Darios Saleim
The Keeper of the Road
(a.k.a. Longinos son of Mahen)
From the passes of the Zagros came a young guard turned messenger. Longinos was chosen not for scholarship but for endurance — to bear the master scroll along the caravan routes to Alexandria. He left a soldier and returned a pilgrim of knowledge, the road remaking both his name and his purpose.
Biography
Longinos was born beneath the stone ridges of the Dara Pass, one of twins. His sister, Lysa, was taken by river-raiders when they were fourteen, an absence that hollowed the rest of his youth. He entered the militia seeking vengeance and found only repetition of loss. Years later, during a campaign along the Tigris, he met a healer named Mekhon of Sardis, a quiet man devoted to Hermes Trismegistos and the balance between will and wisdom. Mekhon treated the wounded with equal tenderness and scorned the hierarchies of soldier and slave. Through him, Longinos learned that the hand which destroys can also preserve. When Mekhon was injured in a desert skirmish, Longinos carried him across thirty leagues to safety; the act changed his life more than any battle. He laid down his spear at the healer’s tent and began to study the Hermetic writings, learning that knowledge is the only victory over death. When the Teachers’ Council called for a courier capable of surviving both terrain and temptation, the Builder’s Guild named him. He accepted not for glory but in the hope that the act might balance his sister’s memory. Along the roads of Pārsa and Ta-Mery he traveled with the scroll sealed against his breast, guarded by caravans and silence alike. By the time he reached Alexandria, he no longer called himself Longinos. He took the name Darios Saleim — the one who upholds peace.Major Works & Reforms
After delivering the scroll, Darios remained within the Builder’s Cooperative to design the Routes of Transmission — the first mapped network of archive houses and learning halls linking the federations. He also recorded the Table of Roads and Rest-Houses, ensuring safe passage for couriers of knowledge. His later writings on Hermetic Service reframed defense as protection of wisdom rather than territory.Character & Legacy
Darios carried his sister’s absence and Mekhon’s teachings as twin burdens. He never ceased to believe that the dead travel with the living through the acts they inspire. Those who met him on the road recalled a man who spoke gently to animals, repaired broken saddles himself, and refused to strike even in self-defense. When asked why he no longer bore a sword, he said, “Because the road itself is weapon enough against forgetting.” His legend endures as both myth and moral: the soldier who became the scroll-bearer, the twin who found peace by carrying what could not be replaced. Among couriers of the Guild, his story is recited before each departure — a reminder that every journey is an act of reconciliation.
Date of Birth
580 zc
Date of Death
642 zc
Life
580 zc
642 zc
62 years old
Circumstances of Death
Wounds sustained while saving the caravan livestock from a prairie fire.
Birthplace
Dara Pass, Zagros Free States
Place of Death
Aswan Caravan Station, Ta-Mery
Children
Belief/Deity
Hermeticism + Christianity 
Messengers and Travelers plus the Compassion School ethos.
Aligned Organization
Other Affiliations
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