It's... it's not the most original concept though. I borrowed heavily from the mordants and ghouls of Age Of Sigmar's Flesh-Eater Courts faction. They're undead zombies who still think they're questing Arthurian knights rather than semi-feral lunatics scrabbling around in rusty centuries-old chainmail and such. It's an amazing aesthetic, and one I really enjoyed working with to fit into a 40K context. It was also the first "full-length" Fenrykan Heresy narrative piece I wrote that really dug into the fall of a specific Legion.

I'm gonna be doing the upshot of Ferrus Manus and his quest for perfection at some point, but the CliffNotes version is: the Iron Hands go full Rubricae. Instead of dust imprisoned in power armour, they're a tangle of exposed nerves wrapped in delicate filigree patterns around a framework of perfect silver. Some of them have even directly connected their remaining nerves to the outside of their armour, the better to experience the rush of excess in the throes of battle. They're barely more than automata powered by meat-scraps, and they're all completely insane, and their jump-pack troops have bound minor Daemons of Slaanesh to these silver feathered wings so they can glide down at the perfect pace to strike.

As for Big Bob, he's got the Daemon-Realm of Ultramar which he directly controls, but a "functioning government" is a bit of a stretch. It's still beset by the same infighting and jockeying for position and general madness of any Chaos polity, but Bubba G's just got ten thousand years of managing it. All of it. So he's become the ultimate expression of fascist autocracy: power from strength, strength from power, and power used entirely at the Great Leader's ineffable whim. It is the ultimate mockery of order. It is Chaos wearing order's clothes. So yes, Ramjet Gargleblast is absolutely in charge of the Imperium Pandaemonium, as an absolute monarch and autocrat, a true king of hell. The process of trying to make that work drove him deeper into madness than anything else ever could have accomplished. He is so drenched in the politics of Astartes, daemons, and daemonic Astartes that everything he says and does can only be viewed in that context, and so to an outside observer it looks completely random. Why withdraw all your forces on the verge of winning an offensive, only to send them against a gigantic mass of enemy troops against which they could not hope to prevail? Why send a gigantic horde of Traitor Astartes to take one single agri-world in the galactic hinterland with a planetary population lower than that of the invasion force? Why anything? Because everything. According to Bob, everything is proceeding exactly as planned. It's just up to you whether to believe him.

First: Thanks for sharing this! 40k theories are always fun. I also have some thoughts, drawing a bit on conversations Phobos and I have had. A while back, he came up with an alternate Heresy that involved three factions: Chaos, the Loyalists, and the Screw This, You All Suck, the latter mostly being composed of the ones who never loved the Emperor or psykers.

A lot of that Heresy hinges on Curze the Night Haunter, i.e., what if his brothers actually listened to him, and acted on his warnings? That could stand the Loyalists in this timeline in good stead, too, especially if Magnus can put up with him long enough to actually teach him a thing or two. For as the Corvidae know well, whole point of looking into the future is to gain knowledge you can turn to your own advantage.

Angron interests me here. As with so many of the Primarchs in the canon Heresy, Angron falls in large part because he's got an enormous chip on his shoulder courtesy of Daddy Dearest. Angron already believed the Emperor was a tyrant and slaver without needing anyone to whisper in his ear. Take that away, though, and remove the Nails from the equation for his legion, and what you've got left is one of the most powerful armies in the Galaxy. The strength of the War Hounds, IIRC, is that they functioned in absolute unity. Their phalanxes were unbreakable: they marched, slowly at first, then faster, faster, faster, and they would not stop. Their reputation for brutality comes from this utter relentlessness more than any particular cruelty. They're simply what happens if the Juggernaut is an army: either you get out of the way or you cease to exist.

Phobos believes, and I'm inclined to agree, that their ability to function with such cohesion is tied to their gift, the gift of their primarch: empathy. You see it in the pain experienced by the Legion's psykers when they get too close to Angron—they can't stand it. Their primarch's pain is their pain, but without the relief granted by doing violence. In the canon timeline, nobody figures this out because all the War Hounds psykers die too quickly while the rest of the Legion is busy trying to make Dad love them by partaking in his worst qualities. Supposing they do figure it out, though. What you've got then is a Legion with the potential to perceive itself so completely that it can react instantly to the shifting arena of battle, because the left flank knows what's happening to the right and vice versa. Hypothetically, they were meant to be the Imperium's answer to the Tyranids, canceling out one of the hive mind's greatest advantages.

Following the Fenrykan Heresy, with no Ultramar on the eastern edge of the galaxy to blunt the Tyranid invasion, the Imperium could sure use a force like that... Too bad the death of Angron is gonna mess up the War Hounds as badly or worse than the death of Sanguinius messed up the Blood Angels. I can see them agreeing, possibly even volunteering to be split up with their morale utterly shattered like that. Maybe they can't stand to be around each other anymore, with the pain of their father's death shared, reflected, magnified between them.

I might have more thoughts later, but that's all I have time for this morning. I hope you like my ramblings!

~Neshomeh

That's quite touching actually. :) Thanks for thinking of me.

(Still haven't read any more yet.)

I'm not sure His Nibs on the Golden Throne would agree that the Legions need to be split, but he's not exactly in on the conversation any more. I still wonder, because... the canon post-Heresy Imperium has two Legions which had basically split themselves already (the Wolves and the Scars), three which barely existed after the Dropsite Massacre, and one (the Ultramarines) led by The Man With The Plan, where The Plan is breaking things up. Your timeline doesn't seem to retain any of those factors, and I haven't yet come across any deaths other than Lorgar, so you've got several Primarchs who, like... don't wanna let go? Plus the Alphas are literally being rebuilt from the ground up with all the knowledge of what could go wrong, so why would anyone worry that they were going to contain the same flaws as the originals?

And then there's Perturabo - builder of fortresses, right? I'm not convinced that he would cheerfully oversee the breaking up of a massive force into smaller units that couldn't withstand a siege from, say, the Blue Legion. But we can construct mitigating factors - perhaps a siege went bad in the fighting on Terra, and a big chunk of his legion was wiped out, while a more broken-up group from multiple legions were victorious in similar circumstances? "I do not like it," Perturabo says, "but the logic is inarguable." (For a bonus: the Loyalist Angels were part of the mixed group, showcasing the anti-corruption benefits of the system.)

One other thought: once Magnus awakens in the modern era (I think you mentioned this in passing), would he be able to speak to the Emperor? I mean, if the Emperor lives through the immensity of his psychic power, and Magnus is The Psyker... can they talk? And might His Undead Nibs actually, finally... apologise?

hS