+ Dramatis Personae +
What price victory?
Victory is priceless.
Motto of the Officio Monstrosa
+ Kolossos Kalamatas +
+ A traditional Olympian term for standard bearer, Kolossos is mostly reserved with the IVth legion to describe the Legion's heralds, rather than the more commonplace Company standards. +
+ As with other Legions, the Heralds of the Iron Warriors were highly-skilled warriors and diplomats both: exemplars of the Legion. By the later stages of the Siege of Terra, honour came to mean less than raw strength, and many of the later Kolossi, Kalamatas included, were elevated to their position for little more than their aggression and fearlessness than any of their less belligerent traits. +
+ So it was in those later stages that as the surface of the Iron Warriors was abraded, a darker alloy was revealed beneath. +
+++
+ Corpsemarker +
+ The grinding nature of Legion campaigns often left Apothecaries splitting their duties between battlefield first aid, geneseed retrieval and implantation. In many Legions, more onerous duties were often leavened by scheduled meditations or less draining combat training. ++ The typical efficiencies of the IVth, however, streamlined this, cycling apothecaries through punishing tours of monotasking; leaving an individual on extended front-line tour; before being cycled immediately back to sort the geneseed of his fallen brethren for weeks on end. Such an approach doubtless had a brutalising effect on the Iron Warriors' Apothekarion as a whole. +
+ In addition, the Iron Warriors' unusual affinity for, and ready acceptance of, bionics meant that Iron Warriors casualties tended to be either quickly treated and pressed back into service, or dead. There was little post-injury care; with the pressure on the apothecaries resulting in their wards being viewed as tools to be repaired, or equations to resolve. +
+ Perhaps surprisingly then, the haunted, drawn visage of Apothecary-ordinary Constantine was a regular attendant at Lodge meetings of the Dodekatheon. Was he attempting to grasp at what slivers of brotherhood he could find amidst the gore; or had he become so inured to pain and injury that he felt no compunction to remain beside his charges? +
+ Constantine's honorific 'Corpsemaker' was equally cryptic – respect from the 242nd for his skill at arms and willingness to fight on the frontlines; or merely a veiled reference to the number of their dead he gathered? +
+++
+ Palatarch Oneomaster +
+ Honoured of the Basilikoi; a true 'Iron Warrior'; Oneomaster was nevertheless not Olympian-born. +
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