Akeem Arsimo

Akeem Arsimo is an aging Pelorite priest, senior member of the Order of Illumination, and former Regency Finger agent. He is currently retired from active adventuring, and resides in the New Viti colony.

Upbringing and Early Life
Akeem Arsimo was born in the Avenanhma caer in 305 YS to a Pelorite cleric and a young Finger agent. He was raised in the church, spending his formative years playing beneath the weak light of the false sun in the courtyard of the big temple in the central cavern. His father was a gentle but firm man, instilling in his son a love of order and a deep-rooted sense of what was right. His mother indulged her son's sense of adventure, telling him stories of the world outside and regaling him with tales of heroic Imperial agents fighting against the forces of chaos.

He displayed no talent for harnessing the divine magic of his father, but he did have an aptitude for more scholarly pursuits. He absorbed his father's religious dogma with enthusiasm, and learned the mundane healing arts from other priests and clerics.

His true skills lay elsewhere, in stealth and subterfuge. As a teenager, he became a skilled liar and thief who disappeared for days at a time into the dark, poor lower levels of the caer. There, he turned his budding skills against the corrupt merchants who preyed on the poorest of the poor. For a time, he became a semi-legendary figure among the destitute, a masked teenager who raided the storehouses of the wealthy and made the fruits of his labors available to all who needed them. Inevitably, he began to focus his vigilantism on the worst of the corrupt merchants – who also happened to be the most powerful. Eventually he found himself hunted by the Hand, and only the intervention of his mother (who had been watching him for some time) saved his life.

After his near capture by the Hand, his mother and father began to exercise firmer discipline. His father enforced a rigid habit of work and study, while his mother took him on short expeditions into the unprotected caverns and shafts beyond the borders of the caer. From his father he learned the ways of the Pelorite order. From his mother, he learned the true tricks of subtlety and the art of the blade. From both, he learned the importance of an ordered life and the rule of law.

Career and Indoctrination in the Order of Illumination
When he turned 16, with his parents' blessing, he enlisted in the Imperial military, and was soon inducted into the Finger. He learned rapidly, quickly outpacing his peers thanks to the training he had already been given by his mother. By the time he was 22 he was in command of his own Finger cell, working within the Fist officer class to root out and expose disloyalty.

During this time, he discovered a quiet, pervasive cult within the middle ranks of the Fist command structure. He had encountered demon cults and the servants of dark gods in the past, but this particular cult worked with such subtlety that only the barest hints of its existence ever surfaced. For more than a year and a half, Akeem and his cell worked to find proof, or even identify a single member – and yet every time they got close, their proof slipped away or their target disappeared or was killed. Slowly, Akeem realized that one of his cell-mates must be working against him, and so he began working alone, refocusing his efforts on discovering whether he had been betrayed.

His plan to expose the traitor backfired. Instead, the traitor, knowing he was being hunted, turned the other cell-mate against Akeem. As a result of the trickery, he was forced to kill both of them. Then, disgraced and worried that more of the Finger might have fallen to the corruption that had taken his cell-mate, he went into hiding.

Shortly afterward, he arranged a meeting with his mother, hoping she could help him. After hearing his tale, she brought him to meet some friends of hers, members of a society so secret that not even the Finger had managed to infiltrate it. In fact, if anything, it was the other way around.

The Order of Illumination, founded even before the Pact of the Three Cities brought the Empire into existence, welcomed Akeem with open arms. His new compatriots showed him all they had learned about the corruption infiltrating the Empire, revealing that the cadre of cultists he had nearly uncovered was only a small tendril of something much more diabolical and far reaching than he had ever imagined. He was inducted into the mysteries of the order, and through their influence his name in the Finger was cleared.

He continued his work as a Finger agent, occasionally using his skills and influence to execute missions assigned to him by the Order of Illumination, and always keeping his ear to the ground for evidence of the corruption against which his order fought.

His mother was killed when he was 32, though he never learned why or how. All he was ever told was that she was on a mission for the Order of Illumination, and died in the service of good.

Only a few years later his father, also a member of the order, grew sick. Akeem arranged for his cover to be switched to that of a confessor of the Pelorite order so that he could be by his father's side. As his father grew sicker, he began to reveal the deepest secrets of the Order of Illumination, including their certain knowledge of an Imperial heir, hidden away for centuries in the gnome city state of Ap'Lei. Akeem's father charged him with eventually carrying the imperial scepter - left in the order's protection by Emperor Memnon just before the beginning of the Scourge and sought ever since by the Council of Regents - to Ap'Lei and awakening the Emperor.

Soon after passing on the imperial scepter, Akeem's father passed away, and Akeem became both a local leader in the Order of Illumination, and a senior priest in the main Pelorite temple of Avenanhma. Years passed.

Later Life and Escape from Avenanhma
By the time Akeem was in his 50s, he knew that the corruption he had first encountered so long ago reached far beyond his abilities and the abilities of the Order of Illumination to deal with. The Finger was in almost open conflict, trading assassinations between Regency and Order factions, their ability to gather intelligence crippled. The Hand had been almost completely subverted, and with only a single exception it was suspected that the Council of Regents was loyal to whatever the still undiscovered corrupting influence was.

It was during this desperate time that a young orphan was abandoned to the care of the Pelorites. The lad, named Augustine, experienced visions and even at a very young age displayed arcane powers that would eventually lead to his forcible transport to the Academy at Misr. Citing his age and weariness, Akeem retired from the Finger and the Pelorite order. He devoted himself to raising Augustine as his son, training him as an Order initiate, and teaching him to hide his arcane powers. He knew that he was too old to ever carry the imperial scepter to Ap'Lei, and those members of the order he trusted well enough to share the burden also shared his advanced age. If he was ever to see his promise to his dying father fulfilled, it would have to be through someone he trained himself.

Augustine proved to be a wild youth, but more than capable. He was intelligent and eager, displaying an uncanny level of power and a willingness to use it to accomplish any goal set before him. Akeem harnessed Augustine's single-mindedness to turn the youth into a living weapon, a spear he would fire straight towards Ap'Lei, and thence to the heart of the corruption infecting the Empire.

When Augustine was 17, the caer doors opened, and passage to the mainland was offered to adventurers willing to venture out in an effort to contact the far-flung reaches of the Empire. Akeem entrusted the scepter to Augustine, charging him with bringing it to Ap'Lei and seeking there a gnome named Errmil Shandock, but not revealing why.

With a heavy but hopeful heart, Akeem bade Augustine farewell and sent him out into the world, never again expecting to see him. When, more than a year later, he learned of Augustine's death at the hand of dwarven assassins certainly hired by Regency agents, he knew that his life's work had utterly failed.

Then, a few months later, he heard from his Finger contacts that a group of adventurers in the company of a man claiming to be the Emperor had hijacked an Imperial airship in Ap'Lei. Shortly after that, the Regency was preparing for war, and rumors were circulating that a new Emperor was raising an army in the north to claim the throne.

More and more information began to filter back to him through his contacts in the Finger, and through Order of Illumination agents returning from far afield. Some of the adventurers who had hijacked the airship in Ap'Lei had been friends of Augustine. At least one was a former Finger agent and Order of Illumination initiate. They were decorated heroes and survivors of a war fought between Anglesey and an army of monsters.

Even as he learned more and more about the new emperor, he also became more and more aware of changes within the capitol cities. Regency forces had begun to crack down, violently, on dissent. Worship at Pelorite and Heironian temples declined, though it was never openly discouraged. The Regency faction within the Finger stepped up its campaign against Order of Illumination agents until the program of assassinations became a full-blown purge. Whatever the corruption against which Akeem had fought his entire life, it was strong enough now that it was beginning to consolidate its hold on the heart of the Empire.

Soon, there were only a few remaining Order of Illumination agents on the capitol island, and all of them had gathered in Avenahma. Most were old timers who had largely retired from active service. Others were so deeply embedded in their cover that any action risked exposing them and dozens more.

At incredible risk to himself, a young agent who had managed to maintain his status as a member of the Finger, made contact with an infiltrator from Anglesey, and brought him to see Akeem. The daring adventurer Lawrence Twoblades told Akeem that rescue would come, and he needed only be patient.

While he waited, Akeem directed a new surge of activity from the surviving Order of Illumination agents in the city. Thanks to their vigor, they uncovered, finally, a name behind the corruption – Kyuss. The Worm that Walks. Only a few days after Akeem heard the name of his ultimate opponent for the first time, half of the remaining Order of Illumination agents in the city were dead, and the rest where in hiding. The Hand, led by a halfling assassin known as Crowley Crane, had somehow rooted out the order and was engaging in one final push to eliminate them.

Before Crane could finish the job, however, rescue came in the form of the same heroes who had completed Augustine's mission and awakened the emperor. What seemed to be victory was short lived, however, as Crane tracked the heroes to the Pelorite temple in the caer. Hoping to kill the last of the order and the heroes of Anglesey, he destroyed the pillars that held up the roof of the vast cavern.

Thanks to the fast action and incredible resourcefulness of the group of heroes, Akeem and his surviving compatriots survived the collapse of the caer. Hundreds – possibly thousands – of others were not so lucky. Akeem watched from the deck of a nearby ship as a vast plume of dust and smoke shot into the sky from the city he had called home all his life. The devastation later described to him by other survivors seemed unspeakable, insane; and it was all for the sake of killing him and only a score of others. What kind of evil was this Worm that Walks? What madness drove its servants?

After the evacuation of the last few defectors from Avenanhma, Akeem traveled aboard the Sky Treader to the Imperial base at New Viti, where he swore his allegiance to the emperor. He met the local lord, an aging paladin named Christopher, and joined his fledgling government as an advisor. He claims New Viti as his home now, and he intends to stay and watch the fledgling community grow until Pelor sees fit to call him to serve in Elysium.