Melark the Great sat out beyond the confines of his tent, his eyes glued upwards towards the heavens. He did not speak a word, nor did he make a single sound beyond his quiet breathing, and if you were not aware as to what he was actually doing you might have thought that he was stargazing. This, however, would not be further from the truth. He looked up to the night sky, covered in stars that twinkled as they stood alongside the brilliant full moon and cursed himself and his foolishness. He was guilty of one crime over all others, a crime worse than the murder, rape, vandalism, torture and other unspeakable acts that he had committed against the Solusand Dominion and its people.

That sin was the sin of simply knowing too much.

He had been a fool to leave his tribe during his youth to go on a grand adventure to discover the people and places of the world and take from them what he could. He had been a fool to believe that the old madmen that he had slaughtered were protecting trinkets and baubles that were only rumored to be cursed. He had been a fool to place upon his body those objects, for when he placed them upon his form his eyes were opened to an unspeakable truth, and they could never be blind to it ever again.

He knew what the stars and moon truly were, as he also knew what the sun that his people worshipped was as well. But he was not foolish enough to divulge such information to his people; he had a great many experiences where the assassins sent by the being that he referred to as ‘The True Ruler’ made attempts on his life. These assassins were potent, and what was worse was that only their target could see or sense them. They would attack at random and, more often than not, very inopportune times and move to kill, regarding their own bodies as expendable in the extreme.

He had been able to hold his own for a while, but then in his sleep The True Ruler contacted him. He was unable to withstand the power of the entity that was now the one who held the noose around his neck, and he had no other option but to become a semi-willing servant of this powerful and unspeakable being. This being that called itself Thiewahr’din opened his eyes to the truth of reality, and this was what ultimately tipped Melark over into his new persona. Through the awakening he had been given, he realized that a new threat was about to be unleashed upon the world, a foe that could quite possibly be the end of his people. Thus, he petitioned his new god for aid, and the aid he received was both great and terrible.

A subliminal power, sourced from the true god of this world, surged out from within him and washed over all the tribes of his people. With that surge coinciding with the broader and more widely felt one from one of the Human Kingdoms, Melark’s general personality subsumed that of almost the whole of his people without any person being any the wiser. They were now bound to his will, at least until he died, but while they now shared his views on their old foe, they were still mostly independent.

This would change when the second of his new god’s gifts was delivered to his doorstep by the same impossible assassins that had tried to kill him many times before. These… objects were unholy creations that tore at the minds of all that beheld them, and not even Melark was immune to this fact.

Now, as he gazed up at the fake night sky, he once again came to terms with a simple and undeniable truth.

He and his people were slowly but surely becoming nothing more than puppets for the true god of this damned world to toy with as it liked. He had already felt his will occasionally slacking and the blind antagonistic malice towards the Solusand Dominion possessed by his god take over. In fact, it was becoming more and more common for him to find entire hours or even days of his life missing from his memories. He would wake up, black out, and suddenly be surrounded by the dead bodies of people he was raised to hate. And, oddly enough, he was liking it.

These objects were letting him and his people claim what was rightfully theirs, and his eyes being opened made him realize just how little his victims truly mattered in the grand scheme of things. He no longer needed to care for his own people either. Why spare the slightest bit of sympathy for a mere doll that could be erased at any given moment by a being more inclined to keep the world stable than care even the smallest bit for those that served it?

He was about to call it a night when his god’s ‘voice’ screamed at him in its otherworldly tongue. He could not understand the words, but he could easily understand the meaning of the high-pitched screeching noise that a certain other person would call a mix of binary and the old 90s-era AOL Online internet connection sound.

Someone had destroyed one of the objects. Someone had given the enemy the room to move that he was trying to remove. Melark rose to his feet and turned his head off towards the distance. His Rhynalont (Think an ungodly fusion between an Ankylosaurus, a Rhino, a Camel and an African Elephant) would take him directly to the place where that foe stood, and he would use his God-given might to smash that interloper to bits. Mounting up, the master of the desert peoples beckoned his fellows to follow him into battle. They would travel through the night to reach their foe, but they would be far from prepared to meet it if they did not use a more sinister means to deal with it.

Melark sent a subliminal command out to his people, and they acted upon it. The objects they had with them were being moved, and once they had been repositioned the fool would be caught in overlapping areas of effect. What strength it had mustered up till that point would be stripped from it, and then…

Then Melark would dedicate the bastard’s soul to his god before ending the mongrel’s life then and there.