The Legiones Astartes, the Angels of Death, the Twenty Hosts. Created to be the ultimate soldiers, the ultimate warriors, forging man and monster into a single being unlike any other.

We are hard to break. But it is possible.

So, what happens when you break an Astartes?
What happens when you strip the man from the monster?
No matter from which bloodline we hail, deep down, the monster beating in our twin hearts remains the same:
Brutal. Pitiless. Uncaring.
Unstoppable.

Each Legion has its own name for these creatures, these warriors who are no longer truly men.
The Iron Tenth names their failures Immortals, who may not die before redemption.
The angelic Ninth weep in sorrow for their Lamented, those bound to the Company of Death who may no longer know of the beauty outside battle.
The Rout – those who most truly carry the beast within – refuse to speak of their fallen brothers, taken by the Wolf of Fenris preying in their hearts.

And yet, always, something remains of the soul of a Legion. There is always that one thing that makes us what we are, without which are nothing. Even the basest among us know this.
The Tenth’s Immortals still fight with their cold fury. The Lamented with their burning passion. The animalist hunger of the Rout’s beasts.

Ours still fight with duty.

It is hard to break a Legionnaire. It is harder still to break an Imperial Fist.  We of the Seventh are trained with hearts of stone and wills of iron. We do not break where others would.

But even still, it is possible.

When a man’s brothers die, a part of him dies with them. That is the inevitability of war. Brotherhood is the strongest bond we know, and when it’s broken, as it always is, it does not tear away cleanly. Even the stoniest of hearts is chipped and worn away by the death of brothers.

Mar a stone enough and it shatters. See enough brothers die, and the strongest man dies with them. There’s no helping it. It will happen. It may take fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand, but it will.

At that instant, when we reach that breaking point, the man is gone. The monster is all that remains. Something new is made of Dorn’s sons then. Something dreadful. Something that knows nothing but war and pain and hate and duty.

It is a thing defined by death.
Born of blood and battle.
War-wrought.

The Warwrought were distinct among the 284th Storm Battalion’s ranks. Clad in battlescarred plate, many heavily augmented by the prostheses replacing limbs lost to war, each one was a veteran of the Battalion, and afforded membership into this company of fallen brothers by their status as a survivor of a forlorn hope – those troops left to fight and to die, so that others might stand victorious in their stead. Many were lone survivors of their squads, and broken as much in mind as in body. War takes a toll on even the strongest of us, and the Warwrought proved that every day they fought at Terra. Despite everything, they held true to their duty. Fearless of death, unwavering in the gaze of an old friend. Free to choose their personal armaments from the Battalion’s stocks, they formed a motley clan: brothers clad in heavy Terminator plate marching in lockstep with those preferring the tactical flexibility of power armor. Their nature prevented them from ever being a numerous brotherhood: at their peak, near Heresy’s end, before the Siege, they numbered no more than 20, and by the time the sun set on the 55th day, every one of them lay dead. Their lives were not bought easily, though, and they lay surrounded by their slain enemies: empty weapons, and broken shields, and dulled blades marking the fury of their passing, having only been stopped when they could fight no more and find their final peace alongside brothers, names etched into the walls of the Temple of Oaths aboard the Phalanx, there to remain for eternity. They would not be forgotten.