Artellus Numeon

Artellus Numeon captained the Pyre Guard, the honour-sworn warriors who attended the primarch of the XVIII in battle, and served as Vulkan's equerry, a station that placed him closer to the Lord of Drakes than almost any other legionary. A veteran of countless Great Crusade campaigns, Numeon embodied the Promethean Creed as fully as any son of Nocturne, a warrior of unshakeable loyalty whose faith in his primarch ran deeper than the world-roots of Mount Deathfire itself.

At Isstvan V, Numeon fought amid the carnage of the Drop Site Massacre and survived where thousands of his brothers did not. Cut off from Vulkan and believing his lord slain, he became one of the guiding lights of the shattered Legion's survivors, holding together bands of grief-stricken warriors when despair might otherwise have unmade them. It was Numeon, more than any other, who nursed the conviction that Vulkan yet lived and would one day return to lead the XVIII from the ashes, a faith that became the closest thing the broken Legion had to hope. In the long, bitter years that followed he carried that ember through darkness upon darkness, refusing to let the flame of his Legion gutter out entirely.