lost before), Hydra Cordatus, and eventually the great siege itself, Terra. He brought the void shields of the Imperial Palace down. He treated the Siege as the logical culmination of his life's work: the largest siege in galactic history, the proof that the things other primarchs had built could be broken if a sufficiently patient engineer was permitted to break them.

At the Siege's close he was rewarded for what he had become. The patron powers of Chaos elevated him to daemonhood. He has been one of the Imperium's most enduring threats ever since.

Legacy

The Iron Warriors hold the daemon-world Medrengard in the Eye of Terror, a planet of cyclopean fortresses that exist for the specific purpose of being broken so that Perturabo can break them. They remain, in M42, the galaxy's most effective siege specialists; other Chaos warlords hire their grand companies when a fortress must come down on schedule and Khorne's mob is not the right tool.

The argument with Dorn continues posthumously, on whichever side of the Eye each man's sons happen to be garrisoning. Some grudges outlast their owners. Some grudges outlast their planets.

Iron within, iron without.

— Iron Warriors motto