Not sure you guys allow excerpts, but I figured you’d appreciate this look at the Tau from a perspective that isn’t Imperial and isn’t Tau.
> In the dark spaces of the galaxy untouched by the Astronomican or the fell light of Chaos dwell countless wretched alien domains. There is a certain tragedy to their striving. They drag themselves from one bleak colony to another, plying the meagre distances between their claimed stars with squalid generation ships or stasis pods or perhaps, for the very lucky, devices or sorceries that approximate the methods used by the great old empires. And then – an explorator fleet, Imperial pioneers, an ork Waaagh!, a slave-raid from the drukhari – they are gone, not even remembered as worthwhile foes. To chronicle them all would be exhausting, but there is one relevant to our story.
> Travel eastwards, find a wan star orbited by a cruel miracle, a planet barely sufficient for life to form. A little less gravity, cooler summers, warmer winters, more water coverage, and existence would be bearable here, but it is not. Technological leaps completed by humanity in decades have taken millennia on this world. Culture is what you scrape in the stone in the scant years before you die. Its inhabitants have a name for themselves, and it is The People.
> The People have a god. Their god is the god of Fate. It is The People’s fate to one day meet a great warlord under the flag of an eagle, who will annihilate them. Until that day, it is The People’s sacred duty to survive. And so, through heroic effort, they master the wheel, agriculture, extreme high-energy alloy-jacketed kinetic penetrators, a little poetry, multiphasic scanners, and so on. On the day that a great, eagle-prowed Imperial battleship first appears on the multiphasic scanners, there is much elation. Warrior-clades of The People teem into their ships to go and meet their perfect, preordained fate. The Great Stellar Dominion of The People – four planets, seven star systems, some moons, one failing exoplanetary arcology – is at last at war. It doesn’t quite go as planned.
> Annihilation is at hand… and then, forestalled. The great eagles are driven off by strange vessels that look like fish that swim from the shadows, only to disappear again. There is panic. What little food The People are able to store runs out. Idols are trampled into the dirt. When the first of the new vessels is sighted in the skies of the Great City of The People, some throw themselves to the ground in worship, while others throw themselves from high buildings in fear.
> Those within the ships do not come to destroy, or despoil. They come to talk. They too are called The People – or, in their language, the t’au. They have been watching and waiting, patiently. They have been learning how to speak to The People – their conceptual translation apparatus was almost finished when the Imperium attacked. They apologise for the stiffness of their lexicon and any lapses in etiquette they have committed in their arrival. It is the view of the t’au that The People are suffering civilisational-level trauma; that they have been forced to develop a maladaptive culture in response to the colossal pressures of living on their home world. They smile as they declare that The People will be liberated from the traditions of several thousand years.
> What follows is the Special Administration. The temples are sealed, the idols are not returned to their sconces. Parents see less of their children. But bellies are kept full, the working shifts are short, and some of The People even grow old. There is, ostensibly, cultural exchange: representatives of The People show their writings, artefacts, discoveries and so on to the t’au, who nod, and smile, and express something that seems very much like interest. They praise the carvings and the poetry effusively, but what they especially want to see is the planet’s manufacturing base, which, with a little adaptation, seems well suited to the construction of the t’au’s own high-energy alloy-jacketed kinetic penetrators. This is a little confusing to The People, who by now have been trained to associate the craft of such things with their previous, incorrect tendencies towards annihilation. Perhaps the t’au are merely being respectful.
> Plans for new factories are built. Schematics are provided.
> The Special Administration never really ends; it just transforms into The Administration. There is a referendum, and many are even given the day off to attend.
> The question is phrased roughly like this, in the olfactory/runic tongue of The People: DO YOU CONSENT TO BEING UPLIFTED INTO THE ONENESS OF THE T’AU’VA YES/OTHER
> Vesa did not have a name before the t’au arrived. Carvers and poets were never permitted to, so that egoism could not interfere with their work as they recorded the deeds and glories of their leaders. Vesa has a name now; it means ‘helper’ in the tongue of his new leaders. They encourage egoism and self-determination, and the psychometric AI provided to Vesa even prompts him to produce carvings, provided Vesa has the time and energy, which he rarely does – after shift there are group games, sessions in learning the T’au language, militia drills and so on. Vesa works in a munitions factory, jacketing railgun rounds for the t’au. The psychometric AI asks how he feels about this and produces artificial expressions and gestures that denote concern and understanding. Vesa finds it hard to explain, so he makes a carving. The psychometric AI performs a scan, then stops and displays the symbol that shows it is thinking. Afterwards it has no memory of the conversation, but makes efforts to guide Vesa away from initiating it again. Vesa focuses on his work instead. He plays the group games. He improves his T’au. When he operates the delicate, filament-like fingers that slip a railgun round’s core into its shell, he thinks about them lancing across the black reaches of space from magnetic rails into battleships with eagles upon their prows. One day, he does not jacket the core. Instead, as the supervisor changes shift, he slips the outer shell from its cradle, and lists it as a defect. He sneaks it back to his hab and carves. It is the image of a creature he has never seen – a creature whose very depiction is now banned across what was once The Great Stellar Dominion of The People. An eagle with two heads. He marks it in runes: UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN. The next day, he places it on the line, and lies about the round’s weight to the sensors. It is shipped off-world with countless others. A decade or so passes as it is caught in warp storms, customs offices, shipped to warzones where it is never needed. Vesa dies in rioting in his district. The workers in his factory are replaced with new t’au colonists. The round makes its way to Rezlan VI, where the t’au have a new Special Administration. It is being loaded into the breech of a Hammerhead-class railgun now. That railgun is pointed at the Psyker Nehemiah Shand, who stares at it and presses his fingers on the weave of reality just so, without even realising it.
> Somewhere, something that may once have called itself the God of The People is laughing.