Unidentified Flying Object

Some more on his personal lore, pre Zariman accident and before he ended up in Duviri:

He grew into the craft beneath the weight of expectation. There were no praises for adequate performance. When he failed or struggled, the punishments were worse than physical. Weeks without acknowledgment, or in the worst case scenario, humiliation amongst his peers and masters. Left to his own devices and no moral guidance, his hunger for recognition grew until it became unsatiable. To feed it he learned to twist himself, emotionally first, morally later.

Kryseos witnessed the stripping of souls from children chosen as vessels, how could he not, he was directly assisting in it. During his younger years there were doubts. Moral quarrels.

But his compassion was mocked until he buried it. His concern was scorned until he cut it away like the bodies he helped craft so masterfully. Empathy was a weakness, they could use him, hurt him, manipulate him through it. And as he cut away the feelings that had made him human, he didn’t realise that his soul had been left empty and starving, just as easy to manipulate by his superiors, by the love- no- in his mind recognition he so craved.

By the time he had risen to competence within his ranks, he had become a creature of control. The last thing he had left to himself. Control. Over others. In a sad twist of irony, he could not control his own emotions.

Selfish, calculating, and volatile, unable to lash out at those who had caused him his aches, he turned to project them onto subordinates through cruelty, be it physical or psychological.

For centuries he clawed his way upward, never quite the favorite, always nearly indispensable. One faithful day, came the novice who shattered his ambitions of ever rising to the top. A young, bright noble, who claimed the status he had bled centuries to approach within a mere year. Not for Kryseos’s lack of skill, no. He simply had “better blood”.

Something in him finally snapped. There was no cunning murder, no careful strategy, no manipulation or plan. He lashed out like a starved rabid dog, let go from its cage after hundreds of years. He killed the boy plainly in cold blood and made no effort to hide it.

He was imprisoned, but where there should have been a trial followed by execution, were only hushed whispers. Tuvul, his ever righteous Executor father with whom he had never even exchanged a single glance or word in person, pulled the strings and freed him from the grasp of death. Not out of love, but out of convenience, because it just so happened that the executor needed a way to bless his newest project: the Zariman 10-0.

Kryseos was assigned to the newly built spaceship as a kind of ornamental penance: a status symbol, a debt owed, and above all else, far away. Let him join the colony into the depths of space, raise the crew’s morale, for their benevolent patron Tuvul’s son was with them.

The Zariman Accident and its aftermath in Duviri:

When the Zariman attempted the jump and failed, Kryseos had been standing close to center of this disaster. Not only was the ship around him twisted and ripped, but so was he. One half became what he had longed to be: the Operator. A fragment of him unburdened by the hundreds of years of Orokin neglect and failed ambitions. A second chance he had manifested within the void. The other half was himself as he was, stuffed with centuries of emotional detritus and societal trauma. He wasn’t so lucky. He was dragged screaming into Duviri.

At first Duviri was his own little hell, sculpted from his own mind. It taunted him, mocked him, laughed when he begged it to stop. When he tried to silence it, it refused to die. Any attempts of leaving, sent him plummeting down into the abyss of his own emotional vitriol.

He struck at the creations inside Duviri with rage and they struck harder. They knew how to fight, he didn’t. He was an artist. An artist of bodies and flesh but one nonetheless. Kryseos had to learn to fight, just as he had learned to hold a scalpel, to survive and to drag himself out of the dust and violent emotions this pocket realm was reflecting back at him.

This torment continued for centuries more. Storms of sorrow, tempests of paranoia, cycles of envy, rage, and arrogance. He was used to those from his normal day to day life back before he got sucked into the void. But... Occasionally he felt joy, the joy of creation, when his muse arose and his soul felt lighter. He created golden monuments, gilded some of Duviri’s friendlier denizens with ornaments to match their bodies. He worked on himself, superficially at least, coating his limbs in gold and twisting them to match his form. It symbolised power to him, he could do what he wanted with his body, metal was harder than his flesh. Ironically, gold was one of the softest metals.

Empathy once felt, is hard to forget

During a particularly bleak spiral of sorrow, drowned in thunderous grief of what he could have been and everything he’d lost, Kryseos heard a child crying. Not one of the inhabitants in Duviri, not a monster or some twisted manifestation. He saw himself, as he had once been: small, alone and unloved. Full of potential no one had cared enough to nourish, left to rot in the emotional prison he was soon going to lock himself into.

The sight pierced him like a thousand knives. His hands began to shake, his vision darkened, he couldn’t breathe. Kryseos didn’t know if the loud thunder he heard came from the clouds in the storms above, or from within his own ears. The child cried. He had to hold him. He couldn’t turn away like he had done every time before.

He sank to his knees, gathered the trembling shade in his arms and wept into its shoulder. His tears streamed harder than the rain hailing upon them. His body shook. So much he had pushed deep down, and now the floodgates were open. For the first time in ages, his emotions did not need to be weaponized to be felt. He cried and cried until the storms threatened to flood Thrax’s castle. Until he was too tired to cry any longer. His eyelids felt heavy, and so did he. He closed his eys for a few moments…

When he opened them the storm passed, and this time it did not collapse into another cruel cycle. The skies cleared up, he felt lighter, relieved. Kryseos had allowed himself to feel the empathy he had long discarded and he didn’t feel weaker for it. On the contrary-..

Slowly he discovered that Duviri offered something Orokin society never had: choice. No superiors to impress, no parents whose opinions mattered, no ladder to climb. Only himself. He could choose what to feel, when to feel it.

With no one left to forbid or mock his tenderness, he began to learn it, albeit reluctantly. He owed it to himself first, the rest of the world would come later. And from that fragile seed of self-acceptance, at last, he felt the possibility of growth. Not of rank, but of the heart.

And then the New War happened, proceed as planned.

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