Tyberos

Tyberos, known as the Red Wake, is Chapter Master of the Carcharodons, a fleet-based Space Marine Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. He fights in relic Terminator armour and wields a pair of lightning claws, Hunger and Slake, which he uses far more readily than words: Tyberos is recorded as saying almost nothing in the presence of subordinates or allies alike, communicating intent through the disposition of his companies rather than through speeches or councils of war.

The Carcharodons keep no fixed homeworld, operating instead from a battle fleet that moves between the Imperium’s frontiers, appearing to collect the tithe of a world and departing once it is met. Their gene-seed lineage and founding Chapter are not settled matters even within the Adeptus Terra’s own records, and the Chapter’s methods on tithe worlds are frequently indistinguishable, to those on the receiving end, from those of raiders rather than protectors. This ambiguity has followed the Carcharodons through every theatre in which Tyberos has led them, and he has made no effort to correct it.

Tyberos and his Chapter fought on the loyalist side of the Badab War, the early-41st-millennium secession crisis in which Huron Blackheart’s Astral Claws and allied Chapters broke from Imperial authority within the Maelstrom warzone. Alongside other loyalist commanders answering the Lord Commander of the Segmentum’s call, the Carcharodons were committed to some of the campaign’s harshest engagements, their willingness to press an assault without pause for negotiation making them useful, if unwelcome, company among more conventional Chapters. Accounts of Tyberos’s specific role in the war, and of his dealings with fellow loyalist commanders, remain incomplete, though his presence at several of the conflict’s worst-fought actions is not disputed.

The epithet Red Wake refers directly to the visible aftermath of his passage through close engagements rather than to any figurative reputation. Tyberos remains active and in command of the Carcharodons in the current era; the Chapter follows him without recorded dissent, and no successor or rival for his position is attested.

Tyberos holds the ancient title Shade Lord as Chapter Master and simultaneously commands the Carcharodons’ First Company, the Red Brethren, from the battle barge Nicor. He is seldom seen outside archaic Terminator plate; when his face is exposed it is corpse-white, with black, depthless eyes, and he speaks to fellow Loyalist commanders in little more than a whisper. His relic gauntlets Hunger and Slake combine barbed power blades with an inner maw of teeth, a pattern unknown to the Adepts of Mars, and were taken from the Ashen Claws.

In the Badab War he was the Carcharodons’ Force Commander among the Loyalists under Carab Culln. From the Nicor he led Red Brethren Terminator assaults across the theatre, and Culln tasked the Chapter with reducing the Endymion Cluster so that the Mantis Warriors would be drawn out and broken. At the Siege of Badab Primaris the Carcharodons sabotaged the atomic and geo-thermal reactors powering the primary hives, collapsing the Palace of Thorns’ defences and opening the way for the Star Phantoms’ final assault, at a cost that left lasting enmity between those Chapters.

After the Tyrant’s fall the Carcharodon fleet returned to the Endymion Cluster with the Fire Angels and entered the Tranquility System, where Mantis Warriors fortresses were stripped of materiel and a generation of the system’s youth was taken in a Red Tithe to refill the Chapter’s ranks. The fleet then withdrew beyond the galactic plane. The Carcharodons remain fleet-based under Tyberos’s command; no fixed recruitment world is firmly established in the wider Imperial record, though later accounts name Ootheca as an official grant.