Index Astartes – Salamanders : Lords of Greed and Pride

Arrogant and cruel, the Salamanders are heirs to their Primarch's unbridled power. From their very inception, dark rumors circulated about them, but by the time the full extent of their corruption was revealed, it was too late to stop them. The blood of two Primarchs stains the hands of Vulkan, who has long since shed the last trace of humanity left in him to become a Daemon Prince of Chaos. Their flesh twisted to reflect the darkness of their souls, the Salamanders are a plague upon the galaxy, enslaving all those who fall before them and plundering their riches to sate their immortal greed. Like the ancient drakes of myth, they are unrestrained in the exercise of their power, unburdened by any thought of morality or compassion. With dark fire and blades inscribed with unholy runes, they crush all those who come before them, selfishly striving to emulate the greatness of their Primarch. Meanwhile, the Black Dragon, who slumbers in his lair, awaits the call of great plunder to rise once more, and rain doom upon the worlds of Mankind ...

Origins : Born of Fire

Knowledge of the Traitor Legions' very existence is forbidden in the Imperium to all but an elite few : Imperial commanders and officers, Planetary Governors on regions plagued by raiders, the loyal Space Marine Legions and, of course, the agents of the Holy Ordos. But there are histories that have been lost to the passage of time, and others that have faded into little more than legend and myth, whose truth is known only to the God-Emperor and those dark souls that still dwell beyond the rings of the Iron Cages, their memory made bitter by ten thousand years of exile and damnation.

Such is the case of Vulkan's legend. Most of the Black Dragon's history is forever lost to us, and the few kernels of fact that remain to us point at a legacy darker and more terrible than perhaps any other of the Traitor Primarchs – even the Arch-Traitor Guilliman himself. The tale of Vulkan's life is one of loss and dread triumph, and if the ramblings of those driven insane by studying this saga are to be believed, it is one that is far from completion yet.

Like all Primarchs, Vulkan was stolen from the Emperor's gene-laboratories by the machinations of the Ruinous Powers and cast across the galaxy. He landed on the world of Nocturne, a Death World located in the Ultima Segmentum. Circled by an oversized moon named Prometheus, Nocturne was constantly ravaged by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that made permanent construction impossible. Life on that planet, for the few unfortunate souls descended of the colonists who had crashed there centuries before, was harsh and short – by the standards of the Imperium, the planet would have been classified as a Death World.

Unlike the other Primarchs, Vulkan was not found by another member of the human species as a child, nor did he wander alone until his path came to cross that of another descendant of distant Terra. Instead, the young demigod was found by one of Nocturne's great beast, a gigantic reptilian creature hundreds of years old, who was the subject of legends and camp-fire stories for the scattered tribes of the surrounding regions. Kasare, they called the beast, one of the great salamanders; predators who slumbered deep below Nocturne's surface and were only roused by the Time of Trials, when Prometheus and Nocturne were closest and the world screamed under gravitic forces.

Vulkan's life-pod crashed in the deep volcanic crater at the bottom of which Kasare had made her lair. Her sleep interrupted, the beast rose and approached the source of the disturbance. She found Vulkan emerging from the pod as an infant, and by all rights the life of the young Primarch should have ended there and then, an outcome that would have been much better for the galaxy. But instead, moved by some primordial instinct, the salamander attached herself to the child as if it were her own. For almost ten Terran standard years, Vulkan remained in isolation with Kasare, raised by the great beast. The salamander left the crater to hunt and bring back the carcasses of other, lesser examples of Nocturne's megafauna, so that Vulkan might feed upon them. She also brought in living specimens, and Vulkan learned how to fight and kill for himself.

Feeding on the rich meat of Nocturne's beasts, Vulkan grew quickly and strong, his body further toughened by the harsh conditions of his lair. The crater in which he lived was fairly secure, but rockfalls from the sides, flows of lave bursting from the depths and radiation-poisoned winds were common. It is believed that it was during that time that his skin darkened and his eyes took on their glowering red tint, as an adaptive response to the hostile conditions. But the first true challenge Vulkan would face came when, after ten years, the instincts of Kasare moved on to their next phase.

Nocturne's salamanders were fiercely protecting of their young, as they must be for the species to have any chance of surviving on that harsh world. But once their spawn had reached a certain age, their children became rivals for limited food resources, and needed to leave the nest and carve their own territory. Normally, young salamanders knew this instinctively, but Vulkan was no mere beast, and so, when the creature he had come to consider his own mother suddenly turned on him, he was caught completely by surprise.

Agony.

It coursed through his body as the claws of his mother tore through his flesh. Never in all his life had he ever known such pain. He had been wounded before, when he had fought the beasts she had brought so that he would learn to defend himself, but never like this. His belly had been torn open, though his organs remained inside – something that had never happened with any of his previous foes but did little to diminish the terrible pain. Again and again she stroke at him, and it was all he could do to rise his arms in defense, until he felt too weak to even do that. Then the claws came for his throat and he fell, a crimson torrent pouring from his ravaged body.

Darkness took him …

… and then, in a flash of light and heat, his eyes snapped open. There was no more pain – he looked, and saw that his body was whole, though the ground was still soaked with his blood. The weakness from moments ago was gone, yet his mother was still staring down at him, her claws red with his blood. She had killed him, yet he lived again, and though she appeared confused, her confusion quickly gave way to renewed fury and she lunged toward him once more.

He lived again, but if he did nothing, he would die again.

With a mighty roar, he rose to his feet and punched the reptilian creature in the side of her jaw, sending her tumbling to the ground with greater force than he had ever displayed before. He felt as if his body was on fire, fuelled by the very power of the ground on which he stood. He would not be a helpless victim of this creature's rage any longer. He would not let her hurt him. He would never let anything hurt him.

And if that meant that he had to kill her, then so be it.

But he was a Primarch, and emerged victorious – though not before making a terrible discovery, that would set him apart from the rest of his brothers forever : Vulkan could not die. After being slain by Kasare in the battle's first moments, he had risen from the dead, restored to full health and possessed of even greater vigour than before, and defeated the creature that had raised him since infancy. It was then that Vulkan learned that he was a Perpetual, though he would not learn that term and what it meant until much, much later in his life.

The Perpetuals

Death is inevitable. It is the one thing that binds all members of the human species together – from the lowest dreg in the underhive to the Lord Governor of an entire Sector, all are bound by the inevitability of death. The Emperor alone, so the Ecclesiarchy teaches us, is beyond death – and even then, it is because He moved beyond it when He shed His human form and became a god. Even xenos species must obey the same law, and save for the unliving legions of the Necrons or the accursed spirits of the Neverborn, all things must eventually face the Reaper. To have a soul, no matter how wretched or tainted, is to live in the shadow of death.

Except that such is not the case, and in the deepest archives of the Inquisition, the truth is written behind half-forgotten myths and legends. There are those who are untouched by death, who go through the passage of millennia unaffected. Hundred upon hundred of years might pass, and yet they remain the same, returning even from the most hideous and complete death looking none the worse for wear. They are known as the Perpetuals, and each of them is a power in him or herself, not because of any particular power they might possess – they have none save for the ability to return from death – but because of the skills they have picked up during their long, multiple lives.

The fact that Vulkan, the only Perpetual Primarch, turned against the Imperium and the Emperor, has led many of the Inquisitors aware of their existence to hunt down the Perpetuals as potential agents of Chaos. But apart from the Black Dragon, none of these immortals have ever been known to bow before the Dark Gods. It is possible that the Ruinous Powers have nothing to offer to an immortal, or that the wisdom and knowledge that comes with such a long existence inevitably reveals the Primordial Annihilator for the abomination that it is, making submission to its insane evil impossible for any sane being. Still, those arguing for the systematic hunting and capture of the Perpetuals argue that for someone who does not know death, the lives of all those around are, by necessity, lessened in value. What does one mortal life matters to an immortal, after all ?

Once victorious, Vulkan set to work, and crafted for himself a cloak and suit of armor from the corpse of the beast, wearing her skull upon his shoulder. He then turned his attention on how to escape the great crater that had been his world for years. Within a few days, he was climbing out, following the steps left in the walls by the claws of his beast-mother. Outside, he beheld Nocturne's landscape for the first time : a desolated land, riven by earthquakes and lava eruptions. He also saw, in the far distance, the signs of civilization, and his long-dormant instincts told him that he would find more of his kind there.

Despite the dangers of their world, the people of Nocturne had managed to build seven cities on places where the land was the least agitated. The city found by Vulkan, Hesiod, was called the Seat of Kings, and was the most influential of the sanctuaries of Nocturne. When Vulkan presented himself at the city's doors, he was welcomed in, though the guards' surprise at seeing a lone wanderer survive to reach their gate quickly turned to shock and fear when they saw him up close. To the mortal eye, Vulkan was a black-skinned giant with burning red eyes, clad in the skin of one of Nocturne's most powerful beast and wearing its skull upon his shoulder. They fell on their knees before his might, awed and terrified in equal measure.

Vulkan was introduced to Hesiod's ruler, and after only a few days he was capable of speaking fluently in Nocturne's harsh, but strangely poetic language. By some strange twist of fate, Vulkan saw a blacksmith's shop while visiting the city, and asked to work there. Something in the shaping of the metal, in the creation of instruments of war and peace, appealed to him, and seeing his cloak, the blacksmith welcomed him with open arms. In only a few days, Vulkan had surpassed his first teacher; within a few weeks, he was the greatest smith in all of Hesiod.

Half a Nocturnian year after Vulkan's arrival to Hesiod, one of the many cataclysms of plaguing the death world happened once more. Unlike the fury of the earth or the beasts that roamed in the wasteland, this scourge came from beyond Nocturne : it came from the dark places between realities, where the scions of dread Commoragh dwell. For centuries, Dark Eldar slavers had preyed upon the people of Nocturne, hunting them down for sport and capturing them as slaves. Hardy and resilient, the Nocturnians made excellent slaves for the cruel xenos, known to their victims as the myth-shrouded Dusk Wraiths.

This time, however, things were different : a Primarch was here. Vulkan fought the Dusk Wraiths in the streets of Hesiod, killing dozens of them and leading the city's people into repelling the xenos. The king of Hesiod had been slain in the confusion – dark rumors claim that he was killed not by the Dusk Wraiths, but by Vulkan himself. The Lord of Drakes, as he was called by the grateful population, was offered the throne, which he seized immediately before calling his people to war. The Dusk Wraiths were still harassing the other cities, and he intended to free them from the invaders' depredations. Within a few weeks, Vulkan had crafted powerful weapons for Hesiod's most powerful warriors, those who had proven themselves in his eyes when fighting back the Wraiths in the city's streets.

City by city, Vulkan and his army fought and defeated the Dusk Wraiths, gaining new followers at each step of the way. However, by the time they reached the seventh city, Skarokk, the Dark Eldar had escalated their activities, driven into a frenzy by the news of their prey's unexpectingly fighting back. When Vulkan entered the Dragonspine, as Skarokk was known, it had become a pit of horrors, where the only living humans were kept in a state of perpetual agony by their tormentors' cruel devices. Vulkan's army marched through the city, their heart full of vengeance, but it was all they could do to end the victims' pain – the Dusk Wraiths had long since departed.

Vulkan swore that such an atrocity would never happen again. He declared that Skarokk would stand forever as a reminder to the rest of the cities of the price of weakness, and the need for strong, unified leadership. With almost no opposition, Vulkan was proclaimed master of the six remaining city-sanctuaries, and began to work on rebuilding Nocturne according to his own vision. A powerful military was created, led by warlords equipped with weapons and armor crafted by Vulkan's own hands, and hunted the beasts around the cities, making it safer for the people to mine the prodigious wealth of Nocturne's earth.

Under Vulkan's rule, Nocturne became a much safer place for its people. Vulkan had a nearly preternatural instinct for predicting the shifts in the earth, and was able to prevent much of the yearly death toll that had become part of Nocturnian life. Out of respect and fear for their coal-skinned overlord, the six cities sent prodigious amounts of gemstones and precious minerals to Vulkan's throne in Hesiod. With these, the Lord of Drakes forged weapons, but also wondrous works of art that were exposed in his castle, and people flocked from all over Nocturne to see them. It was the first time in recorded Nocturnian history that the clans had the opportunity to truly enjoy beauty, rather than fight for survival.

At the same time, Vulkan did not tolerate dissent, and those who opposed his rule or spoke out against him were quickly disposed of by his loyal supporters. The only exception were those who possessed useful skills or connections : they were brought before Vulkan himself, where the natural presence of the Primarch soon overwhelmed them and turned them into the most devoted servants of the Lord of Drakes. Peace and civil order were maintained through an unyielding military rule, and all were expected to serve the will of Vulkan. This system was brutal, but effective, and perhaps the only one that could have worked on a Death World such as Nocturne – we will never know.

When the Emperor came to Nocturne, He found His son at the head of a powerful and prosperous empire, carved out of the savagery of a world that might very well have claimed his life. The Master of Mankind descended on Nocturne in disguise, and used the ancient rituals of trial of the world to challenge Vulkan's might and intellect. Vulkan emerged triumphant in every trial, and demanded to know who was this outsider who dared to question his fitness to rule. Then the Emperor revealed Himself in His true glory, and Vulkan knew that he had finally found someone who did not stand, by their very nature, beneath him. It is said that he laughed when he saw the Emperor, the first time he ever did so in the memory of his servants – for he believed that, at long last, he would no longer be alone. There are even tales that the Emperor joined in his son's joy, in a display of the innocence that would later be so cruelly shattered.

The Emperor told Vulkan of the greater galaxy, of the thousands of worlds that needed to be brought out of the darkness and into the light of civilization. He praised Vulkan's work on Nocturne, and spoke of the Legion that had been crafted from his blood. This Legion – the sons of Vulkan – direly needed his leadership, but first, the Lord of Drakes needed to learn the knowledge he would require to fulfill his role as a general of the Imperium's Great Crusade. He also told the young Primarch about his brothers, those who had been created in the same way he had been.

Eager to meet his siblings and face the new challenges of the Great Crusade, Vulkan accepted the Emperor's offer. He left the ruling of Nocturne to his subordinates, but ensured that they would have the Imperium's support, and that the children of the six cities would be tested for the honor of joining his Legion. For several years after that, Vulkan fought at the side of the Emperor, his true nature kept a secret while he learned the skills of a commander and the structure and technology of the Imperium. Rumors about the mysterious warrior clad in green draconic armor spread widely across the forces of the Great Crusade, and speculation as to his true nature was rife – until the day the Emperor judged Vulkan to be ready to reveal himself and take the place that was rightfully his.

The Great Crusade : Tyrants Among Shepherds

'On the Anvil of War are the strong tempered and the weak made to perish, thus are men's souls tested as metal in the forge's fire. We are the champions of this new age, my sons, and we shall forge the future of all Mankind with our deeds. Like the blacksmith shaping the blade, we cannot afford to be kind to the material we use – only by beating it into shape shall we make it strong enough to weather the passage of time and threats.

For make no mistake : there are threats uncounted waiting in the stars, xenos that would see Mankind wiped out from the galaxy if they had the chance and the legacies of our ancestors' failures slumbering on forgotten worlds, waiting for the foolish to rouse them once more. Only through strength can we defend ourselves from these perils, by crushing all those who oppose the Imperium's right to rule the stars.

Greatest of all those dangers, however, is disunity. When Mankind first took to the stars, it scattered without care no plan, the leaders of each colony ship seeking to create their own isolated society. This mistake cost them terribly, for no world can stand alone in this universe. Even if they resist us, even if they refuse the gift of compliance, we must force it down their throat no matter how much damage is done to the process – because without us, they will die at the hands of one threat or the other, and that threat will grow stronger from feasting upon them before coming for us next.

The people of the Imperium might look at you and see monsters, weapons of war removed from humanity by the gene-forging that made you what you are. And perhaps they are right, but it does not matter. All that matter is that Mankind needs armies strong enough to survive, and you are that army. You are the Salamanders, the primordial beasts bound to the Emperor's will, that He might bring order to the stars and strength to Mankind.

Let nothing stand in our way as we conquer the galaxy for my father. Let none oppose us, for to fail is to do far worse than die – it is to sentence our entire species to extinction, as we become no more than another footnote in galactic history, to be forgotten by those who will rise from our ashes. But we will not be broken by that endless, vicious and cruel cycle. We shall master it, and in doing so, we shall become immortal !'

Passage from the decree of Primarch Vulkan, after taking command of the Eighteenth Legion

Even before Vulkan's discovery, the Eighteenth Legion's reputation was a dark one. Their creation had been shrouded in secrecy by the Emperor, their first warriors kept away from the other Legions for unknown purposes. Dark rumors circulated among the citizens of the Emperor's domain, especially when the only two other Legions to be treated this way were the Sixth and the Twentieth – both of which would come to be feared and reviled in equal measure over time, though for very different reasons and with a very different outcome.

The appearance of the Legionaries only aggravated the issue. While foolish discrimination based on skin color had long since disappeared in an Imperium fighting against the mutated horrors created by the techno-barbarians, the Eighteenth Legion's gene-seed caused those it was implanted into to develop thick, scale-like black skin and red, glowing eyes. These traits gave them an inhuman appearance that surpassed the mere size and proportions of a transhuman, and combined with the attitude of these warriors on the battlefield, fearful whispers of "devils" and "monsters" spread among the human forces deployed alongside them.

The warriors of the Eighteenth Legion were first revealed to the rest of the Emperor's servants near the end of the Unification Wars, when they were unleashed in the Assault on the Tempest Galleries. This was during the final extermination of the Ethnarchy, a cabal of insane gene-twisters controlling thousands of enhanced transhumans of their own and circles of chemically enslaved psykers, as well as possessing many technological relics of immense power. Earlier in the Unification Wars, the Ethnarchy had been contained in the Caucasus Wastes at a terrible price – millions had been lost, and more than ten thousand Thunder Warriors had perished as well.

Using burrowing engines, the twenty thousand Astartes of the Eighteenth Legion infiltrated the Ethnarchy's last fortress from below in order to sabotage its massive and powerful defences. At the core of the fortress, they fought not against flesh and blood, but the antique, near-sentient constructs that were tasked with the defense of the complex which drained energy from the very molten core of Terra. Between the brutally hostile environment and their highly intelligent and powerful foes, it took all the Astartes had to triumph. They finally succeeded in silencing the malevolent machine-spirit that dominated the complex, sending its cogitators down into an ocean of lava, but by that time, less than a thousand of them remained. Without its defence grid, the last city of the Ethnarchy fell, its leader brought in chains before the Emperor so that He might learn the secrets that had allowed this blasphemous kingdom to stand in His way for so long.

While the Eighteenth Legion earned much honor for this battle, with its numbers so dramatically reduced, it was unable to join the Great Crusade as soon as other Legions. Instead of being deployed as one massive force, the sons of missing Vulkan were assigned in small groups to individual forces needing Astartes support. Scattered across the Great Crusade, these groups rarely amounted to more than a hundred warriors – an elite force for the commander of the Expeditionary Fleet to call upon in case of dire need. This meant that every battle the Legionaries experienced was dangerous and desperate even by the standards of Astartes, and casualty rates remained as high as the honors the Legion continued to gain over the dead bodies of its members. This created a brutal mentality among the warriors of the Legion, who did not expect to live long and only saw value in their lives if they died honorable and worthy deaths.

The coming of Vulkan changed all that. For all his faults and later treachery, there is no denying that during the Great Crusade, Vulkan was fiercely protective of his sons' lives. Whether this was due to any genuine bond, the duty of a general to his soldiers, or the callous calculation of a warlord seeking to preserve his most valuable assets, the Lord of Drakes made sure to change his sons' mentality. He named them the Salamanders, so that they would carry on the legacy of strength and near-invincibility of these great beasts. He gathered them all in one force, not hesitating a single moment to use his Primarch's authority to revoke the oaths that had bound them to other armies.

United under his command and with fresh recruits coming in from Nocturne, the Eighteenth Legion was saved from the brink of annihilation and reborn as a potent fighting force for the Great Crusade. In barely a few years, the Salamanders' numbers were in the thousands once more, and a century after the Crusade had begun they were, if not the most numerous Legion, at last no longer considered in danger of dying off. Vulkan's time as ruler of Nocturne had given him a keen eye for ambition among mortal men, and he quickly formed a web of allegiances with other commanders, offering his Legion's support, but also personal presents of weapons and armor crafted with his own hands. The Commanders of the Imperial Army honored with such princely gifts dedicated the forces under their command to Vulkan's endeavors in the Crusade – and would later form the core of the human armies who turned against the Emperor alongside him. Outside of these allied worthies, however, the Salamanders were regarded as mighty but exceedingly brutal warriors.

Vulkan's tactics were brutal, aimed at minimizing Imperial losses and achieving quick compliances with little regard for collateral damage – and they worked. In the battle of Antaem, the first in which the Lord of Drakes fought side by side with his reunited Legion, his tactical instincts served him well against the numberless hordes of the Orks. Using fire weaponry and the first of the strange, deadly weapons Vulkan had forged after learning the secrets of the Mechanicum, the Orks were slaughtered to the last. With the greenskin menace curtailed, the Salamanders quickly pacified this entire region of the Halo Stars, destroying several other xenos threats that had plagued the human worlds of the sector during Old Night. Vulkan rejoiced at a task well done, and vowed that he would repeat this success and surpass it in the rest of the Crusade.

But Vulkan failed to realize that, without a pressing threat to make them welcome the Imperium's assistance with open arms, many of the human communities scattered across the galaxy would cling fiercely to their independence. That was the purpose of the iterators – to convince these reluctant children of Terra to return to her embrace. In Vulkan's eyes, however, any who refused to join the Imperium were either ignorant or foolish, and time spent discussing with them was time wasted during which another world's cries for help against galactic dangers went unanswered. His conquests were quick and violent, as he did not hesitate to use whatever means would lead to the enemy's surrender most quickly. While his methods often left the military forces of the worlds brought to compliance in ruins and the ruling class decimated, the Salamanders refrained from causing civilian casualties where possible. This was not out of any lingering kindness in their hearts, but a matter of supreme pragmatism : the dead made poor Imperial citizens, and butchering civilians often made an enemy's surrender all but impossible. Avenging one's dead family, the Salamanders quickly learned, was a cause that would make even the most cowardly of men take up arms and fight to the death without ever considering giving up.

'The Alliance of Noverion had stood for six thousand years, surviving through the horrors of the Dark Age of Technology and the Age of Strife that followed it. Their fleets and armies had kept their borders safe from alien predations, twelve star systems linked by stable Warp routes and united in the name of survival and prosperity.

It only took one year for the Salamanders to reduce the Alliance to ruin.

After the failure of the first diplomatic overtures, Vulkan decreed that the Alliance's defiance of the Imperium would not be tolerated. Their ships were broken in their worlds' skies, burning fragments raining upon domed cities. Their armies were crushed on the field of battle, executed to the last as retribution for the few fallen Salamanders. World after world fell, their ruling class annihilated and their population cowed in terror as the Legion moved on to the next planet – until at last Vulkan's flagship darkened the heavens above the Alliance's capital world.

In desperation, the Alliance's leaders attempted diplomacy one last time. I was on the bridge of the Flamewrought when their plea was received, and saw and heard the Primarch's response. These men and women had been broken, shown their insignificance next to the power of the Imperium. They offered their lives in return for their people being spared and their few remaining soldiers being allowed to surrender honorably. Vulkan smiled – the most terrifying thing I have ever seen, and I have journeyed through the Warp – congratulated them on their moral courage, and agreed to their offer of capitulation.

The planet was taken without a single shot. The soldiers of the Alliance were disarmed and sent back to their homes. After a year of rebuilding ruins, the adepts of the Administratum were relieved to finally see a world brought to compliance without the Salamanders almost completely destroying its infrastructure first.

I never found out what happened to the leaders of the Alliance after they surrendered.'

From the forbidden account In the Shadow of the Dragons, by Navy officer Torson Veller

Vulkan regarded his more humane brothers as naive, and believed that eventually the rigors of the Great Crusade would bring them to see the galaxy as he did : a harsh and unforgiving place that demanded that the strong rule over the weak. While close to Rogal Dorn and Ferrus Manus, who both shared his outlook, he was shunned by the rest of the Primarchs, safe for Guilliman. The Primarch of the Ultramarines often met with his Nocturnian brother, trying to convince him to change his views with long and passionate debates into the merits of their various approaches to the rest of Mankind. These reunions created a bond between them stronger than any Vulkan shared with his other brothers, for while he never changed his mind and remained certain that Guilliman would change his in time, he appreciated the fact that Roboute was the only one not to have given up on him.

The two of them also often discussed one of Vulkan's most secret and surprising passions : a deep and true interest for ancient art and history. According to remembrancers, the collection of the Lord of Drakes was staggering both is scope and quality, hosting relics from all of Mankind's eras – from the Dark Age of Technology all the way back to before Man first discovered writing. In those days, Vulkan was fascinated by the flow of History – though it might all have been a front, to hide his secret research into discovering the traces left by other immortals across the aeons.

In hindsight, and with knowledge of the secret Vulkan tried so hard to hide – though he faced little difficulties, never encountering any foe he could not defeat without resorting to his peculiar gift – the patterns in the Lord of Drakes' actions are obvious. Whenever a human world colonized in earlier epochs was discovered in regions he was tasked to conquer, he would always begin with a diplomatic phase, even if such efforts were obviously going to be fruitless. In the case of the Monarchy of Blood, his insistence that the iterators discuss with the ruling king was downright criminal, as it sent a dozen men and women to certain death.

At the time, Vulkan claimed that these were the results of his efforts to mend his ways in a fashion more agreeable to his brothers, but the truth has since been revealed by the Inquisition's research. On every such world, Vulkan sought to buy time in order to investigate the planet's ancient history, searching for clues of the actions of another immortal such as himself. Whether he found any other Perpetual that way is unknown. There are no trace of such a discovery in the records accessible to us, but surely had Vulkan succeeded, he would have kept it even more secret than the rest of his shadowy quest. Regardless, Vulkan's investigations also yielded a trove of technological lore that he hoarded like the beast of myth he had begun to be compared to. He used this knowledge to craft ever more devastating weapons, placing them aboard the grandest of all his accomplishments, the forge-ship Chalice of Fire.

Eventually, two hundred years after the beginning of the Great Crusade, the Emperor called His Primarchs to the Triumph of Ullanor. The Master of Mankind, noble Horus, stalwart Perturabo and elusive Jaghatai had defeated the greatest Ork empire to have ever been encountered, and the Emperor wanted to honor those who had fought there, and through them all soldiers fighting the Great Crusade, human or otherwise. Vulkan was there, with a group of his most elite warriors, the Pyre Guard – veterans of the Legion, from the days before Vulkan had been found. They took part in the parade, and marched beneath the gaze of the gathered Primarchs with pride.

When the Emperor announced that He was returning to Terra, and taking Magnus with Him, while leaving Horus in command of the Great Crusade, Vulkan wasn't shocked as much as he was intrigued. The Lord of Drakes had ever suspected his father was keeping secrets from the Primarchs, just as Vulkan himself was keeping secrets from his sons and fathers alike. He attempted to uncover these secrets, believing that they might held a clue in his own quest for answers. But his every investigation, legal or otherwise, was met with an adamantium wall of failure and the sudden silence of infiltrated agents.

Vulkan's mood grew sour in response to these repeated failures. His tactics grew increasingly brutal, and even downright cruel on occasion. Soon, the title of Lord of Drakes was replaced by another, whispered fearfully by civilians of the Imperium and soldiers of the Imperial Army alike : the Black Dragon. Tales of entire cities being butchered as punishment for their refusal to bend knee, of grotesque mutilation being visited upon surrendered enemy soldiers to prevent them from ever fighting again, circulated across Expeditionary Fleets. But it wasn't until Kharataan that things came to a head.

The leaders of the city-states of Kharataan had heard of Vulkan's aggression, their own primitive astropaths picking up the screams of nearby systems. These nightmarish visions had painted them an image of the Imperium as a blood-drenched dictatorship, where cruel warlords slaughtered with impunity while a distant Emperor let them do as they pleased. After a single diplomatic meeting, on the off-chance that the visions had been wrong, or deceitful, Kharataan cut all contact with the Expeditionary Fleet hanging in their system and prepared for war. Vulkan ordered the Salamanders to land in mass on the planet, and prepared to lay siege and break the cities one by one, forcing the leaders who had so insulted him to watch as he did so.

As the first assaults began, however, a new fleet entered the system, much smaller than the Salamanders' own. Konrad Curze, the King of the Night, had come, thinking to aid his brother in bringing Kharataan peacefully into the Imperium's embrace. Instead, he found a planet at war, and sent his Night Lords into the fray. Ostensibly, this was to help the Salamanders – but in truth, the Savior of Nostramo had dark suspicions regarding his brother, though even his worst fears would fall short of the reality.

With the help of the Night Lords, the Salamanders quickly took the first of the city-states, only for Vulkan to order that one fifth of the population be executed. Whether civilian, soldier, rich or poor, young or old – one out of every five inhabitant of that city would be killed, to teach the survivors the price of opposing the Imperium in general, and Vulkan in particular. Curze's rage and horror when he learned the news were terrible, and only the fact that he was on the other side of the planet prevented him from physically attacking Vulkan as he would do with Dorn soon after. Instead, after his pleas for stopping were ignored, the King of the Night withdrew his forces from the campaign – taking with him the entire population of the last city-state that still stood unbroken.

'Are you mad, brother ? What purpose could such slaughter of innocent possibly serve ? Do you so thirst for domination that you care not how many lives you crush ? I swear that if you do not stop this insanity immediately, me and every single one of my sons shall not rest until our father's wrath comes down upon you for your crimes !'

Attributed to Primarch Konrad Curze, during the Kharataan Incident

After the events of Kharataan, Curze sent a report on what had happened to the Council of Terra, including recorded evidence of the Salamanders' excessive behavior, not just on that world, but in numerous other operations. However, the message was subject to the usual vagaries of the Warp, and it took years for actual action to be taken. The reply, when it came, bore the sigil of Malcador himself. It demanded that Vulkan and his sons return to Terra to explain their actions, both in the Kharataan affair and in the many other instances of excessive force that had happened during the Great Crusade. Curze sent ten of his warriors to the Lord of Drakes to carry the Sigillite's message. Nothing was ever heard again of these envoys, for soon after their departure, news of Guilliman's treachery reached the Imperium, and the Salamanders' transgressions lost their importance in light of this new heresy.

Ten sons of Nostramo laid in pieces across Vulkan's throne room when Artellus Numeon crossed the threshold. The Lord of Drakes sat on his throne, eyes fixed upon the carnage his weapon, Dawnbringer, had wrought. The massive, ornate warhammer rested at the side of the throne, still covered in the life-blood of the Legionaries it had torn to fragments.

Artellus walked through the carnage cautiously, eyes fixed on his Primarch, searching for signs that his rage hadn't yet abated. When the Eighth Legion small ship had emerged in-system and the Night Lords had demanded an audience with Vulkan, the Lord of Drakes had been amused if anything, and he had welcomed them aboard his ship, the Flamewrought. Then the Night Lords had asked that all Salamanders leave the room while they delivered their message to Vulkan alone, hinting at the authority behind their orders. Vulkan had grown more agitated then, but had agreed to the demands. That had been nine hours ago – as long as Artellus dared to wait before returning into the room.

'Rouse the astropaths,' said the Primarch at last, turning from the bloody scene to his First Captain. 'I think it's time I answer Guilliman's invitation.'

Heresy : Conquest and Secrets

'I suppose out of all of them, Vulkan turning traitor should have surprised us least. He was always the most brutal, the most ruthless and unrelenting in his approach to conquest. But we were all brutal in our own way, and we had all been ruthless and unwilling to compromise our ideals. This is what it meant to be a Primarch in the first place – to be one of the genetically forged generals of Mankind.

And there is another thing that scholars and historians will fail to understand : any of our brothers turning against the Imperium in the first place was supposed to be impossible. We couldn't conceive it – or at least, I could not. Until the very last moment, when my boots landed on the black sands of Isstvan V and the sounds of my brothers' Legions firing upon my sons reached my ears, the betrayal of Guilliman, Dorn, Ferrus and Sanguinius felt more like a nightmare more than a reality.

"How could they not have seen it coming ?" generations will cry as they learn of the horrors of this war. "How could they let this happen ?"

They were our brothers. We fought and bled at their side, we saved their lives and they saved ours.

The true question is, how could we possibly have seen it coming ? If treachery did not hurt so much, it wouldn't be nearly as effective. If evil wasn't so unthinkable, it wouldn't be evil ...'

From the private memoirs of Primarch Mortarion, written during the Roboutian Heresy

While the treachery of the Salamanders might seem obvious in hindsight, there is actually very little hard evidence as to the exact means by which Guilliman convinced Vulkan to join him in rebellion against their father. There does not seem to have been any attempts by the Ruinous Powers to court his attention prior to the events of Isstvan. His search for other Perpetuals might have caused him to research ancient sorcery, but from the records of his investigations, it seems Vulkan was, at the time of the Great Crusade, still enough of a believer in the Imperial Truth that he steered off such dangerous matters.

All we have, then, are theories and suspicions. The most probable cause of Vulkan's treachery is that, after learning of his coming censure, he was approached by Guilliman, who told him the same lies about the Emperor he had been told himself. Knowing that war was coming to the Imperium and eager to escape the consequences of his crimes, the Black Dragon then willingly joined forces with Roboute. Or perhaps it was whatever passed for brotherly love in Vulkan's heart that convinced him to side with the one brother he was truly close to, no matter the risks. Another theory is that Vulkan knew that the Dark Gods had bestowed strange and previously unknown lore upon Guilliman and his cohorts, and that he believed that this lore held the keys to his long obsession of understanding his own immortality.

Regardless of the truth, Vulkan came to the Isstvan system to help Guilliman's cause, while still draped in the pretences of loyalty to the Emperor. During the journey, his Legion's ranks were culled of those who would not follow their Primarch in betrayal, in a quick and silent purge. Then came the assault on the traitors' position. Vulkan was assigned as part of the second wave, supposed to follow in the wake of the Night Lords, Death Guard and Alpha Legion to secure their gains and crush the rebels with overwhelming force.

The testimonies of Isstvan survivors indicate that the Salamanders bore no obvious sign of Warp-born corruption, such as the Ultramarines and Iron Hands displayed. The Librarians of the Salamanders showed no unholy powers on the black sands of the Urgall Plateau, only the natural proficiency with pyromancy that had been their hallmark during the Great Crusade. The single difference was that the sons of Vulkan were now using their skills and tactics against their own cousins.

Vulkan fought against Konrad Curze there, when the King of the Night willingly sacrificed himself so that his brothers and their sons might escape Guilliman's trap. The Black Dragon, for all his power, was no match against the unleashed fury of Curze, who had finally let loose his darkest abilities, secure in the knowledge he would be dead long before they could turn him into a monster. Time and again did the King of the Night slay his brother, only for Vulkan to rise, his immortality finally revealed to both his sons and the other Traitor Legions. The secret of the Black Dragon was out in the open at last, and it is likely that Vulkan felt relieved at this grand revelation.

Finally, Vulkan struck Curze down, the Primarch's body falling in the hands of Salamanders who promptly plundered it for trophies, before being pushed back by the vengeful Night Guard, led by Talos Valcoran. The Soul Hunter directed his brothers, and they reclaimed the body of their father while Vulkan was still reeling from the mental exhaustion of his many resurrections. Soon the Massacre was over, and the other traitor Primarchs started to look upon Vulkan with mixed respect and fear, wondering how it was that their brother had gained such a powerful gift. The Black Dragon replied to inquiries on that subject only with cold, deadly silence, and soon the Traitor Legions were convinced that his immortality was the result of some dark pact of his own passed with the newly discovered Gods of the Warp.

His brother was dead, and he had been the one to kill him.

When Dawnbringer had fallen upon Curze's chest and blasted his hearts to pieces, Vulkan had still believed, deep within, that he was not the only one of his brothers that could not die. None of the Primarchs had ever died before, after all – if you didn't believe in the rumors whispered about the Sixth and their secret campaigns. Only when he had seen his brother's corpse had Vulkan realized that he had believed Curze would rise again, suddenly aware of the folly of it all, understanding the meaninglessness of other, mortal lives, and embracing Vulkan as his brother.

But instead Konrad had remained dead, staring at him with eyes that, even in death, judged him and condemned him. That had been why he had stepped back, why he had done nothing as the Night Lords killed his sons and took Konrad's body with them. For the first time in his life, he had felt horror … and regret.

In his chambers aboard the Flamewrought, Vulkan brooded on these dark thoughts, ignoring the summons of Guilliman that he attend the war council that would decide the next stage of the war. He was staring at a fire pit, and it seemed to him as if the shadows cast by its flickering light danced on the walls with malevolent intent, closing in on him from all directions. Then, with a mighty roar, he cast down the fire and rose, before storming out of the chamber, leaving Dawnbringer inside, still covered in the blood of the King of the Night. Never again would Vulkan touch the weapon he had forged with his own hands.

And never again, he vowed to himself, would he do anything, and regret it afterwards.

After Isstvan, the Salamanders then spread across the galaxy in several groups led by commanders appointed by Vulkan himself. These groups did not join in the push toward Terra led by Guilliman and Manus. Instead, they focused on the conquest of vast swathes of the Imperium, forcing trillions to kneel and swear fealty to the Black Dragon, and through him to Guilliman. Some among the Traitor Legions began to suspect that Vulkan was building a power base more loyal to him than to the rebellion. They feared that in time, Vulkan would turn against Guilliman, seeking to rule his own empire. Whether these concerns were warranted is, ultimately irrelevant, but illustrates perfectly the distrust and corruption of loyalty that infect the Traitor Legions to this day.

While most worlds were no match for the power of the Eighteenth Legion, the defenders of worlds loyal to the Throneworld were not without allies. The Night Lords and Alpha Legion had scattered after the Massacre, their warriors vowing to get vengeance on those who had betrayed them. While the bulk of the Eighth Legion travelled to the Ultima Segmentum to take part in the Thramas Crusade, thousands of sons of Nostramo remained to help the resistance. The Salamanders found themselves facing the Night Lords' guerilla tactics on dozens of worlds, and one of their leaders, Zso Sahaal, was even responsible for the loss of the legendary Chalice of Fire, including all the terrible weapons aboard this vessel.

The Chalice of Fire

Vulkan was as much a blacksmith as he was a warrior, and what few archives have survived of the Great Crusade tell us that he had forged many great and terrible weapons during that time, combining his own keen instincts with the lore he gained from the Mechanicum and the worlds he conquered. When word of his betrayal reached the Imperium, many feared that he would turn these weapons against the worlds of Mankind, and what the consequences would be – for these were no mundane tools of destruction, but artefacts of immense power, that even the Salamanders had been reluctant to use during the Great Crusade. All of them had been gathered by Vulkan in a ship that itself was one of them, the Chalice of Fire, a vast forge-ship armed with the laser array known as the Eye of Vulkan. This ship was under the command of the first Salamander Forgefather, T'kell. In the skies above Isstvan V, the Chalice was responsible for the destruction of nineteen vessels of the loyal Legions, blasted to pieces by its weapons.

But the lords of the Imperium on Terra were not the only ones aware of the threat posed by Vulkan's artefacts. Soon after the Massacre, a force of Night Lords struck a great blow against the Salamanders. Led by Zso Sahaal, a member of the Circle of Shadows known as the Talonmaster, a splinter group of the Eighth Legion ambushed the Chalice of Fire while it was travelling under light escort deep in traitor space. The Chalice was too powerful for Sahaal's flotilla to destroy in the void, and so the Talonmaster and his warriors boarded it instead, sacrificing most of their ships in order to do so. According to what little information is available to us, there was some dissent in the ranks of Sahaal's group : some warriors wanted to destroy the Chalice and deny the traitors the use of its contents, while others wanted to make use of the weapons themselves to avenge the loss of their Primarch and help win the war against Guilliman and his allies. Sahaal's own opinion on the matter is unknown, and will likely remain so for all time, for as the Night Lords were fighting the Salamanders aboard the Chalice, a new player appeared in the space battle.

A fleet of Eldar vessels emerged from the Webway, surrounding the Chalice. The xenos ships took heavy damage from the forge-ship's escorts, but they ignored their losses, focusing on allowing a few ships from reaching their allotted positions around the Chalice. Once these ships were in alignment, just as Zso Sahaal was confronting T'kell on the Chalice's bridge, the Eldar used their strange sorcery and ancient technology to banish the forge-ship and its contents into the Warp, sealing it away in a stasis bubble of prodigious size. The Eldar vessels then promptly departed, as did the surviving Night Lords ships, carrying word of this strange battle back to the loyalists. Eventually, though Zso Sahaal and many other warriors had been lost, Sevatar deemed the attack a success – the Chalice of Fire was never seen again, and the threat of Vulkan's artefacts appeared to have been removed from the equation of civil war.

Great was the rage of Vulkan when he learned the fate of his forge-ship and the loss of his weapons. He vowed that the Eldar would pay for their treachery, and over the millennia since, he has made good on that promise several times, sending warbands to attack Exodite planets and even Craftworlds, and allying with the Blood Angels on several occasions. Still, the Children of Isha remain confident that they did the right thing – the artefacts forged by the Black Dragon in the time he was still flesh and blood were far too dangerous to be left in the hands of mon-keighs. Yet the question remains : the Chalice of Fire was not destroyed, merely sealed away. Even now, there are many Forgefathers and other Chaos Lords who seek to break its prison and bring it back to the Materium so that they might plunder its contents. Some factions among the Mechanicus that are aware of the forge-ship's legend are also hungry for the lost lore it contains, convinced that since it was sealed before the Salamanders succumbed to the lure of Chaos, all its treasures rightfully belong to the Omnissiah's devoted servants.

The Inquisition is ever watchful for signs of this dread ship's return, and its agents know that, should the Chalice reappears, they can count on the help of the Night Lords. The sons of Nostramo are as eager to prevent the horrors the Chalice could unleash as they are to learn more about the fate of their brothers lost to its holds ten thousand years ago – perhaps even now, in a place out of time, Zso Sahaal battles T'kell still …

Many among the Shattered Legions sought vengeance against the Primarchs who had personally led the slaughter of their brothers, and none more so than the Night Lords against Vulkan. Many plots were hatched to eliminate the Black Dragon, only to be aborted when the realization sunk in that none of them had the means to prevent Vulkan's unholy resurrection. That is, none of them, until the Chief Librarian of the Eighth Legion, the Terran-born Fel Zharost, was contacted by a man calling himself John Grammaticus.

Grammaticus was a Perpetual, something he proved to the Librarian by allowing himself to be killed in front of him. Painful as the process was, it – along with the Twentieth Legion medallion found in Grammaticus' possession – convinced Zharost to listen to what this immortal had to say. The tale he received is preserved in the archives of the Night Lords as well as those of the Inquisition, who received a copy soon after its founding.

According to Grammaticus, he had once been in the employ of a group of xenos from various species interested in manipulating the human race to their own ends. Their enemy was the Primordial Annihilator, the dark force in the Warp that had corrupted and empowered Guilliman and his associates. But this Cabal, as it called itself, was no ally of the Imperium : it wanted the traitors to win so that Guilliman would eventually destroy Mankind, taking the Primordial Annihilator along with it. Grammaticus' desertion was, he said, a tale for another time, for he brought knowledge far more important to Zharost's immediate needs : a mean to kill Vulkan – permanently.

Before departing the Cabal, John had learned of an artefact called the Fulgurite spear, a weapon made of the psychic remnant of the Emperor's own power. Lost and forgotten on an isolated world decades ago, this weapon had been prophesied by one of the Eldar's seers to be able to end the life of the Black Dragon. Grammaticus claimed that of all the traitor Primarchs, Vulkan was somehow the most dangerous, and that if he were not stopped he would, in time, become the most terrible threat to all sentient life in the galaxy. Zharost needed little convincing to go after the Fulgurite, his own hatred of the fallen Lord of Drakes making all other considerations secondary.

The Fulgurite rested on the world of Traoris. According to local legends, the Emperor had travelled to this world long before He had revealed Himself on Terra and begun the Wars of Unification. There, He had battled a coven of daemons, sorcerers, and their minions. Such had been the power unleashed there that the Fulgurite spear had formed from the remaining energies of the Master of Mankind's psychic lightning. The relic had been recovered by an illegal and secret cult of the Emperor as a god, enshrined and preserved for decades.

The Dark Gods, however, were also aware of the Fulgurite and the threat it represented to their minions – for as a relic from the Emperor, it was anathema to all creatures of Chaos. They had told their devotees among the Traitor Legions of the weapon resting on Traoris, and when Grammaticus and Zharost arrived on the planet, it was already occupied by Dark Angels forces. The population had been either exterminated, sacrificed in dark rituals to the Changer of Ways, or shipped off-world to the nightmarish laboratories the First Legion had hidden in the Ghoul Stars. Yet the First Legion was still present, searching for the Fulgurite – the last act of resistance of Traoris' people had been to hide their sacred relic.

Together with a small group of Night Lords, Grammaticus and Zharost infiltrated the Dark Angels lines, using the powers of the Chief Librarian in combination with the Perpetual's own, strange psychic powers. After a brief battle against the Dark Angel Sorcerer leading the traitors on Traoris, they managed to recover the Fulgurite spear and escape. Immediately, Zharost began to prepare a way for them to get to Vulkan – not an easy task, even for the Eighth Legion. The Night Lords were too scattered for a full-front assault, and the Chief Librarian was unwilling to gamble the lives of his brothers on what was, after all, only the word of one human with a strange ability. Even Grammaticus agreed that a direct attack was likely to fail, as Vulkan was leading the core group of the Eighteenth Legion. Cunning, he said, would be their best chance at succeeding.

Using secret knowledge gleaned during his time as an agent of the Cabal, Grammaticus and Fel Zharost infiltrated the Salamanders' flagship, the Flamewrought. The two of them went there alone, for to keep themselves hidden from perception would require all of their combined efforts. We do not know the exact details of what happened, for John Grammaticus was never seen again – and the headless corpse of the Chief Librarian was displayed as a standard by the Salamanders when they next fought against the Eighth Legion. We know, however, that Grammaticus managed to reach Vulkan and hurt him with the Fulgurite.

While Vulkan survived the attack, he was still wounded, and the damage did not heal as it should have. Unsure of what the consequences would be should he die again while the Fulgurite's wound was still on his flesh, Vulkan was forced to turn toward the dark arts his brothers had so fully embraced. A grand ritual was performed, that cost the lives of thousands of sacrifices and shattered the sanity of dozens of Librarians, turning them into full-fledged Sorcerers. Through it, Vulkan was able to contact the Dark Gods themselves, and have them heal the damage inflicted upon him by John Grammaticus. But the Ruinous Powers never give anything without hidden costs, and Vulkan's soul was forever tainted by the ritual, with his every night haunted by visions of horror and corruption, as the Chaos Gods each attempted to draw him to their service.

How long had it been, Vulkan wondered, since he had last truly felt pain ?

When he had fought against Curze, he had died many times, but none of those deaths had felt as painful as the pulsing agony in his flank. Every wound he had suffered then had quickly been healed when he had resurrected, for the King of the Night had been trying to kill him quickly, not make him suffer – another proof of his weakness.

The Black Dragon was still furious that one of the would-be assassins had managed to escape. He had slain the Night Lord Librarian, cutting his head off with the nameless blade he had forged after abandoning Dawnbringer, but the accursed human, the one who had actually carried this damned spear point, had fled before he could catch him. One of his sons had been sure that he had shot the man, but there had been no body when they had reached the location of his supposed death – though there was quite a lot of blood, too much for one mortal to lose without dying. This brought dark possibilities to mind for Vulkan – but he disregarded them, for he had more pressing concerns.

He was standing in the middle of what had once been a prosperous hive-city, but was now little more than a graveyard haunted by the tormented ghosts of its former inhabitants. Millions had been sacrificed in patterns gleaned from the occult lore Vulkan had accumulated in his search for answers and from the other renegade Legions. Around him stood a circle of one hundred and forty-four Librarians, their lips silently moving as they mentally recited incantations of Vulkan's own design, based on scrolls plundered from the vaults of a xenos species he had personally all but exterminated. A few had escaped him, but regardless of what lore they had managed to flee with, Vulkan was confident that the Saruthi would never again threaten Mankind.

The air shimmered with barely contained power. Then, a crack appeared in the very fabric of the universe, then spread, until reality shattered and the layer behind the Materium was revealed. Vulkan looked right into it, and as the incantations continued – now shouted loudly, in voices that seemed to be more than a little hysterical – shapes began to form in the roaring maelstrom. Four great silhouettes that were actually one that were actually a trillion trillion souls scattered across the entire galaxy, looking down at Vulkan with eyes filled with all the malevolence of the universe.

At that moment, Vulkan understood the true nature of Chaos. He saw what Guilliman had seen in the Eye of Terror, the power of the Primordial Annihilator and its connection with every human who had ever lived or would ever live. He saw the true nature of Mankind looking at him through the masks of the Ruinous Powers.

They are us, he thought, cold horror filling his mind at the dawning revelation. These gods … they are us.

He felt his sanity tremble, and for a moment he teetered on the brink of the abyss of madness, about to fall and embrace the worship of Chaos as so many had before him. Countless souls had come to this revelation before him, each broken and reforged into a weapon of the Dark Gods. Before the knowledge that an evil of such scope existed, that it came from and rested into the depths of the human soul, scholars, philosophers, savants and psykers had all been consumed by madness … But not him. As the Black Dragon was confronted with his own insignificance in the grand scheme of things, he did not weep, nor did he break.

'I am no one's slave,' he growled, clinging to his own identity and desires. 'I will not serve ! I will not kneel ! Never !'

The only reply from the storm of ruin was a terrible laughter, filled with dreadful indulgence and the inevitability of damnation.

'I call upon all the powers of the beyond !' Vulkan shouted in the very face of insanity. 'The price has been paid in blood and souls ! Heal me from this curse, and restore my full might !'

The entities around, above, beneath and within him laughed even louder, and reached out …

Soon after the assassination attempt, Vulkan turned his eyes toward a distant planet, in the Segmentum Tempestus. This world had nothing of worth about it, save that it had served as a staging ground for the Great Crusade and likely contained resources left behind by the many forces that had used it over the decades. It was known as Tallarn, and in the nightmarish visions sent by the Dark Gods to torment him, Vulkan had learned a secret that the Ruinous Powers had likely attempted to keep a secret from him : beneath the surface of Tallarn was buried an artefact of prodigious dark power. One that, in the right hands, could be used to defeat the Dark Gods themselves : the Cursus of Alganar, one of the three Gateways of the Gods. This Warp vortex could grant those strong enough to master it – few as they were in the galaxy – control over the energies of the Empyrean, and dominion over its denizens.

The Salamanders came to Tallarn in force, and the war began with a viral bombarding of the entire planet. Vulkan had no desire to waste time by prosecuting a traditional war – he had come to Tallarn for one reason only, and the world's resources and inhabitants played no part in it. Some of the people of Tallarn were able to find shelter in the great sealed vaults that had been used to store the equipment left behind by the Great Crusade, but the environment was ravaged, a once verdant world transformed into a desert of radioactive sandstorms. The Salamanders' resilience to radiation allowed them to walk on the surface while only wearing power armor, but for the human survivors, travel was only possible in armored vehicles, and even then only for a short period at a time. Fortunately, the vaults held plenty of tanks in various states of repair, and soon, the Tallarn rose once more, determined to avenge their world.

Thousands of tanks rolled toward the traitor positions, and despite the clouds of dust, they were visible from orbit long enough before making contact that the Salamanders had time to prepare. Still, Vulkan had not anticipated such resistance – he had believed that only a handful of terrified civilians dwelled in the vaults. The battle of Tallarn began as a gigantic clash of tanks amidst the ashes of the world, and things only escalated from here.

The loyalists on Tallarn managed to send an astropathic call, and soon reinforcements from both sides poured onto Tallarn. The soldiers of the Emperor who came to Tallarn did not know why the planet was so important – all that mattered was that the traitors wanted it enough for a Primarch to direct operations, and therefore it must be denied them. Imperial Army Regiments, Knights, and even Titans were deployed. The skies above Tallarn were filled with light for the first time since the bombardment as the brilliance of orbital battles pierced the dust cloud. Even warbands from other Traitor Legions arrived, drawn by the promise of a glorious battle. Groups from the White Scars, Space Wolves and Imperial Fists were welcomed by Vulkan, but kept away from his real reason for being on Tallarn.

For months, the battle raged on. Eventually, however, the loyalists started to gain ground, thanks to a few decisive operations of infiltration and sabotage by the Alpha Legion that led to a final, decisive engagement. According to the surviving accounts, almost a million tanks and other heavy vehicles were involved in this last confrontation. Through countless acts of heroism and self-sacrifice, the loyalists won the day, taking heavy casualties – but still able to continue their advance toward Vulkan's fortresses. Though he still had thousands of Legionaries at his disposal, fighting tanks and Titans with Astartes was a foolish notion.

And so, at long last, Vulkan was forced off the planet by the combined power of the loyalist forces, forced to abandon the ongoing excavation of the Cursus. The war of Tallarn was over, but the planet would not know peace for long. Years after the end of the Heresy, the ancient evil buried beneath its surface was finally unearthed. This was be done not by the hands of Traitors, but by unaware miners, and the price paid in blood was be terrible – though the threat was stopped in the end. This conflict, known as the Cursus War in what few archives are allowed to speak of it, would also see the Imperium forced to ally with the Eldars in order to stop an evil born of the old follies of this ancient xenos race.

As the Salamanders fleet departed, an astropathic call came from Guilliman, spurred through the Warp Storm by the fell sorcery of the Thirteenth Legion. After years of painstaking advance, the Ultramarines and Iron Hands had carved the path to Terra open. The Arch-Traitor was preparing for the final assault on the Throneworld, and he was calling all of his brothers in treachery to his side. Fuming with the sting of defeat and the knowledge that the power buried beneath the surface of Tallarn would never be his – for he knew that the Dark Gods would never allow him a second chance at securing something that could make him a threat to them – Vulkan ordered his fleet to begin the journey to Terra.

He would yet see the Imperium fall, and be reborn again in a new, strong, immortal form.

Cold and darkness had held him for so long that when they receded at last, it took him a moment to realize that he wasn't dead. It took him even longer to remember what had happened – and when he did, he wished he had not.

Xa'ven, Captain of the 34th Company of the Salamanders, remembered the numbness he had felt when the transmission had reached his ship, during the journey to Isstvan. He remembered the horror that had soaked his soul as he understood its implications. He remembered the burning hatred and fury that had driven him on the very edge of insanity. Then he remembered the betrayal among his own men – how they had fought one another in the corridors of the ship, torn between those who were willing to follow their Primarch's every order and those who refused to abide his madness. Xa'ven remembered marching down the shadowed iron tunnels, stalking his own kind like a beast of Nocturnian legends. He remembered the smell of his brothers' blood as he killed them, remembered the fear and terror of the crew members who had looked upon him in the throes of his fury. He remembered the final confrontation with the turncoats' leader, in the vessel's Enginarium. He remembered the stray shot that had shattered a conduit to the Warp Core, the shriek of the alarms, the ship dropping out of the Empyrean with such violence that it had fallen apart, the infinite blackness of space spread all around him as he floated helplessly, trapped in his sealed armor, condemned to watch the power and oxygen levels steadily dropping ...

He forced his eyes open, and saw a figure standing before him. His vision was blurry, but he recognized the silhouette of another Astartes, though he did not know the colors he wore – grey, but not like that worn by the Word Bearers. This warrior's armor shone with a light that only partially belonged to the material universe – in the crimson eyes of Xa'ven, it seemed that the armor was imbued with some otherworldly light that soothed the torment of his soul.

'Who …' his voice croaked out of his throat, and the pain of speaking was like tearing his vocal chords apart. 'Who are you ?'

'My name is Alexis Pollux, loyal servant of the Emperor. I have come to bring you home.'

The Siege of Terra

'And while the Arch-Traitor marched his legions to confront the father he had betrayed, the Lord of Drakes led his sons against the noble houses of Terra, leaving naught but ruin in his wake . With fire and hatred they came, burning all that stood in their path to ashes and drenching Terra's soil with the blood of heroes. And they cast down the doors of Mankind's ancestral home, seeking to plunder her treasures for themselves, heedless of the destruction they left in their wake ...'

Excerpt from The Canticle of the Dead

While most Imperial records of the Siege of Terra focus on the battles raging around and within the Imperial Palace, the Siege was actually waged all across the surface of the Throneworld. Though Perturabo had focused all the resources and forces at his disposal in the Palace, there were still hive-cities housing billions spread all over the planet, defended by the private armies of these cities' rulers. When the traitor fleet reached Terra's orbit, Guilliman tasked the Salamanders with the suppression of these remaining armies, so that once he had slain the Emperor their lords would kneel to him and acknowledge him as the new Master of Mankind. But there was one army that Guilliman knew would never serve him, and needed to be destroyed : the legion of heroes that would come to be known as Dragonsbane.

During the Heresy, refugees from the entire Imperium flocked to Terra by the billion, fleeing the horrors inflicted by the Traitor Legions upon invaded populations. After being vetted by the Iron Warriors and Custodians – a process that sometimes took months), these refugees were allowed to set foot on the Throneworld. However, for security reasons, the bulk of them was sent away from the Imperial Palace and onto the lands of Merika. The lords of the Merikan hives stretched their resources to the limit to accommodate this sudden increase in population, and the flow of supplies from out-system increased to match.

Over the years, these people integrated themselves into the hives, and when it became obvious that the war would come to Terra eventually, many volunteered to fight for their new homeworld. Several Merikan noble families, fiercely loyal to the Throne, nearly bankrupted themselves to arm, equip and train millions of these volunteers, making them a true military force no inferior to those of the Imperial Army. Driven by the loss of their birthworlds and the desire to protect their families, these men and women trained day and night without complaint. Fears of traitor spies and cultists infiltrating the refugees were laid to rest by the Thousand Sons, who ruthlessly purged such elements, foiling the plot of the Arch-Traitor to use these poor souls in order to seed confusion and paranoia at the heart of the Imperium.

Of all the loyalist forces on Terra not already in the Palace, Guilliman feared this army the most, for they had both the means and the will to attack his forces from behind while he was laying siege to the Palace. He asked that Vulkan himself ensure that they were taken out of the equation, by any means necessary. And so, led by the Black Dragon himself, the primary force of the Salamanders descended upon Merika. But Vulkan had underestimated the amount of resolve an unaugmented human can bring to bear with his back to the wall and his family in danger.

What was later called the Battle of Dragonsbane was a slaughter. Millions of human soldiers fought and died heroically against the forces of the Eighteenth Legion. For months they resisted, giving their lives to hold back the tide of transhuman warriors. Ironically, the nobles who had not spent their wealth to assist and arm the refugees were the first to fall, their private armies crushed by the Salamanders, hungry for the plunder of their treasure rooms – which, while still full, would not save their lives. Meanwhile, the estates of those who had risked their family's fortune to aid others were defended until death.

This battle, where common humans held back the power of nearly an entire Space Marine Legion, is celebrated to this day, with grand monuments built upon the locations of the most important engagements. Many of today's most prominent citizens of Merika are descended from one of the heroes of this desperate battle. While they were ultimately defeated, the soldiers of Dragonsbane saved the lives of their kin, for no sooner had he finally succeeded in breaking the army, Vulkan's attention turned toward the Imperial Palace. His forces had already pillaged the only vaults on Merika still holding any wealth, and the Black Dragon was unwilling to be denied the glory of the final battle (as well as his share of the treasures within the Palace).

There are some theories that Perturabo deliberately engineered the whole thing to ease the pressure on the Palace, personally discussing with the Merikan lords and convincing them to bankroll the creation of the refugee army. While there is little evidence, none of which convincing, it is enough to increase the distrust of Terrans for the Fourth Legion a little more.

Despite the battle's name, the Salamanders' losses weren't very high at Dragonsbane, thanks to their superior endurance. However, it is still a source of shame to the Eighteenth Legion, and they do all they can to keep it a secret, especially from their own slaves. For should these unfortunate souls learn that their demigod masters aren't as invincible as they claim to be their hold over them would be quick to shatter.

While there was some order to the Salamanders' suppression of any potential second front across Terra, the battle for the Imperial Palace was, on the traitors' side, a barely controlled chaos. The Blood Angels were rampaging in the cities surrounding the Palace proper, feeding their unholy appetites upon the defenceless population. The White Scars and Space Wolves, lacking the unifying presence of their Primarchs, fought in dispersed packs attaching themselves to other forces or launching daring raids on their own – which were quickly crushed by loyalist counter-attacks. As the madness of Chaos strengthened its grip over the nine Traitor Legions, Vulkan himself began to lose control of his sons as well as his own desires. Instead of pursuing tactical objectives, the Salamanders turned their eyes on the vaults of the Imperial Palace, where the relics of Mankind's earlier ages and treasures from all over the galaxy were stored.

Some of Vulkan's sons were disillusioned, mocking the artefacts surrounding them as junk, seeing little of value in it – no gold, no gemstones, only antique trinkets from ages long forgotten. But the Lord of Drakes recognized both the artistry of the items gathered here and the subtle power of their historical significance. Here were relics that, for all their apparent lack of immediate value, were tied tightly to Mankind's very nature. Each marked a step, an accomplishment of a fledgling species on the long and tortuous path that had led it to galactic supremacy.

There was a portrait of a woman with the most mysterious smile, and a stele covered in three different alphabets, the characters barely visible after tens of thousands of years. A painting of yellow flowers hang in a stasis field, and dozens of other items were similarly preserved. Surrounded by these items of Mankind's ancestral past, Vulkan felt … at peace. The ravenous hunger that had been burning in his breast ever since he had made that ill-fated deal with the Empyrean in order to recover from the assassination attempt had ceased to torment him.

Then that peace was shattered.

'My lord,' said Artellus suddenly, breaking Vulkan's contemplation. The commander of the Pyre Guard was gesturing at his vox. 'Listen !'

Repressing a violent response to his Equerry's disturbance, Vulkan shifted his vox frequency and listened in to the announcement, just in time to catch the last words :

"We have come for you."

A cold feeling that was very much like doubt spread through his guts. He knew those words, and he knew the voice speaking them, distorted and uglier though it may be. But it was impossible that he be here ! Guilliman had told him of the schemes their Warp-born allies had engineered to ensure he was unable to interfere. And yet …

'It's confirmed, my lord !' shouted Artellus. 'The Third and Eighth have arrived ! Lord Guilliman demand that we hold them back while Lord Corax fights them in orbit and he and the others push in for the final assault !'

Vulkan cursed silently, and looked around one last time. So many treasures, so much knowledge, so much power … The kind of power his siblings would either fail to notice or, in the case of those who had fully succumbed to the attraction of the Ruinous Powers, would seek to destroy in order to plunge Mankind further into ignorant worship of these primordial entities. He would not allow such a thing – Guilliman and him, as well as the others who still clung to their sanity, would lead Mankind to greatness under their rule, not reduce it to barbarism and madness. Order would come from their strength, whatever the will of the self-proclaimed "Dark Gods". So had Guilliman promised him.

'Leave them,' he ordered to his men as he turned back the way he had come, out of the Sigillite's private quarters and back to the field outside the Palace. 'Touch nothing. We will return here once our work outside is done – and before anyone else gets here.'

It is said that when the Night Lords and Emperor's Children arrived and Sanguinius was destroyed, Vulkan was marching through the private collection of the Sigillite, looking over relics from Old Earth with eyes burning with greed. He immediately left the Palace, taking some of the priceless artefacts with him – now irredeemably tainted by the touch of the Warp – and prepared his forces to face the Third and Eighth Legions' reinforcements on the surface of Terra. He believed that the Night Lords would stop at nothing to get a chance at him, and looked forward to sending them to meet their Primarch in the afterlife.

He was wrong. Sevatar's hold on his brothers was strong, forged during the Heresy by regular strikes of genius and inspiration that had saved the Legion several times and brought them to the Siege in time to play a part in the last stage of the war. The Night Lords remained focused on their task, saving countless civilians from the Blood Angels while Vulkan uselessly awaited their charge. Eventually, the Salamanders abandoned their defensive positions and attacked the Night Lords themselves, but the sons of Nostramo had the edge in urban warfare, and the ruins of Terra's cities proved a suitable killing ground for them. While not too many Salamanders were slain before the Siege came to an end, virtually no Night Lords were lost – safe for those unfortunate enough to face the Black Dragon himself.

Because of this, Guilliman was forced to launch his final assault on the Cavea Ferrum without the support of the Black Dragon, whose presence would certainly have made things turn out much differently. When the Arch-Traitor fell at the Emperor's hands, Vulkan was among the first Traitor Primarchs to order his Legion to run. In the eyes of the Black Dragon, he had fulfilled his part in the Siege the moment Dragonsbane had ended – Guilliman had proved unworthy when he had failed in his. Whatever the future would bring, Vulkan refused to face it as an animal caged by his brothers once they realized they could not execute him. His fleet left Terra united under his leadership, and it would prove to be one of the most dangerous threats to the Imperium yet.

Post-Heresy : The Dragon Ascendant

'In the fires of a war greater than any before he rises, reborn,

A creature not of emotions but dark desires and fell ambition,

Waiting for the day he lays claim to the First and Last blade,

And becomes the one even the Gods shall fear.'

Attributed to the Broken Devotee

The demise of Guilliman did not signal the end of the war for Vulkan – it only changed how he chose to prosecute it. The drive for conquest that had inhabited the Salamanders during the Heresy vanished, replaced by a level of greed no one would have thought a Primarch and his Legion could be capable of. The Eighteenth Legion, come together again under Vulkan's command for the Siege of Terra, rampaged across the galaxy, plundering hundreds of worlds like an unstoppable force of nature. Yet even as his fleet's holds were filled with treasure, Vulkan's greed was not satisfied. A deep, dark hunger had formed at the core of his being, born of the emptiness that had come in the wake of Guilliman's death and the loss of Vulkan's purpose.

'Destiny is the justification of tyrants and the excuse of fools.'

Ancient Terran proverb

As the Black Dragon committed atrocity after atrocity, that void began to fill with the energies of the Warp. No single Dark God bestowed his twisted blessings upon Vulkan : the hollowness of his spirit simply called to the flows of the Sea of Souls. Vulkan's powers grew, and at long last, he found a new purpose : to become something more than even his father had planned, to shed the last part of himself that remained human and become a true immortal, freed from the limitations his current body imposed upon him. At this point, Lion El'Jonson and Sanguinius had both already become Daemon Primarchs, and Vulkan intended to follow their example – except that he did not intend to bend knee to any of the Four.

So began the War of the Dragon, fuelled by Vulkan's renewed ambition. The Salamanders slowed their wild course across the galaxy, letting the Imperial pursuit catch up to them. As could have been expected, the Night Lords were leading the charge, burning with the desire to avenge the murder of Konrad Curze. But though the Night Lords and their allies outnumbered the Salamanders – who had lost almost all of their human supports during the Siege of Terra and the desperate flight from it – it was all part of the Black Dragon's plan. Vulkan had learned from the Siege of Terra that his mere presence would not be enough to goad the Night Lords into reckless actions – and so he had designed another way. At his command, thousands of astropaths were tortured while made to watch the relics Vulkan had stolen from his brother's corpse on Isstvan V. The relics' image was broadcast into the Warp, where it was picked up by the Night Lords' Navigators, astropaths and Librarians.

Immediately, Sevatar, Legion Master of the Night Lords and heir of Konrad Curze, lost control of his brothers. The Nostraman warriors abandoned the Prince of Crows' carefully designed plan of attack and launched themselves into a direct and massed assault. All across the Salamanders' territory, thousands of Night Lords died at the hands of the sons of Vulkan, while the Sorcerers of the Eighteenth Legion performed a grand ritual at their Primarch's behest. The exact details of the spell have long since been lost to time, if they were ever recorded in Imperial archives, but the end result was clear : in his fortress in the Crythe Cluster, Vulkan shed his body of flesh and became a Daemon Primarch.

He could hear them all. Billions of voices, crying out in fear and worship of him. Across the galaxy, they knew his name. He was terror and power incarnate to these weaklings, far more than the shadow of his dead brother. He was the one they feared now that their false god had ascended to his golden throne.

He drank deep of their fear, feeling it strengthen him. He reached out across the stars and sensed the carnage his sons were wreaking in his name, the fury and helplessness of Curze's sons as they rushed into his trap, spurred on by the thirst for revenge. He laughed, and the sound of his laughter would echo across the Sea of Souls and drive psykers mad for ten thousand years. The souls of the fallen Night Lords cried out as he captured them and burned them out, reducing these noble warriors to nothing more than fuel for his own ambition.

His body twisted and cracked, his immortality struggling against the transformation taking hold. He focused all of his will to mastering the power that had returned him to life so many times, bending it into unnatural patterns, forcing it to work alongside the Empyric energies rather than against them in an unholy union that perverted everything his father had ever intended. His body grew and grew, swollen with the fear and death and plunder. His armor burst to pieces as his skin was covered in scales, and two immense wings erupted from his back. His sword shattered in a hundred fragments that flew across the air, each embedding itself into the flesh of a different sacrifice.

Whatever little remained of Vulkan's humanity was lost, and the Black Dragon opened his eyes and looked down at a dead world with burning red eyes, seeing the tiny, green-armored beings before him as sparks of light in the infinite black. He opened his mouth, which was now a jaw that could swallow tanks, and roared his might at the face of the universe …

The rise of Vulkan sent ripples across the Sea of Souls, causing cults to appear on dozens of worlds and daemonic incursions to tear through reality's veil on several. The Imperium was forced to send more forces to deal with the situation, while the Night Lords themselves were reinforced by allies of the highest caliber : the Sons of Horus, led by the now legendary Mournival. At the same time, the Salamanders, instead of being bolstered by their Primarch's new terrible power, were instead shaken as their command chain was suddenly thrown into chaos. Vulkan's mind had undergone a transformation as drastic as his body, though philosophers would argue that in both cases his true nature had simply been revealed. He was still struggling with his new existence, and was unable to properly lead his Legion, even as the Imperium struck back with all its strength.

With the help of the Sons of Horus, Sevatar was able to turn the situation, and finally confronted Vulkan in the ruins of Crythe Prime, once a populous hive-world whose people had been sacrificed to fuel the ascension of the Salamanders' Primarch. There, amidst the bones of billions of dead, the Prince of Crows and the Mournival faced the Black Dragon. The details of this confrontation are long lost, but it is known that both Sevatar and the four members of the Mournival survived, while Vulkan fled through the Sea of Souls, abandoning his sons to Imperial retribution. The War of the Dragon was over, and though the Imperium had ultimately been victorious, it had lost much, while a known enemy of Mankind became much more powerful.

He looked upon them, and for the first time since Guilliman had died, he knew uncertainty.

There were thousands of them, charging across the ruins his sons had made of this world, but only six deserved his attention, only six truly threatened him, their soulfires burning bright across the battlefield. Four came together, fighting as one as they crashed through the ranks of his sons like a tidal wave. Two carried the weapons that had broken his brother – the maul and the talon. The two weapons shone with a light that burned his eyes, even from a great distance. They could hurt him, he knew – perhaps even kill him. Was he truly immortal now ? Had his gift endured the transformation ? And even if it had, did it have the power to save him from weapons such as these ? He knew that those like him could be destroyed, by weapons imbued with particular power. Several such tools of death had been aboard the Chalice of Fire before it had been stolen from him.

Then there were the two others, the sons of the King of the Night. One was shining with the light of power long denied, now embraced in full, and moved like a meteor, striking too quick for his sons to even stand a chance to stop him. And the last one … The last one was cloaked in shadows too deep for even his sight to penetrate, and all that radiated from him was vengeance and the cold promise of death.

The six came down on him in a circle, and for the first time since his beast-mother had killed him hundreds of years ago, Vulkan knew fear. He had gone too far, sacrificed too much, to be stopped now. With a roar, he gathered his power and tore through the veil of space, before plunging into the rift. His sons closest to him rushed in to follow him, exposing themselves to the raw madness of the Warp in order to remain with their Primarch. As he fled from Crythe, Vulkan convinced himself that there had been no reason to remain there – he had achieved his goal and claimed the power that was rightfully his. Now he sensed another opportunity in the distance, something that would allow him to finish the war and claim the throne Guilliman had failed to seize …

The Black Dragon did not see the shadow knight who entered the rift behind him, just before it closed. He did not see the lone warrior who stalked him across the Sea of Souls, shades and echoes gathered around him, driven forward by the promise of vengeance.

The hunt would last many hundreds of years. But eventually, the Soul Hunter and the Black Dragon would meet again, and judgement would come at last ...

Soon after the end of the War of the Dragon, the Night Lords destroyed Nocturne, using cyclonic torpedoes to literally tear the entire planet to shreds. Prometheus, the planet's moon, crashed into the surface of Nocturne during the upheaval, and fragments of both celestial bodies still form an asteroid belt in the system this day. It was hoped that this act would draw Vulkan out of hiding and make him confront the Night Lords to avenge his destroyed homeworld. But the Black Dragon had long since left Nocturne behind him, and just as the volcanic planet burst into fragments, he instead emerged from the Warp in the Pandorax system, on the thrice-cursed world of Pythos. A legion of daemons walked in his wake, as well as a handful of Salamanders, reforged through the fires of the Empyrean into Secondborn, Possessed Marines of immense power.

Before him stood the Death Guards and the Thousand Sons, each led by their Primarch, as well as many Imperial Regiments. They had come to Pythos to seal a Warp Rift of immense size, through which the hordes of the Neverborn were pouring into realspace. Vulkan and his followers passed through that rift as Magnus was gathering his power to close it. It is unknown whether Vulkan knew of the Pythos rift when he fled from Crythe, or if he was lost in the Warp, was guided by the Dark Gods to the portal, and seized the opportunity it presented. Had Vulkan triumphed on Pythos, he would have been able to open a new front against the Imperium, and perhaps even win the war that Guilliman had started. But first, the Black Dragon had to face one of his brothers for the second time.

The fight between Mortarion and Vulkan is the stuff of legends, and recorded in the archives of the Inquisition and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Legions alike. It is written that though Vulkan towered above the Death Lord in his new infernal form, Mortarion was undaunted, and faced his fallen brother head-on, wielding the scythe with which he had cleansed his world of the witch-lords. The weapon was the bane of all those corrupted by the Warp, and Vulkan was no exception. But Mortarion was already weary and wounded, brought near the end of his nearly infinite endurance by the days of fighting through the jungles of Pythos – while Vulkan had been reinvigorated by his journey through the Warp. In the end, Mortarion fell before the Black Dragon's claws, but not before inflicting a terrible wound upon Vulkan's flank. The injury was grave enough that when Magnus unleashed the spell he had been preparing during the fight between the two Primarchs, the Black Dragon was unable to resist its purifying power. Vulkan lost his hold upon his material form and was banished into the Sea of Souls, able only to scream in denial as Magnus sealed the Warp Rift and thwarted his dark ambitions.

Vulkan's defeat at Magnus' hands was not permanent, however. After the Black Dragon's endless resurrections on Isstvan V, the fact that he had disappeared after the Crimson King defeated him had led some to hope that he had been banished forever, but that was not to be. Soon, the Seers of the Thousand Sons saw visions of the great drake rising from a sea of flames within the Eye of Terror : Vulkan had returned, though his flank still bore the mark of Mortarion's scythe. The Sorcerers of the Salamanders also felt their Primarch's return, and guided the entire Legion into the Great Eye and toward their master. There, the Legion was reunited – but Vulkan's new, titanic aspect and terrible aura made it impossible for all but the strongest of his sons to even stand in his presence. In shedding the last of his human weaknesses, Vulkan had also lost his connection with his own sons – now, though they feared him and worshipped him, they could no longer love him, for he was as alien to them as the Dark Gods themselves.

Great was the rage of Vulkan as he realized that he had lost so much more than he had been prepared to sacrifice. The ground of the Legion's new daemonic homeworld shook with his fury for the greater part of a century beyond the Eye, and the Salamanders spent most of the Legion Wars fighting for survival, their master lost to the tides of his insane wrath. Many sold their services to one side or the other of the wars raging in the Eye of Terror, and when the Clone Wars erupted, they added their forces to those pouring through the shattered Iron Cage. Without a Primarch to give them cohesion, however, these Salamander warbands who took advantage of Bile's insanity were soon forced back into the Eye by a vengeful strike of the Night Lords. Among the ranks of the Lost and the Damned, whispers circulated that the Salamanders would soon be an extinct Legion, left behind by a Primarch who had abandoned them.

Artellus Numeon, the Broken Devotee

Like most Legions, the Salamanders' cadre of Terminators were gathered in a single brotherhood, whose members were spread across Companies. In the Salamanders' case, this group was the First Company, known as the Pyre Guard. During the Roboutian Heresy, it was led by Artellus Numeon, First Captain of the Eighteenth Legion and Equerry of Vulkan. A Terran Legionary and one of the few survivors of the time before the Legion was reunited with its Primarch, Artellus was a powerful warrior and an inspiring leader, something of a rarity in the Eighteenth Legion. Vulkan recognized his use when he took command, and named Artellus his Equerry, tasked with interceding between the Lord of Drakes and the rest of the Imperium.

Fiercely dedicated to his Primarch, Artellus stood with him when he turned against the Emperor. It is rumoured that he was the one responsible for the quiet purge of the Salamanders' own ranks prior to the Isstvan Massacre, ensuring that those who would still cling to their oaths of loyalty to the Imperium never reached the system alive. While he wasn't completely successful, his bloody-handed efforts participated in ensuring the slaughter of the loyal Legions. On the Urgall Plateau, he led the Pyre Guard at the side of Vulkan, fighting against the Night Guard while Curze and Vulkan battled. He is said to have crossed blade with Talos the Soul Hunter at that time – and to have locked eyes with him as Vulkan killed the King of the Night.

Artellus fought during the entire Heresy at his Primarch's side, and was present at the Siege of Terra and during the War of the Dragon. When the Salamanders were defeated and Vulkan departed through the Warp, however, Artellus was unable to follow. Instead, he gathered the rest of the Legion and directed their retreat from the Eighth Legion's fury, abandoning the relics of Konrad Curze in the hasty withdrawal. While this saved the lives of thousands of Legionaries from the vengeance of the Night Lords and their Sons of Horus allies, it would eventually cost the First Captain everything.

When Vulkan's call reached the Legion, Artellus convinced several of the Legion's captains to go into the Eye of Terror, while they wanted to remain in Imperial space and continue their raids rather than enter the storm of madness and Chaos. He single-handedly kept the Legion from falling to pieces on the way to the daemon world where Vulkan had risen, his devotion to the Lord of Drakes strong enough to keep the very ships of the Salamanders sailing together in the storms. When at last the fleet reached the planet, he was the first mortal Salamander to set foot upon it, and the first to stand before his Primarch in all of his reborn, infernal glory.

Instead of rewarding him for his loyal service, Vulkan unleashed all of his fury at his condition and the loss of Curze's relics on his faithful Equerry. Artellus didn't die, but his mind was shattered by Vulkan's wrath. His faith in Vulkan, a core part of his being, was ripped away when he beheld what the Black Dragon had become, and his soul was defenceless when exposed to the raw insanity of the energies that fuelled the Daemon Primarch's body. His body and mind were twisted as parts of his soul were torn off and devoured by the Neverborn created from Vulkan's violent outburst. Despair, horror and insanity poured into the void, and only a wretched shell of the once-powerful commander remained 