Difference between revisions of "The Fate of Maldegen Dirz"
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| + | == Dirz the Heresiarch == | ||
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| + | 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. | ||
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| + | 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. | ||
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| + | 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. | ||
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| + | '''The Emperor and his faithful''' | ||
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| + | 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. | ||
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| + | 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. | ||
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| + | 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… | ||
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| + | 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. | ||
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| + | 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. | ||
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| + | == The quest of the Heresiarch == | ||
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| + | 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. | ||
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| + | 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. | ||
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| + | 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. | ||
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| + | 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. | ||
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| + | 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. | ||
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| + | 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. | ||
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| + | 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 clone uprising''' | ||
