Shadowun novel Afterword bits

-Phil Kelly swears that he pitched the story before the Covid pandemic. By the time the pandemic hit, he was already committed to it. The irony of writing a story about the embodiment of plague is that he got hit badly by Covid and has never been the same since.



-The journey of Shadowsun in the book is the journey of the T'au race as a whole in 40K. It's the same journey humanity and Aeldari before them went through. To their horror and confusion, they have discovered that there is more to the universe than their knowledge. There is an entire dimension filled with monsters that want nothing more than to annihilate all goodness and every physical law in the material universe until they turn it into a hellscape that reflects the extremes of mortal emotions.



-A T'au mind raised since birth in the logical secular belief of scientific supremacy and manifest destiny would find the existence of Chaos especially traumatic. The bogeymen truly exist in 40K, and the torch cannot fend him off.



-Shadowsun, in the book mourns how her long and glorious life was based on a lie. The encounter with daemons on Pekun utterly murders her worldview. Even as Shadowsun's every instinct screams in her head, she forces herself to see the daemons as aliens to be courted for the Greater Good. Protocol demand it, for the T'au Empire is known for turning even fearsome and unsettling alien lifeforms into its allies. However, when the truth of the situation painfully asserts itself that the daemons are supernatural, Shadowsun is thrown into turmoil. She starts to wonder how the Ethereals could not know of the existence of the dimension or, worse, cover up its truths from the rest of the T'au.



-Shadowsun's reaction to all of this is that of burning fury. Fury was fuelled partly by fear. Fear of how the Death Guard, with their otherworldly powers, could overcome the supremacy of the T'au technology with ease and push her back to the wall with no hope of mustering reinforcements in time. However, unlike Dawnchaser, who chose to die in a blaze of glory than face the truth, Shadowsun endures.



-In the novel, Shadowsun received some character growth. She decides to defy the Ethereals and put her life on the line in what could be a suicide mission for the sake of the T'au Empire and all the souls in it. By doing so, Shadowsun walked the same path as her rival, Farsight. She acknowledges that her way is not always the right way.



-After being cast into the vacuum of space, Shadowsun was confronted with the vast and unknowable nature of space and Chaos. Set against these ancient forces, Shadowsun was consumed with despair and a sense of cosmic insignificance. It was a primal deep depression that saw her almost give up and surrender to death.



-Shadowsun was saved from the abyss when she noticed her allies with her in the vacuum. It was her compassion, camaraderie, and empathy for them that reignited the spark of her dying soul. By saving them, Shadowsun saved herself. Her empathizing with her comrades and the desire to leave behind a better world defeated the cosmic despair within her.



-Shadowsun does not make friends easily. This stems from an event from her younger days. After surviving Master Puretide's harsh training and emerging stronger and more gifted, She and her bond-mates Shoh (Farsight) and Kais were to engage in the ta'lissera ritual (The T'au version of marriage). Such a union would have strengthened their bonds, allowing them to understand their different ways of war, and in time, they would have replaced Puretide as the ultimate Shas general. It was not meant to be. Kais did not come to the ritual. Basically, he left them at the altar. This shattered their bonds forever, and the impact of this event would echo in the history of the Fire Caste for a long time.



-Shadowsun became a broken person after that. She distrusted bonds of friendship and retreated into the companionship of drones. With the drones, she can open up and be her true self without fear of being hurt (Forgive Oe-Ken-Yon, though. He is best boi). This made Shadowsun dismiss her T'au teams as soon as their missions were over. Despite this, she cannot help but form connections with her temporary squadmates.



-During the course of the novel, Shadowsun is brought to rock bottom. The pain and confusion allowed her to open her heart and let others in. No longer would she try to bear the burden alone; she would find strength in friendship. At the end of the book, Shadowsun desires to reunite with her non-T'au friends. It's not because their team would make the most optimum and effective fighting force but because she cherishes their bonds. It's the start of Shadowsun healing her emotional wounds.



-In her younger years, Shadowsun feared the hungry ghosts that haunted her dreams. The mockery of Farsight and Kais, as well as her growing up, saw her suppress this part of her. She did not know at the time that such an instinct was not a folly in the 40K universe. In unlocking the best version of herself through the events of the novel, she realizes that this instinct, this superstition, is something required to survive in the grimdark universe of 40K. It allowed her to blend her logical self with her spiritual side to choose the right direction even though she does not understand it. It allows her to understand that there are forces in the universe that are far beyond her comprehension.



-The T'au haven't truly mastered FTL travel. They have limited reverse-engineered versions of the Imperial Warp drives that allow them to skim the surface of the Warp for a period. Also, they have the ZFR Horizon Accelerator engines that don't break into FTL. The invention of the slipstream engine and its successful testing on a small ship were much celebrated, for it seemed that, at last, the T'au unlocked FTL.



-The Ethereals prematurely mass-produced the slipstream engines and had the Fourth Sphere ships activate them as one. This event coincided with the birth of the Great Rift. The Fourth Sphere T'au were thrown into the depths of the Warp, where they and their allies became prey and playthings of the daemons. The T'au'Va entity came to their rescue. It pulled them from the Warp and created the wormhole that connected the T'au Empire and the Chalnath Expanse.



The T'au'Va entity is not a T'au god. Despite Shadowsun meeting a future echo of the entity in her youth, Shadowsun does not worship, nor does she believe in the gestating deity. The T'au do not believe in gods, nor do they possess the intense, primal emotions that cause Warp entities to be born in the Warp. The faith that the T'au have is not in any higher power. It's a worldly faith, it's self-faith in the unity of their purpose. The T'au emotions are channeled, measured, and controlled.



-The T'au'Va entity is a perverse echo of the nobility of the T'au. It's a creation of their allied races. A side effect of them missing the point of the Greater Good by not accepting it as a guiding philosophy but embracing it as a religion. By spreading the Greater Good to many alien races, the T'au have lit a fire they cannot hope to control. So masterfully did the T'au preach the Greater Good that races anthropomorphized it and gave it life.





-It's no wonder that the T'au'Va entity came to be. There are hundreds of billions of humans living in the T'au Empire at this point in the timeline. And there are far more races within the T'au Empire in terms of psychic gifts. Their collective souls, through subconscious thought and direct worship, are allowing the T'au'Va entity to form.



-Tragically, The T'au hate the T'au'Va entity. They see it as a mockery of the progress and unity they seek to spread in the galaxy. To them, It's a terrifying abomination that resulted from their allied races wholly accepting the Greater Good yet missing its point. It threatens to derail the Greater Good altogether. The Fourth Sphere T'au are the most aggressive and hostile toward it. They would slaughter all the allied races rather than see the empire's creed subverted. As for Shadowsun herself, the events of the book have her overcoming her revulsion of religion. Her outlook is that of weaponized agnosticism. She knows now that there are things in the universe that she doesn't understand. But if they are willing to aid her and the T'au Empire, so be it. She doesn't need to understand them to accept their help.



-The T'au'Va entity is nowhere near the power of the Chaos Gods. It's merely one of the thousands of gestating gods that inhabit the Warp alongside the Chaos Gods. They are all waiting for the moment to be born. Slaanesh, in the dawn of the Aeldari Empire, was once like the T'au'Va entity. Despite being essentially an embryo of a god, the T'au'Va entity wields considerable power. The faith in it is incredibly potent, and so it makes the deity itself potent.