Barabas Dantioch
"I live to tell the tale, however, of the Iron Warriors' final victory: The last loyal triumph of the IVth Legion."
- Barabas Dantioch
Warsmith Barabas Dantioch more commonly referred to as Dantioch was the highest ranking member of the Iron Warriors who stayed loyal to the Emperor during the Galactic Chaos Dumpster-Fire 30,000. The classic cantankerous old general, he linked up with other loyalists at Ultramar and joined forces with the Imperium Secundus. He may have been the founder of the Silver Skulls. Oh, also he worshiped the Emperor before it was cool and openly allowed the worship of Big E at his citadel.
Biography
Back in the hayday of the Great Crusade, He was Daddy's favourite, being promoted to Warsmith at some point.Things were going pretty good, until Dantioch was put in charge of a grand company to take on a migratory xenos race known as the Hrud. Apparently the Hrud had an "entropy field" that caused things to age at a fast pace, causing equipment to rust to unusable amounts, and bunkers to collapse under their own weight. This proved to be not a great circumstance for an equipment heavy Legion like the Iron Warriors (or any Legion for that matter) and the Hrud took half a grand company and a subsector with them before they met the business end of a plasma cannon. After that single failure in an otherwise stellar career, Perturabo pulled a Lion El' Johnson and Luthered his ass to garrison duty. Banished to an outpost that was far enough into the Imperium to definitely not get any action, Dantioch spent his time on his magnum opus, a citadel that would make any Iron Warrior or Imperial Fist squeal with delight. This culminated in Schadenhold: A subterranean fortress located on a Death World, suspended upside down over a lake of promethium.
Eventually the whole Horus Heresy thing came along and that out of the way outpost he was put in command of became essential to Horus' campaign to reach Terra, as the outpost could easily become a rallying point for the Imperial Navy if the traitor legions overextended themselves. Warsmith Krendl, Dantioch's replacement, showed up with a detachment of Iron Warriors with the backing of a Luna Wolf/Son of Horus/Black Legionnaire demanding that he cede Schandenhold to the traitor legions. Dantioch promptly told them to go fuck themselves with the backing of an Ultramarine champion before settling in for a long siege. Throughout said siege, which lasted a little over a year, Dantioch proved himself the greatest troll since, or rather before, Creed. Doing such things as painting Dreadnoughts black and hiding them in dark corners, breaking the dam that contained the lake of Promethium, thus drowning hundreds of traitor guardsmen, then proceeding to light the lake on fire, thus incinerating hundreds more guardsmen and dozens of Basilisks. The siege culminated in Schadenhold being overrun by Krendl's men and an Imperator-class titan, before Dantioch committed the ultimate act of trolling: he detonated the ceiling of the cave system Schadenhold was in, in a defiant middle finger to Perturabo, before teleporting on to Krendl's ship and flying off into the sunset.
Later, he set up shop in the Imperium Secundus, pledging loyalty to Rowboat Gigolo. He died defending Pharos, the Astronomicon Mark 2, from a Night Lords siege. In the process, he decided to fall back on his tried and true method of, "if we can't have it, obliterate everything" pushing the thing into maximum overdrive, in an attempt to bathe the Night Lords in an unfriendly amount of radiation. Turns out lighting things up was a bad idea however, as The Powers That Be have pretty much confirmed that supercharging Pharos is what initially caught the attention of the Tyranids, resulting in almost dooming the realm that he had pledged to protect. Oops.