Editing Story:Warhammer 60K: The Age of Dusk (section)

==Additional Background Section 8: The Burden of Restraint: Gathering Allies==

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Though innumerable were the wars and campaigns of conquest conducted by the Vulkan regime, such constant antagonism would be futile if he wished to unite and make prosperous his new Imperium. Born upon Vulkan, he and his Salamanders knew all too well the values and limitations of empathy, and were almost as eager to forge alliances and treaties with those divergent realms they encountered as they were to defeat and occupy them. Some, such as Grand Sicarium and the Ophelia-Tallarns, did not wish to join with Vulkan’s project, while others, such as the monstrous Chaos Imperiums, or the vile Tenabrian Contingent, were too repellent and evil to parley with, and could only ever be enemies. However, not every rival power was such.
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In the middle decades of M53, the ''Empire of Vulkan'' was a vast and glorious thing; perhaps a golden age. The Promethean Lodges on Armageddon collected and deciphered more and more captured technologies from colonized worlds. The Shipyards of ''The Fifteen Thousand World Empire'' were in constant use, as were the Commandery worlds. Artwork and architecture was at its height, and every city and every world were strong and somberly beautiful places; as glorious as only the master Artisan-Primarch could make them. Every year, word would reach the civilized interior worlds of new members of their Imperium, and there was rejoicing. Warp travel remained ponderous in the continued absence of the Astronomicon, but Vulkan had already begun a project upon the world of Venlaik to attempt to create a form of psychic beacon. Though the projects ended in failure and ''The Year of Nightmares'' seven years later, the fact he was confident enough to attempt this project while still at war demonstrated how secure and entrenched the Vulkan Imperium had become.

There were several empires of note that were brought into the fold relatively peacefully. The so-called ''Ryzan-Catachan ‘Oath-worlds’'' were a cluster of six dozen systems in the local sector directly around the two main worlds. They were relatively easy to bribe and coerce into the fold. The Ryzan tech priests were bribed with Archeotech and a promise to allow their Forge-world Noosphere to link up with the Noospheres of other liberated Forge Worlds, allowing them to share data. The Catachan side of the alliance merely joined because they saw little difference between working alone with the Tech priests, or with the Black Giant’s folk. They just liked warfare.

The ''Confederation of Justice'' was harder to convince. They were the remnants of the Elysian, Harakoni and Varseen Droptroops, who over the millennia had morphed into an elite band of peacekeeping thugs in the southern Segmentum Solar region; attacking worlds and shipping at random on the assumption they had ‘subversive’ elements amongst their populations. When Vulkan’s soldiers eventually encountered these men in battle, it was through ambush. The world of Kaniir was in the process of being brought into the Imperium through the signing of a treaty at their capital. Clerks from one of the many Councils of Armageddon had arrived on the war-battered world, guarded by two Companies of the Commandery of the Dorn Revenants, in their burnished war plate.

Halfway through proceedings, the warships of the Confederates arrived and declared the Vulkans traitors to the original Terran Imperium, and attacked the Revenant Fleet. The Confederates were outnumbered and their ships were under-gunned, and Vulkan’s troops easily routed the fleet. However, their ships were converted to carry large troop transport facilities, and they swiftly deployed their drop troops onto the world before they retreated. The battle raged for weeks, and the skilled mortal soldiers, despite being attacked by the PDF of Kaniir and the might of Mark II Astartes, they held their own. Kowl, the Commander of the Dorn Revenants, was quoted as saying;

“Determined as Fists. Damn them, but you cannot help but admire their conviction!”

Eventually their forces were surrounded and captured. They surrendered honorably, and congratulated the Revenants for their well-earned victory ( ''which unsurprisingly took the Astartes aback somewhat, for they were rarely praised by their foes''). After questioning, the prisoners would not give up their homeworld, claiming ‘every world that needs us is our home, for home is where the honor is.’

As it transpired, Promethean Cultists with the fleet managed to track the warp trails of the retreating fleet (''though they were masked well''), and found the location of their base of operations; a vast Ramillies class star fort, which had become clad with additional living quarters and blister-like bio-domes that made the space station look like a vast shanty town. Kowl and his negotiators managed to gain an audience with the Muster-Lord of the Confederated Drop-Troopers, who listened to their proposals, and perused the files given to him that proven the Vulkan Imperium was a worthy successor to the Terran Imperium, which had fallen long ago.

The Muster-Lord listened and took it all in with patience and good grace, before calmly pointing out that his men had discreetly infiltrated the Vulkan ships, and had taken over the engineering sections and gun batteries. Elite assault boat teams had stormed the ships, and the prisoners held in the vessels had rigged an explosive from inside their cells, and had blown themselves free, before coming to the aid of the strike teams. The Muster-Lord, after informing Kowl of this fact, then requested that the Revenants surrender. 
Kowl snarled, explaining that his men could rip apart his paltry boarding forces and retake the ships within half an hour. The Confederate Lord then countered by explaining simply;

‘That is half an hour without motive power or guns, while being within range of the full firepower of a star fort. I hope your men could re-take the vessels in less than half an hour; otherwise your vessels will be scrap. I humbly request, therefore, that you surrender, and save us having to slay brave Astartes.”

Kowl had little choice other than to surrender to the mortal General. Word reached Vulkan of this setback, and he deployed two battlefleets to the area, to locate and free his men, before destroying the enemy. In the year it took for this force to be assembled and deployed, Kowl and his men were imprisoned, and learned of the culture of their foes. They were not degenerates or villains, but merely broken soldiers, desperate for a central command and a reason to fight on. Everywhere they looked over the millennia had been horror and war; the ophelians were murderers and maniacs, and their worlds burned with hate and misery. Space marines rampaged and laughed as they torched worlds at random. Daemons and twisted xenos fiends capered and spread their malice across countless worlds. The confederacy had looked upon the Vulkan Imperium, and they refused to believe that such a realm could exist in such a galaxy of horror. Kowl explained it was so, but it was only once his men had broken free of the prisons and had efficiently taken over the star fort by force, that the Muster-lord reluctantly heeded his words.

When Vulkan’s twin fleets tracked the star fort down amidst the swirling eddies of the warp lanes, they found that Kowl’s men had made an ally of the Troopers, who eagerly pledged oaths to the new Imperium, and sent delegates to Armageddon for formal training and establishment of their official regiments. In exchange, clerks and administrators were brought to the fleets of the Drop troopers, to help them organize their new territories. The planets that they had madly protected against all-comers for centuries, became their official domain.

Vulkan himself parleyed with the leader of the World of Secae; a world of shadowy smog and blazing lava-canals and plasma pits that fueled its sparse industry. The world was almost useless in almost every way. However, the world was a known hub and control center for the Order of Heracles. This Order was a group of fearsomely competent assassins and spies that bore the heritage of the once-infamous Officio Assassinatorium. Vulkan met with veiled associates of the Order here, and they agreed not to target Vulkan’s officials in exchange for Secae being left as their personal dominion, and unmarked properties upon Armageddon. Vulkan agreed, but it was an uneasy truce. The unmarked towers of the Assassins are discreetly spied upon by Salamanders and Imperial operatives daily, while Secae is a forbidden zone for diplomats and reporters for the Grand Journal (a journalistic mega-project devised by experts of the Gathanar system to document the entire history of the Vulkan Imperium). What the Heracles agents are actually up to is known to a scant few people, and will be covered in a later section.

A Sector spanning Human Empire known as the ''"Realm of Fathers"'' (''this is a rough translation'') was encountered by the Vulkan Imperium on its fringes, close to the Ophelian area of influence, but beyond their control. This realm was filled with hundreds upon hundreds of productive, peaceful and efficient worlds, full of quiet, diligent workers and citizens. There was no unrest, and everyone seemed to be happy and content; they rarely even seemed to speak to one another. When Vulkan’s armies came, they were welcomed by the Court of the Regents, and within a few months of their arrival, had signed treaties and pledged oaths in blood and stone. Their factories and produce yards were so very efficient that they had a major surplus of materials, which they traded within the Vulkan Imperium and provided a massive amount of goods to the expanding Imperium. They even paid double the standard tithes asked of them.

However, the Eealm of Fathers held a terrible secret. For they bore a legacy of ancient corruption in their very blood; they were, to a man, all genestealer cultists. With the abandonment of the genestealers by the Hive Fleets thousands of years ago, the genestealers had merely continued to do what they were born to do; survive and reproduce. Every other den of genestealers had been eventually slain over the years by various powers. Yet, one cult had survived. And, surprisingly, without the Hive Fleets, the genestealers were allowed to flourish. Nobody had ever seen how far a genestealer infestation could develop, until then.

There were hundreds of Patriarchs ruling the Empire in well shielded bastions within the main capital worlds of the Empire. Every single human was a hybrid to some degree, even if the vast multitude were merely smiling drones, infested at birth with the love of the bulbous beasts that ruled from the depths of their worlds. Every mind was linked by the fearsome brood telepathy of the Patriarch Prime and his brothers and sons. There was no dissent or hate between the people, for they knew each other as well as they knew themselves, and they all loved the Patriarchs. As every mind was linked, they produced mega projects and vast quantities of material with frightening speed. Though no one had ever seen the Prime Patriarch, it is said he swelled to an impossibly vast scale, bloated with psychic power until his magnificent potential made his presence visible to Vulkan himself. 

If Vulkan had known of the nature of his new ally, he neglected to mention it to his own Councils, who only learned of their nature after an accidental shuttled crash had dropped one of their officials into the subterranean feeding pits for the Purestrains. There was outrage and furious debate amongst the rulers of the Imperium. The Commanderies were in two minds over the matter; some wished to invade at once, others wanted to wait for Vulkan’s decree. Some of the mortal rulers debated over the matter with more nuance; they had become reliant upon the exports and tithes of this new allied territory, for good or ill. Humanity had a long history of hatred for the xenos, but the genestealer held no specific dread amongst the Councils of Armageddon; most were too young to remember the Tyranids as anything other than mythical monsters from the primordial times (''from their perspective''); creatures as far distant and irrelevant as the dinosaur of the long-forgotten home-world of Terra. Indeed, there were carnifex bones in several museums across the central worlds of the Vulkan Imperium. In the end, it was Vulkan that decided what happened next; he arrived unannounced into the council halls of the Tower of Governance upon the rebuilt Hades Palace, flanked by his robed Salamander Custodians, interrupting a policy meeting of the Grand Lords without a single care. He asked them to show leniency to the Cultists; they had never made war upon him, and their industry was required if the Imperium was to face the ‘troubles ahead’ effectively. Not only this, but a war with the cult would cripple his fledgling Imperium even if they won; the cult had a vast military machine of elite fighters and abundant equipment, supported by legions of Purestrain Shocktroops to serve as their Praetorians. Vulkan asked this of his councils, but never made an order. He desperately wanted his mortals to run their own Imperium; he was merely the agent of their survival.

The Councils agreed. The cultists were to remain upon their worlds, however; they were not to interbreed and subvert any humans in unwilling communities. Every world and every merchant vessel that traded with their realm was required to take genetics screening to detect any possible infections. Additionally, their status as xenos hybrids was to be suppressed and classified; normal citizens need not know that aliens supplied much of their products. Indeed, did not Jokaero smiths make many of the esoteric items of the Imperium of old?

Why Vulkan championed the cultists remains a contested topic. It was claimed he had foreseen the ''Time of Alignment'', beginning M55, which threw the galaxy into the greatest conflict in all the eons of galactic history before it, and saw the worth of the cult in this Great War. Others claim it was a more personal reason. They claim Vulkan traveled into the heart of the Cult’s sector, and straight to the heart of the Chitin Keep, the throne-city of the Patriarch. It is claimed he looked into the golden reptilian eyes of the patriarch, and confronted it, ignoring the oceans of Genestealers that surrounded him silently. The patriarch, they say, promised Vulkan a mighty prize in exchange for a union. It claimed (''through its Magus proxy, which allowed it to speak as men speak'') it had had a vision of a world of pulverized stone, and an empty throne, guarded by sullen Angels. It had seen some great force sweep in and take the unmoving King. It had witnessed the Obsidian Juggernaut, Vulkan himself, arrive and find the tomb empty. The Patriarch knew what Vulkan so desperately searched for, but could not find. Something the Patriarch alone knew.

For it knew who had stolen the Lion of Caliban from his undying slumber. And what was more, the Patriarch knew, with all its psychic might, where he had been taken...
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