T’au

T’au is the arid homeworld of the T’au Empire, a single-continent planet in the Eastern Fringe whose savannah and marble cities anchor the Ethereal seat. Imperial scans have not yet produced a complete map of the continent, and much of what is known of its interior comes from T’au sources rather than Imperial survey.

The planet is recorded as having been found in a feral condition in the thirty-fifth millennium (M35), when the Land’s Vision located it. Warp storms afterwards concealed it throughout the Mont’au civil war, a period during which the T’au appear to have been cut off from wider galactic contact. The Ethereals then unified the planet, and accounts agree that this settled order, rather than any single conquest, is what allowed T’au to seed an empire spanning hundreds of light years. The Sept worlds settled from it, among them Dal’yth, Vior’la, Bork’an and Fi’rios, each developed distinct traditions while remaining answerable to the Ethereal caste.

Within the T’au Empire, the homeworld is the reference point for the Greater Good and for the caste system that supports it. Fire Warriors of this sept still prefer to finish one enemy unit before shifting fire, a habit that later tradition treats as characteristic of the world’s military culture. The world is associated with Aun’Va and Aun’Shi through the Ethereal seat, and with the doctrine line of Puretide that runs through Shadowsun, Farsight, Brightsword and Kais.

On the map–timeline graph, T’au is the origin point for the expansion that reached the Damocles Gulf and the wider Eastern Fringe. Darkstrider and Longstrike carried T’au sept tactics into the Eastern Fringe wars of the Damocles era, which places the homeworld’s doctrine in direct contact with Imperial forces in the forty-first millennium. Contemporaries on that front include the Imperial commanders opposing the T’au advance and the Farsight Enclaves, whose founder departed the homeworld’s command structure but never fully left its tactical inheritance. Readers following the Puretide line or the Ethereal seat will find the linked commander and character dossiers the most direct neighbours to this entry.