Tu’Shan

Tu’Shan is Chapter Master of the Salamanders and Regent of Prometheus, the moon of Nocturne on which the Chapter’s fortress-monastery stands. Nocturne is his home world. He is described as an embodiment of the Chapter’s ideals of compassion, duty, and self-sacrifice, and of its view that the first duty of a Space Marine is to protect the citizens of the Imperium. He is recognised by the many honour scars branded across his face and by a cloak made from the hide of a three-hundred-year-old drake of Nocturne. He is barracked on Prometheus with the Firedrakes, the Chapter’s 1st Company, whose captain he is, and his favoured weapon is the thunder hammer Stormbearer.

Tu’Shan served as a sergeant in the 5th Company and later as Captain of the 3rd Company. In that office he led the attack that destroyed the Astra Militarum garrison of Imhathok, a world in the Ultima Segmentum, after its Guardsmen embraced the T’au doctrine of the Greater Good and rebelled; he refused the plea of the garrison’s loyal colonel, Bey Baeren, to spare them. In 938.M41 he was appointed Regent of Prometheus after his predecessor, Neh’tar, was killed by Huron Blackheart.

He had held the office for three years when the Second War for Armageddon began in 941.M41. He placed himself under Commander Dante of the Blood Angels, the senior Chapter Master present, and helped rally the planet’s scattered defence forces and Astra Militarum regiments. With the Firedrakes he held one of the last bridges over the River Stygies against a column of about a thousand Ork Speed Freeks for three days and four nights, while the Chapter guarded supply convoys and refugee columns. At the end of the campaign Dante praised him before the assembled Blood Angels. In 955.M41, during the Killeneth Rebellion, a rebel Hellhound engulfed his position in burning promethium; he walked out of the fire, destroyed the tank with a single blow of his thunder hammer, and the rebels facing him fled.

When Ghazghkull Thraka returned in 998.M41 for the Third War for Armageddon, Tu’Shan was among the first commanders to respond, bringing six companies including the Firedrakes; one account says the whole Chapter of seven companies came. The Salamanders attacked the Rok fortresses landed along the Hemlock River, and Commissar Sebastian Yarrick welcomed their return. Tu’Shan rebuked Captain Vinyard of the Marines Malevolent before the Armageddon command staff after that Chapter shelled a refugee camp that Orks had breached, and at Hive Tempestora he kept the Orks from overrunning the Khatrin Water Purification Plant, so that most of the hive’s population escaped before it fell. Some accounts place the refugee-camp rebuke and the Tempestora defence in the Second War instead.

In M42, during the Fourth War for Armageddon, Tu’Shan returned to the planet with Operation Imperator, the coalition of more than two dozen Space Marine Chapters mustered under Marneus Calgar, bringing six companies of the Salamanders. Calgar named him one of the operation’s strategic overseers. He commanded the Hive Infernus theatre from a headquarters in the hive’s principal spire, restored the sabotaged South Forge Complex to production, and held the approaches against Deathskulls under Warboss Gorzog Skumloota; the Ork siege of Infernus was broken. He remains active in the Era Indomitus.