Tyrus

Tyrus is a Witch Hunter of the Ordo Hereticus and a staunch follower of the Monodominant philosophy of the Inquisition - a bombastic man whose bloody purges have left thousands of heretics dead in his wake. Suspicious of all psykers, even those supposedly cleared by the Inquisition, it is Tyrus creed to hunt down and exterminate every witch, mutant and warlock in the galaxy (including alien psykers). If, along the way, this means eradicating those who would seek to protect such abhorrent creatures, then so be it. Tyrus is perhaps one of the most active Inquisitors with regards to internal policing, ferociously hunting down those whom he deems heretics within the ranks of his own organisation.

History
The young Tyrus was orphaned when he was a mere six summers old when Daemons came to his home world of Loressa, an isolated Agri-World in the Segmentum Obscurus. Acting insidiously through an adolescent girl, whose miraculous powers of healing had cured many people from Tyrus' village, the Daemon Prince Kholoth the Excoriator spread a plague of mutation across Loressa. This weakened the fabric of reality enough for him to force his way from the Immaterium into the girl's unprotected mind. In its new guise, the daemon destroyed Tyrus' village and began the slaughter of its inhabitants in an orgy of mutilation. Tyrus was dragged from his home into the village's main square, where the inhabitants' corpses lay in a heaped pile. Over the next few hours, Kholoth tortured Tyrus, taking an eye and slicing off an ear, that he might still hear his own screams and witness the destruction of his own flesh. As the leering young girl explained precisely what horrors she would next visit upon his body, Tyrus despaired and prepared for death. Only the timely intervention of Witch Hunter Covonis, who had tracked the daemon to Loressa via the Emperor's Tarot, saved Tyrus' life.

The Tarot has guided the servants of the Emperor for ten millennia and, through the significance of its readings are often obscure to the point of meaningless, its holy instruction is said to imbued with the Emperor's own will. Such indeed seems to have been the case as Cavonis, clad in a massive suit of elaborately tooled armour, intricately carved with decorative scrollwork and fluting, materialised with four, grey armoured angels of destruction in the village square. The daemon girl paused in her gruesome handiwork, and turned to face the Witch Hunter, a hiss of recognition escaping her possessed lips. Through a red haze, Tyrus saw the mighty figure of Covonis and his armoured brethren do battle with the daemon girl. Three of the angels were cut down with bolts of blue fire, before Covonis swung his blessed sword in a glittering arc and beheaded the shrieking daemon. Whirlwinds of daemonic energy howled around the combatants as the creature was banished back to the hell from whence it came, and Tyrus watched as one of the angels burned the corpse in the cleansing fire of its weapons.

Tyrus, almost blinded by pain and blood loss, staggered to the edge of the blaze, his skin blistering in the infernal heat, and spat his hatred into the flames. He cursed the daemon's name and, as an armoured gauntlet settled on his shoulder, he looked up into the stern features of Cavonis and knew that there was only one path open to him now. Tyrus became Covonis' apprentice and journeyed back to the orbiting starship from which Cavonis and the Grey Knights (as Tyrus would later know them) had teleported. He assimilated the wonders of technology and the ways of the Witch Hunter with a zeal only the truly dedicated can muster. He was gifted with cybernetic replacements for his missing eye and ear, and Covonis instructed him in the path of the Witch Hunter, the tools and methods at their disposal and, lastly, the heresy of the daemonic. Never before had Covonis known as acolyte to master the Rites of Detestation so quickly, or one whose pious devotion matched his own. [[Category:T]]