That towering presence was overjoyed.
He had finally ended his long drifting, returned from the Warp to the reality of the Galaxy, returned to the Imperium.
His dark skin, towering frame, and faintly red eyes confirmed his identity.
He was the Emperor's own Primarch son, Lord of the Salamanders, the Black Dragon of Nocturne, The Perpetual, and the Imperium's greatest forge master—Vulkan!
This loyal Primarch of the Imperium, the Lord of the Salamanders, had vanished completely ten thousand years ago. After that, there had been no record of him at all. Only the seven artifacts he left behind could prove he had ever existed.
"I should not have left. I should not have left the Throne World. That may have put Father in danger—"
Vulkan felt deeply guilty.
After the Horus Heresy ended, the Emperor had been trapped upon the Golden Throne, and over the next fifteen hundred years, the Imperium continued to decay.
This Primarch, who loved humanity dearly, had watched helplessly as mankind lost its great ideals, bound by dogma, ignorant, foolish, and cruel.
The Imperium had taken a completely different path, shackling human nature with dogma and turning itself into a cold war machine.
Bureaucracy and the rampant use of Exterminatus had turned civilians and warriors alike into expendable resources.
Everyone was indifferent to life.
What Vulkan found most unacceptable was that the Emperor had been raised onto an altar and made into the very thing that father had hated most.
That father sat upon the Throne, clinging to life day and night on the lives of innocent Psykers, while everyone could do nothing about it.
Not only that, the Ecclesiarchy and the Adeptus Mechanicus grew more and more extreme, even using human bodies to forge instruments and machinery, treating life as decorative material.
All of it