The Archivist

The Fallen Team Sergeant

Hall Of Fame!

Survival - 9 Wins!

Brutal - 2 Fatalities

AFFILIATION

Alignment: Villain

Team: The Fallen

VITAL STATS

Strength: Weak

Agility: Weak

Mind: Supreme

Body: Superior

RECORD

Personal Wins: 9

Personal Losses: 3

Rhekarid

There is great power in secrets. Knowledge flows free throughout intelligent life like blood, but secrets stop and change the flow and decide who thrives on that blood and who withers without it. Secrets give the weak structure to walk on and the strong a system with which to manipulate them, secrets define the very difference between gods and mortals. A god must never let its followers see its face, hear its voice, know its wishes, feel its breath or walk in its temple. To show man your throne is to tempt him to rip it away from you. To show man your body is to reveal to him that you have a heart that can be cut out. A god is not a god unless it is a secret whether it truly exists at all, because secrets are the impenetrable wall that keep your lessers beneath you.~Once I had a people, who had a god, which gave them order. In my lust for secrets I carved out the path between us for all to see and my people followed, gradually closing the distance until there was no god, only a stranger whose flaws and similarities were laid to bare. Reverence failed, order followed, god perished, and my people fell into a vacuum of understanding that consumed them all. All, except me, because I knew the secret to that anarchy and had power over it. I had killed my people, but there was no need for guilt. Only I was left to know that secret and its power could not be wielded against me.~I came to the Fallen because I wanted their secrets and they could not turn me away because they wanted mine. Over time I became the keeper of the archive of secrets, behind and beneath and away from the library where common knowledge was shared with common minds. I understood the nature of secrets, and could be trusted as far as the lie of that trust to keep them from those who could not have them. Not all of the secrets, not the deepest and rarest, but over more time still I have blurred those lines and taken ever more of what I want. In the darkness of my archives, that which is secret is mine alone, and in that darkness I am god.

I keep my archives far from unwelcome light, and my soul in the same place. In the cold silence of the void there is no place for genesis; no new light, no new life, no new knowledge. It is here that secrets are greatest, in the darkness where they can be filed and controlled without ever being tainted by discovery or change, where power over what is becomes power absolute because there is nothing else to control. It is cold, too cold for passion of the heart or bending of the mind. It is law, black and unrelenting, the secrets of its nuances mine to write.

The Secret of Light

     Fire: Standard

 

In my archives, there is no light but one, and that one is mine because to a keeper of secrets there are none more dangerous and important than light. The secret of light is in its place at the beginning of all things, in the spark of life and the corridor of death, in the burning of knowledge and the illumination of secrets. In my time in the Fallen Tower I commissioned a torch that burns eternally, and keep it with me at all times. Without light my archives cannot be read or its secrets stolen, and none can bring light into them without my knowing. It is a small thing within the limited space and influence of the archives, but still a reflection of the greater truth behind the secret; without light there is nothing, and within nothing is the security to define the truth.

 

The Secret of Life

     Matter Animation: Ultimate

 

Many, many civilizations have wondered at the meaning of life. Some of the more foolish ones have devoted their existences to it. There is no mystery here, people are merely too arrogant to accept that they do not HAVE a greater meaning, that they are simple beings with the simple purpose to live for the sake of living, to eat and copulate and continue the species, no more than any other form of life. The true question is the secret of life. If both can walk and talk and makes decisions, what makes one alive and the other a machine? If one can die and be resuscitated and become alive again, why is the inanimate that is given function not alive? The answer to this is born from the secret of light, from the glow that flickers into existence and gradually fades in the period of time called a lifespan, which makes something truly alive. With the power of this secret it is no great thing to bring life into the flames of my torch, which I use to form my basic servants. They aid me in maintaining the archives, and by embracing the unwelcome in the light of their searing flesh.

 

The Secret of Death

     Force Field: Superior

 

At the end of light waits death, the period when one light ends and another begins. The secret of eternal life is not to keep your light from ever burning out, but to prevent another from ever igniting. The secret of death is that it is nothing but a form of ignorance that overtakes when illumination comes to a sudden end, the ceasing of a constant input of information, and that it has no power over those who understand it. I died long ago when I decided that I had more important things to do with my time than stay alive. There are some who come seeking my knowledge that are surprised to see the archives maintained by what they ignorantly see as a corpse and its pet flames, and others who come to steal my secrets that are surprised to see that a knife through the heart is not, in fact, an answer to their goal. They do not understand that my fire, and my secrets in the dark, are the only light and life I need.

 

The Secret of Secrets

     Telepathy: Supreme

 

What separates a secret from knowledge, what gives it power, is in the number of people who know it. A single gun becomes the most dangerous object in existence if only one person in the world knows how to fire it. That more that understand its function, the greater its influence dwindles. Secrets channel their impact through the forbidding of knowledge; steal another man's secrets, and his power over you vanishes. Become the arbiter of such power and you are untouchable. I maintain the Fallen archives because while I share my secrets with those of the ranking to receive them, they must pay a terrible price to hear them, whether they know the true cost or not. I deal only in knowledge not meant for others, and I must be given as much as I release. Secrets cannot be kept from me, and with each I take my own position is made stronger, whether by giving myself power or robbing it from another. The tower is rich with the forbidden, and as long as it remains thus I will keep its secrets, my secrets, faithfully.

 

The Secret of Dust

     Decay: Supreme

 

Between all things is a transition, a time when they are both or neither. As a life ends, its corpse becomes new life for others, but before then it is dust. As a secret passes hands, for a brief instant it belongs to nobody, and in that ignorance is dust. As power inevitably destroys everything around it until it too is extinguished by the vacuum of its own creation, the dust that remains is all that stands of what once was. Dust is the Empty, the Absence, the Worthless, not mere particulate matter but the dried out abomination of nothing. Dust is all you have left when every last secret has been extracted. All things must have some sort of meaning to go on, even if the only meaning is the need for base kinetic energy to move forward. When even that is gone, it crumbles and can never be rebuilt. This is the ultimate fate for one such as me: myself, and the dust of all I have taken, eternally alone in stagnance. Perhaps in another time, I might have seen such a path as sad. Perhaps, but my heart turned to dust long ago.

 

The Secret of Time

     Teleportation: Standard

 

There is a certain irony lost on many, to be an immortal surrounded by time travelers. I have watched them come and go through the blackened halls of this tower, from the rare masters of time who have eons in place of blood to the childish pretenders who think themselves above their station because some crude machine has fallen into their lap. They are a sad and pathetic lot, every one of them, running in circles through a hall of mirrors and desperately smashing their every reflection, never realizing that only they are real. There is no time. No grand and flowing web of fate for them to travel as they wish. For every possibility, what might or could have been, there is another mirror, another dimension in which that thing is real, but it is not time. Maybe those shards reflect a thing a hundred years past or yet to come, but they are not time. One might walk from one mirror to another, into worlds where they are here instead of there, but that does not make them eternal. Time is but a word for those who fear running out of it.