Frostfang

The Frost

Frostfang is a Frost Sword — the Space Wolves' Chapter-unique weapon class. The blade is sheathed in a permanent rime of cold that is, by Mechanicus uncertainty, either active cryogenic technology operating through a mechanism the Mechanicus has not identified, indigenous Fenrisian work whose metallurgical secrets the Iron Priests keep closely, or a property the Chapter has stopped trying to explain. The Iron Priests' standing position is that the Frost Sword class is a Fenrisian tradition older than the Imperium; the Mechanicus has not been able to refute or accept the claim.

The rime is not merely cosmetic. Even glancing strikes inflict frostbite-equivalent damage on living tissue beyond the conventional power-blade engagement, and the temperature differential at the cutting edge — the Mechanicus' restricted measurement records cold in the high triple-digit negatives, expressed in the temperature scale that the Mechanicus reluctantly admits exists for this purpose — is sufficient to brittle ceramite armour at the moment of contact. A Frost Sword does not just cut a Space Marine. It freezes him as he is being cut.

The Iron Priests' Forge

Frostfang specifically was forged in the Iron Priests' Fang-deep forges in M37, for Wolf Guard service in the engagement at Sturm-Kraal. The forging took, by Iron Priest archive record, the better part of a Fenrisian year — a long forging-cycle that suggests an unusually careful working of the alloy, possibly including the Iron Priests' rumoured (never confirmed) practice of folding a portion of a slain great wyrm's chitin into the blade's edge metallurgy.

The blade emerged from the forging with a notch in the cross-guard that the Iron Priests deliberately did not polish out. The notch, by Wolf Priest reading, marks the blade as belonging to a saga rather than to a single owner. Every owner thereafter would add to the saga; the blade itself would persist through them all. Frostfang has had four named wielders since the forging. The notch is unchanged.

Hakon's Inheritance

Sergeant Hakon — Ragnar Blackmane's first mentor when he was raised to the Chapter — carried Frostfang through the campaigns that defined Ragnar's early service. Hakon was a hard teacher of the kind the Space Wolves favour: he expected the student to learn by failure, intervened only when the failure would have been fatal, and did not praise. He named his pack-blade as he named his pack: deliberately, and with the expectation of permanence.

Hakon fell at the close of the Bear-of-Loki engagement, holding a tunnel against a Genestealer Patriarch's bodyguard while Ragnar's squad evacuated the surviving Imperial pilgrims behind him. The Patriarch's claws took Hakon's head. Frostfang took the Patriarch's hand and three of its retainers before the engagement was over. The blade was recovered from Hakon's body by Ragnar himself, who had returned to the tunnel after seeing the pilgrims to safety, and who refused to let any other Brother retrieve his teacher's weapon.

The teacher dies. The blade does not. The student carries both.

— Wolf Priest saga, Hakon's funeral

Ragnar's Campaigns

The blade passed to Ragnar at his elevation to Wolf Lord. Ragnar has carried it through every major Space Wolves campaign of late M41 and early M42 — the Garm engagement, the Battle of the Fang's second siege, the various Indomitus-era counter-engagements where the Wolves' deployment was deemed critical. The blade's kill-tally for Ragnar's tenure exceeds Hakon's by an order of magnitude, primarily because Ragnar's career has been longer and the engagement opportunities of the M42 era have been more frequent.

The Iron Priests note in their maintenance logs that Frostfang's rime has deepened during Ragnar's custody. Whether this is a function of additional cold-charge maintenance, a function of the blade's accumulated kills, or a function of something the Iron Priests have stopped speculating about, is open. The Iron Priests have not changed the blade's metallurgy. Whatever the deepening is, the blade is doing it itself.

The Saga

Frostfang has its own dedicated saga in the Chapter's record — the only Space Wolves weapon below relic-of-the-Chapter rank to receive that honour. The Wolf Priests update it after every campaign in which Ragnar fights. The saga is read aloud at every Wolf Lord council Ragnar attends; the reading is part of the council's opening ritual, on the principle that the blade's deeds are part of the Chapter's collective memory in a way that the wielder's deeds alone are not.

The saga's most-recent entries cover Ragnar's engagement at the Garm Sector during the M42 counter-Crusade — Frostfang took the head of a Greater Daemon of Khorne in personal combat in that campaign, an act that the Wolf Priests have catalogued in the saga as the blade's third confirmed daemon-banishment. Daemon-banishments are, by Chapter recognition, the highest deed-class a non-relic blade can achieve. Two of Frostfang's three are in Ragnar's tenure.

The Cold Question

Whether Frostfang's cold is, in some sense, conscious — whether the rime responds to Ragnar's combat-state rather than to the blade's mechanism — is a question the Iron Priests have stopped asking aloud after a brief M40 inquiry that produced no useful conclusions. The Wolf Priests' theological reading is that the cold is the blade's accumulated history, expressed physically: the deaths it has caused, the cold of the engagements it has been wielded in, the spirit of the wielders who have carried it. The Wolf Priests do not require the Iron Priests to confirm this reading. The Iron Priests do not refuse it.

The Inquisition's Ordo Xenos has filed a query about Frostfang's metallurgy on three separate occasions across M40 and M41. The Space Wolves have responded each time with a polite refusal, citing Chapter-internal traditions. The Inquisition has not pressed.

The Future Wielder

Ragnar is, by Wolf Lord standards, still relatively young — perhaps two centuries into a tenure that Space Wolves Wolf Lords often extend into their fifth century before death takes them. Frostfang will, by Chapter custom, pass to whoever Ragnar designates at the close of his tenure. Ragnar has not designated a successor.

The pack-Brothers who serve alongside him assume the blade will go to whoever takes Ragnar's command after he falls. The Wolf Priests' more careful reading is that the blade has its own preferences — that it has come to Ragnar through Hakon's choice, and that the chain of choice will continue in the same fashion. Whichever reading is correct, the blade will continue. The saga will accumulate. The notch will remain.