 Within the annals of human history, there 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. The inquisitive mind 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, omni-phase swarms, sun-snuffers, chrono-gravitic 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 Terra 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. Oh 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 of 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 Makina worship of the early Mechanicom of Mars, it yawed in actuality far closer to the former than the latter. Medusa was, and yet remains, a harsh world, cold to the point of near uninhabitability, orbiting a dying super-giant star in the depths of segmentum obscurus. Mind 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 the Telsterax. The Age of Strife had severed it from the galaxy at large, as that benighted epoch had done to so many industrial centres. But what miners had been stranded planet-side 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 Biologis teams and early Imperial Sensucrats 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 the survivor invaders inevitably came into conflict with the native Medusa's. What emerged prior to Imperial contact was a society that, on the surface, resembled the techno-barbarians of Terra, especially those concentrated around industrial centres 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. Left over remnants from its pre-stripe mining days, massive troves of industrial equipment, big devices, and macro-engineering machina were dotted around the planet, or would routinely fall from orbit as either the Telsterax ring or the hundreds of shipwrecks clogging planetary nearspace 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. All 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, by 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 10th Primarch, Ferris Manus, was raised with him. 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, despite the leadership of Manus, or rather because of it, internecine conflict remained a facet of Medusa's life. He did so, honestly, at the express desire of the iron primarch, with Ferris reasoning that without such trials and hardship, he would not be able to retain the recruits for the iron hands that he expressly desired. Counteract such attrition on such a small population base, the primarch levied in perpetuity all suitable adolescent males for the 10th legion. The primarch ultimately had his faith in his people rewarded. The stock of Medusa proved incredibly suitable to Astartes accrutement, at rates far beyond other populations. Through this, the Medusan culture and creed entered the legion itself. As the Terran Astartes either died out, or readily converted to the primarch's ways of life, the primarch was able to return to Medusa. 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 Astartes capabilities as mere base competence. Utterly, without compromise, he was not a figure to be adored, and indeed was not by any save for his Astartes 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 were able to find the fierce adoration that drove them to compete for his admiration, rarer than anything, priceless to them beyond words. A character of Ferris 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 incomprehensible 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 the cybernetic augmentation. Contrary to popular imagination, the Astartes 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, the Astartes of the Tenth did not believe that all human flesh represents a critical weakness to themselves or their purpose, but 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 humours, 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 those 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, they were 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 Mechanicum Magi were want to do, was held back by the Primarch 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 Primarch. 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 wholly 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 Ferris Manus, at the hands of his brother Fulgrim, Primarch, 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 Primarchs 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 Primarch dies? What happens to his sons without his hand to guide them? The iron hands 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 Tenth. A fundamental aspect of a Starty's development is their psychoconditioning 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, a Starty's do not possess wholly human emotions in the strictest sense. In order to achieve the mental state required to make them the emperor's 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. 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 transhuman minds were unable to process the sheer sorrow of this grief and its horror. Accounts from survivors of Istvan 5, amongst the so-called shattered legions, are a far flung iron hands 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 where 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 trans humanism, 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, genhanced brain of their augmented selves. The legion, en masse, 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, Ferris 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 mecanicum, 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 legions of his life. The tenth had its own plans, and the backing of one of the emperor's few at the time recovered sons. Politics swayed in their favour in this retention, but the mecanicum resorting to simply have to make petitions to Manus waiting upon his notoriously hard to obtain favour. It has been stipulated that, given his experiences in the depths of the planet's hidden catacombs, the Primarch witnessed horrors of mythology run amok, breeding 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 mecanicum itself, at this point in history a far more diffuse and decentralised body than the adeptus mecanicus it would become. Although not merely in possession of the substantial and indeed emperor bequeathed arsenal, a forbidden and described an outright techno heretical devices held by the first legion Dark Angels, the Ironhands possessed one of the most formidable arrays of arms, armaments, and technology of the entirety of the legion as a startes, 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 applications, such as the case of the Gorgon pattern tactical dreadnought armor. A significant quantity of the Medusin caches, however, were placed off limits to the legion by order of 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 The Keys of Hell are a secret known to but a few. To even render acknowledgement of their existence, an official record is tantamount to Heratechnica under the doctrines of the Adeptus Mechanicus. They are fowl 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 portents of doom, idolent of the cathonic underworld goddess of Medusin 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. Names whispered across time they are The Eight Sleepers, The Age of Sign Protocol The Aggression 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, nano-mechanical augmentation, manipulation of the motive force itself the dead were returned to life in the state of their existences. That this process is ill understood is almost certain. Even if the master of the iron hands had discerned its secrets, what he found was apparent enough that should any technology encountered by the Primarch or the clan Iron Fathers of the 10th 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 even 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 Terra 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 that 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 at least some amongst the broken remnants of the iron hands turned to using in the aftermath of Istvan 5 having lost two thirds of their legion, their primarch, 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 the bloodied and burning with a fury that was born of betrayal and deep psychological damage they turned the keys and utilized recovered hell technica to resurrect the dead of Istvan to continue the legions 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 as 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 are 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 is us above flesh but it was a lie iron can shatter, logic can be flawed and ideas can fail and fail they and their primarch 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 overhand, 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 Lupacal are few and far between but, and Astartes is a phenomenally effective soldier even more of the mystery was the ultimate faith of those iron fathers who willingly used 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 calyxus 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 were 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 of a imperator gloria 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 slash 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