Since the conclusion of the Great Heresy, the Primarch-brothers had vanished one by one.
The fires of the Horus Heresy had left Vulkan in a state of profound disorientation and dread regarding the Imperium's future. He had witnessed the fratricide of brothers and the festering rot of corruption and internal strife within the realm. For the first ti, he harbored doubts about the Imperium for which he had bled.
This internal struggle forced him to contemplate his true mission and eventual destiny.
Simultaneously, the gene-seed of the Salamanders Legion suffered from inherent instabilities, causing his sons to face unique hardships and perils during their ascension. As Primarch of the Salamanders Legion, Vulkan felt a crushing weight of guilt for his failure to rectify this flaw. Believing it his duty to find a cure and secure the future of his Legion, he chose to depart from the Imperium, embarking upon a solitary quest for redemption.
Vulkan carried many burdens during his self-imposed exile.
Among these was the hunt for the traitors of the Thousand Sons, upon whom he sought to visited total annihilation as penance for the bloody rituals they had inflicted upon the Imperial populace during the Rebellion. Chief among his targets was the progenitor of abominations, Fabius Bile.
Yet, as the millennia turned, Vulkan's trail beca a total mystery.
It was not until the world of Caldera that his presence was finally confird. There, he fought alone against a million-strong Ork horde, utilizing his nature as a Perpetual to wage a war of inexhaustible attrition.
Following the arrival of the Imperial fleet led by Lord Commander Koorland, Caldera was liberated, and Vulkan returned with him to Terra. By then, over a thousand years had passed since the Imperium had been surrendered to the hands of the High Lords.
Beholding the chaos of the Imperium once more, Vulkan lapsed into uncertainty. He rebuked the High Lords for their malfeasance, yet unlike Roboute Guilliman, he did not claim the mantle of Lord Regent. Instead, he joined the Crusade to the Ork empire of Ullanor.
To avoid disrupting the established order of the Imperium, Vulkan declined command of the Crusade, delegating all authority to Koorland. He focused solely on the decapitation strike against the Warboss.
As the Lord of Drakes clashed with the ten-ter-tall "Beast" within the heart of a Great Gargant, Koorland ordered all forces to evacuate the vicinity, allowing the two giants their final duel. When the Greenskin war machine detonated into shrapnel, neither the Warboss nor Vulkan erged. The Primarch vanished once again.
Only Vulkan knew the truth of what followed.
During the battle, the Warboss had begun to respect his opponent. The surrounding Orks, witnessing the titanic struggle, felt a collective awe and terror that channeled the power of the Waaagh! into Vulkan himself. In their final exchange, Vulkan and the Warboss plumted into the Great Gargant's power core, torn asunder by the resulting explosion.
The energies of Gork and Mork had empowered Vulkan, but they had also interfered with his resurrection.
His power of rebirth was drawn from the Emperor. Whether by the Emperor's divine will or so other cosmic machination, when Vulkan finally awoke, he was displaced. His mories were fractured and chaotic, but he knew he was neither on Ullanor nor Nocturne.
He wandered the planet for a vast span of ti before his shattered recollections finally coalesced. The obsidian-skinned giant eventually located an Imperial Hive City and secured a ans of departure. Guided by a strange, fated intuition, he recovered his Thunder Hamr and reforged his panoply of war.
During his travels, Vulkan beheld the opening of the Great Rift. He saw the Crusade fleets surging toward Imperial worlds, fighting with desperate courage. Seeing the Space Marines and the Astra Militarum still standing firm filled him with a modicum of relief. Though he realized millennia had passed since the War of the Beast, the fact that the Imperium's machinery still turned was enough.
Vulkan had never loved war.
Now, he felt it was ti to bolster his sons. The flaws in the Salamanders' gene-seed drove him to explore space hulks and ancient ruins, seeking hidden secrets. Any enemies of the Imperium he encountered were t with rciless destruction.
When the broken hull of the Void Sword was spat out of the Warp, Vulkan happened to be nearby. He was piloting a ager shuttle he had bartered from mortal arms dealers using mastercrafted items of his own making. After minor modifications to accommodate his transhuman fra, he approached the wreckage without fear.
Vulkan, viewing the shattered Void Sword as rely another derelict ruin, never expected to be recognized in such a place.
…
Vulkan looked upon the strangely designed Sapient Machine Automaton before him, his expression beneath his helm one of wary caution.
"Tell , what has transpired here?"
Faced with the Primarch's interrogation, the automaton's reply was perplexing.
"The Titan-class vessel Void Sword suffered severe structural failure due to psychic oversaturation during the psychic extraction process."
"Psychic extraction? Psychic oversaturation? Was this a Chaos incursion?"
Vulkan parsed the keywords, gesturing toward the warped tal as he tested the machine's logic. The automaton simply shook its head and provided a brief overview of the Void Sword's test paraters.
The details of its report did more than shock Vulkan; they forced him to confront a disturbing realization. The automaton before him appeared to possess independent sapience. It was far too intelligent, a realization that made him uneasy, yet it remained remarkably hospitable toward him.
The Primarch and the machine stood amidst a field of space debris, conducting a long dialogue via vox-array. As the conversation deepened, Vulkan's astonishnt grew. Having been isolated for so long, he had no knowledge that his brother had returned to the Imperium.
When he learned that Guilliman had been resurrected and now served as Lord Regent, Vulkan's heart surged with excitent. It was not rely because Guilliman was his closest confidant among his brothers, but because he finally sensed hope for the Imperium. Vulkan had visited Ultramar many tis; whether lucid or lost in his own mind, he could never forget the prosperity of that realm.
Yet another revelation stirred his spirit even more.
Through the unreserved exchange with the machine, Vulkan finally saw a glimr of hope for curing his sons' gene-seed defects. It was the Federation legacy recovered by the Iron n from Commorragh, the Panacea Standard Template Construct.
When he requested the cure, the Iron Man did not refuse. Bio-therapeutic agents held no value for the machine, and since Vulkan only requested the finished tinctures rather than the Master Template itself, the Iron n, who had already recorded the STC data, found the request trivial to fulfill.
Everything seed guided by a predestined hand, reminding Vulkan of ancient prophecies. Before the final battle of the War of the Beast, he had foreseen his disappearance and promised his sons that he would return when a great war once again threatened the entire Imperium.
Now, his goals were within reach. His sons' defects would be nded; the Imperium's chaos would be quelled by his brother; and he could finally return to his mission at his children's side.
Yet, the prophecy seed slightly askew. Based on the information at hand, Vulkan saw no signs of the apocalyptic war he had anticipated.
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