Editing Nobledark Imperium Member States (section)

===Tarellian Religion===

EDITOR'S NOTE: Per original writer, section with Be'lakor could use some rewriting/expansion

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The Tarellians, in a rather roundabout fashion, worship the Old Ones as their gods. The Old Ones, from what little we know about them, seem to have some sort of connection to the Tarellians. However, the Tarellians are not direct descendants of the Old Ones. The Old Ones, despite having dry and leathery skin, were still semi-aquatic and had to return to the water to breed. In contrast, the Tarellians have scaly skin, and lay eggs independent of water. Instead, the Tarellians appear to be descended from components of the Old Ones’ biosphere, likely spread to other planets in the Old Ones’ first attempts at terraforming. In human terms, it would be as if a race of sapient rats rose to power long after the extinction of humanity, only to find human artifacts and thus came to believe humans represented a race of gods.

The Tarellians did not evolve on the original homeworld of the Old Ones. Whatever planet the Old Ones originally hailed from, it was lost long before the War in Heaven even began — although there are numerous fringe theories as to where said planet might have gone. The Tarellian world with the greatest concentration of Old One artifacts was Tarellia, the planet where the Tarellians originally evolved sentience. Unfortunately, most of the Old One technology on the planet was rendered non-functional beyond any means of repair, and only the simplest, most resilient objects — statues, tablets, stone carvings, and the like — remained intact. Ironically, the few Old One artifacts that have survived the millions of years since the War in Heaven tend to be either exceedingly primitive (e.g. stone carvings and tablets) or ridiculously advanced (e.g. the Blackstone Fortresses, the Webway, three of the four Ruinous Powers). According the Tarellians, the writing on these Old One artifacts inspired their own writing system and they can even translate it to a crude degree, though modern Tarellian differs greatly from the language used by the Old Ones.

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After Tarellia, the Tarellian world with the greatest concentration of Old One artifacts was the colony of Xibalanique. Xibalanique was a harsh, dry world even by the Tarellians' standards — which is one of the reasons why so many artifacts preserved for so long in the first place. Said artifacts were just about the only reason the world was of any interest to the Tarellian Empire, as the world was barely habitable otherwise, and its population before the Age of Strife was almost entirely composed to researchers studying the Old One artifacts. When Xibalanique was cut off from the rest of the galaxy during the Age of Strife, the Tarellians stranded there had to either adapt or die. Xibalaniquans are short and stocky compared to other Tarellians and tend to be relatively heavyset, which is thought to be due to genetic adaptations towards conserving energy for times of famine in harsh environments.

The inhabitants of Xibalanique were also notable in that all were psykers; a situation somewhat analogous to a Tarellian Prospero. It is not clear if this is because of something the Old Ones did to Xibalanique, or if it was simply due to a founder effect from the original population of researchers having a higher-than average proportion of psyker genes relative to the rest of the Tarellian worlds — Tarellian psykers are not unique to Xibalanique, it should be noted. Tarellian psykers are normally so stoic and dispassionate as to appear almost emotionless, interspersed with huge spikes of emotion whenever they use their powers. There are a variety of Tarellian idioms and proverbs that allude to this, common in the Imperium is "past years' passions land fast as lightning," in reference to these sudden onsets of emotional impact. On the one hand, this behaviour makes Tarellian psykers noticeably less susceptible to daemonic attention than the psykers of other races. On the other hand, this also results in a tendency to use their powers in quick bursts and thus become rapidly exhausted when attempting to do anything strenuous afterwards, as the stress of the moment becomes entangled with emotionally-depleting psychic highs and lows of feeling and realization. Nevertheless, this safeguard was insufficient to completely avoid the attentions and depredations of hostile forces, and Xibalanique was destroyed shortly after the end of the Age of Strife.

The Xibalaniquans that survived their planet’s destruction migrated to the other Tarellian worlds, where they were eagerly assimilated with open arms. The Xibalaniquans were of interest not only for their psychic abilities, which were of value to any Tarellian warlord, but also for any potential lost knowledge that had been lost to the wider Tarellian Confederacy. Due to their psychic powers the Tarellians viewed psykers as being closer to the Old Ones, and on many worlds these psykers (typically Xibalaniquans) were organized into councils of mage-priests who would often served as advisors to the resident warlord. This arrangement varied from world to world; where Maza has no mage-priests in any administrative position, the mage-priests of Tikal became the direct rulers of the planet at some point in their history. The organization of mage-priests into councils was not simply for symbolic reasons, as it also allowed for the organization of mage-priests into choirs similar to the human Astropath system for interstellar communication. Even today, the Tarellians remain one of the few non-human, non-Eldar races to use their own methods of faster-than-light communication. The practical concerns of this system have likewise influenced Tarellian politics, as these councils are clearest in casting their messages when they are in unanimity as to the content, thus encouraging local cohesion as a necessary prerequisite for wider organization.



The Tarellians know the bare basics of the War in Heaven. They know that their gods were in a war with a pantheon of anti-gods and that their gods spawned a race of dark gods to help them. They know that the gods made lesser beings to act as soldiers. However, this is where the Tarellians get a few things wrong. They believe that they were the race created by the gods to fight in their war, when they were not. Indeed, in terms of age, the Tarellians are closer to humanity or the Kinebrach than the truly ancient races like the Eldar or Orks.

The Tarellians believe the stylized bipeds in the Old One hieroglyphics at the right hand of their gods — figured to the same scale that peasants are often figured relative to gods and royalty — are the semi-mythical ancestor kings and queens, from who the Tarellians claim their descent. They’re not, but don’t bother try telling the Tarellians that. They’re actually representatives of the various gods of the mortal races the Old Ones uplifted during the War in Heaven. Isha recognized herself in the carvings, as well as Kurnous and Qah. Actual mortal representatives of those races are nowhere to be seen.

The Tarellians also believe that their gods walk among them, though perhaps not in a physical fashion. When Isha discovered this fact in M30 this, as well as the general physical similarity between the Tarellians and the Old Ones, it was enough to excite the then recently-freed Eldar goddess about the possibility of finding fellow survivors of the War in Heaven and Age of Strife. Although still acclimating to the current situation in the galaxy, Isha made plans to travel to Tarellian space at the first opportunity. The mage-priests were excited at the prospect of an outsider taking an interest in their gods, and eagerly escorted Isha to the nearest temple to “show her their gods”. However, Isha’s hopes were dashed. Instead of finding living, breathing Old Ones, she found stone statues and temples filled with a few attending devotees. Isha, furious at having her hopes raised at and having that hope robbed from her just as quickly, almost lashed out at the “horrid little newts” in her grief and rage, before being calmed down by the Handmaidens. The mage-priests at the time were confused and did not know what they had done to make the outsider so angry. It is thought that later priests figured out what had happened and were slightly bitter to the Eldar about it, as they saw Isha’s reaction as a dismissal of their gods.



When the Daemon Prince Be’lakor, the last of the Old Ones, found out that the Tarellians worshipped the Old Ones, he realized he had a potential means to take control of the Confederacy. It has long been known that Be’lakor has a habit of setting himself up as the power behind the throne in a number of empires, both human and Xenos, in his attempts to break free from the machinations of the Chaos Gods — though typically his involvement with these petty empires was visible only in retrospect. Be’lakor often likes to cover up any evidence of his existence — or better yet lay contradictory evidence, or trick his enemies into destroying the evidence for him. However, in the millennia following the Age of Apostasy, Be’lakor began to find he had fewer and fewer civilizations naïve to Chaos to work with, with most either being absorbed by the Imperium, subverted by other aspects of Chaos, or being outright destroyed. When Be’lakor discovered the Tarellians worshipped his people, being the last of the Old Ones he decided he was by default their rightfully inherited master.

When Be'lakor felt he had gathered enough information, he made contact with the Tarellians and enunciated his demands. At first, the Tarellians were surprisingly receptive to Be’lakor, apparently believing his claims and requesting that he meet their mage priests at their peoples’ traditional sacred meeting grounds to consecrate his reign. However, when Be’lakor and his court of Warp anomalies manifested in front of the Tarellian mage-priests, the Tarellians dropped the act. In that moment, Be’lakor realized that for the first time in millennia he had miscalculated. Despite worshipping the Old Ones, Tarellian society is largely meritocratic and achievement-based, to the point that social advancement is based on personal deeds. For Be’lakor to appear and claim that the Tarellians should fall to their knees and worship him because he is one of their long lost gods simply because he is a god, rather than what he has accomplished with his godhood, was highly insulting. The mage priests told him as much to his face.

This, according to Kroak, leader of the Tarellian delegation, meant one of two things. Either he was a fake god who knew nothing of Tarellian culture and was stealing someone else's title and accomplishments for his own ends, or he was a terrible god with no glory to his name and did not deserve to be worshipped in the first place. On that note, the Tarellians revealed that the so-called “sacred meeting grounds” Be’lakor had met them at was actually a fake (which, the Tarellians added, if Be’lakor had really been one of their gods he would have realized was a fake in the first place), built above a vast cavern and wired with explosives. The trap sent Be’lakor and his retinue screaming down the mile-deep crevasse. Kroak himself dealt the final blow, striking the daemon prince with a house-sized rock as he tried to fly out of the rockslide and burying Be’lakor beneath the debris.

Unfortunately, the Tarellians paid a terrible price for their accomplishment. The Tarellians had maintained their freedom, but they had done so by humiliating Be’lakor, someone to disrespect at your own peril. Be’lakor would not tolerate such disrespect from the younger races, but he was patient and more than willing to play the long game to get his revenge. Less than twenty years after the Tarellians banished Be’lakor, Hive Fleet Leviathan made galaxyfall. It is rather noteworthy that despite coming from the same general direction as Behemoth, something made the Hive Fleet change course at the last minute and caused it to take a different path through the galaxy — right through Tarellian space.

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