L-XII-1884 Tiberius Thanatos
L-XII-1884 Captain Tiberius Thanatos First born son of a Terran tech-barbarian warlord, Tiberius Thanatos was taken as a tribute and recruited in the Emperor's 12th Legion after his father was cast into submission at the end of the Unification Wars. He swiftfully emerged from the ranks, being the exact kind of officer the twelfth needed at the time: a brutal, cunning but noble leader driven by his own pragmatic honor code, as he had been raised up to be when he was meant to inherit the mantle of command in his tribe. When the 16th Company's Centurion died in the Siege of Hierotzelem, Tiberius won command over the Merciless by defeating every other pretendant in the ritual fights that followed: not yet satisfied, he also challenged those of the other two companies attached to the 32nd expedition along with the 16th, who had also lost their respective Centurions during the Siege. Bending or killing every opponent, he found himself alone to command a battleship and -at full strenght- three hundred Astartes, a position that would later be confirmed with a laughter of approval by the Primarch Angron. In the following years he proved himself a skilled void commander and a warm brother for all of the 12th Legion, respected for his insight and martial sense of humor as well as for his physical resilience and hand-to hand skills, but he was never animated by the same fervour some of his brothers had towards the Emperor of Mankind. To Tiberius he was a distant, brutal tyrant who destroyed the life he was meant to live and whom he was forced to serve by lack of choices. This is why when Angron came to the Legion with his tragic story and his bloody warrior code he was seen by Thanatos as a similar soul to him, and easily won his loyalty over that for the Emperor. In Angron, Thanatos found a true leader to follow, someone he would gladly fight for, and who would also later give him the opportunity to stand against the Emperor he so clearly hated. Such was Tiberius' devotion to his genesire that he was among the first to volunteer as a test for the cortical implants soon to become widespread within the Legion, and it comes to no surprise that he followed him in the events of the Horus Heresy. Unfortunately his Nails were a particularly strong device and degenerated sooner than expected: after the battle for Isstvan V they had already eroded much of the man he was, allowing him only glimpses of the leader his men were used to and turning him into a colder, killing addicted monster who gladly broke his former self on the same anvil that twisted his father, and would do so again even knowingly.
