The Horus Heresy: The Iron Hands & The Keys of Hel (Warhammer 40K & Horus Heresy Lore)

within the annals of human history their dwell discoveries that by any moral or ethical standard should remain there buried by the past so that they cannot hurt us further humanity's curiosity in this fell universe of ours was once our greatest boon and yet turned to becoming our greatest threat inquisitive minds sought answers to the greatest questions of both science and existence and in their quest for knowledge there occurred discoveries damnable beyond words the conflagration of the age of strife in part caused by these self-same discoveries buried many on now nameless worlds under uncaring skies lost to the memory of our species and perhaps for the better because of it self-aware of thinking machines mechanivores ontological weaponry entropic engines omniphage swarms sun snuffers chronogravitic inverters blasphemous creations that endangered so much more than simple human lives threatening in their power the fabric of reality itself as a great crusade slipped beyond the bounds of the homeworld of terror during the fateful years of its beginnings it was diving headlong into a galaxy polluted by sins of those who had come before in this nightmare playground of devastated worlds and systems it was perhaps inevitable that hateful technologies thought lost were rediscovered this chronicle is a record of one such example and of the situation that drives the employment of science that to put it mildly is of questionable morality know then that this is a record of what men do in times that try their very being of trans humans pushed beyond the bounds of what they had ever considered possible and the terrible choices made in that impossible void a record of the iron hands and the keys of hell the belief system of the 10th legion astartes the iron hands though they themselves would likely bulk at the assertion that it is thus was highly idiosyncratic a hybrid mix of the tribal culture of their homeworld medusa fused with the machina worship of the early mechanicum of mars it yawed in actuality far closer to the former than the latter medusa was and yet remains a harsh world called the point of near uninhabitability orbiting a dying supergiant star in the depths of segmentum obscurus mined during the dark age of technology for its mineral bounty its climatic hostility was mitigated by the hungry delving machines of humanity managed from a massive orbital ring known as a telstar axe the age of strife had severed it from the galaxy at large as that benighted epoch had done to so many industrial centers but what miners had been stranded planetside when the void went dark yet managed to survive overcoming the ice-clad world through canny employment of what technology they could maintain and laterally sheer dogged perseverance in a sadly not common enough tale of the times the will of humanity to survive the depths of old night was redolent in the peoples of medusa despite what efforts were made to retain some form of civil society the long millennia the impossible planet and the passage of time caused social and cultural regression typical on worlds suffering this same separation from the human whole it's been hypothesized that the origins of medusa's clans lay in pre-strife work shift gang groupings or even private corporate alignment only for the millennia to grind away these known origins and render what remained a tribe formed by an association now long forgotten medical examination undertaken by mechanicum biologist teams and early imperial sensocrats found no coherent point of origin for the world's genetic base indeed noting that it is likely that the world's population was fascinatingly further supplemented by off-world arrivals during the age of strife medusa was not forgotten during these dreadful millennia merely lost and the mechanicum itself had launched sleeper barks into the void hoping that these flotillas would arrive at the now near-fabled destination besides this its fame would have attracted refugee fleets and other warp tossed starships fleeing wherever they could during old night and these survivor invaders inevitably came into conflict with the native medusans what emerged prior to imperial contact was a society that on the surface resembled the techno barbarians of terra especially those concentrated around industrial centers like the uralic heights the world they inhabited sought to end their short lives at every turn developing them into semi-nomadic people ever on the move to new hunting grounds or to avoid the glacier quakes and tectonic movements of massive permafrost plates what set medusa aside from other primitivistic societies was the sheer abundance of technology the world possessed leftover remnants from its pre-strife mining days massive troves of industrial equipment scientific devices and macro engineering machina were dotted around the planet or would routinely fall from orbit as either the telstra x ring or the hundreds of shipwrecks clogging planetary near space degraded and plummeted to the world hidden amongst these caches could sometimes lurk partially functioning stc systems or at the very least production engines modeled off said while the knowledge to maintain such technology degraded with the planet's stranded society the clans yet retained their most robust capabilities and the lore to keep them functioning passed from generation to generation by a shamanic leadership cast that became known as the iron fathers persisting in folk memory precious understanding of machines cybernetics and weaponry were kept alive by this patriarchal wing and allowed the clans to continue surviving against all the world and indeed other belligerent clans could throw at them naturally such practices developed a quasi-religious aspect likely merging with the machine cult beliefs that the survivors of the crashed martian generation ships had brought to medusa while never organized in any sense the degenerate superstitions served to further bind the clan groups together and indeed further render interloper clans as other warfare was a way of life resources were scarce as was the technology and the means to maintain it and all were fought over in the bitterest of struggles the clan wars were as unrelenting as the climate and all of these aforementioned factors had but the time of imperial contact developed the medusans into a people forged strong beyond human expectation by their endless toil strength endurance and resilience were the only qualities that mattered on this world weakness was abhorrent and any who displayed it were rendered as outcast from their clans both for the liability they represented and the sheer disgust their familial structure would view them with this was the crucible that the tenth primark ferris manus was raised within this was a culture from whence all laterally recruited iron hands were born of following his return to the imperial fold indeed the reclamation of medusa albeit now under the rule of the emperor had done effectively nothing to halt the warfare of the tribes despite the promulgations of the iterators and the coming of the imperial truth indeed despite the leadership of manus or rather because of it inter nissan conflict remained a facet of medusa and life it did so honestly at the express desire of the iron primark with ferrous reasoning that without such trials and hardship he would not be able to retain the recruits for the iron hands that he expressly desired to counteract such attrition on such a small population base the primark levied in perpetuity all suitable adolescent males for the 10th legion counting on the hardiness of these baseline humans to carry them through the rigors of the astartes ascension surgeries and genetic enhancements the primark ultimately had his faith in his people rewarded the stock of medusa proved incredibly suitable to astarte's recruitment at rates far beyond other populations through this the medusan culture and creed entered the legion itself sataran astartes either died out or readily converted to the primark's ways of life and war he was a figure utterly abhorring of failure an embodiment of the world and people he had come to maturity within vocal in his disdain and infrequent in his praise the standards he placed upon his sons were those of he himself regarding acts of duty others even his brothers may have considered beyond to start his capabilities as mere base competence utterly without compromise he was not a figure to be adored any need was not by any save for his astarte sons who bore for him the love a child would for the sternest but fairest of parents to ferris's credit he held himself to his own standards bearing a fierce hatred for hypocrisy and this fairness his sons would find the fierce adoration that drove them to compete for his admiration rarer than anything priceless to them beyond words the character of ferrous manus shaped his legion utterly his self-same hatred for weakness becoming the credo of his astartes as on medusa the weak were hindrance and threat to clan and hold so too in the iron hands were the incompetent a stain upon the legion and the imperium the great crusade they were undertaking was the greatest human endeavor imaginable and it would not be risked by the fragility of any if the iron hands had anything to say about it this abhorrence of weakness is central to one of the key aspects of the psychology of the legion and laterally the chapter namely their extensive employment of cybernetic augmentation contrary to popular imagination the austerities of the tenth did not and do not believe that all human flesh represents a critical weakness to themselves or their purpose or at least this belief was not as widespread throughout the legion as was commonly repeated rather they saw within technology the ability to rid themselves of specific weaknesses often deemed so by the astartes themselves or perhaps their comrades this could represent anything from an imbalance of humors a quirk in a particular aspect of physiology of the individual themselves or most commonly a battlefield injury more so than any legion the iron hands utilized bionic enhancements to replace limbs organs or whole segments of their bodies that they deemed insufficient to their own standards their close relationship with the mechanicum of mars born of the latter's interest in the technology and resources of medusa as well as shared roots of social creeds was a natural vector for the ideology of self-cyberization to enter into the legion and while the astartes would rarely undertake modification to the same degree the tech priests had it was nevertheless far more sweeping and extreme than their cousins in other legions full development to cybernetic transhumans as some of the most prestigious and ancient of mechanical magi were want to do was held back by the primark himself who in his own words believed the machine is strong and logic can lay open any realm of understanding but without the hands and minds of the living they are nothing we live and bend iron to our will but iron can break machines fail and logic can become corrupted life is the only true machine cut away too much and we lose ourselves it must be understood that while the iron hands were quite literally quick to cut off and replace a limb if it was deemed an issue to the comportment of their duty they would retain a quintessentially human fundamentality about themselves issuing those amongst the mechanicum who desired to achieve some form of technologically delivered post-humanism indeed such reliance upon the machine alone was ironically a weakness in the eyes of the primark ferris believed in reliance upon the human self however augmented and that was paramount but that same humanity must be owned by oneself and retained at all costs for was it not the ultimate goal of the great crusade and his father the emperor of mankind to deliver a holy human future this was the creed with which the iron hands prosecuted the two centuries of their war against the galaxy a legion of utterly ruthless and uncompromising standards and expectations becoming as akin to the metal they were named after strong yes but as it would turn out brittle the death of ferrous manus at the hands of his brother fulgrim primark of the third legion emperor's children during the terrible events of the dropside massacre sundered the iron hands in mind and soul as much as the massacre itself did in body the first of the emperor's sons to be by historical record confirmed killed in action the first of the primarks to perish in the opening conflicts of the horus heresy the wound caused by his passing was as unprecedented as it was catastrophic what happens to a legion when its primark dies what happens to his sons without his hand to guide them the iron hands it was not merely the loss of their gene progenitor their commander their father something no legion had up until that point been forced to face but a fundamental usurpation of their entire creed they had failed to save their gene sire and he had failed to live not only that but he had failed his sons at least in the eyes of some had he not lived up to his own standards he had lost and it had cost him everything leaving what surviving iron hands yet lived to continue existing without him reality would not align with the sheer emotions that such a loss revealed amongst the iron temp a fundamental aspect of astarte's development is their psycho conditioning and hypno indoctrination as the old adage goes they know no fear the capability of it has literally been excised from their mental capacities the process is far from exact and as a standardized industrial process designed to produce super soldiers readily and generally predictably this could never account for all the possible interactions between either an individual's mind or a legion's gene seed or culture suffice it to say however astartes do not possess wholly human emotions in the strictest sense in order to achieve the mental state required to make them the emperors angels of death a lot is simply removed and bluntly too a hatchet approach to psychological manipulation this causes traumas conditions that ideally the individual space marine will never have to actually address with the iron hands not only was the trauma inflicted upon them literally unprecedented they had absolutely no means to cope with it either provided from outside the legion or inside their own heads their mutilated trans-human minds were unable to process the sheer sorrow of this grief and its horror accounts from survivors of istavan v amongst the so-called shattered legions are a far-flung ironhand's detachments receiving the news in its aftermath show a legion bereft of leadership and utterly without the means to understand what they were simply feeling where in the calculations of purpose in the cant of iron were pithy maxims to simply assuage such pain these astartes were dealing with tumultuous emotional storms within their own heads and the cold press of logic what they relied upon the bedrock upon which the legion had built itself could not help what they needed to survive this trauma had been deliberately removed from them human beings are fundamentally emotional creatures in their transhumanism the astartes were caught in a horrific prison of the emperor's own creation trapped between the emotional heart of a human being and the disfigured indoctrinated enhanced brain of their augmented selves the legion on mass went insane it is little wonder perhaps that in their grief their thoughts turned dark and in their desperation their means turned darker medusa was a planet as mentioned wholly blessed and cursed in equal measure by archaeotech of the dark age of technology while the techno barbarian clans were only able to maintain either the simplest or most robust of the downfallen civilizations the ruins of which they squatted in ferrous manus in his life had broken open many of the world's hidden places and in doing so unearthed dark things the existence of which only history may judge in partnership with a highly interested mechanicum the iron hands upon their takeover of medusa following imperial contact surrendered some of this recovered archaeotech to red mars for study and possible development yet also ensured that either copies were retained or that some technology never left the legion's fife the tenth had its own plans the backing of one of the emperor's few at the time recovered sons politics swayed in their favor in this retention with the mechanicum resorting to simply have to make petitions to manus waiting upon his notoriously hard to obtain favor it has been stipulated that given his experiences in the depths of the planet's hidden catacombs the primark witnessed horrors of technology run amok reading within him a loathing for the willful excesses of science that the humans of millennia past seem to revel in it is equally likely that this distrust extended to the mechanicum itself at this point in history a far more diffuse and decentralized body than the adeptus mechanicus it would become although not merely in possession of the substantial and indeed emperor bequeathed arsenal a forbidden prescribed and outright techno-heretical devices held by the first legion dark angels the iron hands possessed one of the most formidable arrays of arms armaments and technology of the entirety of the legion as astartes including vehicles weaponry and armor of rare and hard to maintain patterns far in excess of similarly sized legions additionally they were often involved in the spearheading of new military technology and its applications such as the case of the gorgon pattern tactical dreadnought armor a significant quantity of the medusan caches however were placed off limits to the legion by order ferris manus himself marking as proscribed technology to never be unsealed unless by his express order one such set of devices was prosaically known as the keys of hell [Music] the keys of hell are a secret known to but a few to even render acknowledgement of their existence in official record is tantamount to hera technica under the doctrines of the adeptus mechanicus they are foul beyond imagining a product of such demented science that one cannot even fathom either their means or the will that drove their development in the first place the name is itself deliberately laden with poor tents of doom redelent of the catholic underworld goddess of medusan mythic tracts and is in effect misleading the keys are not in actuality a single device or even necessarily a series of devices but an umbrella term for a set of technologies that all contributed to or were part of the same end goal whispered across time they are the eight sleepers the ager sign protocol the progression of the seventh gate the ophidian scale the terrible sacrosan formulae all were the keys and when the keys turned the result was cybernetic resurrection the powers of cybermancy nanomechanical augmentation manipulation of the motive force itself the dead were returned to life even after the end state of their existences that this process is ill understood as almost certain even if the master of the iron hands had discerned its secrets what he found was abhorrent enough that should any technology encountered by the primark or the clan iron fathers of the tenth legion would deemed be keys adjacent they were immediately seized and sequestered either in the vaults of medusa or upon hidden legion armories and archives scattered on cold lost dead rocks throughout the span of the galaxy if records are to be believed even the mechanicum was not aware of the legion's possession of the keys and should they have been one can only imagine the crisis between mars and terror that we have emerged because of it representing as they did of course heretical technology that was utterly abhorrent to the writ of the machine god it is likely that none of the keys function in precisely similar fashions but all work towards and deliver upon the same effect life after death resurrection of body but not of soul a sacrosan wave generator for example channels a form of exotic energy of unknown origin to reanimate dead flesh other elements of the keys integrate animating technologies at a cellular level and when combined can stimulate and perpetrate the motor functions of say an astartes especially one with heavy cybernetic augmentation perhaps in perpetuity as for what happens to the soul several now quite dead mechanicus magi have attempted to postulate upon the fate of it once a human is returned to life by the keys yet no conclusion has ever been reached most additionally do not even remember their former lives or if they do typically only fragments of who they were remain from what records exist it appears only the strongest and bluntest emotions remain especially those most present at the time of death serving post-resurrection as a semblance of personality a gola thing rather than the person who was these however were the technologies some amongst the broken remnants of the iron hands turned to using in the aftermath of istvan five having lost two-thirds of their legion their primark and effectively their sanity with their fleets fleeing from the combined arms of nine traitor legions the desperate survivors led by what iron fathers remained turned to literally forbidden measures to enact their vengeance on those who had wronged them broken bloodied and burning with a fury that was born of betrayal and deep deep psychological damage they turned the keys and utilized recovered hell technica to resurrect the dead of istvan to continue the legion's war according to surviving records obtained from the ships of the shattered legions certain iron hands managed to retain some notable semblance of their original selves but as one was reported to have stated most only remembered how to hate whatever facet of the technology that powered them into this wretched unlife it is unclear if the negative emotions retained so strongly were the result of the keys themselves or simply indicative of a wider and incredibly deeply ingrained trauma present in the iron hands that witnessed the death of ferris as this same gola astartes noted the logic fails after a while have you noticed that the pure flow of data and reason after a while it just runs out you're trying to understand to bargain with the reality of what has happened but there is no understanding to be had no bargain to be made the way of iron the logic of the machine it was meant to make us strong to raise us above flesh but it was a lie iron can shatter logic can be flawed and ideas can fail and fail they and their primark had but they were not creatures for whom such an outcome could enmesh with their conceptual reality they were sundered things adrift in a universe they had no longer the power to comprehend driven only by hatred and madness as that quote has shown the pillars of logic of the machine of their strength were broken what more did they have what sporadic reports remain of encounters between these shattered legion gola and the traitors of horus lupercal are few and far between but an astartes even a dead one is a phenomenally effective soldier even more of the mystery was the ultimate faith of those iron fathers who willingly use the keys on their departed brethren to continue their own personal wars against the war master aspects of keys technology continue to exist if reports of a sacrosan generator in the calixis sector are to be believed but of the secrets of the rest none can say during the age of darkness gola astartes prowled the stars enacting vengeance wherever they sought to it is quite likely that the technology that made them perished with the same iron hands that wielded them howling their rage into the dark as their ships were torn apart by traitor macro cannon fire ultimately what are we left with judgment judgment of those who are betrayed do their actions deserve it or perhaps our pity both that is a personal question only you may decide war as is so terribly often the case makes devils of us all ave imperator gloria in excelsis terra this video and this channel were made possible thanks to the very kind donations and support from my patreon subscribers if you'd like to help support the channel head on over to patreon.com oculus imperia if you'd like to receive more updates about the channel and any future videos you can contact me or follow me on twitter at oculus imperia otherwise please like subscribe comment let me know your feedback and as ever thank you very much for watching [Music]

Channel: Oculus Imperia

Views: 82,339

Keywords: Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, Warhammer Lore, Warhammer 40k Lore, Warhammer 30k, Horus Heresy, Horus Heresy Lore, Forge World, Games Workshop, Astartes, Primarchs, Space Marines, Adeptus Astartes

Id: U5ojleFas3o

Length: 30min 40sec (1840 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021