Kalar Cethegus
It’s uncertain what Cethegus was before. Something of a mad scientist, probably, and it’s assumed that he was carried back into the Drovinain Reaches in a raid. Or perhaps he went hunting for revenge. Or maybe it all started beforehand, when he was truly alive. His history is a secret to most of D'hennex. The truth is a mix of all of the above.
While the Kalar’s former name has been lost to history, parts of his story have been able to be pieced together. He was once the scion of a rich merchant clan. Trading was meaningless to him, though, it bored him to tears. Allowing his family’s managers to handle the business, he adventured. Gaining power and fighting prowess, he eventually discovered the joys of technology, having come across a few examples of it in his travels. He was intrigued, and took them back to his family’s lands.
Digging in, he discovered the way that things worked, but was not limited by ‘science,’ as he didn’t know the rules to limit himself. And so the magical or perhaps mental powers that he had trained while he was adventuring were refocused from combat to construction. It started out innocently enough, creating small little clockwork robots to do chores. Building things that would allow him to travel further, faster.
But it was never far enough, never smart enough. The devices he made all ran either by large levers as controls, or doing simple, pre-programmed tasks. They were useful for only one thing, at one place, and that was it. People started to talk, he was wasting the family fortunes, and so it was that he was removed from his place, toppled in favor of a greedy cousin, and sent to make his way in the world, and to take his junk with him.
And so he did. He discovered the ways that people could be mentally bent to the will of a power user. He learned all that he could of this, though he didn’t care to hold humans hostage. The flesh was weak, after all. And so he started experimenting to change this. Replacing an arm here, a leg there, a heart or maybe a lung, he discovered how the body worked, and was able to improve it.
He was still doing well, mostly, even if some of his experiments weren’t on willing subjects. But what he was doing was deemed necromancy, and he was chased off, his subjects destroyed, barely escaping to Drovina with his life. Things went downhill from there, as he discovered the joys of necromancy. No longer did he need to find willing subjects, he was able to lash parts to corpses and animate them. Make them move, make them live again, better than they were before. As he researched, the idea that he could take a dead body and animate it with magic and machinery turned to the idea that perhaps he could use a live soul to animate dead machinery.
And so, raiding over the borders, he took any people he could find. Stole them away on the back of his metal-meat beasts. Eventually he discovered the secret that skyrocketed him to Kalar status. He could remove the soul of a living being and use it to give life to his creations. No longer did the meat and metal monstrosities need to be controlled by his massive mental and magical powers, but they could think and function on their own. The green goup that he created from removing a soul granted his beasts a sick facsimile of life, but it allowed him to carve out an empire, granting his favored ‘sons’ power, and setting them up against each other. For only the strongest would be allowed to march to war with him to take over the entire world, and even if their soldier fell, so what? It was just more meat for the grinder. War machines were built from bodies and metal. The common soldiers were upgraded and the weapons of war grew in size from man-like creatures that were 7 feet tall to giant building sized walkers. All powered by the souls of the damned.
The Kalar sat back and orchestrated these wars, pitting one general against another, delighting in their triumphs as well as their failures. Experimenting on his minions wasn’t enough, however, and as the years passed he turned his attentions to his own body. He’s more machine now than man, ruling his lands from atop his black tower. These are all bits of legend and hearsay, of course, the truth known only to the Kalar and perhaps some of his top lieutenants