Evitrix
Contents
Introduction
Evitrix is much like her creations: cold, mechanical, often expressionless, often ruthless. She is the strategist of her peers, concerned for logistics and numbers; for cause and effect. While the others around her quibble over philosophy and morality, or claim to know the indistinguishable truth around such affairs, Evitrix sets her sights on things both existential and immediate, her mind always whirring with possible answers to the complex issues that plague her kind. She is as detached as a God can be, but that is - perhaps - because she never wanted to be that, and because her mission is not one of receiving glory and reverence, but redeeming her people and her name.
History
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Construct
For as long as Evitrix has lived, she has never been able to forget that one moment: timeless, grim, standing in the front row of an orderly crowd, peers to each side of her in a line formation. Blood from the raised platform spattered onto her face and even sprayed into her eyes, and yet she did not flinch; did not blink. She did not move at all, retaining her poise, arms clasped together behind her back as she stood upright and tall. What Evitrix stood in the face of was the execution of her father and mentor, whose very blood smeared across her face, the intention of the ones who killed him, to remind her of her own fate if she were ever to follow his path. The purpose of her father's execution was punishment for creating a weapon of war, the greatest and most devastating weapon ever forged in the universe.
Evitrix, like her old man, is one of the greatest engineers to have ever lived. Like all Adac that reign over Atharen, she was born to an alien civilization, one eventually destroyed by the colossal Mana-Eater known as the Outsider. Evitrix was a member of an elite cabal of scientists, along with Gevala, a group that once focused their genius on generating technologies meant to slay others of their kind, only to change their focus in the face of their species' extinction. When the Outsider destroyed the Adac homeworld, rending them scattered and crippled, she devised the construction of a vessel of unbelievable might: Eridan-5, a marvel unlike any the galaxy had ever seen.
Eridan-5 was, ultimately, a last ditch effort to escape the destruction that surrounded her kind. Utilizing Quantum Theory and a crux made from refined anti-matter and Divinity, Evitrix and her engineers learned to produce a vessel that could bridge time and space, folding the layers of reality to be able to leap to any point in the universe. It was their view that by utilizing this ability, they could escape the Outsider; they could bound a distance long enough that it could never prey upon them, and in this theory the last Adac worlds invested their hope, sinking the waning remainders of their resources to enable the rapid production of this transcendent vessel. Evitrix became the hope of her kind, and when Eridan-5 was complete - and was proven to function - she was heralded as their savior. Nearly twenty million of her people funneled onto that ship, and it made its first voyage, moving through the endless dark to find a new home.
And, when it arrived, Eridan-5 was greeted by it. The Outsider. The beast swiped through the hull of the ship, sending it plummeting through space, the creature's tendrils extending out to carve through its sections like a blade. After a conflict that lasted for nine hours, the ship was completely razed, over ninety percent of the Adac on board slain in the conflict or due to the implosion of Eridan-5's energy core. Those that remained scattered across the new galaxy that surrounded them, fleeing in all directions so that the Outsider would need to hunt them one by one.
It was years after this point that Venadak found these stragglers, uniting those willing to join him in forging a new plane; a final escape from the Mana-Eater's grasp. During this time, Evitrix brooded and mourned, steeped in a confluence of regret and humiliation, lamenting her failure and blaming herself for the extinction of her people. She wept, and then eventually found herself numb of anything; numb of purpose and life, numb of any desire to escape or receive companionship. She was, in her view, the Adac's greatest failure, and it was only a matter of time before she was delivered her retribution by the Outsider's all-consuming maw.
Instead, she was found by Venadak and three others, the first to join his cause: Brazim, Y'shendra, and Saren. Evitrix was impressed by Venadak's plan and his resolve, and was persuaded that she would be a necessary component in bringing it to fruition. He did not scorn her for her failure, but praised her for the ingenuity of her vessel, and her devotion to serving the remnants of their species. His logic and charisma appealed to her, and the woman ultimately surrendered her addiction to grieving, reassembling that same poise she held as she watched her father bleed onto her ivory plate. Evitrix became one of the key components in Atharen's construction, and one of Venadak's greatest confidants.
Once Atharen was successfully forged and the fourteen remaining Adac assembled within it, Evitrix largely kept away from the mythological absurdities of her peers. She retained that she was an Adac, merely an alien species, and continued to follow their ways. The woman did not take upon the title of "God," but rather "Architect," or "Creator." While the others frolicked in their own power and divinity and eventually fell to the poison of their own arrogance, she remained sequestered within her mind-numbing purgatory, endlessly chipping away at the schematics for a new Eridan-5, and a new hope for bringing the Outsider to its knees at last.
Depiction
While many of the other Gods like to be seen as reverent, mythical beings, Evitrix prefers the regalia of an erudite sophisticate. Among all the Gods, she is the only one who continues to wear the adorned raiment of the Adac before Atharen's construction, demonstrating their old interstellar primacy. Evitrix is often difficult for people to even conceptualize, physically. She wears garments built of materials that do not exist on Atharen's plane, sleek white plate with golden lining, her hair a pale blond and often styled into a simple bun. She is often most associated with wearing gold-plated talons, which are known to be divine instruments; the Creator's Marionette, through which she assembles and operates both spirits and advanced machines.
Many of her depictions are that of a faceless woman, typically obscured by a dense, golden mask, or even a helm. Many times, she is turning her back towards the crowd facing her, her arms and legs outstretched in a way that make her appear as if walking away. Evitrix has always known to be the Adac least fond of mortals, neither despising nor lamenting them; she is ambivalent to their existence, and because of that statues and idols of her have historically been sparse.
The symbol most commonly associated with Evitrix is the gold-banded sphere, one with tiered layers with inscriptions written upon it in an alien language, the predecessor to Eldhan. Seeing as the sphere appears to move and come apart, often - in symbols of her - it is fragmented or spread out into multiple bangle-like rings, with a core of crystal locked inside.
Domains
Evitrix suits her domains well. She is the Goddess of War, and the basis for this title is that she is the most ruthlessly efficient in how she wages it. Unlike Jaxkael, Evitrix does not worry for honor, or semantics, or showmanship, or presentation. She does not need to excite the roar of a crowd, nor to feel any personal elation or thrill in the destruction of her enemies. She plans things as any heartless dictator might: with math. Evitrix focuses on the objective elements of war; how many can be killed for the least amount of resources, how their deaths might affect the morale of surrounding soldiers or regions. She is content to kill civilians if necessary, and has done so in the past. When the Gods declared war on the Unbroken Empire during the Age of Tyranny, it was Evitrix who determined their plan of action.
Evitrix quickly decided to raze Mithira, the Empire's capital province, to nothing. She launched rays from the heavens from her prototype of Eridan-5, ones which annihilated entire city districts in moments, murdering thousands every minute. When the Gods determined they would escalate the war to one of total annihilation, it took only hours for Evitrix to carpet bomb the entirety of their base of power, killing eighty million people in the process.
Her domain of Craft holds an obvious attribution. Being the greatest engineer of the Gods, Evitrix has constructed countless weapons, artifacts and even magic throughout time, and she was also the one tasked with providing the early races their initial knowledge in architecture. Evitrix is the forger of Artifice, the expert behind the construction of Necromancy's tools, and also the mastermind behind many of the complex mechanics behind Muid. Additionally, Evitrix was essential in the production of the Well of Souls, even if it was Malek's magic that ultimately bound the elements of that project together.
Tact is the final domain of Evitrix, associated with her due to her astute articulation, her mind for strategy and her awareness of others' motivations and the variables that might affect them. Evitrix is a master of misdirection. She is eloquent and unbelievably well-spoken, but is painfully difficult to acquire answers from and never blunders in her speech. She always appears to have the higher ground in any situation, finding flaws in others' rhetoric and avoiding any accountability with finely concocted jargon. Evitrix was — during her life as an Adac before the fall of their kind — a leading bureaucrat, in an arena far more intellectually demanding than the one she resides in now. Her ability to retain supremacy and to manipulate others' perception of her, even when she is proven to be deceitful, is befitting of a higher level being.
Influence
"Eridan-5 was my life's work. Without it, I am nothing. With it, I wield an Empire."
Evitrix is the greatest engineer the galaxy has ever known. Beyond innovating and improving upon already existing Adac technologies, Evitrix constructed the foundations of Atharen's World Magic, providing the blueprints for most arcane crafts as well as producing their initial instruments. She has also, of course, wrought a terrible legacy onto Atharen: she has been the orchestrator of war unlike any the planet has witnessed since her seclusion. Evitrix has directly killed more people than the rest of the Gods combined, and each time she did, she acted with a callous pragmatism suited to a creature without empathy.
Dogma
Evitrix's philosophy is heavily cited, and is one commonly found on Atharen, known as "Output Morality." It is the belief that cause and effect is the source of nature's flux, and that ultimately, impact is the basis of moral goodness. If the death of a million will save tens of millions from suffering in later generations, the choice is obvious. Ironically, the Griscian Commonwealth is a key adopter of this philosophy, even if they claim it has no connection to Evitrix or her faith.
Many of Evitrix's perspectives are difficult to distill due to her poor relationship with mortals and her very closed inner circle, but several Draedan from other Gods who have interacted with her in the past have published her perspectives in chronicles and philosophical books. She is largely considered to be the master of the ideologies connected to the 'will to power,' a leading inspiration for Kyrikain as he designed the mortal mind to pursue its own self-sustenance and to achieve success, rather than stagnation.
Notable Religious Factions
Ordinators
The Ordinators are a secretive group founded by one of the few people to ever fall into Evitrix's good graces. Yanea Morell, an architect from Ectahl-Prior (now Daravin), founded the Ordinators with the express intention of helping advance Atharen's knowledge of engineering. She relocated to Dagrun some time near the end of the Age of Tyranny, and within Dagrun the foundations of the Ordinators were built.
The Ordinators often possess a Blight, known as Adjunct. The Adjunct are mechanical-mortal hybrids with a lethal effectiveness in combat, seeking to serve Evitrix by providing her with relics and materials necessary to complete her creation of the new, superior version of Eridan-5.
The Presidium
When one first enters the Presidium, they will emerge from a strange aberration in physics; a spiral-like waterfall, one which appears to arc and bend around in reality, actively twisting and reshaping as transparent gold and violet crystals briefly appear in the air around its edges, dissipating shortly after. Rather than the water dousing the individual as they emerge, it will simply appear to store and encode their information, acting as a disassembler and allowing them to teleport to a different location within the realm should they so desire.
After the initial awe of the waterfall recedes, the entrant will look around them to see a number of things: a beautifully maintained garden, layered with bushes of flowers never before seen on their planet, often uniquely colored or translucent. They will see a white courtyard of impressive scale, spanning for hours with excellently designed architecture throughout, Draedan and Noradac gathered around tables with tea to discuss and formulate blueprints. As they look further out, one thing will be incredibly clear: they are within the hull of an absolutely colossal ship, something so truly epic in scale as to defy their understanding of reality. The Presidium is the garden and courtyard of the new Eridan-5, a slate black vessel capable of housing entire civilizations. As they look along the edges of the ship, incomplete in its construction, they will see Noradac ascending throughout the sky, welding holographic blurring into physical reality, as if forging something real and concrete from nothing.
At the very end of the Presidium lies its overlook, from where one can view its massive weapons: eight artillery easily the size of a large castle each, the tools utilized to annihilate the greatest Empire Atharen has ever known. Near the very back of the Presidium looms Evitrix's tower and command center, a multi-winged spire of sleek metal, with shifting, opalescent glass along its mystifying edges. The Presidium has been seen by few in all of Atharen's history, but those who have witnessed and recorded it have never been believed.
Demigods
Asexual and dispassionate, Evitrix has no Draedan, and likely never will.
