Chronicle, entry number seventy-six.
I left my boots in the spot marked on the floor plan.
The next day, someone had moved them three centimeters to the left and left a note: “Corrected.” I don’t know who it was.
I suspect the Primarch.
In the Iron Legion there are no pranks.
There are corrections.
I.
The Princess’s Titan
In a small American town called Sherman, where nothing ever happened, giant monsters fell from the sky once a week.
They came from Galaluna, a distant planet torn by civil war.
A traitor general named Modula had seized power, and now he was sending biological creatures—the Mutraddi—to Earth to capture three fugitives: Ilana, crown princess of Galaluna; Lance, a rebel soldier charged with protecting her; and Octus, a self-aware robot who could disguise himself as a human.
The three of them lived in hiding in Sherman, posing as high school students.
And every time a monster arrived, they merged into a single giant fighting machine: the Sym-Bionic Titan.
That week, the monster that showed up was especially big.
It had six legs, three heads and an acidic breath that melted asphalt.
The Titan faced it in the middle of town, and for the first time, it started to lose.
Then, down from the sky, came an Imperial Knight.
It was a bipedal war machine, tall as a building, painted steel gray and hazard yellow, with a battle cannon on one arm and a chain-fist on the other.
It landed between the Titan and the monster with a crash that shattered every window on Main Street.
It fired exactly once.
The monster was reduced to a smoking smear.
The Knight turned toward the Titan.
It studied it.
Then, without a word, it turned around and left.
Inside the Titan, Octus processed the information for several seconds.
“Probability that that was a coincidence: zero point zero zero one percent,” he said.
“I recommend we run.”
“From who?” Lance asked.
“The dead monster or the giant robot that killed it?”
“Both. But mostly the second one.”
II.
The Inspector
The next morning, Sherman High woke up under occupation.
Not by soldiers.
By something much worse: an inspector.
He was an Imperial functionary, a thin, pale man with round glasses, a clipboard and a perfectly pressed gray suit.
He wandered the school hallways measuring things.
He measured the height of the lockers.
The width of the doors.
The pitch of the stairs.
Every so often, he jotted something on his clipboard and sighed deeply.
“These stairs do not comply with structural regulations,” he told the principal.
“They deviate by two degrees.”
“They’ve been like that for forty years,” the principal replied.
“I know. It’s unacceptable.”
Ilana, Lance and Octus—disguised as a chubby student named Newton—watched him from the cafeteria.
“Who’s that guy?” Lance whispered.
“Structural inspector of the IV Legion Astartes,” answered Octus, who had hacked the school network.
“Sent to evaluate this town’s infrastructure.”
“Why?”
“Because the Primarch Perturabo apparently considers this town’s infrastructure a personal insult.”
* * *
The school assembly was held that afternoon in the gym.
Every student and teacher was summoned.
Nobody knew what for.
When the lights went down and the projector came on, a face appeared on the screen.
A hard, square face, brow furrowed, jaw clenched.
Behind it, a backdrop of architectural blueprints.
“I am Perturabo, Primarch of the IV Legion, Lord of Iron,” he said.
“I have taken possession of this planet in the name of the Emperor of Mankind. My first order is as follows: every staircase in this school will be rebuilt.”
Silence in the gym.
“My second order: I wish to meet the three students who arrived in this town a year ago. The ones with no prior school records. The ones who live in a house with a basement twelve meters deep.”
Ilana, Lance and Octus exchanged looks.
“He’s found us,” Ilana whispered.
“He found us days ago,” Octus corrected.
“He’s only now bothered to tell us.”
III.
The Princess
Perturabo received them aboard his ship, in a command room full of screens showing blueprints, calculations and fortification diagrams.
The three fugitives entered cautiously.
Lance kept his hand on his belt, where he had a weapon hidden.
Octus had assumed his true robotic form.
Ilana walked in front, chin held high.
“I know who you are,” Perturabo said without turning around.
“I know she is the princess of Galaluna.
My psykers detected it on the first day.
I know he is a soldier.
And I know that you”—he pointed at Octus—”are a thinking machine.”
The Tech-priest standing beside the Primarch, Magos T-99, went taut as a spring.
“Potential heresy detect—”
“Not now, T-99.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Ilana took a step forward.
“If you know who we are, then you also know why we’re here. Our planet is at war. A traitor general has seized power. My father is a prisoner. And the monsters they send keep getting stronger.”
“I know.”
“Then what do you want from us?”
Perturabo finally turned.
He looked at her for a long while.
Something in his hard face changed, just for a moment.
“Nothing,” he said.
“I want to offer you something.”
IV.
The Deal
Perturabo’s offer was simple: the IV Legion would help liberate Galaluna.
In exchange, Galaluna would join the Imperium.
And Octus would be examined by the Mechanicus.
“Examined,” Octus repeated.
“What exactly does ‘examined’ mean?”
“It means we wish to understand you,” said Magos T-99.
“Not destroy you. Yet.”
“That ‘yet’ is not reassuring.”
“It was not meant to be.”
Ilana looked at Lance.
Lance looked at Octus.
Octus ran a quick calculation.
“Probability of liberating Galaluna without their help: four percent. With their help: ninety-seven percent. Probability that I get taken apart: eighteen percent.” He paused.
“I accept the risk.”
* * *
While they prepared the invasion of Galaluna, they spent weeks aboard Perturabo’s ship.
Octus was examined by a team of Tech-priests who treated him with a mixture of admiration, horror and a professional fondness none of them would admit to.
“The machine designated Octus possesses self-awareness. However, its loyalty toward its human companions is absolute. I recommend against destroying it. I recommend instead that it be studied for several centuries. It is the most polite heresy I have ever encountered.”
Lance trained with the Iron Warriors.
A commissar named Varnak put him through a training regimen so brutal that by the end of the first week, Lance had stopped complaining about anything.
By the end of the second, he started smiling.
By the end of the third, the commissar clapped him on the back.
“Not bad, kid,” said Varnak.
“For someone from another planet.”
“You’re not bad either, Commissar. For a sadist.”
“Thank you.”
V.
Kaliope
Ilana spent a lot of time alone.
One night, walking the ship’s corridors, she got lost and ended up in a room that shouldn’t have been there: a gallery of sculptures.
They were marble figures, carved with incredible precision.
Warriors.
Cities.
Landscapes.
And, at the center of the gallery, a single statue of a young woman in a simple tunic, her expression serene.
“You should not be here.”
Perturabo stood in the doorway.
Ilana spun around, startled.
“I’m sorry. I got lost.”
The Primarch didn’t answer.
He walked up to the statue of the woman and stood there looking at it.
“Who is she?” Ilana asked.
There was a long silence.
“Her name was Kaliope,” Perturabo said at last.
“She was my sister. Not by blood. On the world where I grew up, a family adopted me. She was the only one who treated me like a person.” He paused.
“She died a long time ago.”
Ilana came closer, slowly.
“I’m sorry.”
“You remind me of her,” said Perturabo.
“That is why I am doing this. Not for Galaluna. For you.”
Ilana didn’t know what to say.
But she stayed by his side, in silence, looking at the statue.
The Primarch didn’t ask her to leave.
VI.
Galaluna
The invasion of Galaluna began at dawn.
General Modula had foreseen everything.
He had an army of Mutraddi, an arsenal of biological weapons and a network of planetary defenses.
What he hadn’t foreseen was that the IV Legion would build a fortress in orbit in a single night and launch forty thousand siege projectiles from it in the first hour of combat.
“The important thing about a siege,” Forrix, First Captain of the IV Legion, explained to a slack-jawed Lance, “isn’t force. It’s geometry.”
“Geometry?”
“If you calculate the exact angle, you don’t need as much force.”
“And if you don’t calculate the exact angle?”
“Then you need a lot of force. And we have plenty to spare.”
* * *
The Titan fought on the front line, upgraded by the Mechanicus with Imperial weapons, adamantium plating and a little servo-skull on its shoulder that recited litanies of protection.
Beside it stood the Legion’s Imperial Knights.
And at the center of the battle line, the Dreadnought Valtus, a veteran of the Imperium’s siege wars.
When Modula unleashed his final weapon—a colossal Mutraddi the size of a mountain, created from the DNA of every creature on Galaluna—Valtus planted himself in front of it.
“Glory is a whisper,” he said in a voice like thunder.
“Duty is an eternal roar.”
And he charged.
The Titan and the Knights followed him.
The colossal Mutraddi fell in twenty minutes.
Modula tried to flee in an escape ship.
Perturabo brought it down with a single throw of his hammer, Forgebreaker, hurled from the planet’s surface like a projectile.
Nobody knew how he did it.
Forrix said afterward that it had been “a perfect ballistic calculation.” Perturabo said it had been “well-directed rage.”
VII.
The King
The king of Galaluna was found in a cell in the depths of the palace.
He was thin, weak, his beard long and his eyes sunken.
When he saw his daughter enter the cell, he burst into tears.
Ilana held him for a long time.
Then the king got to his feet, with Lance’s help, and walked to where Perturabo was waiting.
The Primarch stood in the palace courtyard, gazing at the ruins of the city.
The king knelt before him.
“I have nothing to repay you with,” he said.
“You have given me back my daughter and my people.”
Perturabo looked at him.
“Rise.”
“I ask only one thing more.” The king raised his eyes.
“Rebuild a world where my help is never needed again.”
Perturabo was silent for a moment.
Then, for the first time in the entire campaign, he smiled.
It was a small smile, almost invisible, and only Ilana saw it.
“That,” he said, “is what I do best.”
Chronicle, entry number seventy-seven.
Galaluna has been rebuilt in eight months.
The new walls are perfect.
The new staircases have a pitch of exactly thirty-five degrees.
Princess Ilana is now queen.
Octus is her official advisor and, according to Magos T-99, “the only heresy with a seat on a governing council.” In the center of the capital’s new plaza stands a marble statue.
It is a young woman in a simple tunic.
The plaque says only: “Kaliope.”
VIII.
The Bugs
Perturabo’s next world was the exact opposite of Galaluna.
There was nothing to rebuild.
There were only bugs.
That universe’s Terran Federation had been at war for years with a species of giant insects from the planet Klendathu.
The bugs were huge, fast and numerous.
The Federation’s soldiers, young recruits thrown into combat with automatic rifles and light armor, were dying by the thousands.
Perturabo arrived on Klendathu right in the middle of a disastrous Federation offensive.
The soldiers were being crushed in a canyon.
A young corporal named Johnny Rico was running for his life with a giant bug right behind him.
Perturabo landed between the two of them.
The bug slammed into his armor like a car into a wall.
Rico sat there on the ground, panting.
“What…?”
“On your feet, soldier,” said Perturabo.
“This is not a war. It is a design problem.”
IX.
A Fortress in an Hour
Perturabo’s first order was to relieve the sergeant in command of Rico’s unit, an incompetent man who had sent his men into the canyon without any prior reconnaissance.
A commissar of the Astra Militarum who was accompanying the Legion walked up to him.
“Your incompetence has cost lives,” said the commissar.
“I was following orders!”
“Badly,” said the commissar, and settled the matter the way commissars do.
Rico stared at the scene, eyes wide.
“That was… fast.”
“That’s how the Imperium works, soldier,” said the commissar, holstering his pistol.
“Your life belongs to the Emperor. Don’t waste it.”
* * *
Perturabo’s second order was to build a fortress.
On Klendathu.
In enemy territory.
In one hour.
“That’s impossible,” said the Federation’s chief engineer.
“For you, yes,” replied Perturabo.
The Iron Warriors built it in fifty-eight minutes.
Ferrocrete walls, automated turrets, zigzag trenches, buried bunkers, minefields and a perimeter of electrified barbed wire.
When the bugs attacked that night, they ran into a wall they couldn’t get through and a hail of fire they couldn’t dodge.
By dawn, there were forty thousand dead bugs around the fortress.
Rico peered over the wall and looked at the carnage.
“It’s like things can’t possibly get any crazier,” he muttered.
“They will,” said an Iron Warrior beside him.
“They always do.”
X.
High Command
The Terran Federation did not take the IV Legion’s intervention well.
Its high command—generals, admirals, politicians—issued a statement demanding that the Iron Warriors withdraw “so as not to interfere with official operations.”
Perturabo responded with a live broadcast to the entire Federation.
He showed the casualty figures from the past few years.
He showed high command’s battle plans, riddled with errors.
He showed the offensives launched without reconnaissance, the troops sent to die without support, the “acceptable” loss calculations signed by men who had never set foot on a battlefield.
Then he showed the high command.
Arrested.
Handcuffed.
Lined up.
“These men,” said Perturabo, “have squandered the lives of millions of soldiers through incompetence. In my Imperium, incompetence that kills is not forgiven.”
What followed was not broadcast in full.
The Imperial archives say only that “the Federation high command was replaced.” The Federation’s soldiers, in the trenches of Klendathu, received the news with a silence that lasted several minutes.
Then someone started to clap.
XI.
Iron Without
The war against the bugs went on for months.
The insects learned.
They changed tactics.
They dug tunnels under the fortresses, sent in flamethrower bugs, flying bugs, tank bugs.
In one of those battles, a tank bug—an armored monster the size of a bus—broke through the defensive line of Rico’s unit.
The soldiers fell back.
Their shots bounced off its carapace.
Rico threw himself at it with a grenade.
He ran under its legs, grabbed onto its belly, climbed up to the joint of its neck and shoved the grenade into the wound.
The bug exploded.
Rico hit the ground, covered in green guts, coughing.
An Iron Warriors sergeant walked over, lifted him up with one hand and looked him up and down.
“You live,” he said.
“For now.”
Rico smiled weakly.
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me this whole war.”
* * *
Not everyone survived.
Lieutenant Rasczak, the officer who had trained Rico, died defending an outpost.
There they also found something worse: the corpses of soldiers with their brains sucked out.
There was a new kind of bug.
One that thought.
And in the final assault on Klendathu’s main hive, Sergeant Manrak of the Iron Warriors stayed behind to cover the retreat of Rico’s unit.
“Sergeant! Come with us!”
“Negative,” said Manrak, planted in the tunnel with his heavy bolter.
“Someone has to shut the door.”
“They’re going to bomb the area!”
“I know. I called in the strike.”
Rico stood frozen for a second.
Manrak turned toward him one last time.
“Iron within, kid,” he said.
“Iron without.”
The bombardment began a minute later.
Manrak didn’t come out of the tunnel.
Neither did a single bug.
XII.
The Brain Bug
The campaign ended with the capture of the Brain Bug: the intelligent bug that directed the entire hive.
A huge insect with a swollen head and quivering mandibles, found in the deepest depths of Klendathu.
The Federation soldiers looked at it with a mixture of disgust and fascination.
“It’s scared,” said Rico, watching it tremble.
“Good,” said Perturabo.
“Let it learn how that feels.”
Rico was promoted to lieutenant.
He received a medal from the Primarch’s own hands.
When he pinned it on his chest, Perturabo put a hand on his shoulder.
“Manrak believed in you.”
“I know, sir.”
“Do not let him down.”
* * *
Carmen Ibáñez, the Federation fleet pilot who early in the war had nearly crashed her ship into an asteroid over Buenos Aires because of a navigation error, received an evaluation from the Iron Warriors.
The report read: “Flies very well. Calculates very badly.”
They demoted her to copilot.
She protested.
“Either you give me back my ship,” she said, “or you turn me into a servitor.”
Magos T-99 looked up from his data-slate, very interested.
“Are you serious?”
“No!”
“What a shame.”
Chronicle, entry number seventy-eight.
There is a plaque at the entrance to the Klendathu fortress.
It reads: “Sergeant Manrak, IV Legion. Iron within, iron without.” Every morning, Lieutenant Rico walks past it and touches it with his hand.
He says nothing.
Neither do the Iron Warriors who see him.
My next posting is the XIX Legion.
The Primarch Corax has sent me a message consisting of a single line: “Bring chopsticks.” I don’t know what for.
I’m afraid to ask.
I’m an aspiring writer with countless stories yet to tell and a lifelong passion for Warhammer.
I love bringing dark worlds, epic battles, and beautifully flawed characters to life.
I write to learn, grow, and become a better storyteller.