The Seat of Ruin
Deep within the hellscape of @Sekharos, in a citadel hall that predates every civilization now walking the galaxy, @The Burning Throne awaits. It is a slab of jagged obsidian, stark and unadorned, set upon a dais ringed by skeletal metallic appendages—the remnants of ancient @Kthon machinery that forged it as a weapon to rival gods. Fragmented legends, known only to a vanishing few, hold that @The Burning Throne was cursed by @Arakhor himself during the age of the Aulorean Ascendancy, so that any mortal who attempts to claim its power is wracked by nethereal fire and lightning, incinerated body and soul. Only the true Lord of Ruin may wield it. All others are destroyed.
@Arakhor, in his new incarnation, came to @Sekharos in the years following Operation Fall-Ruin and his false death. He had wandered the galaxy's forgotten edges, following visions he could not name and could not resist. The pull led him here, to a world that had waited for him since before his current body was born. He stood before @The Burning Throne as a man recognizing something he had lost before he was alive.
The claiming was an ordeal measured in hours. The fire took him. The lightning took him. The citadel hall blazed with blue-white light as the @The Burning Throne attempted to do what it had been built to do. And @Arakhor Reborn burned, and bled, and refused to die. When it ended, his body was charred to the bone in places, his armor fused to his flesh, his eyes alight with a crimson luminescence that has never since dimmed. He had withstood @The Burning Throne. Whether this constituted recognition or merely a temporary armistice remains unclear—to @The Burning Throne, and perhaps to him as well.
The Fire and the Power
Before @The Burning Throne, before the @Ashen Remnant, before the name @Arakhor settled into his mind like a fact rather than a hope, there were only the visions. Sigreon Calath - the man who had once been @Arakhor the Lord of Ruin, and who would soon take up that mantle again - had been forged in the crucible of the War of the Chosen; a psion of unprecedented destructive potential, yet from his earliest years he was haunted by something beyond the war, beyond the Unity, beyond the present age entirely. Fragments of another existence pressed at the edges of his consciousness—a hall of twelve, a golden empire spanning the galaxy, a throne of obsidian, and a death that he defied.
These visions were not merely dreams. They were imperatives. While others saw him as the Unity's most lethal weapon, he understood himself as something else: a vessel waiting to be filled, a king in exile, a @Lord of Aulor who had not yet remembered how to be one. This obsession consumed him long before he had a name for it. It drove him to feign his own death during Operation Fall-Ruin, to abandon the only comrades he had ever known, to scour the galaxy's forgotten edges in search of a world he had never visited but recognized instantly upon arrival. @The Burning Throne was not merely a discovery. It was a homecoming—the first moment in his current life when the vision and the reality aligned. And when the fire took him, and the lightning scoured him, and @The Burning Throne fought him as it had fought every other soul that had ever dared to sit upon it, he did not resist. He welcomed it. The agony was proof that what he sought was real.
For @Arakhor Reborn today, to sit upon @The Burning Throne is to be unmade and remade continuously. Nethereal fire scours flesh to ash even as biomancy restores it. Lightning arcs across the obsidian surface and converges on the seated figure, charring tissue, boiling blood, cracking bone. The agony is absolute—a price that would destroy any other living being in seconds. @Arakhor endures it. His body regenerates as fast as it is destroyed, a cycle of ruin and renewal that has continued for decades without pause.
Seated upon @The Burning Throne, his power and reach within the nethereal becomes monstrous. His consciousness expands across entire sectors of space, touching the minds of agents scattered throughout the warring successor states. He perceives eddies of probability that lesser psions glimpse only in fragments of augury. Entire theaters of the @Ashen Remnant's covert war are orchestrated from this single point—the god at the center of the web, coordinating a galaxy-spanning campaign without ever leaving the citadel hall. @The Burning Throne makes him something approaching what he once was. Without it, he remains among the most powerful psions alive—but finite, diminished, a shadow of the @Lord of Aulor he claims to be.
He rarely rises anymore. Not because he cannot—when he stands, he remains a towering force of devastation—but because rising means severance. @The Burning Throne has become the organ through which he breathes his own divinity. Without it, he is incomplete.
The Throne's Toll
Endless Unity biomedical science can restore virtually any trauma. Limbs are regrown in hours. Fourth-degree burns are routine. Soldiers pulled from battlefields as shattered husks return to duty within days. Every disease, every defect, every frailty that once defined mortality has been cured for centuries. Contemporary technology allows this to be done easily, to say nothing of the possibilities provided by the nethereal arts of biomancy.
The damage inflicted by @The Burning Throne can be healed, and @Arakhor does heal it—tissue by tissue, organ by organ, session after session. But @The Burning Throne never stops. Each time he sits upon it, the fire scours him anew. Each time he rises, he must begin the work of restoration again. The intervals between sessions are too short, the damage too regular, his biomantic reserves too drained by the demands of @The Burning Throne itself. He heals, but never completely. He heals, but the next session is always hours away. Over decades, this grinding cycle has left him in a state of perpetual incompletion—always mending, never whole.
He lives confined within his modified @Overlord-Pattern Battlesuit, the exosuit's internal atmosphere pressurized and sterile. His lungs, repeatedly flash-charred and then repaired only to be charred again, struggle with unprocessed air. His skin is a shifting patchwork of fresh grafts and fresh burns. His blood requires constant filtration. His digestive tract has been rebuilt so many times that nutrition is delivered intravenously - or foregone entirely. He does not sleep—the repeated neural trauma has been healed but never given time to settle, leaving natural sleep cycles replaced by meditative trances.
To an outsider, @Arakhor is a body locked in a war of attrition with the instrument that empowers him. He endures. The flesh fails and heals and fails again, but neither the flesh nor the machine that sustains it constitutes his true self. That self is older and independent of the biology that contains it. The sacrifice is willingly made. The Lord of Ruin cannot be destroyed by any fire in this cycle or the last. Whether this conviction is truth or the necessary fiction of a man who has given everything else away remains a question he does not permit.
The Reprieve
What draws him to @The Burning Throne is not merely power. It is memory. Each session upon the obsidian slab becomes an excavation of his own fractured identity. Fragments of the past cycle crowd his consciousness: the twelve Lords arrayed in their glory, the long golden age before the fall, the War of Wrath, the death that should have been final. He was the Lord of Ruin then, and @The Burning Throne allows him to remember what that meant—never completely, but enough to know what was lost. Enough to burn with the knowledge. He cannot stop seeking these descents. He cannot let go of a past that predates every living civilization by a hundred million years.
The agony serves another function. When the fire takes him and his consciousness is forced into the narrow channel between destruction and regeneration, there is no room for anything else. The weight of what he has done—the betrayals, the manipulations, the decades of engineering the deaths of those who trusted him—recedes. The magnitude of what he still intends to do becomes abstract, manageable. @The Burning Throne burns away everything except the immediate, eternal present of suffering and power. In this sense, the torment is not merely a price. It is, in a twisted way, a reprieve.
The Unanswered Question
@The Burning Throne has grown more resistant over the decades. Its flames burn hotter. The lightning strikes with greater precision, probing for vulnerabilities it has not yet located. The escalation is constant, insistent, as if @The Burning Throne is still testing—still trying to determine whether the being who sits upon it is its true master or merely something that has proven remarkably difficult to kill. @Arakhor rationalizes this: he is pushing deeper into @The Burning Throne's mysteries, demanding more of its power, and the resistance is proportional to the reward.
He does not entertain the alternative.
He calls this communion—the alignment of mortal flesh with divine essence, suffering as the necessary bridge between two states of being. The proof is that he survives what no other being in the galaxy can survive. @The Burning Throne destroys everyone else. It does not destroy him. This, to @Arakhor Reborn, is evidence enough.
Those lieutenants of the @Ashen Remnant permitted entry to the Throne Room do not understand what they are seeing. @The Burning Throne is their master's own relic, cursed by his own hand in an age before memory, and yet it burns him as if he were an intruder. The fire, the lightning, the charred flesh—this is not submission. This is resistance. They have been taught that @The Burning Throne recognizes its true Lord, that the agony is communion, that survival proves divinity. Yet the Throne attacks him, as if he is an impostor.
And yet and he does not die, as the impostor should - as any creature of this reality should, when wracked by such extreme forces.
This should settle the question, and it does not. It leaves it hanging in the air of the throne room, unasked and unanswered, and the reality it gestures toward is more fearsome than either answer alone.
@Malevanthor Abrenach, mastermind of the @Ashen Remnant, when he visits the throne room to deliver reports on the order's progress, observes the charred flesh and the steady crimson eyes and the tremor in the hands of his comrade. He knows @The Burning Throne is consuming @Arakhor by increments. He knows that, at the same time, @Arakhor will not endure without it. He files this away in the cold calculus of his own designs and says nothing.