Some of the alcoves housed the massive forms of mighty dreadnoughts, their hulking, imposing forms immortalised by the sculptor's art for all eternity, captured in dramatic battle poses, so that an observer could easily imagine their assault cannons, plasma weapons and storm bolters raking the enemy with gunfire, whilst their scything blades and crushing power-claws brought low the weak and unworthy before them.

And there were many such heroes, for the Chapter had a history as long as the Imperium itself, ten thousand years of heroic deeds, apocalyptic battles and holy crusades. The tides of the warp had taken the Iron Hands far from their homeworld of Medusa. For much of the time the clan companies lived a nomadic existence, travelling aboard their mighty starfaring battle barges and strike cruisers, much like the wandering tribes who scraped a living from the harsh world that the Iron Hands still called home.

Gdolkin passed between the adamantium pillars of another portal and entered the Weyland's council chamber.

The vast, vaulted cathedral space was lit by hovering candelabra that cast peculiar bars of light and shadow across the huge clan symbol suspended beneath the central span of the ceiling vault. The means by which the massive insignia remained suspended, rotating slowly, above the council chamber was a secret still preserved by the techno-magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The servants of the Machine God of Mars had built the vast land-behemoth, as large and as threatening as a mobile volcanic crater, in return for some debt owed by them that had occurred in ages past. Only a few amongst the most ancient and revered of the brothers of the Chapter, encased forever more in the adamantium shells of their dreadnought war machines, knew what the debt was but it was enough for the Iron Hands to know that there was a special bond between the Adeptus Mechanicus and Sons of Ferrus Manus.

The symbol was in the shape of a huge toothed-cog, twenty metres across, which denoted the Iron Hands' Chapter's connection to the mysterious galaxy-spanning Machine Cult. At the icon's centre was the lightning strike of the Vurgaan clan, raised in bas-relief, to which Gdolkin had belonged ever since he had been recruited by the Iron Hands, following his fateful encounter in the ruins of the Ancients' city within the Land of Shadows.

Each Iron Hands' Space Marine still retained a strong bond to his clan.

Ancient, age-faded heraldic banners bearing the heraldry of a thousand notaries of the Vurgaan clan and ten thousand campaigns, amongst them the chalice and broken blade of the Grailsword Crusade against the enigmatic eldar and the burning hive-spire motif of the Third War for Armageddon. The banners stirred in the breeze from the air scrubbers, frayed gold thread sparkling like distant star clusters in the haze of the ceiling gloom.

The Iron Hands' Chapter, and by extension the Vurgaan clan, had a long and noble history, of which its brothers were rightly proud. But the clansmen were also proud of their clan and kept themselves apart from the other nine clan companies that made up their Chapter when war did not dictate that they fight together. For the Iron Hands of the Vurgaan clan were as likely to meet their fellows from the other clans in internecine disputes on their own world as they were to fight alongside them against their mutual enemies of the alien, the daemon and the heretic, who would confound the Emperor's galaxy- and eon-spanning plan.