>>40283721see
>>40259582Desert-dwelling Salamanders successors with a curse laid on their gene-seed by their traitorous Chief Librarian Orpheus and his cronies when they caught him with his hands in the Chaos cookie jar.
He tried to distract them ahead of time with a WAAAGH, but a battle-brother managed to survive past his squadmates in a boarding action and blow up the whole WAAAGH fleet singlehandedly in a heroic sacrifice by hijacking a krooza to kamikaze another and setting off a chain reaction, so forces got home sooner than he'd expected and noticed Librarians mucking about with foul Chaos magics.
The loyalists didn't take heavy losses against the traitor librarians, but weren't able to stop them from escaping with the Chapter's entire stockpile of geneseed and cursing the Chapter.
At some point (either after the betrayal clusterfuck or when they were first dumped on the planet over their deviant geneseed) the natives taught them how to harvest an incredibly potent fuel from the local desert megafauna, called 'Drakes.' Like proppa Salamanders descendants, the prospect of hotter fire made the Chapter cream their collective pants so hard that they now ride the massive lizards into battle, with extensive cybernetic enhancements to specialize them for combat. (We never established whether they had some kind of flammable venom that lets them breath fire, or if the fuel's rendered from their endocrine glands or something. Either way, they can breathe fire post-cybernetics.) The Inquisition wants a steady supply of that fuel, though, so they strongarmed some low-ranking Ecclesiarchy schmucks into colonizing the planet for them. The Chapter's come to a mutual agreement with them - both sides tell the Inquisition that everything's going great, omitting the many setbacks to the colonization effort and the Marines' gene-seed issues. The Fire Drakes field no Scouts, as the entire Tenth Company has graduated to full Marine status since the betrayal, and spearhead the effort to hunt down their former Chief Librarian in hopes of retrieving usable geneseed and lifting the curse. Unfortunately, he and his fellow traitors have joined up with a Tzeentchian Chaos warband, and the bastards' tricks make progress slow for the Chapter's effort. Those not immediately engaged in hunting down the forces of the traitor Orpheus try to keep their subsector under control, purging it of xenos and Chaos when they appear and working to establish some semblance of basic infrastructure.
To have remained at full Chapter strength for centuries since the loss of their gene-seed, the Fire Drakes have practiced extreme caution in battle by Astartes standards, favoring ranged combat where possible and fielding many Apothecaries to stabilize any fallen Battle-Brothers for retrieval after the engagement. Even so, many cybernetic implants have proven necessary to keep each Marine combat-capable, from simple bionic eyes and limbs to replacing entire vertebral columns. The Ecclesiarchy helps bankroll these expenses; their backwater subsector may not attract overmuch conflict, but neither does it have regular deliveries of supplies from the AdMech, and the church's gold lets them acquire otherwise rare goods for their Marine allies, who in return keep them supplied with enough Drakefire (we had to name the biofuel sometime, here works) to satisfy the Inquisition. They have plenty of Techmarines to help install these cybernetics and those of the drake mounts, but that's not so unusual for Salamander successors. They don't have too many Librarians after so many turned traitor or were slain by their traitorous brothers, but they accept psykers as would any other Chapter.
