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Bio:
In the immediate aftermath of the Reformation, the peoples of two worlds found themselves in an extraordinary and unprecedented point in their histories - a new world, healed of its past but now also home to an entirely alien other. The earliest days of the post-Reformation were ones of great hope but also great confusion as the long struggle to establish an entirely new order was just beginning. Tahu, veteran leader of the Toa Mata, would emerge as a rallying figure and voice for the handful of surviving Toa as well as one of many informal leaders shepherding numerous bewildered Matoran groups still emerging daily out of the ruined Great Spirit Robot. It was a role he neither expected nor wanted, born out of the personal alliances under his direction during the covert war against Teridax’s final reign, but one he dutifully embraced regardless.
During the first year’s conflict against Velika, Tahu would struggle to subordinate the echoes of the Makuta inherent in his Golden Armor’s absorbed Rahkshi powers. For a time he grew overly cautious and feared the potential of losing control to the taint of a Makuta, something he had already experienced once and swore to never again. But it was an inner struggle that Tahu would overcome during the climax of the final engagement with Velika when through sheer will he reasserted himself over his armor’s Rahkshi powers, triggering a final transformation and cementing his mastery over Shadow. In this final form the Golden Armor was now fused seamlessly onto Tahu and his weapons, no longer a separate entity but fully part of himself. And it would be this Tahu that oversaw Spherus Magna’s coming years, now truly worthy of bearing the Ignika’s great gift.
In the next decades the four extant Element Tribes of the native region - Fire, Water, Ice, and Jungle - entered into an official League, in honor of the Unity brought about by Mata Nui and in memory of a mythic era when the original eight Element Tribes of Octerra lived in harmony. As more and more formal structures of governance began emerge, Tahu would slowly step back from a position of overt leadership of the new societies and into a more limited role as guide and mentor to the new Toa. With confidence but a deeply pragmatic sense of caution toward power, Tahu would lead the swelling numbers of new Toa informally but sternly, giving renewed preeminence to the Toa Code, to self restraint, the Virtues, and to veneration of Mata Nui’s example, codifying a new standard for Toa in the New World.
In the mid second century after the liberation of Castra Magna, Tahu would give his conditional assent to Toa entering the newly formed mixed Toa/Glatorian arm of the Octerran League, the Guard, recognizing the need to organize formal jurisdiction among the now numerous Toa in Octerra but wary of the outsized influence of its founder, the ambitious Glatorian Verico. Tahu made his beliefs clear that Toa were protectors not soldiers, a line that would inevitably become blurrier with time, and that they were bound by Duty against enmeshing their powers with any partisan cause and especially wars of aggression. Though it was without formal authority, it was a proclamation that would be heeded by most young Toa and the Matoran around them as well as respected by their Magnan counterparts. But not all.
By the time of the third century crises as tensions within the League rose and upon the reemergence of Energized Protodermis from the core, Tahu would increasingly find his stance on the wrong side of both extremes, both from certain zealous Magnan leaders growing frustrated at the lack of Toa committment in matters of prospective but preemptive war and from younger Matoran and Toa idealogues who disdained the restraint against leveraging Toa power to increase their own standing in the political order of the League. Tahu’s cautious pragmatism and traditionally Virtue minded influence would come to characterize a conservative position among the Protodermans living in the League. At the same time however, Tahu would prove to not be inflexible to the concerns of rapidly changing times, and through the tumultuous second half of the third century, his measured opinion and firm guidance would continue to be a necessary pillar of stability for many, not just Matoran, looking up to him.
