Editing Nobledark Imperium Notes (section)

== Shas'O Shadowsun ==

* Currently the greatest military hero of the Tau that is still alive and not a renegade. Typically seen as the Tau equivalent of a primarch or a Phoenix Lord by the rest of the Imperium (Farsight would be the other, except for the whole treason thing).
* Shadowsun was a good friend of Farsight. Then Farsight did something during the Tau civil war that made Shadowsun swear a blood oath against him.
* Probably did something so grievous that in Shadowsun's opinion Farsight has no moral justification in claiming that he's doing what's right, like escalating the tension between the two factions into outright violence and the first shots of the Tau Civil War. Farsight saw it as necessary and justified because the reformists weren't letting the traditionalists practice the Tau'va the way they wanted to. Shadowsun called bullshit, his actions led to Tau killing Tau and in her mind this was an act of barbarity just asking for the Mon'tau to return.
* Probably had some sort of forbidden feelings for one another, but after that moment their relationship changed to that special feeling of hate and betrayal you can only have for someone you once loved
* More open-minded and less xenophobic than Farsight (known as an Imperial hero even outside of Tau space, which the Tau will remind you of quite frequently), but at the same time more prone to obeying the Ethereal Council and is more manipulable by them.
* As opposed to Farsight or Aun'Va, Shadowsun is still around because she's been leapfrogging through time via cryo-stasis as opposed to the Dawn Blade or whatever Aun'Va is doing. Explicit instructions to wake her when Farsight shows his head so she can fulfill her oath
* Like Kryptman, Shadowsun has lost numerous friends and allies due to the passage of time. Unlike Kryptman, she is a bit more philosophical about this.

Shadowsun is essentially the Tau WMD that walks like a mortal.

It has the lovely image of Aun'va as some sort of Davy Jones dinosaur of another era that the others of his kind defer to out of respect/fear and when shit gets too hard to handle he declares "release the Shadowsun". Those are the days that you know shit has got beyond real. If is the legendary 1st Sphere veteran commander than by now she has fought everything from Dark Eldar to xeno Skynet. Like Kryptman she is awoken when needed and preserved when not. Like Kryptman she is getting on in subjective years now despite this though not to the same extreme. Like Kryptman she is awake in the final days of 999M41 and it doesn't look like she will sleep again soon.

Humans have stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, Tau have Shadowsun.

Imperium has Saint Celestine around whom the masses flock with songs on their lips and fire in their hearts. Shadowsun is this also. When she wakes up the other castes start to readily form citizens militias to ease the burdens of the Fire Caste PDF equivalents. Not actual soldiers, goodness no. That would be against the scripture. They just assist and serve as best they can right up to what they can bend the scripture to accommodate.

Her personal mission is to uphold the values of the Imperial Tau'va by adapting to new tactics and destroying whatever she's pointed at better than anyone else can, and to find closure by ending her former friend's life. She doesn't really concern herself with issues that aren't relevant to this, having a sort of tunnel vision that makes her an extremely dangerous opponent and which probably helps her cope with having to constantly play catch-up in the fastest-developing society in the entirety of the Imperium. She's built her entire life around fulfilling this purpose, becoming cynical and jaded instead of wrathful and manic the way Inquisitor Kryptman has, as a person who hasn't quite lost everything and is simultaneously expected to be a paradigm of the Greater Good's ideals.

From Shadowsun’s perspective, literally every waking moment of her life for the last nigh-on a hundred years has been some form of conflict. The closest she has ever gotten to “down time” is the moments of strategic planning and stretches of boredom between FUBAR events. She goes to sleep only to wake up a moment later wondering “what in the name of the Tau’va is wrong now”. Shadowsun has essentially lived through every major military conflict of the last millennium, which would be the equivalent of a soldier fighting in every war since the late 18th century, and all the changes in technology that implies. Imagine having to constantly relearn how to fight as weapons go from muskets to bolt-action rifles to semi-automatics. Shadowsun would point this out…albeit in a rather cynical fashion.

“Sometimes the weapons are different. Better, faster, they say.
In the end they are all the same. I pull the trigger, and something dies.”

Shadowsun has figured out by now that Aun'Va is more than meets the eye. The "my identical grandson for whom politics skipped a generation" works after a while, but someone who knows the guy personally would see right through his act in seconds. She doesn't voice what she knows because Aun'Va being in charge is literally for the Greater Good, but it allows her to be more critical of him because she knows he knows she knows and she sees his feet of clay through the shared ages. She believes in the Greater Good and the Empire as it fights for the Greater Good and the Imperium as it seems to mirror and facilitate the Greater Good but she also believes that Aun'Va was a late bronze age bureaucrat and blind obedience to the rules of another time taken in a vacuum and not adapted to this time will always lead to disaster. Her original dispute with Farsight. So she's more willing to push back against Aun'Va (though not the Etheral council), because she knows his tactics. Ironically Aun'Va trusts her more than almost anyone else based on how she was completely honest with him about what happened in the initial shots of the Tau Schism.