Darkstrider

Few officers of the Fire Caste are so admired and so resented as the Pathfinder called Darkstrider. Born El'Myamoto upon the sept world of T'au, he passed his Trial by Fire and, like all who survive that rite, was offered the great honour of the battlesuit, a distinction he pointedly declined. Drawn instead toward the shadow-work of the Stealth Teams, he ultimately returned to the Pathfinder cadres in which he had first served, and there he has remained, refusing promotion after promotion rather than abandon the scouts who fight at his side.

By rank Darkstrider is a shas'el, a sub-commander entitled to direct whole formations from the rear, yet he insists upon ranging at the very forefront of the reconnaissance screen. His methods are unorthodox and his contempt for proper protocol notorious, and while the whole of the Fire Caste acknowledges his brilliance, his high-handed superiors regard him as a maddening thorn in their side. Every audacious victory he wins seems only to earn him another enemy among the traditionalists of his own kind.

Upon the battlefield this maverick is without peer at the arts of misdirection and ambush. He strikes from angles no enemy anticipates, bends every scrap of terrain to his advantage, and improvises with a speed that leaves both foes and allies scrambling to keep pace. Chief among his tools is a structural analyser, an instrument with which he reads the hidden fault-lines in an enemy's armour, defences and formation, then orchestrates a sudden, surgical strike to exploit the weakness he has found and unravel the foe wholesale.

Darkstrider's cunning reached its most celebrated pitch during the Battle of Mu'gulath Bay in the Third Sphere Expansion. Amid that vast and desperate campaign he detected the presence of an Imperial Vindicare Assassin, a phantom killer dispatched to slay Commander Farsight himself. Where a whole cadre might have failed, Darkstrider tracked the assassin down and saw it destroyed, preserving the life of one of the T'au Empire's greatest heroes and proving, to any who still doubted, that the Empire's most irregular officer is also among its most indispensable.