Tiiseâs History: Rough Guide
Ended up on a planet called Haven, known post-30k as âOld Havenâ: a tightly-controlled dystopia, ruled by an AI called Mother from before the Age of Strife.
Citizens were born from vats aged five, spent their lives in a blissful drugged haze, and were culled aged forty; they had no names, only Citizen Numbers, and no families.
The Pill rendered them incapable of feeling fear, anger, pain, sadness, and desire. They had no knowledge of love, death, illness, art, money, sex, family, war, and nature.
Mutants, the disabled, the chronically ill, and psykers were all culled.
There were no shops, libraries, cinemas, or anything aside from houses and places of work. Citizens were forbidden from leaving the City walls to the forests beyond.
Their jobs were chosen for them by a series of tests when they were 10 years old, after being raised in mass creches by nannies; they then spent the next three decades of their lives working every day to maintain the Six Cities and Motherâs servers.
Every house was identical, as were the mass-produced clothes and rations each Citizen was given every day; they were provided with harmless, soft toys and a screen of calming pictures to watch, and listened to wordless recordings of pleasant noises.
Tiiseâs pod was found in the forest beyond City Five by Wall Guard, one of the Pill-resistant minority who were the only ones on Old Haven trained to fight.
He was taken in and forcibly kept inside the pod until Mother decided the âgene-freakâ might be useful, though she had his âexcessâ organs removed as an infant.
Tiise was trained as an engineer and assigned to maintain Motherâs central servers.
Despite the Pills removing âbad-feelingsâ, being different was looked down on in Haven; Tiise was seen as a gene-freak by his peers and superiors, a glitch and a mistake.
Being somewhat resistant to the specially-made Pills they gave him, Tiise soon tired of Motherâs regime - especially once a friend of his was vanished for being injured on the job - and sought to bring her down by sabotaging her servers one day.
Shutting down Mother shut down the Six Citiesâ electricity, water, transport, and sewer systems. Food and Pills were no longer made or delivered. Forced to go cold turkey, the Citizens were introduced to fear, starvation, cold, and disease. Long-suppressed emotions ran riot; soon people were literally tearing each other apart in the streets.
Though he did his best to fix things, people were dying in the hundreds.
Tiise was forced to turn Mother back on to bring the systems back and beg for her forgiveness; in a cruel mercy, she sent him to the Wall Guard to fight and die for Haven. And he went, weighed down by grief and guilt. He was fifteen years old.
He fought in the Wall Guard for ten years against Orks, Dark Eldar, and nearby human settlements, trying to keep the violence and death away from the Cities.
The Emperor found him aged twenty-five and introduced him to his Legion, charging him with finding new recruits from his comrades in the Wall Guard.
Mother was shut down, her ancient AI core transferred to Tiiseâs flagship for study, and a human government put in place while the Citizens were weaned off their Pills.
Due to his shyness, weakness, and lack of command experience, Tiise fitted in poorly amongst his brothers and was not popular with the Imperial people.
His use of AI made him enemies with the Mechanicus and Emperor alike.
Eventually, Tiise began to fear that he and his Legion would be culled for their flaws and secretly began plotting a way to flee the Imperium and settle elsewhere.
After years of sending scouting parties in secret, he found a series of safe, suitable worlds in the Halo Stars where the Imperium had not yet set foot. A company of Astartes and a few hundred humans were sent to begin settling the system.
One day the population of Haven were ordered to evacuate, loading their belongings onto a vast fleet of void ships. Those who couldnât fit aboard waited for the second wave. A few thousand, however, simply refused to leave their homes. It is assumed that one of these sent word off-world and the news travelled to the ears of the Emperor.
When the colonists attempted to contact Haven with news of the second wave of shipâs imminent arrival, there was no reply. The second wave also went abruptly silent.
Fearing the worst, Tiise rushed back to Haven and found a slaughterhouse. Forests of burnt stumps and ashen bones. Cities reduced to rubble, filled with burnt corpses of civilians and Astartes. The knowledge that his so-called father and brothers - which one he never knew - had done this only strengthened his decision to leave.
Ten thousand years later, the Tafos system became the core of a settlement known as the Wayward Holdings, with twenty-five worlds, their moons, and two asteroid belts.
The Primarch still fears the wrath of his so-called Father and brothers, half-expecting any one of them to swoop down any day now and burn his new home to ashes.
He knows of the Heresy and somewhat regrets turning his back on the Imperium when innocent people were suffering and dying, especially after the Rift opened.
