Editing Death Smiths (section)

===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.