| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Raest

Page history last edited by Grebote 13 years, 6 months ago

Raest

 

Name: Raest

Pseudonyms: None

Age: 300 000+ years (about 300 000 years were spent in stasis)

Race: Jaghut

Appearance: See below

Warren: Omtose Phellack

Further info: A Jaghut Tyrant imprisoned by his own people under what would become the Gadrobi Hills outside of Darujhistan. He was freed by the Malazan Empire in a gambit to capture the city, which failed. He was destroyed and ensnared by the burgeoning Finnest House, where he remains at present.


 

Raest, a Jaghut Tyrant  - (GotM, Dramatis Personae)

 

"A tall figure ..., black leather and banded iron in tatters, the dull gleam of snapped ribs showing through torn, green skin. A face in shadows, pitted eye-sockets, a broad slash of mouth hinting at up-thrust tusks." (TtH, ?, p.?)

 


 

His Chaining

 

"Had they not joined in chaining Raest, they would all - Imass and Jaghut both - have found themselves kneeling before that Tyrant. A temporary truce of expedience." - (MoI, UK mmpb, p.26)

 


 

His Re-emergence

 

"Struggling in his mother’s wake, it was Raest’s first lesson in power. In the hunt for domination that would shape his life, he saw the many ways of the wind – its subtle sculpting of stone over hundreds and then thousands of years, and its raging gales that flattened forests – and found closest to his heart the violent power of the wind’s banshee fury.

Raest’s mother had been the first to flee his deliberate shaping of power. She’d denied him to his face, proclaiming the Sundering of Blood and thus cutting him free. That the ritual had broken her he disregarded. It was unimportant. He who would dominate must learn early that those resisting his command should be destroyed. Failure was her price, not his.

While the Jaghut feared community, pronouncing society to be the birthplace of tyranny – of the flesh and the spirit – and citing their own bloody history as proof, Raest discovered a hunger for it. The power he commanded insisted upon subjects. Strength was ever relative, and he could not dominate without the company of the dominated.

At first he sought to subjugate other Jaghut, but more often than not they either escaped him or he was forced to kill them. Such contests held only momentary satisfaction. Raest gathered beasts around him, bending nature to his will. But nature withered and died in bondage, and so found an escape he could not control. In his anger he laid waste to the land, driving into extinction countless species. The earth resisted him, and its power was immense. Yet it was directionless and could not overwhelm Raest in its ageless tide. His was a focused power, precise in its destruction and pervasive in its effect.

Then into his path came the first of the Imass, creatures who struggled against his will, defying slavery and yet living on. Creatures of boundless, pitiful hope. For Raest, he had found in them the glory of domination, for with each Imass that broke he took another. Their link with nature was minimal, for the Imass themselves played the game of tyranny over their lands. They could not defeat him.

He fashioned an empire of sorts, bereft of cities yet plagued with the endless dramas of society, its pathetic victories and inevitable failures. The community of enslaved Imass thrived in this quagmire of pettiness. They even managed to convince themselves that they possessed freedom, a will of their own that could shape destiny. They elected champions. They tore down their champions once failure draped its shroud over them. They ran in endless circles and called it growth, emergence, knowledge. While over them all, a presence invisible to their eyes, Raest flexed his will. His greatest joy came when his slaves proclaimed him god – though they knew him not – and constructed temples to serve him and organized priesthoods whose activities mimicked Raest’s tyranny with such cosmic irony that the Jaghut could only shake his head.

It should have been an empire to last for millennia, and its day of dying should have been by his own hand, when he at last tired of it. Raest had never imagined that other Jaghut would find his activities abhorrent, that they would risk themselves and their own power on behalf of these short-lived, small-minded Imass. Yet what astonished Raest more than anything else was that when the Jaghut came they came in numbers, in community. A community whose sole purpose of existence was to destroy his empire, to imprison him.

He had been unprepared.

The lesson was learned, and no matter what the world had becomesince that time, Raest was ready for it. His limbs creaked at first, throbbing with dull aches bridged by sharp pangs. The effort of digging himself from the frozen earth had incapacitated him for a time, but finally he felt ready to walk the tunnel that opened out into a new land.

Preparation. Already he’d initiated his first moves. He sensed that others had come to him, had freed the path of Omtose Phellack wards and seals. Perhaps his worshippers remained, fanatics who had sought his release for generations, and even now awaited him beyond the barrow.

The missing Finnest would be his first priority. Much of his power had been stored within the seed, stripped from him and stored there by the Jaghut betrayers. It had not been carried far, and there was nothing that could prevent his recovering it. Omtose Phellack no longer existed in the land above – he could feel its absence like an airless void. Nothing could oppose him now.

Preparation. Raest’s withered, cracked face twisted into a savage grin, his lower tusks splitting desiccated skin. The powerful must gather other power, subjugate it to their own will, then direct it unerringly. His moves had already begun.

He sloshed through the slush now covering the barrow’s muddy floor. Before him rose the slanted wall that marked the tomb’s barrier. Beyond the lime-streaked earth waited a world to be enslaved. Raest gestured and the barrier exploded outward. Bright sunlight flared in the clouds of steam rolling around him, and he felt waves of cold, ancient air sweeping past him.

The Jaghut Tyrant walked into the light." - (GotM, UK TPB, p.435-6)

 

"Raest spread his arms wide and unleashed his Warren. His flesh split as power flowed into him. His arms shed skin like ash. He both felt and heard hills crack all around him, the snapping of stone, the sundering of crags. To all sides the horizons blurred as dust curtained skyward." - (GotM, UK TPB, p.438)

 


 

Servant of the Azath

 

"I am Jaghut. Raest, once a tyrant, now a prisoner." - (TtH, ?, p.?)

 
  

 

Return to Dramatis Personae.

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.