Thalion Vycorious

Every failure we suffer comes at the hands of over zealous or inexperienced commanders. These are the true heretics, these slack jawed fools who squander the Emperor's resources and spill the blood of honest guardsmen in pointless battles for their own vanity. –Commodore Thalion Vycorious

Thalion Vycorious is the presiding commodore of the Calixian 5th Expeditionary Battlefleet, and master of the Belial within the Achilus Crusade. As of Solomon Tetrarchus' ascent to Lord Militant, she and her fleet serve as the Imperium's vanguard within the Acheros Salient before being reassigned to the Canis Salient.

History
Many Imperial commanders are callous and shallow men and women, filled with a personal lust for glory and possessed of a blind observance of doctrine. They often have little regard for the lives of those below them, especially if the expenditure of those lives would further furnish their own advancements.

There are some, however, that manage to rise to power with their sense of morality intact and never forget that the larger games they play across the stars are played with the lives of thousands of living souls. Commodore Thalion Vycorious is such a commander.

Risen up through the ranks of the Imperial Navy and blessed by connections to some of the most powerful noble families of the Calixis Sector, she is the master of the Emperor-class Battleship Belial and overall commander of the Calixian 5th Expeditionary Battlefleet.

Thalion was among the first naval commanders to enter the Jericho Reach, and was chosen by Lord Militant Tiber Achilus himself for her bravery and skill during the 775.M41 Year of Lamentation and her personal actions which destroyed a Yu'vath Dark Fortress, saving numerous worlds on the edge of the Calixis Sector.

Eager and willing to serve the Lord Militant and do her duty, Thalion felt it was the will of the God-Emperor that guided her to the Jericho Reach and the chance to reclaim part of the Imperium from the hands of foul aliens and vile heretics.

During those first years of the crusade, she was kept busy smashing worlds to dust and cowing others into surrender with the presence of the Belial. Against the largely primitive and backward worlds of the Reach, it was rare that her Battlegroup faced any kind of serious opposition, the guns of the Belial hammering apart system ships and ground targets from the safety of high orbit.

All that changed however with the death of Achilus and the arrival of his replacement Solomon Tetrarchus. Thalion and her fleet were among the vanguard of the assault into the Acheros Salient and narrowly escaped with her ship and her life after becoming isolated and ambushed by a Traitor Legion fleet.

Since then she has become embittered towards Tetrarchus and constantly questions his judgement (a fact that has made her senior staff more than a little nervous). She has also come to view the crusade as a pointless waste of life and resources, which has little to do with her own sector or with the noble families of Scintilla from which she hails.

Unknown to all but a few of her most trusted advisors, Thalion has also begun to have doubts as to the right of the Imperium to dominate the Jericho Reach and whether or not it should concern itself with this far flung piece of void.

These seditious rumblings have been slowly increasing in Thalion in recent months, especially as in the aftermath of the Acheros disaster she was reassigned to the Canis Salient against the T'au. These are foes that seem to value life, human or otherwise, and Thalion has become dangerously sympathetic to their point of view.

She has even spoken to T'au prisoners at length about the notion of the Greater Good. How far these treacherous thoughts might take Thalion not even she knows, though she is thoroughly disgusted with the quality of her commanders (an opinion not improved by her time in the Canis Salient under the paranoid Lord Commander Sebiascor Ebongrave).

However Thalion's sedition develops, it can only spell disaster for the Imperium, as the loyalty she commands among her crew and the captains of her battlegroup would cost the crusade not just a talented naval officer but also the terrifying power of the Belial as well.