Darien Cordel
People are scary
A Life Spent Fleeing
Darien was a child who seemed to know only trouble. Born on Dromund Kaas, the child of two officers from an empire that has fallen and risen in various forms in the years since, who were not hugely visible in his life, often about their work and much too busy to spend time with him. Once he was old enough he was often sent out of his house in the morning to play and only permitted to return in the evening when the work of the day was done. Like all children in that situation, he often found himself up to mischief, what else was he to do a boy of some privilege left alone?
He was 7 when that propensity for trouble came back to bite him. He made the mistake of angering a Sith knight in the service of an ambitious sith lord, the current sith governor no less, with an act of childish theft. Intended to be a foolish prank he stole and then hid a data card taken from the knight's bag, he had meant only to cause annoyance and perhaps a modicum of worry. Having hidden the card in a potted plant, not 100 metres from the knight he promptly forgot all about it.
It was soon found, though not by the Knight.
Regrettably, it was collected by an observant agent of a rebel group who used it to free several political prisoners. The scandal was explosive and the sitting governer was openly challenged by a powerful rival and flowing blood was sure to follow. The investigation revealed Darien's involvement and the governor in one last flex of power ordered that Darien and his Family be erased. Abandoned by his professional soldiers he was reliant on mercenaries who knowing that they had a short clock before their principal could no longer pay did not invest sufficient time into the job. The house was burned, and his parents were killed. No one bothered to look for him and in the ensuing chaos, no one cared to.
He Wandered the streets alone and lost for a few days as all around him turmoil reigned. By week's end, there was a new governor and Order was restored. The streets were cleared of undesirables. Vagrants were thrust back to the underground and back alleys and lost children were shipped to orphanages to await proper inspections. He was picked up and taken to an Orphanage that for all he knew might be a planet away from his former home, he was silent in his guilt and grief.
Two weeks in the opening and closing of frozen eyes before a sith knight Lucien Cordel arrived and adopted him. Why he did Darien could not say, he had not spoken to the man. He had not spoken to anyone. He barely even remembered sharing a room with him. They must have ofcourse and the Lord Cordel must have seen something in him but what that was he could not dare to guess.
Lucien was at that point the governor of Elom and a sith bureaucrat under the old sith empire. He took Darien to his palace and placed him in a room. There were plenty of toys in there, enough to engage him but no one really spoke to him and he hardly saw his new father. Clearly, there was something serious afoot as just one week after his adoption Lucien fled the empire taking himself and his "son" to the unknown regions to seek political asylum. Again Darien neither knew nor asked just who they were fleeing from.
Darien was too young and grief-stricken to really notice or care about the true meaning behind the change or to care that he and his Lucien were practically homeless, well they lived out of a Luxury yacht but ... it was no house. Even Crammed into the far closer quarters of the yacht talk with Lucien was still very … very tortured. It would have been plain to an older child that Lucien had little interest in being a father. He wanted Darien for legacy nothing more and at 7 Darien could do little to provide that. He was force-sensitive and Lucien cared about that. Nurtured that but beyond that he nurtured nothing. It was like Darien was just clay to be made into something taht he was not yet able to see.
By the time Darien was 9 Lucien had cemented himself in a position of power within the lands of the fringe and was excessively wealthy once more. The Lords of the Fringe were bringing order and unity to savage and untapped lands and so long as he furthered the organisation's larger goals no one much cared what he did on the planets that he oversaw. Darien was still hardly spoken to by Lucien. The man watched him at his lessons sometimes or stepped in to finesse the boy's use of the force but he was no father figure. That said Darien had never really had parents.
It seemed Lucien tired of even that meagre interaction and from the age of 10, Darien attended boarding school. Having never really connected with Lucien in any real intimate way he noticed little in the way of change. He grew up alone. He never really got himself a personality and he felt meaningless in the world. He knew that he existed only to further his father's legacy. He would rule as his father ruled. He knew of concepts like class and propriety but little of feeling.
Shortly after his 25th Birthday, his father discussed with him the prospect of returning Darien to his childhood age, so as to allow them both a second chance. Lucien had aged in those fifteen years. He had risen high and fallen too. He was humbled by the galaxy and by his own failures and he longed for something more than he had devoted his life to. Finally, he wanted a son more than a successor. It was too late to make a son of a 25-year-old though. Darien had become a shell of something that did not know how to be a son. He lived to study and watch. He agreed all the same, however. He was Lucien's clay and he would do as he was told. What else was he for?
They no longer lived in the fringe by this point, following yet more political backbiting Lucien had moved himself, his "son" and his wealth across the galaxy to become a Technocrat in a faction now also gone to dust, the techno union. A faction with the technology and lack of ethical qualms needed to make a man a son.
To this end, Lucien contracted a scientist named Tmoxin Temi to conduct a dramatic age reduction. The procedure was successful and shortly after Lucien wiped Darien's Memories of everything that had ever occurred in his life in a feat of power he did not normally exhibit, replacing them with false memories of a happy childhood marred only by the death of his loving mother, modelled after Meret Blackmoon an old flame of Lucien's. As far as Darien knows and knew he is no older than 27 and never has been. He does however suffer frequent nightmares about his old life but never tells anyone about them as he doesn't recognise anyone in the dreams of his first childhood, not other than his father who behaved nothing like the man Darien knew in those nightmares.
Life was better then, for a few years at least. Lucien was contented in his place. Wealthy and respected he devoted himself to giving Darien a better life. He protected him and provided for his every want and yet he still kept Darien secluded away from anything else. He remembers some friends but not many from outside Lucien's staff. He went everywhere with Father and as the years turned their steady beat taht meant going to few places. Particularly as the Techno union began to fail.
The Power went.
The money followed and they stayed locked away high in the towering fortress-like mansion Lucien had built.
They held out there for a time and Lucien never really let Darien know what was going on. Sometimes Darien would just wake to find corpses in the hallway. Lucien could not hold out forever though. The banking clans wanted Lucien Cordel gone and eventually they were willing to pay a high premium to get it. They came in force the night of Darien's 18th birthday and father knew he was defeated. He gathered what little he could in a bag for Darien. The few heirlooms he had of his glory days. Then with the bag thrust from Trembling hands, Lucien sent him down a hidden passageway to the estate's spaceport.
Lucien did not follow and as the ship bearing Darien peeled away he saw the home he had known crumble to ruin. Presumably burying his father and all those many assassins. It was not enough, however. With Lucien dead, the Banking clans still hungered. He could settle nowhere long before someone came to take his life, or do him harm.
They chased him to the very edge of the known galaxy. Till there was nowhere left to run but a place taht ought not to exist. His star map had shown nothing and yet before him, he knew he was seeing a pair of moons and a planet taht looked ripe to sustain life.
Zaathru.
Even had he wished to keep running he could not. His tentative approach to the planet was ended by the loud pound of a heavy beam of … something … that knocked his ship out of the sky. It hurtled down burning up as it did and landing him in the middle of a desert. His ship was aflame and his head ringing. He could save little but a small bag of valuables taht he kept in one place for fear of losing them. Items father had died to place in his hand.
Memories.
He soon found himself set upon and though he could convince the creatures who found him, Great horned demons that they were, not to take his bag of valuables. He could not persuade them not to take him. He was conveyed with forceful persuasion to an encampment in the desert. A village of tents and cages around water. A paradise of looted goods and lost tribes. Darien had been taken by a conqueror.
A Conqueror who he found had grown too greedy in his sights. Reached too far and now he was sat atop a powderkeg. Rebellious thought fermented amongst the beings he kept as slaves. Insurrection brewed amongst his own Tribe. The one thing keeping him in the post was that all three groups failed to get along. They saw more prophets in fighting with each other over the scraps falling from his overfilled table than they did in taking the table.
Darien put an end to that. He could hear what was in their minds. There were two tribes left in some coherence amongst the slaves. Zaathri as he came to learn, meek and considered by all the proper slaves, they had been there the longest and though meek there had grown in some of them a resistance. They wanted freedom. Hungered for it. They would not fight alongside the other tribe only to become slaves again with different masters.
The other tribe made up of another group of those demon-like people, Shaal, who his captor belonged to were not willing to fight and get nothing if the Zaathri took over and besides they were much decimated. Both sides were decimated. Darien saw a commonality in them. Both sought freedom and power. Both refused to remain under the rule of the other and both feared the other would make them slaves. Both had seen the best of them killed and their tribal threads were fraying by the day. Their leaders day by day found they had less influence on their fellow tribesmen.
It was easy to draw them both to the table and convince them that they had more to gain together. A chance floating of a cord between them and his voice in their heads had convinced both peoples that he was some sort of divine being. A god they could follow. A god they had to listen to when he told them that they ought to become one tribe. That they ought to fight so that there was no Usul over them.
Fight they did.
Darien did the heaviest lifting. His father's sabre cutting through many. Something about this planet made dark urges seem to swell up in him and he felt his connection to the force more inclined to wreak harm. It culminated in the grip of his power around the warlord's throat. Choking the life from him and leaving him in a crumpled heap.
The warlord's former tribe offered trade then. Their swords his, their worship his, they named him their Usul.
He refused them. He would be no one Usul. There would be no Usul in this place from that day and so they learned to all him a Contra-Usul. The being who existed to prevent any one person from being the highest of them. Self Contradiction though that was.
He demanded a ransom for their lives too. One horn from each cut as high as they could survive and their pledge to defend his new tribe. In return, he would grant them their lives and a share of the prosperity. He took their old tribal name and culture from them and offered his own. The New Tribe the former slaves called Vasmerca.
They called him Mercurius their god of trade and Prosperity. He taught them meditation too and they called him the god of that too. The arrival at a compromise where both parties walked away having neither won nor lost.
Over time his tribe cemented itself as the facilitator of trade and of agreement. The camp he had taken grew into a settlement, a settlement into a village and a village into a city. The city of Mercuitie. Prosperity increased exponentially as with every passing day more trade began to pass through his land, encouraged by the stability he brought. That stability also made him a neutral ground for the peaceful resolution of disputes. A peace his tribe enforced with rods of iron.
The Zaathri were the first to freely engage in such resolutions but as the City grew Shaal tribes came as well. True most tribes came only when neither could afford to fight any more but it was progress. Nowadays there is relative peace in his small patch of desert. He refuses any but his Shaal guards, identified by their short horns, the right to bear arms within his city walls and few break his rules.
The occasional sacrificial execution keeps the rules fresh in the minds of visitors. Though Darien dislikes the way that ordering and seeing such things makes him feel. How it makes something in him boil and turns his calm into an urge to bring pain.
He finds being a ruler hard. It is difficult for him to be out amongst the throngs of people in the city or to talk in a booming voice. Where he can avoid it he does not stray from his palace in the city's centre. It perhaps fuels his mystique that it is rare to see him and rarer still to hear him. To have his voice in your head is a great honour. He leaves the day-to-day management to the beings he calls the co-heads of his tribe. One Zaathri and on Shaal. He exists only to handle the matters upon which they can not agree or which are deemed fitting only for a god.
Strengths and Weaknesses
- + Kind and Generous of hospitality: Given his perceived upbringing, that being a string of fake memories, Darien believes most people are at heart good and therefore tends to treat all people kindly even if public consensus is that they are undeserving, he withholds condemnation until he sees cause for it himself. This enables him to bring parties with deep-seated grievances to the table together without the fear of prejudgement.
- + Educated: Darien is no fool and has received the finest education possible, he has a sharp and scholarly mind and is hard to fool.
- +/- Just: He follows his father in regard to fairness and avoids inflicting undue harm, but if someone falls foul of his perception of what is just he will make an effort to destroy them.
- - Shy: most People scare Darien plain and simple. He is glad to be surrounded by a race that does not speak in words and another that sees more use for action. Where speaking is required he often speaks through his translator or his colleagues who help him minister the city.
- - Sheltered: Despite his education, Darien shows no hunger to expand his horizons, this is due to the fact that he had never really left the sheltered world of the upper class, all memories of pain or suffering before his father's last days had been masked from Darien and the only experience he'd had of the world outside the bubble has come from children's stories and the holo-net. He likes to linger where things are familiar and having had to get used to life on Zaathru he is keen to keep to his ordered part of it.
- - Veiled Scars: Darien has suffered a lot in his life but he doesn't remember much of that, he has forgotten his true parents and the isolation he felt when Lucien sent him to boarding school. All lost to him in the course of the age reversal which is equally fogged over to him. All of these experiences have been masked by false memories of a happy childhood planted by Lucien. Were he ever to remember the truth the trauma would likely make him go mad. He still reels from the horrors he witnessed in his father's waning days too and this gives him much to fear and makes the pull of the planet's dark nexus all the stronger on him.
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