Biel-Tan

Biel-Tan is an Aeldari craftworld, a mobile world-ship city-state of the Asuryani, noted for extreme militarism among its kind. Its people hold that the fractured Aeldari empire of old can be rebuilt through the deliberate destruction of the lesser species that have settled worlds once claimed by the Aeldari, including maiden worlds (paradise planets terraformed in antiquity) and the colonies of the Exodites, the Aeldari who never dwelt on craftworlds. Biel-Tan maintains a markedly higher proportion of Aspect Warriors, elite Aeldari devotees of a single war-shrine and its associated fighting discipline, than other craftworlds, and its Exarchs, the masters who lead and are partly bound to those shrines, sit on a ruling council that sets the craftworld’s foreign and military policy. Within Biel-Tan stands a chamber where the spirit stones of fallen Aspect Warriors are kept, consulted by Farseers seeking guidance from the craftworld’s dead.

As a void-borne polity rather than a fixed world, Biel-Tan’s given position lies toward the galactic south, without a settled homeworld to anchor it. When Biel-Tan goes to war it musters a warhost known as the Swordwind, a fast, concentrated strike force built around Aspect Warriors and swift grav vehicles, intended to fall upon an enemy before it can organise a defence. Biel-Tan’s foremost enmity is reserved for Orks, whose expansion permanently displaces worlds the craftworld regards as rightfully Aeldari, though it has also moved against human and other xenos settlers occupying former Aeldari territory.

For long ages after the Fall, the catastrophic psychic cataclysm that shattered the ancient Aeldari empire, Biel-Tan fought alongside craftworld Iyanden against the forces of Chaos, coordinating warhosts through the webway to notable effect. That alliance broke down as Biel-Tan widened its war aims beyond Chaos to include the reconquest of maiden worlds from human and xenos settlers, a course Iyanden judged to offer no advantage against the greater threat it faced. Biel-Tan later answered the summons of the seer Eldrad Ulthran during a major incursion into the Eye of Terror, fighting alongside Maugan Ra to secure footholds on the crone world of Eidolon.

Biel-Tan was struck by a daemonic invasion, recorded as the Fracture of Biel-Tan, in which forces devoted to Slaanesh and Khorne breached the craftworld and corrupted its infinity circuit, the wraithbone matrix that preserves the souls of its dead. The craftworld’s Biel-Tan-born seer Yvraine, acting as an emissary of the newly stirring Aeldari god of the dead Ynnead, joined the Phoenix Lords and the nascent Ynnari in sealing the breach, at the cost of a ritual that consumed a great number of Biel-Tan souls to check the invasion. Biel-Tan endured but lost roughly half its population to the fighting and to Aeldari who subsequently departed to follow the Ynnari, and the wraithbone structure of the world-ship broke apart soon after, leaving Biel-Tan as a dispersed fleet rather than a single vessel. Its remaining people continue to hold to their martial creed, sustained increasingly by wraith constructs, while elements of the Swordwind are said to have withdrawn into the webway to carry on the craftworld’s war against xenos usurpers of Aeldari worlds.