Commander Brightsword

Among the Eight, the elite cabal of battlesuit commanders who form Commander Farsight's inner war-council within the Enclaves, none embodies aggression so fully as Brightsword. The T'au as a people disdain close-quarters butchery, trusting to disciplined fire delivered at a distance, yet Brightsword revels in the charge, hurling his battlesuit into the thick of the enemy and hewing a path with the fusion blades that are his signature. His ferocity and tactical daring have made his name a byword for the headlong assault throughout the Farsight Enclaves.

The first to bear the title fought at Commander Farsight's side during the Arkunasha War, that early campaign in which the young shas'o first revealed his genius by turning a doomed defence against the Orks into a legendary victory. From those days onward the name Brightsword was bound to Farsight's own, a blade-champion ever at the commander's shoulder through the fire of the Damocles Gulf Crusade, the desperate defence of the sept world of Dal'yth, the great expedition across the gulf, and the long centuries of the Enclaves that followed.

Herein lies one of the strangest of the Enclaves' secrets. The original Brightsword fell in battle long ago, yet the title has never once lapsed, for seven warriors and more have since taken up the name. Each is no mere volunteer but a clone of the first, grown by O'Vesa, the brilliant and secretive Earth Caste scientist who numbers among the Eight and who keeps himself alive by micro-drones of his own devising while piloting a modified Riptide into battle. Through O'Vesa's forbidden art, the perfect close-combat champion is reborn again and again to serve at Farsight's side.

In Brightsword, the divergence of the Farsight Enclaves from the wider Empire is made flesh. He fights in a manner the Ethereals would deem crude, sustained by sciences the T'au proper would never sanction, an undying blade in the hand of a renegade lord who has set his realm beyond the reach of the Greater Good. To the warriors of the Enclaves, however, he is simply their champion, ferocious and unfailing, the living edge of Farsight's defiance.