Editing Slaugth (Hektor Heresy) (section)

===The Fractured World===

Planet T'au was a harsh stepmother to its dwellers. A desert world enshrouded with blazing hot winds carrying vicious sandstorms, it almost appeared hostile to all life. And yet, life did bloom there. Instead of succumbing to the manyfold challenges of their planet, the sons of T'au were hardened by them, forged into masterful survivors. It was a cruel, eat or be eaten world, but it also had a fair share of savage beauty. The slender and elegant bodies of its numerous predators, perfected by millennia of natural selection, were not unlike the austere shapes of firearms in their deadly beauty. This was especially true in regard to the Tau, the planet's vicious apex predators turned a sapient race. But, in spite of their ascension to sentience, they never quite forgot their roots. Theirs was a race of cruel hunters and ruthless merchants, unscrupulous spies and double-dealing diplomats. It's safe to assume that there were at some point kind-hearted Tau committed to a greater good than personal gain, but most of them ended up with a dagger between their shoulders. 

Is it, then, any surprise that a race of such ambitious and cruel individuals couldn't live in peace? At the time of their discovery by the Slaugth, the Tau were going through an era which later historians would call Mont'au - "The Time of Blood". The entire population of the planet was divided into four major blocks waging a brutal war of extermination against each other. The Burning Horde united the countless warrior tribes of arid steppes and rocky deserts. Still little more than the vicious predators their race descended from, these brutal nomads saw civilisation as a sign of weakness and lived by raiding and pillaging. No settlement was ever safe from their raids, no treaties or agreements could guarantee peace with them, for their minds were as fickle and volatile as the fire they worshipped. 

Their incursions were most often directed against the megalithic bastions of the Stoneheart Tyranny, a corrupt empire holding the metalliferous hills of central T'au in its iron fist. The expansion of this technologically advanced dominion was driven by the insatiable avarice of its aristocratic rulers, whose greed was so immense that they often supplied blackpowder guns and electromagnetic catapults to the raiders of their own towns in exchange for large gold nuggets found in the desert. On the other hand, they feared losing even an inch of their property so much that they were constantly working hundreds of their subjects to death constructing endless lines of defence, each one grander and more elaborate than the other.

The trade between the Horde and the Tyranny was facilitated by the enigmatic monks of the Order of the Wet Shroud. A secretive organisation of hypocritical charlatans posing as holy men, they used their constant pilgrimages in boats of porous stone along the knee-deep rivers of T'au as a cover for smuggling, drug and tau trafficking, and, perhaps most important of all, espionage. They sold the lords of the stone cities information about the movements of the nomads and provided the chieftains of the steppes with detailed plans of the Tyranny's bastions - for a hefty pay, of course. But these duplicitous hypocrites were much more than simple spies and smugglers: the secret protocols of their sect described a complex agenda of fuelling war and conflict in order to weaken the other nations of T'au and, when the time comes, take over the world. Too few in numbers to wage a full-scale war, they used assassination to further their political goals.

Only the fourth and final major Tau faction wasn't infiltrated by the spies of the Wet Shroud. The xenophobic, racial supremacist dwellers of the Celestial Utopia only allowed foreigners into their mountaintop cities as slaves or prisoners. Theirs was a strictly hierarchical society ruled by eugenics and scientific racism. Only the tall, azure-eyed and purple-haired Tau with elongated skulls could receive citizenship in their cities; those not conforming to these standards were labelled as metics and forced to break their backs performing hard menial jobs. The arrogant mountain dwellers looked with disgust at the inferior races crawling like insects on the ground down below, and used their hot air balloons to bomb any settlements founded too close to their borders. The ground dwellers were believed to carry disease, and even speaking to them was rumoured to cause stupidity. 

It was clear to the Slaugth that in order to turn the Tau into a formidable spacefaring civilisation that could effectively oppose the Imperium, they first needed to unite them as a race, give them a common purpose. The opinions of the Principals divided on how this needed to be done. The more straightforward of them proposed to conquer the Tau, those with more subtlety suggested to use mind control to steer the race into the right direction. But Principal Txont had a much better plan. One that involved remaking the Tau society from scratch.