Vulkan

Vulkan is the primarch of the Salamanders, the XVIII Legion of the Space Marines, and a Perpetual, a being able to regenerate from any wound, including death. He is also known as the Lord of Drakes and the Unbound Flame. Born on Terra in the late thirtieth millennium and cast onto the volcanic world of Nocturne as an infant, he was raised by the blacksmith N’bel in the town of Hesiod. In his fourth year there he led its people in defeating a Dark Eldar raid, after which the leaders of Nocturne’s seven largest towns swore never again to hide from the raiders. At a later tournament he was matched by a stranger who saved his life on an erupting volcano and then revealed himself as the Emperor; that account, known as the Promethean Opus, is told across many worlds of the later Imperium, though how much of it is accurate is unknown.

Vulkan served at the Emperor’s side for some years before joining his Legion, which he reached at the head of 3,000 new recruits in time to save it from an Ork horde; the Legion was later named the Salamanders. On Kharaatan, designated One-Five-Four-Six, he campaigned alongside Konrad Curze and the Night Lords, nearly came to blows with Curze over the massacre of Khar-tann City, and afterwards reported Curze’s conduct to Horus and Rogal Dorn. On One-Five-Four Four, later known as Caldera, he fought beside Ferrus Manus and Mortarion against the Eldar, ordered the world purged by fire, and vowed that it would never again suffer such destruction. He became known as a craftsman of weapons and armour, and recovered the Saturnine patterns of Terminator and Dreadnought armour, which he shared with the other Legions.

In the Horus Heresy he led the Salamanders against Mortarion’s Death Guard in the Ignis Sector of the Urgall Depression during the Isstvan V Drop Site Massacre, where most of his Legion was destroyed. He survived an Iron Warriors nuclear barrage through his regenerative nature and was taken prisoner by Konrad Curze, who killed him repeatedly aboard the Nightfall. One account records that he escaped by teleporting with his hammer Dawnbringer into the upper atmosphere of Macragge, regenerated in the care of the Ultramarines, and fought Curze across a city before John Grammaticus struck him down with the Fulgurite, a petrified bolt of the Emperor’s psychic power; another records that his comatose body was brought to Imperium Secundus. Artellus Numeon carried his remains to Nocturne, where the Salamanders repelled a Death Guard attack in the Battle of Nocturne, and Vulkan returned to life in Mount Deathfire after Numeon cast himself into its flames. He then travelled through the webway to Terra. During the Siege of Terra he defended the Emperor against Magnus the Red in the Imperial Dungeon, defeated Magnus again in the Impossible City of the webway, and guarded at the Golden Throne the Talisman of Seven Hammers, a device of his own making able to destroy Terra should Horus prevail.

After the Siege he led a counterattack out of the Imperial Palace and sat on the Grand Council of Reconstruction, where he supported Rogal Dorn’s call for a punitive crusade before backing Roboute Guilliman; during the Great Scouring he sought to hunt down Fabius Bile. Accounts of his later fate differ. One holds that he left the Salamanders after the Heresy, declaring that, like Leman Russ, he would return at the End Times; another records that he led his Chapter for three millennia before disappearing on an undisclosed mission. During the War of the Beast in 544–546.M32 he reappeared on Caldera and defended it almost alone against an Ork invasion, then returned to Terra with Koorland and led the Imperial crusade to Ullanor, where he fought the Beast in its temple-gargant and was presumed killed in the explosion of its power generator. The Salamanders hold that he will return once all nine Artefacts of Vulkan have been recovered, a search led in the forty-first millennium by the Forgefather Vulkan He’stan.