Khati Sha the Twisted

The king’s explorer

Ages ago a mighty kerran beastlord named Khati Sha faithfully served his king, Vah Kerrath. When Shar Vahl was carried to the moon of Luclin, he set out at once to explore the new world, serving with honour and widening his people’s knowledge of the moon and its strange inhabitants.

Into the Grey

He heard stories of a place on Luclin’s light side where the evil snake-folk, the Shissar, held sway. Fearing the threat they might pose, and perhaps a little too curious, he went into the blazing eternal day to find the region called the Grey. He never came back. The Vah Shir mourned their greatest beastlord, and the beastlord guild of Shar Vahl still bears his name. Most believe he died; some think he lives on, watching over his people from the wilds.

What the Shissar made

The truth is worse. The Shissar captured him in the Grey and took him to their temple, where he suffered unbelievable torment. Curious about the moon’s newest inhabitants, they twisted his body and mind into something cruel and terribly powerful, infected with their own xenophobia and lust for power. Their ambition was greater still: a Shissar writing in his own blood to the Emperor, in Testament of Night, reports that “the ceremony performed on the Vah Shir captive has failed.” They had tried “to leash the divine, to merge mortal flesh with the power of the gods.”

Tashakhi

What had been Khati Sha escaped the Grey, wandered the moon, and came back at last to the Mushroom Forest, where his people worked the Acrylia Mines. Deep in the mines he found a primitive race he named grimlings, and he shaped them as cruelly as the Shissar had shaped him, into a sadistic people bent on spreading death, above all among the Vah Shir.

By the thousands the grimlings burst from the mines, killed countless Vah Shir and drove them from the forest, which became the Grimling Forest. The grimlings worship him as a god under a twisted form of his old name: Tashakhi. Few have noticed, though some say newer grimling buildings mirror Vah Shir design.

Legend of Lies

The grimlings know the truth and hide it from their own god. “To remember what our god does not is folly,” their Legend of Lies warns. Reminding him of his days as a Vah Shir explorer, or of “his torture and rebirth through death at the hands of the Shissar,” would bring their destruction, “and so we must conceal the truth. Our legends must be lies.”

Master Tashakhi

He broods now in the depths of the Acrylia Caverns, a skeletal being with the powers of a malevolent nascent godling. He means to destroy the Vah Shir first, then the tegi, then the Combine refugees of Katta Castellum, Sanctus Seru and Shadow Haven, and only then to crush the Shissar in a final, self-destructive act of revenge. He fights with two backward-curving blades fixed to his arms and keeps out of reach on small metallic wings. In the Grimling Forest, Agent Tiesh already suspects that Khati Sha “is somehow wrapped up in the past and present of the Grimlings.”