Fenris

Fenris is a death world in the truest sense, a planet of grinding glaciers, storm-wracked oceans, and fire-belching volcanic isles locked in a lethal dance with its erratic orbit. Its very geography is a weapon: when the long winter of Helwinter descends the seas freeze solid, and when the fleeting summer of Fire-tide comes the ice cracks and whole landmasses sink beneath the boiling waves. Only the strong survive here, and only the strongest of those are worth anything at all.

Upon this brutal world dwell the Fenrisians, a hardy, superstitious people of longships, blood-feuds, and hearth-sagas, who reckon a death in bed a shameful thing and a death in battle the only fit end for a warrior. From the fiercest and most fearless of their number are drawn the aspirants of the Space Wolves, the wild and untameable sons of Russ.

High above the killing seas rises the Fang, a mountain-fortress of impossible scale that serves as the Chapter's home, its armouries and halls carved into the tallest peak on Fenris. From here the Great Wolf and his Great Companies range out across the galaxy, warriors who wear their savagery openly and answer to few but their own. Their sagas are sung the length of the Fang, each hero's deeds remembered in halls where the pelts of slain monsters hang.

The transformation from tribesman to Adeptus Astartes is perilous even by the standards of the glossary of Fenris, for the gene-curse of the Canis Helix can drag an unworthy aspirant down into beasthood and madness. Yet those who master the wolf within emerge as some of the most formidable warriors humanity has ever produced. Fenris asks everything of its sons, and grants nothing that is not first earned in blood and ice.