Executor Ballas

Executor Ballas stood at the summit of Orokin power: architect of the empire's terrible works, its most honeyed public voice, the gold standard of a civilization that measured worth in beauty and beauty in control.

The public record shows a patron of impossible projects and a survivor of impossible politics. The rest of this record shows what those projects were, and what surviving cost everyone else.

The Warframes are his. Ballas took the Helminth strain, the infestation the empire feared enough to bury, and made it into armor by making it into people. Condemned subjects were remade. Memory was pared away. The rage was left in, as a feature. The Vitruvian preserves his own account, delivered with the tenderness of a man who mistook remorse for absolution.

He loved the Archimedian Margulis. The empire executed her for the crime of mercy toward the Zariman children, and Ballas signed his grief over to vengeance. The record attests his hand in the Sentients' cause during the Old War, a traitor at the exact altitude where treachery decides eras. Umbra, the frame that remembers, exists because Ballas wanted one victim at least to know exactly whom to hate.

At the New War's height Ballas took the system itself as a project. Narmer: the veil-empire, every eye masked, every will made adoring, the Lotus held as trophy and instrument in one. The Orokin dream, perfected. Rule without even the inconvenience of being seen ruling.

It lasted about as long as things built on a stolen mother tend to. The record closes with Ballas struck from every continuity he ever purchased, defeated by the family his cruelty had accidentally assembled: the children he made into weapons, and the weapon he helped make into their mother.

The recovered memories of the Old Peace add a chapter to this record from before the fall, and it is the worst one. Ballas brokered the treaty between Orokin and Sentient: a real peace, in Tau, built on the individuality the Xenoflora granted. His most honeyed work, spent for once on something like grace. Then he re-targeted kill-codes in secret and aimed them at the Xenoflora itself: the plant the peace stood on, killed by the man who planted the peace. This record's lede speaks of gifts becoming knives. It was written years before this memory surfaced. The archive lets it stand.

His reasons are not in the record, and the archive declines to furnish him with any. What is attested: he made the peace, he murdered it, and the Old War followed. Margulis erased the Operator's memories of Tau, and the truth went into the dark with them. For ten thousand years the sabotage appeared in no record at all. This archive corrects that now, and notes what the correction makes of every later section: the man who lent his hand to the Sentients' war had first made certain there would be one.