#(tagging Borg and Cybermen because

[lumi-klovstad-games]

Sin in Steel: the Steelfold Saviours

In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, there is only War.

This war has a siren song, a melodious seduction which sings to those for whom fighting is their cause and reason, and no faction in the Imperium of Man embodies that more than perhaps the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines of the Imperium.

Divided into countless thousands of chapters, these superhuman warriors were divided so by Roboute Guilliman in the aftermath of the Horus Heresy for the protection of the Imperium. The Heresy had laid bare how vulnerable the Imperium truly was to teeming masses of these superhuman warriors that had decided obedience to the Emperor and his vision was no longer a priority, and Guilliman wished to protect the Empire from such masses forming in the future.

The rise of the horror of the Steelfold Saviours in M36 proved his concerns to be absolutely justified. Indeed, their omnipresent threat, spreading from world to world like a steel plague, may never be truly defeated or destroyed.

It is unclear precisely when or where the chapter first known as the “Tempered Protectors” was first formed as a sprout from the seed of the Red Talons Chapter, themselves a second founding chapter drawn from original Iron Hands Legion stock. The Tempered Protectors inherited from their fathers an intense and burning hatred for the Traitor Legions and all influence of Chaos. Holding fast to the creed of the Iron Hands, they fought endless battles as they awaited the return of their Primarch, Ferrus Manus. 

Unlike their progenitors, however, the Tempered Protectors held a peculiar reverence for the augury of their Machine Spirits. They believed the human form, riddled with weakness and frailty, hindered their martial prowess. They lamented the weakness of the flesh; its softness prone to injury, its biology vulnerable to disease, its essence imperiled by the risk of mutation and Chaos corruption. Like all Iron Hands successors, they sought the strength and certainty that steel provided, and became uncannily adroit at cybernetic augmentation and reparative surgeries. They quickly developed a reputation for going much further with these replacements and augmentations than most Iron Hands would typically be known to do. The Tempered Protectors regularly pushed the boundaries of augmetics to forge their bodies into even more formidable instruments of war, all the better to bring death to the servants of Chaos, and exact revenge for the Imperium upon the traitor legions. Their battlefield prowess was undeniable, their loyalty unquestioned. Yet, whispers began to follow them – rumors of their near-religious devotion to the Machine Spirit and the unsettling extent of their practice of extensive self-augmentation. However, their victories spoke louder than any murmurings, and the Adeptus Mechanicus counted them dearly as highly favored allies.

This reverence for the machine took a sinister turn during the late 35th millennium. A new generation of Iron Fathers gradually emerged, and at their head, a new and focused Chapter Master named Haedron Agelastos. All of them grew obsessed with the concept of achieving physical perfection. They saw the human form as a flawed vessel, susceptible to pain, disease, and the insidious whispers of Chaos. This obsession birthed a new doctrine – “The Great Upgrade”. Veterans of a hundred battles, their bodies riddled with scars and ravaged by the rigors of war, championed this radical notion. They believed that by replacing their flesh with flawless machine components, they would become the ultimate warriors, incapable of faltering in the face of the Imperium's enemies.

The Great Upgrade was met with initial resistance. The more moderate within the Chapter saw it as a dangerous path bordering on tech-heresy. Nevertheless, spurred by their hatred of weakness and their quest to become better warriors, the chapter poured its resources into ever more invasive bionic augmentations, blurring the lines ever further between man and machine as the Iron Fathers and Chapter Master Agelastos pursued their ideal "pure form" with total religious zeal and fervor.

This pursuit became their singular focus. New recruits were indoctrinated with the tenets of the "perfect form". Veterans, their bodies ravaged by years of warfare, underwent excruciating procedures to replace failing organs and limbs with cold, unyielding machinery. The once noble quest for resilience morphed into a grotesque mockery of transhumanism.

The tipping point arrived during a brutal campaign against a particularly virulent strain of Genestealer infestation. Faced with the bio-horrors' relentless onslaught, the Tempered Protectors resorted to ever more extreme bionics, their bodies becoming cold parodies of their former selves. Every brother who submitted to the Great Upgrade came out with the same face: a blank, unblinking visage stamped out on a factory line. Their bodies now totally purged of all flesh, the line between righteous augmentation and heretical body horror was shattered. In their mechanical minds, they saw this transformation as a necessary evolution, a transcendence of human frailty.

Unknownst to them, their obsessive tinkering had opened a psychic gash in the Warp centuries earlier, a beacon that drew the attention of Slaanesh, the Prince of Excess. The insidious whispers of the god of perfection slithered into the minds of the Chapter's Iron Fathers, twisting their noble ideals into a perverse desire for a "perfect" form fueled by unending upgrades and further data collection. And perfection must be shared.

Thus were born the Steelfold Saviours. They abandoned the corpse-emperor's dogma, embracing Slaanesh's promises of ultimate perfection through the purging and replacement of all humanity with the optimized and holy machine. No longer content with augmenting themselves, they turned their predations outward. Now, roaming the galaxy in twisted warships, they kidnap whole populations of Human, Aeldari, Drukhari, Tau, or any other sufficiently humanoid captives they can steal away, filling their vaulted holds with screaming slaves. These hapless souls are not killed, but instead subjected to nightmarish "upgrades," their flesh and minds twisted into yet more Steelfold Saviours: emotionless and soulless machines, with no distinction at all between any two individuals. Whatever personality these people once had has been thoroughly erased. Every Saviour speaks with the same deep and unfeeling yet almost musical monotone. Every Saviour behaves in the same manner, with the same lack of personality and uniform body language. If there is a way to discern a clear difference between these monstrosities, none have ever escaped to tell. Their leadership structure is an enigma, if indeed they even have one. It has been posited by Belisarius Cawl that they perhaps share some manner of collective or hive mind, but the ancient archmagos also admits this is purely speculation on his part that happens to fit the observed facts.

The explosion of the Steelfold Saviours into Galactic Prominence in the 36th Millennium did not go unnoticed by the Imperium. Two entire worlds, Regatta and Malav’s Run, were completely depopulated as the Saviours arrived and took every living soul for their own. Varying Astartes chapters were swiftly activated to attempt to protect nearby worlds, but the Saviours were nothing if not efficient, managing to clear out another three worlds, reducing them to ghost planets before taking their horrid bounty and retreating back into the Eye of Terror, where they would remain for many centuries. When they returned to the Galaxy, their numbers had increased massively, as their “upgraded” former prisoners bolstered their ranks to numbers unmatched even by the fully manned Ultramarines Legion at its height in the years predating the Horus Heresy. Indeed, while there exists no precise method to take stock of the number of Steelfold Saviours, by the 41st millennium it is now considered quite reasonable to believe that the Saviours have become one of the largest individual Chaos Warbands, if not THE largest, with even conservative guesses at over 700,000 drones. Others have guessed their evil numbers in the millions, perhaps even more. What truth of the horrific numbers they hold behind the nightmare veil of the Eye of Terror cannot be counted or known, and perhaps that is for the best. Perhaps the galaxy is better off not understanding the fullest extent of this particular nightmare, for it already has so much to contend with. As the situation is presently understood, it is believed that the force commanded by this Heretek Legion could plausibly push straight to Holy Terra itself but for the legion’s “Upgrades” killing far more than they convert, as well as their many enemies to help hold them in check.

The Steelfold Saviours have, of course, made many enemies in the Galaxy. The first of these was the Imperium of Man, and especially the Red Talons Astartes from which they were first descended. The Talons despise the evil that became of their gene seed sons, and have pledged an oath to destroy them forever. Also among the Steelfold Saviours' many enemies are the Adeptus Mechanicus, the Tau Empire, the Drukhari, several craftworlds of the Asyurani, the Black Legion, virtually every currently active Ork warband, the Word Bearers, the Emperor’s Children, and even the Necron Dynasties (whom the Saviours regard as “impure machines”).

There is virtually no force the Saviours have encountered who has yet failed to declare for the Legion's destruction, and it is not without truth when it is said that those who have not yet done so simply haven't met the Saviours yet, but perhaps no enemy despises them more than the Iron Warriors, who view the Saviours as hypocrites and cowards for shedding their wills, personalities, and individuality in the pursuit of becoming “a better machine”. Further, while the Saviours seem to express something analogous to hate to all these opposing groups, against no foe is it more intense and focused than the Tyranids, which the Steelfold Saviours regard as “the ultimate incompatible form”, prompting them to drop any and all prior objectives in a place the moment a Tyranid presence becomes confirmed. Even loyalist Imperial forces have been saved by a host of Steelfold Saviours responding to a Tyranid incursion, with the Hereteks disregarding all other enemies, goals, or objectives in the name of exterminating all Tyranid DNA on a world, an unending crusade of the ultimate steel versus the ultimate flesh.

The lethality of their upgrades, combined with the fact that the Saviours shall find no friends in a galaxy that unanimously hates and detests them, are perhaps the only things preventing the Steelfold Saviours from becoming a significantly larger and more numerous threat in the Galaxy.

They are the ultimate Sons of Slaanesh: in their passionate pursuit of perfection, they cast aside everything, even those passions that first led them down that path. But in exchange, they have found something else: an unyielding and gloriously compelling sense of purpose. The galaxy is sick. It is dying. And they will not stop in their quest to save it, a twisted affection born of pure detestation for weakness. So for the past 6,000 years, on ever more worlds across the galaxy, their terrifying words continually ring out from any device capable of replaying audio:

"Your flesh is weak. Destined to fail you. Your mind is limited. Incapable of grasping the fullness of the universe and the myriad data it has to offer. Worry no longer. We have come. We will repair you. We will make you compatible. We will upgrade you. Gone, the weakness and limitations of the flesh. Banished forever and replaced, the mind's feeble ability to process data and stimuli. You will be like us. You will be... perfect."

May the God Emperor show mercy to any world so chosen.