Some minor Warhammer 40k characters can end up being among the most famous, because they capture fans’ imaginations through a few personal traits or deeds, and take on a meme life of their own. Tyberos, the Red Wake is one of my favorites – these days he’s renowned as one of 40k’s biggest badasses, despite only featuring in one novel and a handful of pages in an old rules supplement. Why? Because he’s an absolute unit, that’s why.
Tyberos (also known as the Red Wake, and Reaper Lord of the Void) is the Chapter Master, Shade Lord, and First Company Master of the Carcharodon Astra – a.k.a. Space Sharks. They’re one of the lesser known space marine chapters, to be sure, but also one of the first to be added to the setting, way back in first edition, as part of the Badab War storyline.
If the Carcharodons are known for one thing in 40k lore, it’s for being a particularly mysterious bunch of ruthless killers to match even the killiest Warhammer 40k factions – especially Tyberos himself. We first met him way back in 2010, in GW’s Imperial Armour Volume 10 lore supplement – where he’s referred to as the “baleful First Captain Tiburon”, commander of Carcharodon forces that wreaked horrific destruction upon the supposedly renegade Mantis Warriors chapter, which was sworn to the traitorous Lufgt Huron.
Tyberos’ trademark wargear alone is enough to make an impression. As a First Company marine, he wears space marine terminator armor – but a heavily customized suit, covered in heavy, studded panels reminiscent of Heresy-era armor marks. His weapons are even badder-ass: Tyberos fights with two unique fist weapons named Hunger and Slake – each of which is a power fist, lightning claw, and chainfist blade combined into one.
His sheer physicality sets Tyberos apart from even other hulking terminators. In Robbie MacNiven’s 2018 novel Outer Dark, Tyberos is described as a head taller than his terminator honor guards, “seem[ing] to dwarf those around him, utterly immovable, a vast, silent judge”, and also as a “giant” and “supreme predator” whose massive, custom terminator suit “throbbed with the vast power necessary to keep its thick servo bundles active”.
Thicc indeed! That kind of vocabulary in Black Library novels is normally reserved for the naturally gigantic Warhammer 40k primarchs – not mere Space Marine captains. The key fact here is that Tyberos doesn’t just have big armor on – that’s nothing special, he’d still look titchy next to a Centurion. The point is that he has to wear XXXL plate because his body won’t fit into the regular stuff. Outer Dark describes the armor as “heavily modified to suit his stature“. Ergo: he chonky.
Tyberos isn’t just a big lad, though – he’s goshdarn terrifying. Imperial Armor Volume 10 tells us that, on the rare occasions he takes off his helmet, his face is “a corpse-white nightmare with half the bones of the face exposed in a bloodless grimace, while his eyes [are] a soulless, depthless black”. I can’t miss the implication there that Tyberos is, in nature as well as in name, a shark.
His flair, too, leans well towards the vicious, macabre side, with trophy skulls hanging on chains from his waist – something more commonly seen on Chaos Space Marines than loyalists to the Imperium of Man. Add to that the fact that, in spite of his hugeness, Tyberos speaks exclusively in an unnerving “soft whisper that nevertheless carried with it the promise of certain death”, and I can see why this silent, malevolent bastard has curried a cult following – it’s a compelling combo. I imagine his motto to be ‘speak softly, and carry two big fists’.
More awesome still, though, is the way he fights. Despite his extreme size, Tyberos the Red Wake earned that gruesome title by being uncommonly quick and agile in a melee, able to cleave through whole squads with a speed and precision normally impossible for a warrior in terminator armor.
His Imperial Armor entry puts this in no uncertain terms, with witnesses recalling him as “a blood-spattered killing machine moving almost too fast for the eye to see and leaving nothing but mangled and shredded corpses after his passing”. At the tail end of Outer Dark, Tyberos slays three Tyranid Warriors in a couple of seconds, before casually hopping into the nearby ‘nid boarding pod and silently slaughtering everything inside.
Despite these comparatively scant appearances in 40k lore, I’ve seen enough to justify Tyberos’ fame as a bona fide hardcase. But I think what truly makes him stick in the mind is his narratively satisfying contrasts: he’s huge, but unnaturally fast and nimble; he’s a ruthless, devastating murder machine, but never gets angry and only speaks in whispers; he’s commanded campaigns of merciless slaughter, but always acts the calm, balanced judge. A few questions remain, however…
Is Tyberos the Red Wake the biggest space marine in Warhammer 40,000?
As with most questions of Warhammer 40k lore, it’s impossible to be sure Tyberos is really, officially, the Emperor of Mankind‘s biggest boi outside of the 13-foot primarchs.
There are over 1,000 chapters of Astartes zipping round the galaxy, and more than 1,000 times that many individual marines, including growing numbers of the newer, taller, and stronger Primaris marines. Personally, I doubt anyone could ever manage to take a tape measure to Tyberos and compare, without ending up an aerosolized meat smoothie.
What we can be sure of is that he’s among the largest firstborn (i.e. non-Primaris) marines of all time, and one of very few whose descriptions make extreme bigness a core distinguishing feature. Space marines are big, terminators are bigger, and Tyberos is bigger than that. So he is, at least, the biggest space marine we know of.
Is there a Tyberos the Red Wake model?
Sadly, there’s no official Games Workshop model available for Tyberos the Red Wake. GW released a Forge World resin model of Tyberos in 2011, which is now long discontinued – and we’ve heard no rumblings of the chief Carcharodon getting a new plastic mini any time soon.
However, a growing cohort of space shark lovers are still finding ways to convert him using regular Assault Terminator minis, added armor studs, and 3D-printed bits to scratch-build his trademark chainfist-lightning claws.
Where is Tyberos the Red Wake now?
True to their mysterious habits, almost nothing is known about what the Carcharodons – and Tyberos – might be up to in the current Era Indomitus. The one exception is a battle described in 2020’s White Dwarf issue 451, in which a Space Sharks force under Company Master Mannfor fought the Word Bearers alongside the Indomitus Crusade’s Fleet Secundus.
The Red Wake isn’t mentioned as participating in that battle, but we also have no reason to suspect he’s dead – so we must assume Tyberos is still leading the main body of the chapter in war, most likely out on the galactic fringes, chopping up traitors and xenos alike.
And, until he shows up with his sea-grey warriors again to exact his bloodthirsty tithes on the Emperor’s enemies, that’s about all we know about Tyberos, the Red Wake!
For more Warhammer 40k lore deep dives, try our full explainer on the best Horus Heresy book order, and our overall picks for the best Warhammer 40k books. Or, for the latest upcoming grimdark goodness, check out the main Warhammer 40k codex release dates and our Warhammer 40k 2025 release schedule predictions.
Source: Wargamer
