Contemptor Dreadnought

A Contemptor Dreadnought of the Iron Warriors carries a veteran of countless sieges into a mechanical afterlife of endless war, an ancient interred within a war-engine as grimly functional as everything the IV Legion built. There is no ornament wasted on these hulls, only the cold utility the Iron Warriors prized above beauty, their armoured shells marked with the same hazard chevrons that warned of the destruction their occupants dealt.

Within a Legion that spent its warriors so freely, the Contemptor represented a rare permanence, a hero whose accumulated knowledge of breaching and bombardment was too valuable to surrender to death. Swift and powerful as the pattern allowed, these ancients strode into the breach at the forefront of the Legion's assaults, absorbing punishment that would have annihilated lesser machines. During the Heresy the Iron Warriors woke their sleeping dead in great numbers, sending them grinding forward into loyalist guns with the same patient inevitability that defined every facet of the IV Legion's terrible art.