Editing Death Smiths (section)

==Warband History==

===The Great Crusade===
The marines that would go on to form the bulk of the Death Smiths came from Glacier World Savolax. A planet ruled by sorcery and hatred, it was divided into two powerful magocracies, the all-male Conclave of Warlocks and the all-female Coven of Witches. Ever since the Age of Strife, those two had been entangled in a brutal war of extermination. This pointless conflict came to an abrupt end when the [[Black Augurs|Solar Warriors]] made a landing on Savolax and brought it to Imperial Compliance using the controversial methods introduced by their recently found Primarch. At the orders of [[the Voidwatcher]], all female psykers were burned at the stake, and the male ones were offered a choice between sharing this fate and joining the Legion. Ever the pragmatists, it's not hard to guess what the majority of the warlocks chose. As they joined the forces of the Great Crusade, they brought their unique sorceries with them, many of which had no analogues in the Galaxy. Clearly impressed by the contribution of his new recruits, the Voidwatcher ordered the planet thoroughly rebuilt and turned its largest wizard school, the Goetium, into a fortress-monastery for his Legion. The more he learned about Savolax and its ancient culture, the more his fascination with the planet grew. He was particularly interested in their school system that eliminated two students out of five to weed out the weaklings and forced the survivors to undergo torturous rituals that increased their power at the expense of some of their sanity. Some say it was then when he started conceptualising the ritual that would eventually become the Decimation. 

Not all Savolaxi Solar Warriors shared their Primarch's admiration of their planet. In particular, Ilmari Wieland, better known as the Hammerfist, originally joined the XIV Legion exactly because he wanted to leave his cruel homeworld behind and never look back. Wieland had despised his planet's customs ever since he was forced to kill two of his friends during his final exam at Goetium, and his hatred for everything Savolaxi only grew during his tenure as one of the Conclave's elite enforcers. He had very high hopes for the Legion when he applied to join its ranks, as he envisioned it as a force of enlightenment and reason, fighting benighted prejudices across the Galaxy. And so, his disenchantment was truly intense when he realised that he essentially ended up in a bigger, more formidable Conclave of Warlocks amidst the stars. 

His hopes for a brighter future crushed, Wieland found solace in studying the massive volumes of knowledge the Solar Warriors had amassed during the course of the Great Crusade. Eventually, his attention was drawn by a dusty tome stashed in the far corner of the Legion's library that described techniques used to bind sentient entities of the Warp to material objects, thus infusing these objects with their powers. Driven by creative enthusiasm, he managed to bind a minor spirit to his combat knife in his laboratory. This experiment didn't end too well, as the knife melted when Ilmari touched it, but this failure only ignited his desire to succeed. Before long, he had mastered all of the techniques described in the book, and then even surpassed its anonymous author as he began to make his own discoveries. He noticed that the properties of a possessed weapon were determined by the synergy between the type of the weapon, the material it was made from, the Daemon bound to it and the sacrifice made to accomplish the binding. During his experiments with different combinations of these factors, he soon found out that a massive human sacrifice was the only way to forge a really potent weapon. Since this was clearly unthinkable, Wieland abandoned his project with a heavy heart and went back to the library looking for new distractions.

He was still there, melancholically perusing through the books, when the Decimation struck. With wicked glee, the Voidwatcher unleashed his ultimate spell on his flagship, opening it to swathes of malevolent entities of pure dark energy. Within minutes, the void fortress turned into a death trap where disconcerted and helpless Space Marines were hunted by nightmarish creatures they could not comprehend. Most of the Solar Warriors met an ignoble demise there, with their minds torn to shreds with agonising lassitude and their souls brutally consumed. But those few of them who emerged alive from this hell had to pay a horrible price for their survival. Even with all of their willpower concentrated, they could not drive the Warp predators out of themselves, so in order to survive they had to merge with them. This alchemical wedding imbued them with potent psychic abilities and allowed them to peer into the future, but these new powers did not come free. Everything that had once been noble and admirable in them was consumed by hungry darkness, leaving nothing but cruelty and thirst for power in its stead. Wieland was amongst the survivors of this calamity, for a similar ritual he had to undergo in his Goetium days prepared him for the Decimation. But whereas that ritual had not affected his personality much, the Voidwatcher's dark ceremony killed the man he used to be, only to resurrect him as a heartless monster.

His pervious self's reservations about human sacrifice were little more than laughable superstitions for the new Hammerfist. As soon as he recovered from the Decimation, he requested an audience with the Voidwatcher, told him about his plan to forge a Daemon weapon and asked for some slaves. Although the All-Father was impressed with the research the young warlock undertook, not to mention his ambition, he refused to fulfill his request. Instead, perhaps intending to test the upstart Marine, he offered him to capture as many slaves as he needed during the upcoming campaign on Elon II. This turned out to be a much harder task than Wieland originally anticipated, as the Elonian officers made a point of evacuating all the civilians out of the harm's way well in advance. Yet the Hammerfist eventually found a way to turn their cautiousness against them. When the squad under his command managed to capture a small mountain fort, he used illusions to assume the appearance of its slain commendant and sent a vox announcement to all of the Elonian officers in the area, saying that the fort was in perfect safety and ready to accept refugees from the nearby settlements. One by one, coaches with military markings drove through its open gates, carrying tens of hungry and scared Elonian families to their impending doom. 

While Wieland was forging the weapon he intended to infuse with a Daemon, his soldiers were toying with their captives, testing new spells on them, forcing them to play dangerous and humiliating games and telling them bloodcurdling stories of the horrors that were awaiting their souls in the Warp. After two entire days of constant smithing, the Hammerfist had finished his masterpiece: a traditional Ossian trident that he intended as a gift for his Primarch. The trembling refugees were then brutally corralled into the profane pentagram Wieland drew in the fort's courtyard. As the Black Augur lit the incense sticks in the pentagram's power nods and began muttering his malicious incantations, it got filled with singing irridescent flame. Some of the refugees caught inside it were reduced to ashes, some were frozen solid, others turned into stone statues or melted into pools of multicoloured slime. A Greater Daemon entered the pentagram through the tear in reality left by this sacrifice, but his sojourn in the material world was extremely brief: as soon as he appeared, a trap set for him by Wieland trapped him in the trident. 

Thus the infamous Aeon Slayer was born. A true masterpiece of both sorcery and smithing, it still counts as one of the most dangerous profane artefacts to darken the Galaxy with its existence. Essentially little more than a common power weapon, it possessed a unique quality that made its wielder nigh invincible in close combat. The Aeon Slayer existed synchronously both in the present and in the future, allowing it to wound people several seconds before actually striking them. Even the Galaxy's most skillful swordsmen couldn't hold their own against the owner of this trident, as within minutes they all succumbed to the wounds that had yet to be inflicted. Needless to say, the Voidwatcher was deeply pleased with the Hammerfist's gift. Ever since the Conquest of Elon II, his Primarch's favour shone brightly on Wieland, and it is little surprise that he entered the Qesh campaign as a Vate, the first Savolaxi to reach this status.

===Hektor Heresy===
Wieland was amongst the Vates who thought that their Primarch was a fool for siding with Hektor. Although there were hardly many true Loyalists amongst the Black Augurs, a lot of them believed that there was more to be gained from siding with the Emperor's forces. It was mostly Hektor's blatant worship of the Ruinous Powers that put them off, for the sons of the Voidwatcher traditionally looked at the denizens of the Warp as servants, not masters. This applied to none more than to Wieland, for whom Daemons were an expendable material hardly more valuable than the metal he used to forge his weapons. He tried to reason with his Primarch, explaining how using sorcery to defeat the Traitors could change the Emperor's opinion on it. Yet all of his arguments fell on a deaf ear, for the All-Father had his own reasons for taking sides with the Warmaster. The second most powerful psyker in the Galaxy, he wished for nothing more than to claim his rightful position as the strongest one, and the only way to achieve this was over the Emperor's dead body. He realised, although not without annoyance, that he was no match for his father, so he planned to use his foolish brothers to dispose of him. In his boundless hubris, the Primarch was convinced he could easily deal with them after the Emperor was finished, either directly or by pitting them against one another. 

And so the fate of the Black Augurs was sealed. Like a murder of crows their fleet traversed the frigid void of space, leaving countless worlds turned into grotesque menageries of nightmares in its wake. Wherever they went, madness followed: shadows started coming to life and murdering their owners by sucking the dimensions out of them; skeletons gained a will of their own and began freeing themselves from the prison of their still-living owners' flesh; all the words disappeared, driving everyone insane as they were left without a way to understand or express their own thoughts. No longer forced to hide their allegiance with the lords of the Immaterium, Black Augurs treated every planet they landed on as a testing site for devastating new spells and enchantments they created. Wieland and his apprentices were slightly less extravagant in the destruction they caused than most, merely capturing and slaughtering throngs of slaves to forge new Daemon weapons. A great many accursed artefacts were born during this era, such as the Sagebane, a spear that erased memories with every hit it landed, the Doom Mosaic, a sword with a blade assembled from tens of tiny pieces of metal that turned into a whirlwind of razor sharp steel at its owner's command, or the Blasphemace, a mace that summoned a lesser daemon for every warrior slain with it. 

It is little wonder that word of Wieland's matchless prowess as a smith soon spread far and wide within the Traitor Legions. The mightiest warriors of this accursed host soon started sending him commissions for Daemon weapons, promising to pay in slaves and arcane knowledge. And yet, in spite of the wealth beyond measure the Heresy brought him, the Hammerfist was still dissatisfied with his lot. First and foremost, he saw himself as an artist and a visionary, and being forced to churn out commissions for uncouth brutes who could never appreciate the elegance of his work made him furious. True creative freedom was his heart's deepest desire. Besides, he was tired of being surrounded by and taking orders from bumbling incompetents and nosy upstarts who believed their mastery of the Warp to be superior to that of Wieland. And so, like many other Vates, the Hammerfist was planning to betray and abandon his Legion once its usefulness to him was depleted. His last goal before leaving the Fourteenth Legion behind was his most ambitious one to date: to finally create a pair of weapons for himself that would be worthy of him. Of course, he needed a sacrifice of truly cyclopean proportions to make this dream a reality, but he didn't doubt for a second that he could easily find one on Holy Terra.

===The Fall of Batavium===
{{Main|Siege of Terra (Hektor Heresy)#The Fall of Batavium}}
Like most other Vates, Wieland used the Battle of Terra to further his own goals. As soon as the forces under his command made a landfall, he headed towards the great Hive of Batavium with the intention to sacrifice its whole population. Although the [[Scions of Europa]] managed to discern his dark intentions and did their best to stop him, ultimately they failed. As the last Batavian perished in an apocalyptic thunderstorm conjured by the Hammerfist and his closest apprentice Jove Ampere, two Greater Daemons were summoned into the material world: a Bloodthirster and a Lord of Change. But as soon as they appeared, Wieland trapped them in his own hands, thus turning his bare fists into mighty Daemon Weapons.

With his ultimate goal on Terra achieved, the Hammerfist saw no reason to stay with his Legion any longer. After hijacking a Loyalist battleship orbiting the planet, he set course for the Eye of Terror, thus being one of the first Traitors to choose it as his refuge. But whereas most other Chaos Marines fled there seeking refuge from the Great Scouring, Wieland deliberately chose it as the perfect location for his new forge. Although a lot of Black Augurs followed him for different reason, he quickly singled out those who were more interested in wielding Daemon weapons that in forging them. With a band of his closest followers, he hunted those unfortunate fools down, stripped them of their power armour and bound in a fetal pose with runic chains. Ever since then, he has been using their bare backs as anvils for forging new weapons. 

Eventually, Wieland's coven reached the Eye of Terror and started searching for a new home. After a while, they discovered a planet that suited them perfectly: a Daemon World composed entirely of different metals and alloys, with clockwork predators stalking wind-up prey in telescopic forests and submarine whales dreaming in the oceans of molten iron. Although the planet had already been inhabited by lesser Daemons and Wieland's men were few in number, they managed to clear it of all hostile life in a few months, for the weapons they wielded made each one of them equal to a small army. Renamed Adranum by its new masters, this world has been the base of operations for Wieland's followers ever since.

===Current situation===
During the millennia that have passed since the Heresy, Wieland's followers have been content to quietly remain on Adranum, forging Daemon weapons and building Daemon engines. Originally simply known as the Hammerfist Coven, they gradually came to be known as the Death Smiths after the nickname given to them by Varus Tithonus of the Eternal Zealots. Not an aggressive Warband by any stretch of the imagination, it nevertheless plays a crucial role in any major conflict that plays out in the Eye of Terror, for it is their weapons that often determine the victor. It is even rumoured that it was Wieland's support that allowed the Great Unifier to secure victory at the end of the Legionary Wars. A popular anecdote has it that the Hammerfist was so fed up with Traitor warbands constantly clashing with each other in the Adranum system and distracting him from his labour that he personally contacted the Unifier and offered to forge new equipment for him and his retinue if they could finally put an end to these annoying wars. That being said, if the Death Smiths do not like fighting, it is certainly not for the lack of skill. Most Marines of this warband are outfitted with Daemon Weapons of their own creation, which makes them a force to be reckoned with. Their modest numbers have led numerous warlords of the Eye of Terror to underestimate them, only to find out that a single Death Smith was more than a match for a whole squad of their warriors. 

If anything can force the followers of Wieland to leave Adranum, it is the constant need for new slaves to sacrifice. Although they usually obtain them by trading them for Daemon weapons with more active warbands, time and again their needs far outstrip what little other warbands can offer. Whenever this happens, they embark on an incursion into the Imperial space. Relatively disinterested in causing unnecessary destruction, they conduct a series of small-scale raids on unimportant worlds until they gather enough slaves for their needs, after which they swiftly return to their base in the Eye of Terror. The small size of their fleet usually allows them to successfully outmanoeuvre any pursuers from the Imperial Navy and avoid major confrontations. Another reason why the Death Smiths may trespass into the Emperor's domain is to retrieve a Daemon weapon that has fallen into the wrong hands. Numerous times they have ambushed the Grey Knight forces carrying captured artefacts of the Warp to Titan in order to be studied by the Inquisition.  

Although Wieland himself does not take commissions from anyone, many of the ferromancers under his tutelage do accept them gladly as opportunities to hone their skill and earn fame. There is never a shortage of demand to their supply, for it is a rare Chaos Lord who does not crave a weapon forged by the Death Smiths. However, their prices are so steep that only a select few can afford such a purchase, and even they would think twice before going through with the deal. Of course, there is no shortage of self-confident fools who believe themselves able to steal a weapon from Adranum without leaving a single gold nugget in the pockets of its greedy inhabitants. All of them without exception have paid dearly for their hubris, for Wieland despises thieves almost as much the philistines who don't appreciate his art. Most of those would-be raiders end up as living anvils in the Hammerfist's great forge, forced to endure scorching metal and hammer strikes on their backs for all eternity. 

Every bit as petty and confrontational as any other Marine carrying the Voidwatcher's gene-seed, the Death Smiths are constantly engaged in a cutthroat competition with their peers. Every one of them believes himself to be the Galaxy's finest blacksmith, only held back by the machinations of his incompetent rivals. Although physical confrontation is strictly prohibited and punished with excessive cruelty so typical of the Death Smiths, professional rivalry is highly encouraged in the warband, since Wieland believes it to be the best motivation for his followers to improve their skills. There is no such low to which a Death Smith would not stoop to ensure that his weapons are superior to those forged by his competitors. They constantly spy on each other, attempt to ruin one another's weapons and take credits for ideas that are not theirs.