View source for The Fate of Maldegen Dirz

Maldegen Dirz was born in Carthag Fero, in Akkylannie, to the rich house of engineer Balfeden Dirz, in 643. The child soon revealed extraordinary intelligence and obviously possessed a gift for magic. Trained from a very young age in all scientific fields, he was able to correct his father’s plans before he was ten. Indifferent to any possible development of his mystic abilities, Maldegen Dirz favored his passion for science.

He quickly specialized in biology, a rather unexplored field at the time. At eleven, Maldegen Dirz discovered parasites in the water recycling systems of Carthag Fero. He offered to coat the city reservoirs with copper and to treat drinking water with selected bacteria. Within a few months these corrections had cleansed the city of a great number of major diseases. Being a voracious reader, Maldegen Dirz used his newfound glory to gain access to the best libraries of the city and to correspond
with some of the brightest minds on Aarklash.

Thus, he entertained some serious correspondence with mystics and scientists of the Kingdom of Alahan, including Rhea de Brisis.
It is she who told Maldegen that missionaries sent to the Syharhalna, on the other side of the Migol Sea, had discovered the ruins of an ancient and powerful civilization.

== Chronology ==

*''643'' : Birth of Maldegen Dirz in Carthag Fero (Akkylannie).
*''652'' : Dirz improves the water distribution network of Carthag Fero.
*''659'' : Dirz leads an expedition into the Syharhalna.
*''660'' : Dirz discovers an Ishim’Re artifact, a cloning tank, and achieves his first cloning. It is the first time the word “Technomancy” is used.
*''665'' : Dirz becomes a member of the Alchemists of Merin.
*''667'' : Dirz becomes Prime Alchemist of the Empire, Head of the Alchemists of Merin. Dirz extracts his fi rst stem and deciphers the code.
*''668'' : The first “tigers of Dirz” are created. Dirz converts to the cult of Arh-Tolth. Shamir and Arkeon Sanath are discovered.
*''670'' : The disciples of Dirz create the kraken arhteths.
*''671'' : Dirz designs a vaccine against a cattle plague, saving the Empire of Akkylannie from famine.
*''673'' : Dirz creates the fi rst combat clone. He is accused of heresy. He is acquitted after trial.
*''675'' : The Battle of Kaïber reveals the presence of Black Togas on Dirz’ side.
*''676'' : Dirz is once again accused of heresy and imprisoned by the Inquisition. He is rescued by Arkeon Sanath.
*''677'' : Dirz escapes from Carthag Fero on a stolen ship while the city burns. Dirz appoints the fi rst Basileus, leader of the cult of Arh-Tolth. Dirz is crowned Emperor of the Syharhalna by the Basileus. Djaran falls under Akkylannian control. The clones of Dirz officially become the basis of the armies of the Syharhalna.
*''679'' : Danakil creates his sentinels. Based on them, Dirz elaborates the Genariah stem, prototype of the commodores of the armies of Syharhalna.
*''707'' : The tarascus arhteths are released in the desert.
*''719'' : Dirz creates the isatephs to neutralize the tarascus arhteths.
*''725'' : Dirz engineers the stasis tank.
*''744'' : Karnyrax, the wolfen, is captured and the cornerstone of an artifi cial incarnation project is laid by Dirz. Creation of the laboratories as they are known today.
*''746'' : Dirz launches Project Hybrid.
*''747'' : Dirz achieves the cloning of the human mind and creates the neuromancers.
*''808'' : Based on the goblin stem, Technomancer Khorda develops the Khorda clone, ancestor of the orc race.
*''869'' : Revolt of the Khorda clones who take the isatephs with them. Th ey vanish into the canyons of the Bran-Ô-Kor and found the orc clans; the isatephs are renamed “brontops”.
*''853'' : Destruction of Shamir. Dirz is seriously wounded. Basileus Antykaïn is appointed head of the Empire.
*''1000'' : Death of Dirz, sacrificed



== Dirz the Heresiarch ==

The Emperor and the Pope grew worried of such excessive influence. Their worries came true in 675, when the Battle of Kaïber demonstrated that Light was under threat of being extinguished by Darkness. Following the Black Togas, Iandoras Lazarian betrayed his family and sided with the barony of Acheron. He fought alongside the forces of the Meanders of Darkness. Cardinal Lazarus’ suspicions became certainties.

As an answer to these terrible events, the Church of Merin created the Inquisition and gave it a wide range of discretionary
powers. Cardinal Lazarus was appointed to lead it. His first official decision was to arrest Dirz and his collaborators
to try them in secret. However, the Black Togas had warned their protégé. Dirz had clandestinely transferred Arkeon Sanath to Akkylannie, along with a pack of his famous “tigers”. On the day of the trial, supporters of the Black Togas caused uproar in the city, allowing the Incarnate to reach the tribunal. Arkeon Sanath unleashed his beasts and used the commotion to free the captives. No one was able to stop them. Chaos spread across Akkylannie. Civil war was setting the country ablaze. The artisans of the Black Togas were fighting openly with the Inquisition. Answering the rebellion, the inquisitors fell upon all those who had been in contact with the man who was now being called the Heresiarch.

The Order of the Alchemists of Merin was destroyed and many persecuted alchemists joined the fugitives, who had been traveling to the country to warn their partisans or to save them from the stakes of the Inquisition. Having prepared for such events, the Heresiarch hurried to Carthag Fero, a city he knew well and whose population he knew was behind him. He “stole” several ships from their consenting owners and left for the Syharhalna with several thousand people.

'''The Emperor and his faithful'''

When the Heresiarch landed in Djaran, he knew he was being pursued. He turned the whole of his laboratories’ resources toward building a resistance force. The coordination of the armed force required strong central power and the support of the whole population. In 677, the Heresiarch took a certain number of decisions that irrevocably cut him off from Akkylannie. First he chose the most influential priest of Arh-Tolth, Ikbaal Kazzaz, to become the supreme leader of the cult, Basileus of the Syharhalna. Ikbaal Kazzaz took the name of Antykaïn I and crowned Dirz as Emperor, thus federating the tribes of the desert and the population of the Syhar cities around the imperial power. The Akkylannian expedition in charge of capturing the Heresiarch and regaining control of the Syharhalna had prepared to meet some resistance. And it wasn’t disappointed.

The kraken the Heresiarch had let loose decimated the fleet that had already been weakened by diseases called by the faithful of Arh-Tolth. The troops that landed ran into several bloodhound packs and an army of the fi rst combat clones. The elite templars fought a long and deadly battle. Still, the clones were not perfectly finished yet and the bloodhounds, no matter how fierce they were, they were not enough to be called a real army. Quite predictably, Djaran fell.

The Heresiarch wished to test these first prototypes of fighters. He had foreseen and accepted the loss of the city, relying on the desert rather than brute force to defend his laboratories. The Akkylannians wandered in the Syharhalna for months, misled by local guides loyal to Dirz, by mirages summoned by the first technomancers, by rumors concerning mysterious fortresses…

The Heresiarch used the time won to send Danakil, his most talented disciple, to rebuild an ancient Ishim’Re fortress in the northern parts of the Syharhalna. The disciple was given an important mission: improving his mentor’s clones in order to create a
new generation of fi ghters capable of leading troops
and providing worthy generals. Danakil sought to shine and saw this mission as the opportunity to surpass his master. He used his
own stem rather than those provided by Dirz to create combat clones superior in every way possible to those of the Heresiarch. These new fighters were complex and required great quantities of resources but the result was sufficiently brilliant to justify the production of a limited number of them. However, the loyalty of Danakil was in doubt. The Heresiarch himself started working on the improvement of the clones and sent his unique result, Commodore Mezaian Genariah, to execute his disciple. Genariah slashed its way through the clones of Danakil to take care of their creator.

Once it was done, Genariah took command of the leaderless fortress as it had been ordered. The Battle of Dawn that was fought there against the Akkylannians later demonstrated Generiah’s qualities as commander (see Army Book: Clones of Dirz): This victory eliminated the threat of an attack on Shamir, where the Heresiarch had retreated. Dirz had every right to be satisfied with his work.

== The quest of the Heresiarch ==

His status as Emperor did not quell the ardor the Heresiarch put into his research. In 707, he put the final touches to the land
arhteths, the Tarascus. He was able to test these new creations when more templars tried to capture him, in Shamir this time. The creatures, assisted by a handful of combat clone units, quickly drove the Akkylannians back. Pleased with his success, the Emperor soon ordered the release of the Tarascus arhteths into the wild, in order to fight the periodic incursions of Akkylannian crusaders.

In the meantime, the genius of the Heresiarch kept producing amazing results. In 719, the Tarascus had become a nuisance to the Syhar as much as to the Akkylannians. The famished creatures attacked both sides indiscriminately. It did indeed prevent sporadic movements of crusade troops sent into the desert, but it also paralyzed Syhar commerce. The Emperor decided to design
creatures meant to neutralize the Tarascus.

Thus the isatephs were born from the tanks of Shamir. These fast and gregarious creatures travel in great herds, making them an
irresistible prey to the arhteths. Designed to develop an extremely peevish character, the reaction of an isateph herd faced with an arhteth is not fl ight: quite the contrary,
they stand up as a group to their aggressors. Their natural arsenal, long tusks and sharp teeth, takes care of the rest. A few carefully released isateph herds worked marvels: within months, the land arhteths were only a bad memory. In 725, the eresiarch, age 82, was reaching the end of his long existence and his projects were not complete. He modified a cloning tank to make it a statis tank that could slow down forever the vital functions of a living being. Technomancers engaged in long-running enterprises would have a refuge to wait until an emergency called for their attention or until their project was completed.

Dirz the Heresiarch took refuge inside it and spent nineteen years in artificial slumber. In 744 a clone patrol found a female wolfen named Karnyrax lost in the desert. The deprivation of water and food should have killed her long ago and yet she was still alive; alive enough to tear half of the patrol to pieces before being captured. Carried to Shamir to be experimented on, the wolfen proved incapable of dying. Arkeon Sanath took the decision to wake the Heresiarch.

The capture of a new Incarnate allowed the Emperor to further his research to understand the nature of these beings.
The previous work of the Heresiarch on Arkeon Sanath answered many questions that had in turn brought even more unanswerable queries. The capture of Karnyrax offered further elements that the father of technomancy could work on. Late 744, the first conclusions drawn by the Heresiarch allowed him to prepare the future cloning of Incarnates. Even better, there was reasonable hope that he could extract the code of Incarnation and therefore inject it in order to cause artificial Incarnation. Eternal life was within reach.

However, the project was prickly. Immortality was not for everyone and its discovery could throw Aarklash into chaos. Dirz elaborated a secret research plan supposed to unfold over several centuries and no one else was to know its goal. Only the Emperor knew its objective. The Heresiarch organized the laboratories and gave them the orders they are working on today. Some research centers were to provide clones ever more powerful and cheaper to create.

Others were to refine the cloning techniques in order to create the perfect human, called “clone alpha”, for Dirz’s return
into a younger and improved body. Another section bearing the seal of absolute secrecy was entrusted with exploring the first discoveries of the Heresiarch concerning Incarnates. So Project Hybrid was born and its countless secret laboratories scattered across Aarklash. The first Code Hybrid laboratories were built in 746. Their work soon showed great potential with the creation of the aberrations and later of the nemesis. After two years, the satisfi ed Emperor returned to his artificial slumber until some more significant progress was made.

'''The clone uprising'''

The technomancers dissected the emissaries of No-Dan-Kar who showed up in 808 to establish an embassy in Shamir. The Heresiarch was woken for the occasion. It would be the last time he authorized the use of a stem other than his own in order to create stronger, more obedient and more resilient clones by injecting fragments of isateph code into this new stem. This time, he chose Khorda, his most obedient disciple to lead the project. The Khorda clones proved as strong and enduring as foreseen but their character seriously deviated from the parameters expected of the experiment. Their stubborn temper made them diffi cult to dominate, but the use of drugs could largely compensate for this defect. Khorda was more worried by their lack of the
cruelty that made clones of Dirz such fierce fighters.

Yet their strength and dexterity was precious. So they were produced in limited numbers to become elite cavalry fighters. A variation of the isateph clones was engineered for the occasion. Three generations of Khorda clones ensued, improved each time, until 869. Khorda discovered that these creations had developed a language and an embryo of civilization outside of any parameter of the experiment. Fearing the reaction to the Emperor if he was to wake him to tell him of his failure, Khorda told Basileus Antykaïn III of the situation. The latter ordered the execution of all the Khorda clones. The clones proved far more intelligent and far more independent than feared. Instead of passively waiting for death, the clones threw themselves
at the Syhar, massacred their masters and fled. The Khorda clones vanished into the canyons of the Bran-Ô-Kor before renaming themselves “Orcs”.

Eventually Dirz was woken to inform him of the situation. Infuriated, the Heresiarch banned the use of new stems in the creation of sentient creatures. 

'''The dawn of the Rag’narok'''

The Emperor’s sleep lasted more than two centuries. He was woken again on a clear night in 853 when five hundred invaders appeared out of nowhere to attack Shamir. They wielded unknown weapons, made from technologies far more advanced than that of the Syhar, and they used an extremely powerful form of magic. After only a few hours of fierce fighting, the aggressors unleashed such firepower that even the Ishim’Re fortification, which had resisted the destruction of their country and millennia of oblivion , were swept away. Nevertheless, the masses of clones of Shamir, supported by the Heresiarch himself, eventually defeated the invader. Unfortunately, the Emperor was seriously wounded in the fight.

The final hours of lucidity of the Emperor were dedicated to interrogating the only surviving aggressor. A handful of carefully selected biopsists, assisted by the Basileus himself, ripped the truth out of the prisoner; revelations that were immediately
concealed. A century and a half into the future, a total war between the peoples of Aarklash, called “Rag’narok”, would break out. Seizing the opportunity of this conflict, the hundreds of clones produced for battle would revolt against their masters
and massacre them to found their own people. The last of the surviving loyalists who had fallen back into the deepest levels of the alchemical tower of Shamir would call upon Arh-Tolth to help them. The god would then give them a machine designed to send them into the past to prevent the fall of the alchemical empire.

After the questioning, the Emperor felt his fi nal hour approaching. However, his mind was still working with the genius that had always characterized him. He ordered that Shamir should be abandoned and that a new city be built where the true-born would live at the top of the alchemical tower and not underground. Thus the circumstances in which the revolt was supposed to take places would be altered in favor of the true-born. He decreed that all male clones would be made sterile so that the goals of the revolt could not be achieved. He then transferred the regency of the Empire to the Baliseus who would be in charge of preparing the final assault of the Rag’narok. Finally, he gathered years of annotations, re-wrote some of them and reorganized
the rest, creating within a few hours one of the founding texts of the empire: the Traitise of Alchemy, halfway between religious scriptures and scientific reference book. The Heresiarch then sunk into a coma and was returned to the stasis tank, until the day Syhar science would be able to heal the terrible wounds of time.

== The Return of the Heresiarch ==

The epilogue of the life of the Heresiarch happened in 1000 during the Dawn ritual. Basileus Villa, head of the church of Arh-Tolth, and the Magon, grand priest of the cult, received from Djabril the Voyager the means of summoning Arh-Tolth to Aarklash for good. The ritual required inflicting unspeakable spiritual and physical suffering to the most fervent worshippers
of Arh-Tolth. Physical suffering would not be a problem. The proper injection would provide a satisfying result.

The real challenge was the moral part. No drug could help here. In an ordinary nation, they could have sacrificed the women and children of their faithful. Unfortunately, the Syhar felt no attachment for those they reproduced with, or their own progeny.
Once again, Djabril had the solution. The only being they all adored and loved was their guide, their spiritual father: Emperor Dirz. The Basileus himself stabbed the sacrificial dagger into the heart of the founder of the Empire while the Magon began the ritual of Dawn… and Arh-Tolth appeared. The army of the Syharhalna marched out to sweep away the old world and sow the seeds of a new one. Victory would herald the dawn of a new alchemical era.