Daern

There was a time when Daern was one of the most respected men in the Empire. His magical and alchemical inventions helped propel the second half of the Golden Age that preceded the Scourge. His feats of engineering and medicine increased the average lifespan across the Empire. He was consulted and confided in by emperors, kings, and great men of business and the military. So great was his fame that con men across the Empire sold false trinkets to the gullible, claiming Daern had enchanted them for luck, fertility, or long life.

Early Life & Education
He was born to a humble merchant family in Faroe, but his potential was recognized early on by a friend of the family who was a scholar and dabbler in the magic arts. Daern manged his first cantrips at the tender age of nine, and shortly thereafter his family sent him to apprentice at a wizard's college in Aksum. Separation from his family - especially his beloved older sister - was difficult for Daern. At 12, he was the youngest student at the college by a full four years, and he was tormented mercilessly by the older boys. His genius isolated him, while driving his peers wild with jealousy. Mystical concepts that took other students years to master took Daern days. His confidence - some called it arrogance - won him no friends, and without his sister to temper his behavior - or offer him solace in his isolation - he soon found himself in constant conflict with his fellows. He found his niche in the quiet of the alchemical and medical labs. Because of the esoteric nature of those disciplines, many students - even many of the teachers - avoided them in favor of pure magical study, and the labs were often empty. The teachers there were glad to have a student of Daern's skill - someone who might one day bring their arts to the next level. By the time he was 22, Daern had learned all that the college had to teach him, and he moved out into the city of Aksum to open his own lab and hospital, hoping to offer domestic charms and medical services to the wealthy merchants of the city. He found, however, that his medical skills were most often sought by the mercenary companies that called the city home, rather than the wealthy patrons he'd hoped to attract (who preferred the services of a cleric for even the most minor wounds). What's more, Daern found himself enjoying the company of the rough and tumble mercenaries. So when he was invited to join a party of adventurers for a trip to the Broken Lands, he was more than happy to close his business and head out into the unknown world.

Adventures and Corruption
During his eight years as an adventure, two things happened that would forever change Daern's outlook on the world. First - he fell in love. Marissa was one of his party; a brawler and a fighter, but beautiful nonetheless, and full of a reckless joy in life that Daern had never encountered before. She was devoted to the perfection of her abilities as a fighter, so she and Daern studied every legend, explored every dark place, sought every artifact and method that could enhance a fighter's skill. Eventually they thought they had exhausted the possibilities presented by the mundane and the magical - until Daern discovered lore that told of the illithid practice of grafting. And so the pair sought out the mind flayers. No one knows what vile bargain they made, but they spent a year and a half with the mind flayers - Daern learning about grafting and symbiosis, and Marissa undergoing procedure after procedure to transform her into the ultimate warrior. When they were done, they were both monsters - but Marissa was the one who looked the part. What's more, the strain of the extreme surgeries she'd undergone had driven her insane. Daern was forced to kill her. He returned to Aksum a rich and powerful man, only to discover that during his extended absence his sister had died giving birth to her son. He visited his family and brother-in-law in Faroe, and found that without his sister he had nothing in common with them beyond blood. He soon left and returned to Aksum, where he once again set up shop, this time as a magic and engineering consultant to the local Baron. The next few years saw Daern flourish. He improved the design of the Empire's flying ships, and even presented a concept for an actual flying fortress. He also created a number of magical items that became standard military and adventuring equipment across the Empire. He devised potions and ointments that vastly improved the perspicacity and puissance of those who used them. He became a trusted medical adviser first to the local noble class, then to the mighty and influential from far afield. Such was his reputation that he was summoned to Avenanhma to oversee the confinement of the Empress and the birth of Memnon, last of the Nemalian Emperors. It was a difficult birth, but thanks to all that he had learned, and driven by the memory of his sister, Daern was able to save the lives of the Empress and her son. During all of this time, Daern secretly continued his work on the vile science of the illithids. He used "volunteers" from the poorest areas of the cities, as well as captives brought to him by his adventuring contacts. Despite his dilligence and skill, he continued to be frustrated by the outcomes. His subjects were inevitably driven mad by the agony of the grafts, and only a few seemed to benefit from enhanced abilities of any kind. Not to mention that he was unable except through magical domination to exercise any measure of control over them the way the mind flayers - with their powerful psychic abilities - had been able to. It was when the aging Emperor asked Daern to perform research into prolonging human life that he finally found the missing key to his attempts to unlock the potential of his subjects. First, he realized that only those rare individuals capable of exceeding normal sentient limits could possibly withstand the trauma of his grafts. Then, deep in the magical archives of one of Aksum's largest colleges, he found an ancient text full of unspeakable rituals. This hoary tome included mad scribblings left over from a bygone age, most of which Daern could not interpret. Only one set of pages was perfectly clear to him. This was a ritual that would transform the subject into a conduit for negative energy, rendering him an immortal battery of indestructible unlife. What was more - Daern saw a way in this ritual to connect his life force - through a device called a phylactery - to that of his creations, giving him some measure of detailed control. By this time, the old Emperor was dead, and the child he had helped birth - Memnon - had ascended to the throne. No one but Daern knew of his research into immortality. So Daern stole the book and spirited it back to his lab, where he began the long preparation for the ritual that would help him live forever and allow him to perfect his grafting technique. The disappearance of people from the Aksumi slums accelerated - enough that even the local constabulary took notice. But the city was in an uproar over the coming Imperial visit, when the Emperor and his entire family and entourage would visit. So the law had better things to do than track down a passel of missing drunks, whores, and madmen. While the city celebrated their Emperor, Daern cavorted in the darkness of his lab surrounded by the annihilated bodies of his sacrifices. Daern died there in the darkness and stink of blood. Died, and rose again, only to find the city of Aksum in flames around him.

The Scourge and Aftermath
In the chaos that followed the destruction of Aksum, it took Daern some time to recover from the disorientation of his rebirth. By the time he felt ready to emerge from his partially collapsed workshop, the yugoloths were already swarming over the ruins of the city, herding the survivors into pens and slaughtering those who resisted. The weather wall had cloaked the city in perpetual twilight, and the intensity of the wild magic effects at the beginning of the Scourge made teleportation impossible. Despite his power, Daern found himself trapped. Reasoning that it was only a matter of time before the Empire found its way through the weather wall and brought the weight of its army down on the invading yugoloths, Daern began to style himself as a leader of the human resistance. He collected survivors in a hidden network of tunnels cleverly disguised beneath the ruins, and found willing grafting subjects among them, thus creating the first of his Fleshers. As the months wore on, however, and Daern struggled to feed his refugees or gain any kind of advantage against the powerful yugoloths, he began to think that perhaps Aksum had been sucked into a pocket dimension entirely cut off from Imperial help. Without access to a lab or any resources to speak of, his ability to create Fleshers was limited, and he was unable to answer any of the mounting questions he had about his city's fate. He eventually decided to abandon his flagging resistance, and, reasoning that it might be a kind of planar portal, attempt to traverse the weather wall. At the time of his attempt, however, the wind was far stronger, howling along at hundreds of miles an hour, whipping along debris and sand at such an astonishing pace that within a few minutes Daern's clothes were in tatters and his flesh was being stripped from his bones. Those Fleshers he attempted to bring along were killed either by the flensing dust or the shrieking ghosts of the Aksumi dead trapped within the swirling wind. Resigned to his captivity within the ruins of Aksum, Daern realized that his only chance to continue his research on the ultimate potential of humanity was through the patronage of the yugoloths. He turned himself over to them, offering up his Fleshers as slave enforcers, and sacrificing the other refugees under his protection to the daemons' rage. In exchange for his service, he was given freedom, resources, and comfort, and was even allowed to explore those planes he was able to access through the portal at the base of the Black Tower. For 350 years he waited, growing ever more bitter about having turned over his phylactery to Hykksmoth, and frustrated with the dwindling number and quality of human subjects to which he had access. Unable to escape, and unwilling to risk his own survival, he waited. From his short jaunts to other planes, he knew that there were a few denizens of the Prime Material Plane still active in the multiverse, and that a few of those were heroes. He hoped one day to contact one and enlist help in mounting an insurrection against the yugoloths. In the meantime, he optimized his Fleshers for an eventual war of extinction against the daemons. Help came from an unexpected direction when a group of Imperial agents managed to traverse the (now much weaker) weather wall and infiltrate Aksum without alerting Hykksmoth's forces.Though their original intent was to slay Daern, he managed to strike a deal with them that led in short order to the recovery of his phylactery, the death of Hykksmoth, and the final collapse of the weather wall. With the human survivors of Aksum now freed, the party of heroes turned on Daern and destroyed his body. Unfortunately, they were unable to find his phylactery. Upon his reincorporation, Daern took his few surviving Fleshers and marched - first east toward the abandoned city of Besiktas, and then south to join the Regency army at Faroe. By all appearances, he now serves the Regency - though of course he would not be Daern if he did not have his own agenda.