Armoury and the Masters of the Forge, an unusual triumvirate but necessary given the Salamanders' predilection for weaponscraft.
Three of the seats were for honoured guests sequestered by the Chapter Master himself and by dint of the rest of the council's assent. Praetor, the Firedrake's most senior sergeant, often assumed one of these seats. Dak'ir knew that Pyriel now occupied another. He wondered if the Librarian would be unflinching before the Chapter's hierarchy, particular under Master Vel'cona's gaze. The last position had remained empty for many years, since before Tu'Shan had even assumed the mantle of Regent of Prometheus. Its incumbent was a figure of much veneration.
Here the Masters of the Salamanders would sit and consult the Tome of Fire. This artefact was written by the hand of the primarch himself in ages past. Though Dak'ir had never seen it, let alone perused its pages, he knew that it was full of riddles and prophecies. Rumours purported that the words themselves were inked partly in Vulkan's blood and shimmered like captured fire if brought up to the light. It was not merely one volume, as the name suggested, but rather dozens arrayed in the stacks around the circular walls of the Pantheon. Deciphering the script of the Tome of Fire was not easy. There were secrets within, left by the primarch for his sons to unlock. It foretold of great events and upheavals for those with the wit to perceive them. But perhaps most pointedly, it contained the history, form and location of the nine artefacts Vulkan had hidden throughout the galaxy for the Salamanders to unearth. Five of these holiest of relics had been discovered over the centuries through the travails of the Forgefathers; the locations of the remaining four were embedded cryptically within the tome's arcane pages.
So Chapter Master Tu'Shan and those masters still on Prometheus had convened and would pore over the Tome of Fire in the hope of unearthing some inkling that pertained to the discovery of the chest. The artefact's origin stamp had already ignited something of a fire within the Chapter. Some proposed that it meant the return of Vulkan after so many millennia in unknown isolation; others refuted this, claiming that the primarch was not lost on Isstvan at all, but had returned already at the breaking of the Legions and whatever the chest contained it could not relate to that; more still remained silent and merely watched and waited, unwilling to hope, not daring to suggest what apocalypse might be about to befall the Salamanders if their progenitor had fated a reunion. Patience, wisdom and insight were the only true keys to unlocking the Tome of Fire, and with it the chest's mystery. Like tempering iron or folding steel at the foot of the forge's anvil, any attempt to try and unravel its enigmas had to be approached slowly and methodically. It was, after all, the Salamanders' way.
Dak'ir exercised these credos in the swelter of one of the workshops deep in the undercroft of Hesiod's Chapter Bastion.
The
none had survived the journey. Their bodies had been incinerated within the pyreum. It rubbed salt into already bitter wounds as more questions were raised about the viability of the mission into the Hadron Belt and Captain N'keln's decision to undertake it. Such objections were spoken in whispers only, but Dak'ir knew of them all the same. He saw it in the looks of discontent, the agitated postures of sergeants and heard it in the rumours of clandestine meetings to which he was not invited. Ever since 3rd Company had made landfall, Tsu'gan had been waging a campaign of no confidence against N'keln. Or at least, that was how it appeared to Dak'ir.
Promethean lore preached self-sacrifice and loyalty above all else - it seemed that the loyalty felt by some of the sergeants towards their captain was being stretched to its limit.
The only shred of exculpation for N'keln was the chest discovered in the storage room. 3rd Company's strike cruiser had barely landed on Prometheus when Librarian Pyriel stalked down the embarkation ramp, eschewing all docking protocols as he went in search of his Master Vel'cona who could press for an audience with the Chapter Master. The council in the Pantheon had been arraigned in short order. Their verdict and the announcement of it would not be so forthcoming. The rest of the Salamanders aboard the
had disbanded, waiting to be recalled by their liege-lords at the appropriate time.
Dak'ir, like many others, had returned to the surface of Nocturne.
Classified a death world by Imperial planetary taxonomers, Nocturne was a volatile place. Fraught with crags and towering basalt mountains, its harsh environment made life hard for its tribal inhabitants. Burning winds scorched its naked plains, turning them into barren deserts. Rough oceans churned, spitting geysers of scalding steam when they met spilled lava.
Nocturne's settlements were few and transient. Only the seven Sanctuary Cities were strong enough to serve as permanent havens to a dispersed populace eking out an existence amongst rock and ash.
However arduous, it was nothing compared to the Time of Trial. Being one half of a binary planetary system, Nocturne shared an erratic orbit with its oversized moon of Prometheus and great strife befell the planet every fifteen Terran years whenever these two celestial bodies came into proximity. Molten lava would spew from the earth, and entire cities would be swallowed by deep pits of magma; tidal waves, like foaming giants, would smite fishing boats and crush drilling rigs; clouds of ash, belched from the necks of angry mountains, would eclipse the pale sun. Massive earthquakes shook the very bedrock of the world below whilst above, the skies would crack and fire would rain. Yet, in the aftermath rare metals and gems could be reaped from the ash. And it was this which promoted Nocturne's culture of forgesmithing.
After a few short hours since their arrival in-system, Dak'ir alighted from the
in particular his discovery of Vulkan's chest, had disturbed him greatly. Only in solitude and through the purging heat of the forge would he find equilibrium again.
The crafting hammer pounded a steady rhythm that matched the beat of Dak'ir's heart. The Salamander was in total synchronicity with his labours. He wore leather smithing breeches and was naked from the waist up, his branded torso marred by ash and soot. Sweat dappled his ebon body, rivulets following the grooves of his muscles. It came from exertion, not from the heat.
The forges of the undercroft were excavated down to Nocturne's very core and ponds of lava gathered in the cavernous depths providing liquid fire to fuel the foundries and scalding steam to impel bellows. There was a strange anachronism about the sweltering forges, the way they blended the ancient traditions of the first Nocturnean blacksmiths and the technologies of the Imperium.
Adamantium blast doors, strengthened by reinforced ceramite, marked the entrance to the chamber where he toiled. Bulkhead columns, the foundations of the Chapter Bastion, plunged down from a stalactite ceiling and bored deep into the rocky earth below. Mechanised tools - rotary blades, bench-mounted plasma-cutters, belt grinders, radial drill presses - stood side by side with stout anvils and iron- bellied furnaces. Intricate servo-arrays and ballistic components were racked with swages, fullers and other smithing hammers.
The air was filled with heady smoke, turned a deep, warm orange from the lambent glow of the lava pools. Dak'ir drank in the fuliginous atmosphere as if it were a panacea, soaking his every pore with it. And like the metal on the anvil before him, the impurity in his troubled soul was gradually beaten out with each successive hammer blow.
Dak'ir was gasping by the end, a reaction to the purging of emotional trauma rather than physical exertion. As the last ring of the anvil echoed into obscurity, he set down the forging hammer and took up a pair of long-handled tongs instead. He had tempered neither blade nor armour but something different entirely, its glow slowly fading. Gouts of steam rushed off the artefact when it breached the water's surface in the deep vat alongside the anvil. When Dak'ir withdrew it, pinched between the iron fingers of the tongs, it shimmered like molten silver. Captured light from the lava flows blazed over its contours like a fiery
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