Contemptor Dreadnought

To the Salamanders, a Contemptor Dreadnought was no mere war-engine but an honoured elder given new form, a fallen brother whose wisdom and skill were too precious to surrender to death. Interred within a sarcophagus of master-wrought ceramite and adamantium, these ancients strode to war bearing the accumulated craft of centuries, their every movement guided by a mind that remembered the forges of Nocturne and the earliest campaigns of the Great Crusade. The XVIII adorned their Dreadnoughts as living reliquaries, hanging them with drake-scale and votive flame, and entrusted them with the Legion's heaviest guns and most storied duties. In the wake of Isstvan V, when so few of the Legion remained, these interred veterans became irreplaceable pillars of its strength, striding through firestorms that would fell a battle-tank and answering betrayal with the slow, implacable wrath of a Legion that would not die.