Editing Farsight (section)

==Once upon a time, there lived a Tau who literally had the word "hot-blooded" in his very name...==
From the beginning, Farsight was a fiercely independent thinker and [[Creed|tactical genius]] who managed to get three years ahead of his fellow pupils with nothing but determination and planning; in fact, he was such a bright spark he ended up embarrassing his instructors, which led to a lot of them getting replaced. Though this led to some [[Butthurt|bad blood]], Farsight moved past it, becoming a famed commander in his own right. However, Farsight's personal gut instincts and a desire for close, aggressive combat put him at odds with the Empire's battle doctrine. Farsight sucked it up and continued on as best he could, and finally was promoted to a battlesuit piloting role that he took to with gusto.

Back during the halcyon days of the major conquests of the [[Tau|Tau Empire]], the majority of the army's victories could be attributed to a single commander: [[Commander Puretide|Puretide]]. Puretide was a legendary genius who wrote the book on Fire Caste tactics, and shaped the military for years to come. He was basically Sun Tzu 40k to the point where O'R'myr actually quotes Sun Tzu in the Taros Campaign book and it is attributed to Puretide. Puretide's many pupils were all famous warriors in their own right, and Puretide himself was so valuable that before he died of old age, the Earth Caste actually scanned his brain and encoded portions of his brilliance into what they called Puretide engram neurochips in order to help train future commanders. Farsight trained directly under Puretide, learning even more about battlefield tactics and strategy, and became one of his top pupils along with [[Shadowsun|Commander Shadowsun]] and [[Shas'o Kais]] (who is the same Kais from [[Warhammer_40,000:_Fire_Warrior|Fire Warrior]] and [[Dawn_of_War|Dawn of War]]). After studying with Papa Puretide himself, Farsight was made the leader of a massive Tau fleet and sent out to do the Empire's bidding. In his first deployment as mission commander, he performed amazingly, trouncing the [[Orks]] singlehandedly with skill and cunning. As he fought, the young Tau realized that aggressive, up-close combat was the key to defeating the Orks, and as a result became more comfortable with the idea of close quarters combat. Though he was unhappily reassigned to another battle zone before defeating the Orks completely, Farsight met with the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyamoto_Musashi Ethereal Aun'Shi], on whom he modeled a style of close-combat battlesuit fighting which he applied for years afterwards.

Farsight's next big deployment was at Dal'yth during the [[Damocles_Crusade|Damocles Crusade]]. A branch of the [[Imperium|Imperium's]] forces had launched a steamroller attack on the sept world, knocking over colonies, shelling planets and smashing fleets to get there. Though the attack was clumsy, the sheer grit and numbers of the [[Imperial Guard]] meant that the Tau were completely on the back foot, and only Farsight and Shadowsun's combined tactics managed to hold Dal'yth together. During this battle Farsight became aware of the unsettling power of human [[Psykers|psyker]] and [[warp]] technology as well as their incredible fanaticism, and began to recognize an element of the latter in his own doctrines. In addition, some of his fellow commanders were implanted with Puretide engram neurochips by the Ethereals to make them as tactically capable as Puretide; however, Farsight found this horrifying when it turned his soldiers into robots with no will of their own and made them completely useless when psykers were involved (since Puretide had never encountered them). Finally, after a long and bloody war, the Imperium of Man had to pull out when the [[Tyranid]] [[Hive Fleet Behemoth]] reared its grotesque head in the Eastern Fringe and headed straight for [[Ultramar]]. While the rest of the Tau Empire was celebrating, Farsight was the only one who noticed that the Imperium would have won the war of attrition, and wondered if something else had caused them to pull out. After the war, Farsight discovered to his additional alarm that when the engram chips were removed, they left the commanders brain-dead. You can probably see where this is going.

However, the neurochip business was not enough for the Ethereals, who decided that some of Puretide's students should be cryogenically frozen so that they could be useful far beyond their meager lifespans. Puretide's three top pupils (Farsight, Shadowsun and Kais), all aggressive commanders with a bitter rivalry between them, were chosen for this. It was decided that the three would work in decades-long rotations, with one awake and two asleep at all times, kind of like the three vampire lords in ''Underworld'' were supposed to preside over the coven in turns. Of the three, Farsight was chosen to remain active first while Shadowsun and Kais were frozen to be brought back into service in the future, making him, for a time, the sole military hero of the Empire.