The Mesitori

Once, long ago, the ancestors of the Mesitori were human. Now, their descendants are something else entirely. The masters of Bel'Zanar, the so called Tenth Planet, are truly a race apart but whereas the other transhuman cultures of the Sol System owe their origins to genetic engineering, the Mesitori were born of a dark fusion of science and arcane arts.

ORIGINS

Those who would one day become the Mesitori began as a small and obscure cult dedicated to the worship of a strange group of entities. It was one of the many new religions of the time that had begun to proliferate during the tumultuous times of the Great Diaspora. This group, the Enlightened Order of the Star Children, had wealthy patrons and so were able to procure a modest generation ship that would take them to their promised land, a place they did not know but were assured fate would guide them to.

Their ship, the Bell-Zandroth, left our solar system sometime in the late twenty-fifth century. Just one of many. Most would never be heard or seen again.

Then sometime in the 39th century during the Dark Age following the fall of the Elnorian Empire, the Bell-Zandroth returned almost unrecognisable. It was now a veritable planetoid, an immense half-orb studded with spires and jutting towers. The habitats it encountered as it emerged from the Kuiper Belt were consumed, their inhabitants meeting a grisly fate at the hands of its own denizens.

Stories emerged telling of nightmarish creatures led by tall and thin pale skinned beings wielding strange weaponry and peculiar powers. As word of this new horror spread the warring fiefdoms of the system turned their attention toward this new threat, but not for long of course. Perhaps had they presented a united front this menace would have been eliminated long before it could take root. But alas this was the Dark Age after all and unity and peace were things of the past.

At some point the masters of Bell-Zhandroth revealed themselves. They were the Mesitori and their home was Bel'Zanar. They did not speak of from whence they came, only that they had come home. They did not call for friendship or trade. They had returned to conquer. They were the children of the Star Gods. And amidst all the horrors of the Dark Age, they were perhaps the single most horrific. Though they would never conquer the system entirely, they would control a sizeable portion and war ceaselessly with their neighbours for what remained out of their grip.

THE ASCENSION CRUSADE

The Dark Age only ended when the Ascension, like the Bell-Zhandroth before it, returned after a long, long time away. Like the former it and its inhabitants had changed in their long journey. But the Ascendants and the Mesitor were polar opposites and the rulers of Bel'Zanar saw immediately a threat to their dominance.

For their part, the Ascendants looked upon the Mesitori with disgust and declared them the first of the so-called Adversaries; cultures so abominable they were enemies of peace and order. Led by the Ascendants a small but ever growing coalition of factions joined the Crusade to end the Dark Age and the Mesitori rose to the challenge. The war that followed, the Ascension Crusade, was costly and destructive but slowly it bore fruit. The Adversaries were defeated one by one, driven into extinction or wiped out entirely. The Mesitori opted to flee, seeing the inevitabability of their defeat and choosing survival through exile. Into the darkness of interstellar space they went but not before seeding the system with countless nests of their horrific warrior-broods, engineered atrocities that would lay dormant until disturbed.

The Mesitori would only return following the collapse of the Ascendant Empire sixty years later. Though their power was diminished they were still as dangerous as before and once again the dark planet of Bel'Zanar took its place in Sol.

THE MESITORI

The Mesitori themselves are few in number, reliant instead of a large slave population kept cowed by their Templars and Paladins; an elite breed of soldier created to be utterly subservient to the Mesitori. The Mesitori themselves are tall and thin with grey skin. They tend to wear restrictive leathers and concealing helmets and masks and practice body mutilation and scarification, projecting an unsettling BDSM image.

They claim to worship a pantheon of Gods whose names are often unpronounceable by outsiders and also claim descent from those Gods. They preach that in the darkness between stars their ship suffered a malfunction and began to lose power, dooming those within. Yet their faith saved them and their Gods broke the viel between worlds to bring them to sanctuary. There, the Mesitori say, they beheld their Gods in all their glory and were blessed. Their flesh was reshaped and their souls exposed to true power and meaning. The chosen, men and women alike, made trysts with their Gods and a new breed of human and God was born; the first true Mesitori, human and something else.

At some point the Bell-Zhandroth returned to our universe and gifted with divine knowledge and other gifts, the newly born Mesitori set about building their power and return home. The generation ship became the core of what grow into Bel'Zanar, taking on the mass of a rogue dwarf planet and growing inexorably. It would be powered by the Dark Star, a black-hole tamed and controlled, and its might would be without equal. Their technology was a fusion of the arcane and science, a potent and quite unique combination that would give them a considerable edge when they returned to Sol.

The Mesitori then and now prefer to avoid combat where possible, seeing themselves as too precious to risk. Thus they rely on their Templars and the elite Paladins as well as the hordes of genetically engineered abominations. On the few occasions that the Mesitori do deign to meet with lesser beings face to face, they are arrogant and overbearing, their appearance upsetting to most. They are also so alien that most humans and indeed transhuman cultures find them impossible to act cordial towards for long. The Mesitori do not care. They are not looking for converts to their faith. They see themselves not as Children of the Star Gods. They are the Star Gods now. All other beings are either a resource or a servant. There is nothing else.