The Spear of Vulkan

The Spear

The Spear of Vulkan is, by Chapter record, the second of the Nine recovered. The spear-tip integrates a melta-effect emitter — the same family of focused thermal weapons whose principle Salamanders Apothecaries continue to study without having fully reverse-engineered. The haft is forged of an alloy no modern Mechanicus can reproduce; the Chapter's working belief is that Vulkan drew on materials from beyond the standard Imperial forge-tradition for this piece specifically, although the surviving Promethean records do not specify which materials.

The Spear is, in functional terms, longer than a standard Astartes assault spear by approximately a third — calibrated, the Chapter's Apothecaries assess, to a primarch's reach rather than an Astartes' reach. No Salamander has wielded it in engagement since the recovery. The haft's grip-wear pattern is exactly that of Vulkan's own grip, mapped by the Chapter's Apothecary corps from secondary reference images. The grip does not yield to other hands.

The Forging

Vulkan made the Spear second of the Nine, after the Gauntlet of the Forge. The Promethean Cult's preserved account holds that the Spear's forging took the longest of any of the Nine — eleven uninterrupted days of work, during which Vulkan did not leave the forge and did not eat. The Apothecary attendants assigned to monitor him in the forge that month reported that he spoke aloud during the work, to no one apparently present, in a language the attendants did not recognise and the Cult has not since identified.

The Spear emerged from the forging visibly altered from its initial blueprint. The Cult's archived sketches of the planned form show a Spear with a single-edged head; the finished Spear has an asymmetrical head that the Chapter's weapons-historians read as deliberately calibrated for a specific opponent. Who the opponent was, Vulkan did not say. The Promethean Cult's quiet reading is that the Spear was made for the engagement Vulkan was preparing to seek out — the journey that took him out of the Imperium and into the warp from which he never returned.

The Test

Vulkan tested the Spear once, on Nocturne, before he scattered the Nine. The test took place in the Pyre Desert at the southern edge of the Salamanders' fortress-monastery's territorial range. A captured Heretek war-construct of pre-Heresy manufacture, salvaged from the Scouring engagements, was used as the target. The construct's armour was rated as resistant to standard Astartes anti-armour weaponry; melta-bombs, multi-melta sustained fire, Astartes plasma at point-blank range — the construct had survived all three in the original Scouring engagement.

Vulkan struck the construct once with the Spear. The construct's armour gave at the impact point. The Spear continued through the construct's primary reactor housing. The reactor was no longer recoverable for study afterwards; the Pyre Desert in a wide perimeter around the test site was, by Apothecary survey, glassed to a depth of forty metres. Vulkan did not test the Spear a second time. He cleaned it, returned it to the forge, and began the work of concealing it.

A spear is patient. Mine has been patient since the Heresy.

— Vulkan He'stan, attributed Promethean record

The Recovery

The Spear was recovered before the Eye, by a Forgefather whose tenure is preserved in the Promethean Cult's archive but whose name the Cult does not publish — a convention the Cult applies to Forgefathers who died on the recovery campaign itself. The recovery cost, by the after-action report's accounting, three Astartes and an unspecified number of mortal Imperial Navy auxiliaries. The Spear was found on a world the Cult's archived coordinates list as "Promethean Forty-Seven" — a designation suggesting it was the forty-seventh of the worlds the Cult had investigated in the search for the Nine, and that the search had been considerably more extensive than the Cult publicly admits.

The Spear returned to Prometheus with the deceased Forgefather's body. The Spear's grip-wear pattern was, on inspection, exactly the same shape the Apothecary corps had mapped before the Spear was scattered — Vulkan's grip, unchanged by ten thousand years of concealment. The Cult treated this consistency as confirmation that the Spear had not been wielded by any other being during its hidden centuries.

The Restraint

The Spear has not been used in combat since its recovery. It rests in the chamber on Prometheus where the recovered relics are kept. Vulkan He'stan considered using it in his quest for the remaining Six but has, by his own account preserved in the Cult's records, declined — the Spear is not, in his judgement, a tool for the journey. It is a tool for the destination. Whatever Vulkan made it for, He'stan reads, was not finding more of the Nine. It was the engagement that would follow the gathering.

The Apothecary attendants who maintain the relics nightly note that the Spear's melta-emitter is not powered down in the standard sense. Imperial melta-weapons require a fuel cell that depletes whether the weapon is fired or not — the Spear's emitter draws no measurable fuel from the cell the Apothecaries replaced once during a maintenance cycle. The emitter is, by their working assessment, drawing power from a source the Imperium has not identified. Whatever it is drawing on, the Spear is not running low.

The Pair

The Eye and the Spear are, by Chapter custom, displayed paired in the Promethean chamber. The pairing is, the Cult's symbolic reading holds, a visual statement: vision matched to weapon, sight matched to intent. The Gauntlet of the Forge — recovered third — sits on a separate stand a few metres distant. The three together are the largest gathering of Vulkan's recovered work currently in one place. The Chapter's senior Apothecaries have not commented, in any record available to mid-rank Brothers, on what proximity of the three artifacts might produce.

What the Apothecaries have noted, in restricted-access maintenance logs, is that the chamber's ambient temperature is consistently three degrees above the surrounding fortress baseline when all three relics are in residence. When the Gauntlet is removed from the chamber (for the brief annual ceremony in which it is paraded through the Cult's outer hall), the temperature returns to baseline within twenty hours. When it is returned, the elevation re-establishes within four. The Apothecaries have stopped logging the readings. The chamber is, in some sense, doing something. The Cult does not require an explanation.

The Standing Question

Whether the Spear's edge would still cut what it was tested against — whether the test that glassed a forty-metre crater in the Pyre Desert was a property of the Spear or a property of the moment Vulkan struck — is a question the Salamanders have not tested. The Spear has not been activated for engagement since the recovery. The Cult's working position is that the Spear's full activation is a one-time event, reserved for the engagement it was made for, and that testing in advance would diminish what it had been calibrated to do.

The Mechanicus has, on three separate occasions across M40 and M41, requested permission to study the Spear's melta-emitter. The Salamanders have refused each time, citing Promethean Cult prohibitions against disassembly. The Mechanicus has not pressed. The Spear waits, the Cult teaches, for the moment Vulkan returns and asks for it back. Whether it will recognise him when that happens — whether his grip will be the same after ten thousand years of warp-presence — is a question the Cult does not articulate. The Cult's confidence, never written, is that Vulkan made the Spear to recognise him. Recognition will not be a problem.