arian was an orphan. His parents had emigrated from Earth, that ancient and hallowed mother world of Mankind, when he was yet barely conceived. They had embarked aboard a wandering star merchant’s ship toward Epaphus, the windy third moon of the gas giant Thoriam in the Epsilon Eridani System. But fifteen years into it’s long journey across the vast, black abyss that separates the stars, a malfunction occurred in the ship’s hibernation units. And when the cranky, old vessel arrived at Epaphus, the receivers there found Darian’s parents, as well as the rest of the passengers and crew, dead. They did, however, find one passenger who, although the errant hibernation unit had failed to preserve her, did manage to preserve the unborn child in her womb. The scrupulous Epaphians, deeply religious since the most ancient of times, could not abide to let a life go to waste. They extracted the unripe creature from the ill-fortuned mother’s belly and nurtured it in an artificial womb. And so, Darian was born.
         Through most of his childhood, Darian lived in a state orphanage in Namsatin, the chief city on Epaphus, old as the moon itself and full of corruption. Here, crooked, wrinkled men in purple robes scolded and harangued young Darian every long Epaphian day and every long Epaphian night. Never was he allowed to play, always was he whipped into submission and impelled to learn the ancient dogma. For orphans were set aside for religious duties and were raised to be faithful squires to the doctors. A term retained from a long forgotten time when the leaders of Epaphus were required to receive their Doctorate of Science. But the science had long ago been reduced to a theocratic worship of nature and the doctors themselves to not much more than priests.
         And thus, this went on, long-day after long-day, year after year. The windy moon circled mighty Thoriam, and Thoriam circled the sun until one day, when Darian was twenty Epaphian years old (about twelve in Earth years), an eccentric old man had come to the orphanage from the north-east. His name, Darian was told, was Doctor Waeko, shepherd and father of a small commune in the northern foothills of the Racsagan Mountains. He had come to Namsatin in search of a new squire and had heard the orphanage there had an Earth boy which, for reasons left unexplained, he was in need of. And so it was the time came for Darian to leave that wretched orphanage to be entrusted as squire to serve for life his ordained doctor. And after traveling half-way across the moon on a train and a long, bumpy truck ride from a local rancher, Darian arrived at his new home.
         The commune of Doctor Waeko was made up of a few hundred men and women and their families living in a small village at the base of a foothill overlooking the vast, barren northern plains of sub-arctic Epaphus, all of whom were ardent followers of Waeko and his twisted and unorthodox cult: the “Peitho Kephale”. As he grew up serving as squire to the eccentric doctor, Darian was trained in the ways of the cult. He learned all the chants and rituals, he attended the sacrificial ceremonies, and as he grew older he even began to be trained to be a doctor himself. And he learned about Alaliaq.
         Alaliaq was the figure around whom the Peitho Kephale cult was centered, and they hailed him as the Lord returned. He was more than forty thousand years old and remained alive by having his head hooked up inside a cerebral preservation tank, a cylindrical jar not much bigger than the head itself. He was the son of Enmenleus, the Almighty King of Earth, who had also been an immortal but was murdered thousands of years earlier by Alaliar (also an immortal), his ambitious son and Alaliaq’s half-brother. When he deposed his father, Alaliar had his twin brother Alalium and his half-brother Alaliaq sent in exile to Epaphus. Alalium frozen in cryostasis, never to be woken again, and Alaliaq separated from the robotic body he previously enjoyed and stranded on a world whose religious order would not permit such a monstrosity. Ever Alaliaq dreamed of the day when he would get his revenge on his traitorous half-brother.