Ilmari Wieland

This page details people, events, and organisations from the /tg/ Heresy, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. See the /tg/ Heresy Timeline and Galaxy pages for more information on the Alternate Universe.

Ilmari Wieland, the Hammerfist

"For the Imperium, Daemons are universal evil incarnate, the embodiment of everything wrong with this world. For the Traitors, they are godlike beings worthy of veneration. As for Wieland... they are expendable consumables to him, nothing more."

- Inquisitor Roderick Ovanesian

Also known as the Hammerfist, Ilmari Wieland is without a scintilla of doubt the greatest smith of Daemon weapons to ever darken the Galaxy with unholy fruits of his labour. In many ways he originated the art of fusing metal and Warp energy together into unnatural amalgamations that poison the reality with their bare existence. Even though he does not share the burning hatred most of his brethren feel towards the Imperium, there are few amongst them who managed to inflict so much damage on the realm of Man as the Hammerfist. By providing the Traitors with tools of destructions of unparalleled power, he managed to secure countless victories for the Forces of Chaos. Weapons wrought by his hand have robbed the Imperium of scores of glorious heroes, and will probably continue taking their grim toll long after their master is gone.

Origins

Born and raised in the dark, dense and menacing pine woods of Glacier World Savolax, young Ilmari Wieland had no choice but to become a firm believer in the saying that every man forges his own destiny. A land ruled by cruelty and bizarre archaic traditions, Savolax was literally divided along the gender lines into the Coven of Witches and the Conclave of Warlocks, which housed all of the planet's males and females respectively. The two realms were locked in a perpetual war to the death, which only paused for one week ending in summer solstice. During this week, the representatives of the warring sides met in a sacred crater called the Unclean Pit, with each delegation bringing along one thousand of randomly selected young men and women with no psychic powers. They were then arranged into pairs and forced to conceive a child, or several children, since a peculiar mutation caused by the warp storms of the Age of Strife made twins and triplets a normal occurrence on Savolax. In exactly nine months, the war halted for one week again, and these men and women gathered one more time in the Unclean Pit. Under the supervision of witches, the women gave birth to their children, which were then sorted out - the warlocks received the boys while the witches kept the girls. When all this was done, the parents of these children were stripped naked and left to freeze to death for having copulated with the abominable sex.

A talented psyker, Wieland stood no risk of being forced to have sex with a women and slaughtered for that nine months later. Instead, he was taken to the Goetium, a giant non-Euclidean castle where the planet's male psykers were trained for fighting the witches. Apart from such subjects as sorcerous incantations, pentagram drawing, alchemy and languages of the animals, the pupils were from the first classes onwards constantly showered in vile propaganda against the opposite gender. They were regularly reminded that the witches would use their wicked spells to make the warlocks feel sympathy or even attraction to them. To prevent falling victim to these foul enchantments, the young warlocks needed to nurture hatred towards all females. At the time, young Ilmari didn't care much for these tales, as he had yet to see a single witch. Besides, his mind was occupied with much more urgent problems. All pupils in Goetium were organised into groups of five that studied and prepared assignments together. At the end of their education, these groups had to pass the final exam - a fight to the death in the school's arena, which was stopped when only three out of five students remained alive. This way the schoolmasters ensured that only the most talented and ruthless of their pupils would join the Conclave. Wieland passed the exam with excellence, although not without accidents - he unintentionally killed two of his friends at once with his final spell, thus leaving just two students alive out of his group of five. Much to his surprise, he was commended by the schoolmasters, for they valued overachievers.

Very soon the young warlock received his staff and was sent to the front lines to join the armies of the Conclave. For several years he has been a thorn deep in the Coven's side, blasting their amazons with baleful fire, unleashing horrors made from snow and ice on their vestals and knocking their disc-riding valkyrior out of the sky with bolts of lightning. Eventually he formed a strong bond with another warlock called Nidung, and the two quickly became the bane of the Coven's armies, who knew them as the Diaboloskouroi. They almost always fought together, yet one day Wieland decided to join a raid without his best friend. After several hours of fierce fighting, he became separated from his squadron while chasing an injured valkyrie. He eventually managed to shoot the witch down at a relatively low height, so that he was positive she survived the fall. Ilmari was delighted with this outcome: it was considered a great accomplishment to capture an enemy psyker and sacrifice her to the great Raven God. However, when he approached the crash site and found her unconscious in a snowbank, strange and unwelcome feelings seized him. The sight of a helpless woman from such a close distance awoke instincts in him that were long suppressed. After some inner struggle, these instincts prevailed over his rational judgement, and, instead of bringing her back to his camp and publicly sacrificing to the Raven God, he secretly took her to his private quarters, treated her wounds and brewed a potent medicinal potion for her.

When she came back to consciousness, only the spells put on her by Wieland while she was asleep prevented her from grabbing the nearest sharp object and stabbing her captor in the throat. It took quite a lot of explaining from Ilmari that he merely intended to nurse her back to full health and then let her go for the witch to calm down. Initially distrustful of the warlock, she started gradually warming up to him when she realised how much risk he was taking by hiding a woman in his quarters: her discovery would certainly lead to his disgrace and execution. As her wounds were mending, her hatred of men was slowly melting away. Before long, the two became close friends, and then, lovers. Together they planned to escape from this pointless war into the primeval forests of Savolax and start a new life.

Yet nothing can stay hidden forever. One day, when Wieland opened the secret room where he was keeping his prisoner, he was shocked to find her dead, with her throat slit by a sacrificial dagger. As he was kneeling over her dead body, shacking his head in disbelief, the room suddenly filled with a strong smell of sulphur. The air rippled in the room's dark corner, revealing Nidung, who had been standing there all along, cloaked with spells of invisibility. A bloody dagger was clenched in the warlock's hand. In a calm tone he explained to furious Wieland that he had merely fulfilled his duty and saved his best friend from the vile witch's enchantments. Then he offered his help in disposing of her body until anybody else found out. Left with no other options, Ilmari begrudgingly agreed to take his help. As Nidung laid his weapon aside and bent over to grab the body by the shoulders, Wieland seized the dagger and stabbed his friend in the back. He was furiously stabbing him until his back turned into a single mutilated wound and the dagger got bent. Then he took both corpses, dragged them to his ritual room and burned them both in sorcerous fire until but ashes remained.

Although the other officers were upset to learn that Nidung didn't return from the latest raid, they found little reason to doubt the words of Wieland. Ilmari continued his highly successful career in the Conclave's army, yet now he held nothing but contempt for his superiors and his whole country. He was longing for this ridiculous spectacle sustained by nonsensical traditions to end as soon as possible, preferably with those responsible for perpetuating it dying slow and painful deaths. But he was just a soldier, and so he was powerless to change the system... or so he thought. One day, narrow and sharp yellow silhouettes pierced the leaden clouds of Savolax, like the fangs of a great predator beast feasting on the planet. From those gigantic flying structures, down came monstrous giants wielding sorceries unheard of even by the Conclave's most ancient sages. After several weeks of wanton destruction, their leader offered the planet's people a choice: to join the so-called Imperium of Man, or to experience horrors that would make everything that had happened so far pale in comparison.

Unfortunately, the warlocks foolishly believed they could fight this new threat, and the witches would never bow down to a man, even one as mighty as the Voidwatcher. As the yellow-clad giants started their campaign of total extermination, Wieland telepathically contacted their leader and asked if the invaders needed any help in destroying his planet. Amused by the warlock's nihilism, the giants invited him aboard one of their flying fortresses. When he received an invitation to join their ranks, he hardy hesitated for a second before accepting it. It wasn't long before he received the Voidwatcher's gene-seed and became a full-fledged Solar Warrior. He wasn't, of course, the only one to do so: given the pragmatic nature of the warlocks, most of them eventually betrayed their dying realm and swore fealty to the Space Marines, thus making Savolax one of the most important recruiting worlds for the Fourteenth Legion. Yet Wieland was by far the most successful of them all and the first one to reach the rank of Vate under his new name Hammerfist.

The Great Crusade

Although Wieland was a talented psyker and a ferocious warrior, his true passion lied in creation of magical weapons. When he discovered that he needed a human sacrifice to forge a truly potent tool of war, he decided to abandon smithing, as such an act went against his principles. However, everything changed after the Decimation. Robbed of every good quality by a dark ritual, the Hammerfist returned to his forge and soon achieved great success as a smith. As time went by, he started to feel annoyed by his brothers in arms who cared more about sorcery than about Daemon weapons, and so he decided to abandon his Legion ans start a Warband of his own. But first, he created a pair of weapons for himself by binding two Greater Daemons inside his fists during the Siege of Terra.

Current situation

Even compared to other Chaos Space Marines, Ilmari Wieland has an imposing figure. A true giant, he would tower over most of his brethren if it wasn't for the hunch on his back caused by millennia of toiling away at the anvil. His permanently squinted eyes are the colour of molten bronze, and their gaze burns like a scorching iron. When not clad in blacksmith clothes, he wears an ornate suit of Artificer armour decorated with numerous bas reliefs, which miraculously emerge undamaged from every battle due to protective charms put on them. A chainmail cape hangs heavily from his shoulders, constantly red hot from the flame exhausts of his backpack. Yet it is not his magnificent armour that inevitably draws the gazes of the onlookers. His hands are what truly unsettles the observers, one of them fashioned from scorching brass and constantly wreathed in a crown of baleful fire, the other one a reptilian claw dressed in iridescent scales, sparks of sorcerous lightning dancing across the tips of its crystal talons. Complex pentagrams and long-forgotten spells are tattooed across both of these hands with luminescent daemonic ichor, keeping the evil spirits residing inside them firmly bound. For the fists of Wieland are in fact Daemon weapons, with his right fist holding a Bloodthirster and his left fist infused with a Lord of Change.

Thus his bare hands are far more dangerous than even the most potent power weapons. The right fist can hit with an impact of a ballistic missile, easily punching through tank armour and fortress walls; it's so hot that even stones melt in it. His left hand can fire devastating lightning bolts, but that is not its main function: with this hand, he can freely shape and sculpt any material like clay, be that metal, stone or even flesh. Though his hands are devastating in combat, they show the true extent of their powers in a forge. By using his right fist as a hammer and his left hand as blacksmith tongs, Wieland can forge weapons and tools that are not even physically possible.

Although Wieland is known to speak his mind openly, not even his closest apprentices know of his black heart's true desire. The mad smith secretly wants to forge a weapon with which he could challenge the Gods of Chaos themselves and win. While the absurdity of this endeavour is clear to anyone whose mind is not as clouded by hubris as that of Wieland, he is stubbornly determined to see it through. Recently, his attention has been drawn by the mysterious findings on the deceptively barren planets dotted with black obelisks that Astrologicon Imperialis dubs Tomb Worlds. The artefacts found there are wrought from a peculiar metal that is strangely effective against the denizens of the Warp. Wieland's determination to obtain as much of this wonderful material as possible has led to a series of seemingly pointless raids on uninhabited planets by the Death Smiths, from each of which they return with heavy casualties and great heaps of scrap metal in tow. In the deepest recesses of his forge, the master of Death Smiths experiments tirelessly with weapons made from this metal, trying to infuse them with magic. Even though his efforts have been in vain so far, there is no telling how much devastation his new tools of war could unleash upon the Galaxy if he succeeds in his task.

Wieland's unsurpassed prowess as a smith is known throughout the Galaxy, yet he possesses one more power nobody knows of. He can always sense where exactly any of the weapons he has ever forged are and who wields them. This makes him the only person in the Galaxy aware of the Voidwatcher's true whereabouts, as the Primarch was holding the Aeon Slayer when the Bloodseer pushed him into the Warp. Nobody knows what exactly the Hammerfist is planning to do with this knowledge, yet everyone who knows him even a little would agree that he would definitely try to somehow use it to his advantage. It is entirely possible that he might sell this information to the Bloodseer, who would probably be interested in destroying his genetic father once and for all. But this would be no easy task, for the disdain the Bloodseer and the Hammerfist feel for each other is legendary. Another possibility is that he could try to save the Voidwatcher from his prison in the Warp in exchange for the priceless knowledge of the Daemonic realm the Primarch must have accumulated during the millennia spent there. Theoretically, he could use his expertise in infusing souls into inanimate objects to extract the Voidwatcher's soul from the Empyrean and put it into a mechanical body like that of Talos, forged from the mysterious Tomb World metal for a good measure. But until there are any definitive proofs of his true intentions, this all remains pure speculation.