#also taleath needs a tag

[mothiir]

since it was an open invitation to ask about ocs. I’m curious about why taleath joined a craftworld! any particular reason? what was he like when he was a kabalite?

so sorry it took me ages to get to this! always happy to answer questions about the boys, especially my baby eldar:

So, quick primer on drukhari lore: they live in a warp-city called Commoragh. Most live for tens of thousands of years, sustaining themselves on the pain and suffering of others. Babies are born either via artificial wombs (vat-born) or the traditional way (trueborn). Because drukhari society is so treacherous and bloodthirsty, it is a sign of immense privilege to be able to incapacitate yourself for the process of pregnancy and childbirth; thus, only the drukhari women with the status and political sway to protect themselves have children. Trueborn nobles consider themselves superior to vat-born because of course they do.

Taleath is vat-born. He has no clue who his biological parents actually are, only that they donated some genetic material as payment for services rendered by his adoptive mother, Quinathra, the leader of a haemonculi coven. She wanted a child, for purposes she never really explained, and — he suspects — that she forgot about between requesting the genetic material and Taleath’s birth. Like many of her kindred, Quinathra is batshit insane, though hers is a bright-edged madness, capable of brief insights of stunning brilliance. She raised Taleath in her coven, and if you know anything about haemonculi you know precisely what sort of things he grew up with. She seemed to care for him, in her own very twisted way, and often told him that his destiny lay far away in the stars. The full name she gave him — which he very rarely uses in its entirety, since it’s a mouthful even by Aeldari standards — translates as ‘far from this place I will go, to stand on a field of blue grass, under the auspices of a golden son, where I will bring fire and bloodshed and agony to the lost children of dead men’. It is only after he meets Roboute Guilliman, clad in splendid blue and gold raiment, that he realises that perhaps she wasn’t quite as mad as he used to think. Perhaps the dreams she had were not all drug-induced hallucinations. Perhaps.

Anyway: when he reached adulthood, she told him that he may be a skilled assistant, but his heart wasn’t full of the joy of scientific discovery and therefore he could never be a good haemonculi. He had to find a kabal. Or she could peel off his flesh and make him into a very fetching wall decoration. He chose to join a kabal. His connections to his mother’s coven served him well; she may not have wanted him as a colleague, but she was happy to help him with his political goals. Within a few centuries, he was happily in place as the third in command of the Crimson Talon. He learned that it was good to be near power, close enough to whisper in its ear, but not so close that people got ideas about assassinating you.

His kabal was part of the group that swanned into save the craftworld Iyanden. Iyanden had been forced to muster the spirits of their ancestors to fend off a Tyranid hive fleet; yanking spirit stones from the Infinity Circuit, destroying their eternal rest. And yet it did not seem enough — necromancy would not save them. And yet at a time when all seemed lost, the drukhari rallied behind their kindred to send the bugs fleeing. Was it out of the kindness of their hearts? Absolutely not. They thought it was funny that the Iyanden aeldari had been forced to break their final taboo. And because they found it amusing to imagine their cousins forced to live with the knowledge that they had shattered the respite of their resident ghosts, they saved them.

While in Iyanden, Taleath was mortally wounded by a tyranid termagaunt. His guts spilled out over his hands, his blood choking his breath, and his last thoughts were dreams of revenge — but he did not die. A young Aeldari warrior (“barely off the teat, they were recruiting babies —“ Taleath would later say) found him, and stemmed the bleeding, before half-dragging him to safety. He stayed beside the drukhari, tending to his wounds when no one else would. The boy had lost his entire family to the tyranid invasion. All he wanted to do was to save one soul, no matter how lost.

Taleath’s kabal gave him up for dead, because of course they did. He did not expect anyone to come for him. And so his initial plan was to manipulate the boy, to play the reformed monster — ending up with the inevitable gory betrayal that drukhari so like to inflict on those who make the mistake of trusting them. However, months turned to years turned to decades, and Taleath couldn’t pinpoint the moment when he eventually started genuinely caring. He just…did. He detoxed from his terrible grinding soul-hunger, because there was no way to effectively feed aboard the craftworld, and found his head clearer than he could remember it ever being. He saw how the boy was doted on by his parents, and thought of his own mad hag of a mother. He changed.

One day, he heard a rumour of Yvraine — the crazy death-worshipping bitch — making nice with the humans. He paid the rumours little mind, until they could no longer be ignored. Through a series of complicated and lengthy campaigns, he found himself fighting on the same side as the Primarch, destroying the legion that called itself the World Bearer’s. At a break in the fighting, looking up at the brilliant bronzed figure of Roboute Guilliman, Taleath laughed breathlessly to himself, attracting some strange looks. “Killing the lost children of a dead man,” he said, with his off-kilter grin. “Under the auspices of a golden son.”