Nocturne

Nocturne is a world at war with itself, a hellscape of black volcanic wastes, rivers of molten rock, and skies choked with ash, all wracked by the gravitational torment of its enormous moon, Prometheus. When that moon swings close in its orbit the whole planet convulses in the Time of Trial, a season of earthquakes, eruptions, and tidal devastation that would render most worlds uninhabitable.

Yet the Nocturnean people endure, sheltering their sanctuary-cities in the most geologically stable pockets of the crust and emerging to rebuild each time the fury passes. Generations of such hardship have made them a folk of extraordinary resilience and craft, master metalworkers and smiths whose skill is renowned, and whose communities are bound by deep loyalty and mutual aid. Great feasts and drake-hunts mark the passing of each Time of Trial, celebrations of simple survival on a world that gives nothing freely.

From this crucible are drawn the Salamanders, a Chapter that mirrors its homeworld in both fire and character. Where other Adeptus Astartes hold themselves aloof, the sons of Vulkan live among the people of Nocturne between wars, working the forges and sharing in the labour, and they carry into battle a rare compassion for the innocent alongside their mastery of flame and metal.

Marked by the effects of their world's radiation, with coal-black skin and burning eyes, the Salamanders are a small Chapter but a stubborn and enduring one, as befits sons of a world detailed in the glossary entry for Nocturne. To them, cataclysm is not catastrophe but a test to be met, endured, and outlasted, exactly as their homeworld has taught them since birth. On Nocturne, to survive the fire is to be tempered by it.