Bjorn the Fell-Handed

Bjorn the Fell-Handed is the Eldest, the most ancient of all the Space Wolves and indeed the oldest living Space Marine in the entire Imperium of Man. More than ten thousand years have passed since he walked as a mortal warrior, for Bjorn fought at the side of the primarch Leman Russ and the Emperor himself during the Great Crusade and the terrible civil war of the Horus Heresy, and he remains a living thread binding the Chapter of the present to the founding legends of its past.

His grim epithet is bound to the loss of his hand. In the fighting of that distant age, battling a daemon whose corruption began to creep up his arm, Bjorn fought on rather than yield, until a comrade struck the tainted limb from his body at the elbow to halt the spreading taint. Whether the name arose from the lightning claw he once bore or from that grievous wound, ever after he was known as the Fell-Handed, and the deed became part of his legend.

When his primarch vanished from the galaxy, it was Bjorn, chosen by his brothers as the greatest among them, who took up the mantle of leadership and became the first Great Wolf of the Space Wolves. He led the Chapter through the uncertain years that followed until, grievously and mortally wounded in a rebellion he could not be healed from, his broken body was sealed within the armoured shell of a Dreadnought so that his wisdom and strength would not be lost.

Now Bjorn slumbers through the long centuries, roused only on the most solemn occasions or in the direst need, when the Chapter wakes the Eldest to seek his counsel or unleash his fury. To fight beside him is the highest of honours, for he remembers the days of Russ that all other Space Wolves know only from saga, and when the Fell-Handed strides to war it is as though the age of legends has returned to walk among his distant sons once more.