Space Wolves

The Sixth Legion answered to many names, the Space Wolves, the Vlka Fenryka, the Rout, but the Imperium remembered them best by the one function that defined them: they were the Emperor's executioners, the sanction loosed when reason had failed and a thing simply needed to be destroyed. Where other Legions warred to conquer and to build, the Wolves warred to end things, and they did it with a ferocity that unsettled even their fellow Astartes.

They wore that reputation openly, even proudly, a brotherhood of storm-grey warriors who cloaked their discipline beneath the manners of the barbarian world that had made them. Beneath the fangs and pelts and saga-songs, however, ran a cold and deliberate purpose, for the Rout were never so wild as they let their enemies believe. This was the leash the Emperor kept for his other sons, and when the Heresy came, it fell to the Wolves to prove whether a weapon forged to punish primarchs could be trusted to master itself.

Fenris and the Wolf King

The Wolves were raised upon Fenris, a death-world of grinding ice and drowning fire where the seasons themselves tried to kill the tribes that clung to its islands. Only the strongest survived to be taken into the Legion, and the savagery of that world was bred into every legionary. From Fenris also came their primarch, Leman Russ, found among the wolves of the wild and raised a king before the Emperor reclaimed him, a giant of appetite and cunning who ruled the Sixth as a lord of the sagas rather than a general of drill-yards.

The Wyrd and the Fang

Fenris left its mark upon the flesh as well as the spirit. The gene-seed of the Wolves carried a flaw the Legion named the wulfen, a wildness in the blood, the canis helix, that could rise in battle and, in a cursed few, consume the man entirely. The Wolves fought in packs rather than companies, led by wolf-lords whose deeds were remembered in saga, and they went to war beside the great Fenrisian wolves and the silent, doom-touched Deathsworn. It was a Legion that wore the mask of the beast so well that many forgot there was a keen mind beneath it.

Executioners at Prospero

When the Emperor judged Magnus the Red and his Thousand Sons to have transgressed too far, it was the Wolves he sent to bring the sorcerer to account, and the burning of Prospero became the Sixth Legion's defining act of the age. What was meant as an arrest became annihilation, twisted by the whispers of Horus into outright destruction, and the Wolves razed a wonder of the Imperium to ash. Yet through the Heresy that followed, the Rout held loyal to the Emperor who had forged them, executioners still, hunting the traitor Legions with the same remorseless purpose they had once turned upon their own kin.