‘Are you ready for the honour-scarring, my lord?’ asked Tsek.

Dak’ir nodded, still a little disoriented from his dream. He watched as Tsek brought forth a glowing rod, white-hot from the embers of the brazier-cauldron that Dak’ir was standing in barefooted. The Astartes barely registered the pain from the fire-wrapped coals beneath him. There was not so much as a globule of sweat across his bald head or onyx-black body, naked but for a tribal sash clothing his loins.

The ritual was part of the teachings of the Promethean Cult, to which all warriors of the Salamanders stoically adhered.

As Tsek applied the branding rod to Dak’ir’s exposed skin he embraced the pain it brought. His fiery eyes, like red-hot coals themselves, watched approvingly. First, Tsek burned three bars and then a swirl bisecting them. It conjoined the many marks he and other brander-priests had made upon Dak’ir’s body where they’d healed and scarred into a living history of the Salamander’s many conflicts. Each was a battle won, a foe vanquished. No Salamander went into battle without first being marked to honour it and then again at battle’s end to commemorate it.

Dak’ir’s own marks wreathed his legs, arms and some of his torso and back. They were intricate, becoming more detailed as each new honour scar was added. Only a veteran of many campaigns, a Salamander of centuries’ service, ever bore such markings on his face.

Tsek bowed his head and stepped back into shadow. A votive-servitor shambled forward in his wake on reverse-jointed metal limbs, bent-backed beneath the weight of a vast brazier fused to its spine. Dak’ir reached out and plunged both hands into the iron caldera of the brazier, scooping up the fragments of ash from the burned matter collected at its edges.

Dak’ir smeared the white ash over his face and chest, inscribing the Promethean symbols of the hammer and the anvil. They were potent icons in Promethean lore, believed to garner endurance and strength.

‘Vulkan’s fire beats in my breast…’ he intoned, making a long sweep with his palm to draw the hammer’s haft.

‘…With it I shall smite the foes of the Emperor,’ another voice concluded, letting Dak’ir cross the top of the haft with his palm to form the hammer’s head before revealing himself.

Brother Fugis stepped into the brazier’s light, clanking loudly as he moved. He was already clad in his green power armour, but went unhooded. His blood-red eyes blazed vibrantly in the half-dark. As befitted a Space Marine of his position, Fugis bore the ash-white of the Apothecaries on his right shoulder pad, though the left still carried the insignia of his Chapter on a jet-black field, the snarling salamander head there a blazing orange to match the pauldrons of his Third Company battle-brothers.

Thin-faced and intimidating, some in the company had suggested Fugis might be better served in a more spiritual profession than the art of healing. Such ‘suggestions’ were never voiced out loud, however, or given in front of the Apothecary, for fear of reprisal.