An Angel Called Eternity

Lore Chapter: Dathan and Aegos

The Dathan peninsula. There's a lot of history in so ancient a place as this, but unfortunately not much of a future. Well, not unless you count religious fundamentalists, resurgent slavery, and a quality of life that somehow manages to be poorer than that of the Klironomoi to be the future. You want to know about Dathan? Here's the most important thing you need to know: It's fucked. Completely and utterly fucked. Constant border wars and unending civil strife, enough bureaucracy to make even the most accomplished Tildan paper-pusher blush, and a growing tide of sectarian violence. I can't exactly claim innocence on that front, nor shall I.

See, as you're no doubt aware, we in Aegos have just finished up with our own little civil war. I say finished, what I really mean is it's been put on hold for the foreseeable future, since Imperator Thrax needs to lick his wounds after I beat him back alongside my master but we in the Church lack the strength to cross the river and take the fight to him, not without crippling our own military capabilities anyway. Anyway, the semantics are beside the point. We were at war, now we're not. See, that seems like an improvement on paper, right? Wrong! Even putting aside how fucking disgusting the regime I've managed to become a major player in is, tensions on the peninsula have never been higher! There's a complex web of alliances and rivalries stretching more than a dozen nations, and all it's gonna take is one small incident to bring everyone to loggerheads. The trouble is that it's impossible to keep track of who's in league with who at any given time, and you're likely more than aware of the sort of issues that can cause. One wrong letter to someone you thought was your ally can turn a sure victory into a crushing defeat, and you'd do well to remember that.

I trained as a part of the clergy under Archcardinal Adikos, with a specialisation in all things martial and violent. Nowadays I wish I'd tried my hand at something else and remained an unremarkable little runt, but what's done is done. I trained to be a holy soldier, and I was very good at it. When Cardinal Trios floundered and his flank was broken at the fields of Pylamum I was the one who won the day, recovering our position on the field and turning aside the foe. When the city of Thermanthus rose in support of the Imperator it was me who stormed its walls, slaying the dissidents and avenging the garrison within that had been slaughtered by the locals. It was me who won the civil war for Adikos, and no-one else. If only I'd seen what I was really doing back then, but it's too late to change things now. It's only been a few months since the end of the conflict, and already I've grown to hate what I've served this whole time. I always hated certain aspects of the faith as a kid, but I was an actor; hiding my thoughts on the matter was easy. The hard parts came about when Adikos was able to convince me that the thoughts I was hiding were wrong, that I wasn't supposed to think like that and that if Adikos thought something then it was right. That's how you indoctrinate people.

And of course, that's what it was. Indoctrination. If he could make me think my own mind was betraying me, if he could convince me to reject what my own senses were telling me in favour of the words he spun, then I wouldn't even be able to hide in my own mind from him. He succeeded for a long, long while. I think in some ways the war was good for me, as much as I hated the strife it caused; by taking me away from Adikos for so long I started to realise how much of a hold he had over me. That was when I took my first steps away from the church, in secret of course. I practiced my acting skills to keep myself safe for the first time since I was a child, I allowed myself to think anti-Church thoughts, and most dangerously I reconverted to my old faith. I'd been indoctrinated out of my old beliefs, but with some prompting from a dear friend and almost a year of separation from my master I was able to find the courage to go back to what, in truth, had always been the faith to which my heart and soul belonged.

You wanna know how to make a man think whatever you want him to think? Train him when he's a boy.

That was a dark period in my life. Even now I find myself in its shadow on occasion. But you're not here to listen to me talk about me; you're here to learn about Aegos and Dathan!