Part VII: The Twin Towers Conspiracy
Chapter 2: The Priory of the Myz
Timeline: Drokka History
King Baldur had opened his borders for all comers, thinking he would be avoiding an international disaster, but instead only to unwittingly create one – much to the delight of the secret cabal of power players who were eager to see him fall.
With their security measures lax, a host of nefarious groups took advantage of the situation – not the least of which was the infamous Priory of The Myz.
Now I don’t know about you, but I love secret societies – you humans have such a knack for creating some amazingly clever ‘private fellowships.’ Yes there are the modern cliche ones you all know about – to include the Knights Templar, The Rosicrucians, The Illuminati, and The Masons. But for the money I’ll go with The Brotherhood of EArth (it is the most secret, the most powerful, and also the oldest of all, tracing its roots all the way back to my time with Eve), but the boys of EA are a tale for another time. As for the Priory of The Myz, while they certainly never reached the status of these other groups, they had their moment in the sun – and it was made possible in part by Hecla, Lord Aric, Hylra Klyzntz, and their shadow cabal (and me, of course).
The Priory of The Myz was a group I helped ‘inspire’ shortly after Baldur rose to power and professed his plans for peace – The Priory leadership were all Babelonian Derkka, but their membership was open to Derkka of all types (since the Babelonians needed the Common goblins to do their dirty work). The beliefs of The Priory were much like your zealots of today – call them hardcore nationalists, extreme peacekeepers, terrorists, whatever you like, the results are the same: they are men and women who will do anything to make the world in the ‘ideal’ image they think it should be. Those who believed in this creed referred to themselves as “The Myz” – it was a moniker that stuck for a time, but I would later have a hand in making that word “myz” mean something else entirely – something far more sinister (but let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet).
While there’s a lot of backstory to The Priory, the skinny is that it was really just another trite brotherhood filled with membership levels that equated with secret knowledge and honorific titles that grew stranger the higher one rose through the ranks. Rookies were told that The Priory worshiped Zar and that the goal of the club was to take down the Drokka; this is also what the outside world (read: The Drokka) knew about The Priory’s goals. [It should be noted that Common Goblins were not eligible to advance beyond this lowest rank and most of them didn’t even know other levels existed). Babel Derk who did secretly advance into a higher tier participated in ghastly rituals filled with violence, mind-bending herbs, and macabre sex such as is common in secret societies throughout human history – these mid-levels also worshipped Zar. And for 99% of the Derkka who comprised the Priory’s rank – this was the extent of the group’s focus: i.e. worship Zar and help him debauche the Drokka. The god in question, my fellow lumenarc Zar (aka. Gwar) was thrilled with The Priory and loved that it praised him – although he did little to earn their praise or reward their efforts.
But there was another group within The Priory who knew something more – the elites of Babel society – the so-called 1% – believed something else entirely. The Drokka Parliament leader Marge of the Thatches, the Grand Marduk Garrick of the Golden Hand, and other elites were among this secret rank. For them, The Priory’s goal was to assist my alter ego Baal – in destroying the world so that their god could remake it as a gift for them to rule over. The allure of this plot was so powerful that even some of the Drokka’s shadow elites were secret members of The Priory [which over time included high level members of the Rukstinz (among them Lord Aric and his father Lord Thane), Byl and Hylra Klyntz, Byryk Boma and his heshe partner Mykk, and more.
On the rare occasions that their groups met in super secret locations, human sacrifice, torture, and worse were on the menu – as was the drinking of human blood (for I’d led them to revive the infamous Derkka King Bashumel’s “The Feast of Shadows” – a ritual where victims were drained of blood to feed a dark flame that The Priory’s high priest ‘washed in the flames’ in order to release the blood’s ‘Adrenochrome’ – allegedly granting those who drank it eternal youth. Yet what these elite fools didn’t know was that not only was Bashumel’s ritual a farce, but more importantly I had no intention of ever gifting them any part of the flat earth for helping Baal.
[After all, why should a god ever reward the pawns he uses for simply doing what they were created to do? That’s like giving everyone a ‘participation trophy’ – unearned rewards only serve to make people fat, lazy, and entitled and then they become useless].
When you really boil it down, the beauty of The Priory was that the goals for all the ranks were largely the same (just puffed up with different verbiage) — as a result, The Drokka’s prosperous mountain kingdom was the A #1 enemy and the prized token every member of The Priory wanted to take down was always The Siq – those twin towers of prestige that professed the glory of the Drokka’s self-contained nationalistic society.
And remember – even those Drokka elites who were members of the upper levels of the Priory worked to destroy their own kingdom. Why? Because most of them had convinced themselves they could become far richer if their families left the ‘prison’ of the mountains.
And so it was that, within the mountains, word of The Priory’s existence had first leaked to Baldur early in his kingly career. Whispers of the Priory of The Myz spread like wildfire, the name alone enough to send shivers down the spines of the bravest men. Stories about clandestine meetings and mysterious rituals became the stuff of nightmares, a shadowy threat that loomed over the kingdom. Each report of their activities added to the growing sense of unease.
At first the naive young leader paid keen attention to the warnings because his courtiers stoked his fears about the group (thus allowing the rich to use that external fear to inflate prices of goods and services internally), but over time (and after what appeared to be countless flubs on the part of The Priory), the Baldur grew tired of hearing about it and instead relegated The Priory to a cliched existence.
[Which, like all secret societies, was the very thing the group needed to finally give it a chance for real success!].
A few more decades passed, Baldur was advised by his counsel that The Priory had become more of a social club than anything else, and so the king eventually forgot about any threat from this front.
And that’s when it was finally time for The Priory of The Myz to make it’s everlasting mark on the world!
The Apocrypha of Azazel 