Diadea Poliorkitis

She had left them behind, early on. She had never quite understood the Imperium, with it’s catechisms and rites. She was a person of logic, with a real genius with machines. She had been seconded to the Martian cult of course, but they were even worse than the Imperium at large, anointing everything with foul smelling oil and so stuck in their ways that any innovation was aberration to them. So she left them - her blank grey armour was left in it’s arming chamber, and she stole a shuttle. Avoiding the Imperial scanner systems was easy, and when it had been safe, she plunged into the warp.


She began raiding junkers and scrappers, upgrading her vessel as she went. Even without her armour or her bolter, she was still Astartes, and her superhuman physique was easily the match for the rusted stub throwers her quarry clung to for protection. Within a few solar months, she had control of a real ship, with a crew of mortals. They were deserters, gangers, voidborn and mutants, but they were good at what they did. She drilled them hard, training them for a war against the Imperium that would define their existence. In the forge decks, they manufactured armour, using her knowledge of STCs to churn out military-grade autoguns and retrofit mining rigs with heavy stubbers. She had become a warlord with her own army. She had terrorised shipping, raided planets, and escaped into the warp every time.

Until the Iron Warriors came.

How they tracked her down, she did not know, though she made no secret of her existence. Her army, her work of years, was cut down in the space of a few solar hours. Her ship was crippled by battery fire, then picked clean for parts by the victorious IV legion. She had capitulated, expecting an unjust death years before her prime, though it never came. Their lord - her lord now - must have seen something; a kinship perhaps. There had been resistance, true - they were all veterans of the long war, while she was a new astartes - and one of Cawl’s creations too - but they were quelled by Lord Grond’s favour. He had seen potential and brought her into the legion. Now she served by his side, a Warsmith in her own right, iron within and iron without.