We continue to publish exclusive Angel of Darkness documents from Murti Schofield, the writer of the game. This one reveals more details about Morgau Vasiley
MORGAU VASILEY
New Hope or Terrible Threat?
The path of young Morgau Nanuaat Madura Vasiley’s life was constrained by a destiny bequeathed to her by her father Mathias Vasiley. Mathias had been a member of the Lux Veritatis but he had to disappear at the end of WWII like many others with a history they did not want following them around. He and his imperilled family lived a shadow life hunted by both Cabal forces and the Lux Veritatis who regarded him as a treacherous renegade believing he had played a key role in Eckhardt’s escape from his prison pit beneath the Kriegler Fortress. There was never the opportunity for Mathias to answer these accusations properly and he was too wily to trust himself to an unproven system of appeal within the LV Order. The relentlessly merciless attacks by Cabal forces left no one with time to consider such niceties as a fair hearing or due process. And so Mathias vanished.
Morgau Vasiley was born in 1983 and spent her early years as a fugitive. She learned from her father how to become invisible. For decades they were continuously assuming new identities and being constantly on the move. Morgau was raised in the ways of the Lux Veritatis, or as much as Mathias could manage without access to true LV resources and personnel.
The decades spent as a fugitive had a powerfully formative effect on Morgau’s character as well as her abilities and she emerged as a dangerous and unpredictable individual with a wild card personality that was the despair of her father. Mathias knew she was a gifted pupil and he struggled to form and guide her innate gifts in ways that would allow her greater control of her considerable potential. But Morgau was wayward and strong minded and she rebelled.
Well before her father’s murder she had already taken to disappearing on her own and deliberately putting herself into perilous situations. She seemed drawn to dangerous individuals, semi-legal groups, and anything involving high level risk. Mathias himself was no stranger to risk but it had always been within Lux Veritatis guidelines and usually to protect something or someone of value. Morgau was different. She fretted at what she saw as the constraints of a conflict she felt no real identification with. [see other documents on Morgau’s early years]
In an unsettling echo of another LV progeny Morgau finally broke away from her father completely and set off, intent on forging her own destiny wanting no further part in the Shadow War or the senseless LV-Cabal slaughter. She had her own priorities. How things progressed from that point on did not make for a happy outcome.
FURTHER BACKGROUND TO MORGAU’S ORIGINS.
In the late 1990’s Mathias Vasiley became increasingly aware of just how dangerous the Five Paintings were because of what they contained. [recorded in another document.] From all too bitter experience he knew that the Black Alchemist was not someone one crossed with impunity and although he never knew the full extent of Eckhardt’s pact with the Nephilim this was not an area he wanted to walk into blind. The unleashing of the nightmare scenario, Le Cauchmar du Nephilim, was an event that no one would escape from unscarred.
News came to him of the demise of Konstantin Heissturm and with great reluctance Mathias knew that it was time to break cover, at least partially, and take a part even if it was only for his own survival and that of his daughter Morgau, wherever she might be at the time. Having monitored Von Croy’s career almost as closely as had the all-watchful Luther Rouzic and the ever vigilant Karel, Mathias was very aware of the existence of a certain remarkable individual named Croft, someone descended from a very special bloodline.
He charted her exploits as well as he could from a safe distance and drew up his plans. Unfortunately they came to nothing when destiny finally caught up with him in the form of the Monstrum. But he had left a trail of clues intended to lead Von Croy to the all important fifth Engraving. Von Croy was way out of his depth and also ended up murdered. However, this action in Paris directly involved the young female Croft, a protagonist who was ideally suited to taking on the insane Black Alchemist. [detailed elsewhere.]
MORGAU CARVES HER OWN PATH.
Well schooled in the art of stealth and disappearance Morgau assumed a variety of identities and over the years became drawn, almost inevitably, back into the turmoil of the Shadow War. One advantage she had was that she came from a background of formless anonymity buried beneath layers of secrecy skilfully woven by her father around their origins and roots. This meant she could infiltrate organisations and groups whose motives and operational methods fascinated her. Her ever-developing combat skills made her ideally suited to the shady worlds these groups operated in. She was naturally covert and excelled in operating under extreme conditions.
She adopted a string of personas, including Claire Issoux, Annessa Chimoya and Maude Holtzmün. At one time she took employment for a covert organization calling itself the Agency and as a contract operative led a number of actions for their field operations section. Their head of operations was a walking cannon called Gunderson and Morgau avoided personal contact with him as much as possible.
From time to time she ran into a certain Vance Renner, a highly capable, close-lipped freelancer like herself. He was reputed to be an ex-Legionaire but whether this was true or not he had an ‘air’ about him that she felt wary of. Like most people employed by the Agency he clearly had a ‘past’ but as none of his ‘team runners’ was prepared to dig into it nothing more came to light. Generally the rule was – if an operative is competent and prepared to carry out tasks on a no questions asked basis they were left alone.
This was a guiding rule that Morgau exploited on many occasions in many situations, one of them being her astonishing infiltration of some LV hierarchies. She knew who they were but betrayed nothing, hoping to possibly gain some advantage, information or weaponry that she might have a use for. The LV Order at this time was under threat of extinction and desperate for suitably gifted individuals to recruit. It was during one of Morgau’s infiltrations that she came to the attention of Konstantin Heissturm as an individual of great promise, possibly even as an initiate. Clearly he recognised the considerable potential in the young Annessa Chimoyaand was intrigued by the promise he saw there. Possibly he was a little blind-sided by her.
A brief outline of how she managed to purloin Konstantin’s greatest weapon at the time of his greatest need is to be found elsewhere. The substitution-theft-loss of the Chirugai by Morgau, aka Annessa, contributed in large part to Konstantin’s demise beneath the extinct volcano of Snaefellsjökull in Iceland. Morgau herself only managed to hang onto the stolen LV weapon for a very short time. She was nowhere near being able to control the Chirugai yet despite it showing some degree of harmonic acquiescence to her uniquely attuned LV personality. If any but an LV initiate had tried to make use of the LV weapon it would have torn them to shreds. As it was it tolerated her contact but she was unable to control it.
Caught up in a vicious all out assault on the LV vessel-base recently vacated by Konstantin himself she was badly wounded and captured by forces of the Dark Alchemist. Realising it would be a disaster for the LV artefact-weapon to fall into Cabal hands she hurled the reinforced weapons cask or vasculum containing the Chirugai into the icy depths off Gotland. Her intention was that she would return at some future point and retrieve it. That never happened and in fact the missing Chirugai was tracked and recovered much later by Konstantin’s wife Marie Cornel with the aid of a tribal ally Chingacha Red Hand.
From there it eventually came into the possession of Kurtis Trent who, with his training and knowledge of the all important invocations or ‘Aiyessu’ he could make devastating use of the legendary Lux Veritatis weapon. Kurtis’ father had imparted the closely guarded invocation phrases and mind keys to him many years before as part of a technique for atuning oneself to any specially forged sky iron weaponry.
[see notes on : the Chirugai weapons, the Irenfolm, the Irenscyld, the Culcrys and the Baetyl training fragments all forged from meteorite iron.]
And so the Chirugai vanished for a while and Morgau herself was taken prisoner by forces of the Cabal. She ended up in the hands of Eckhardt and after a process of extended torture and genetic modification she became enslaved to the Dark Alchemist.
ECKHARDT’S PART IN MORGAU’S TRANSFIGURATION.
Using techniques garnered from centuries of Alchemical experimentation in his Breeding Communities her made her dependent on bio-grafted filaments wired into her marrow and keyed to her individual genetic make up. She became the closest Eckhardt had been able to perfect so far in his centuries long labour to produce a race of Nephumans. Eckhardt saw this new breed as a first step in creating a hybrid somewhere between contemporary humanity and Nephilim, themselves a product of human-angellic interbreeding from earliest recorded history. These Nephumans would be the perfect warrior sentinels for the coming re-emergence of the Nephilim race. An alchemically enhance human breed!
Essentially Morgau Vasily was reconfigured with silicon enhanced collagen in her tendons providing her with a musculature that was off the charts in terms of tensile strength. Carbonite fibres were culture-woven into her skeletal structure making her faster, stronger and more resilient. She could sustain damage and heal fast. Really fast. Her nervous system was enhanced with alchemically boosted synaptic catalyst hormones so that her mentation rate and responses were increased phenomenally. Her outward appearance was only minimally changed, a ghostly white pallor to the skin and a tendency for her irises to turn translucent when using her enhanced LV kinetic abilities.
Her physical appearance remained misleadingly slight. Being slender of frame she would appear to pose no threat but the reality was that she now verged on something that was barely human.
ECKHARDT’S WORK OVER THE CENTURIES.
In the intervening years of his incarceration in the Pit beneath Castle Kriegler
Eckhardt’s obscene Breeding Programme, established in the 1400’s, had been carried on by various of his acolytes and peers, such as Allacord Siglum. The alchemical based genetic research was known by many different names over the centuries but always had the same goal, the perfection of the Nephuman. On his release from the Pit at the end of WWII he had picked up the threads of his Great Work and used parts of his research to help maintain the vigour and strength of his own time-raddled body. His grisly work as the Monstrum using the Harvesting Glove is recorded elsewhere.
The use of alchemically purified bio-elements ripped from living victims was not actually necessary. In truth there was no need for such archaic theatricalities but with a mind tortured and near destroyed by centuries of almost unbearable pain in the Pit Eckhardt still thought and functioned as a 13th century entity. His thinking processes were locked into an archaic persona that he could never entirely throw off, and this of course made him more vulnerable to manipulation by the enigmatic, sinister and ever present Karel.
Apart from the Glove Eckhardt wore a cuirass or body plate which helped maintain and protect his ancient physical form. For his first near-Nephuman he made use of the same principles in forging an armoured corselet which Morgau could never survive without. It protected her but also increased the dependence of her artificially boosted existence.
His work on Morgau was a source of great pride to Eckhardt. She was a terrible living proof of his ability to rework the physical structure of a human being and create something truly new. He even gives her a new name, Lilith.
MORGAU LILITH, SLAVE, WARRIOR AND ASSET OF WAR
But inevitably all this intrusive enhancement came at a terrible price. The demands on her body meant that she would simply self consume without a highly complex process of maintenance impossible under normal circumstances. The cost of such physical ability was total dependence on elixirs and processes administered to the newly mutated body via her armoured corselet or cuirass.
Eckhardt never recognised that one of his original Cabal associates still at his table was someone from his far distant past 500 years ago. When he had returned from Cappadocia charged with preparing the way for the return of the Nephilim race the Cabal members had all willingly conceded to play a part in this Epic plan of domination. Two extraordinary individuals were close associates of the Cabal but removed enough to witness the awful treachery when Eckhardt killed almost all of them as his lust to be ‘the only one’ overwhelmed his fevered brain. Arne Saknussemm and Régis Limoux both retreated into the shadows content to slide through the pages of history and bide their time as they monitored the emergence of Eckhardt’s chosen bloodline experiments. If successful they would be a prize worth the waiting.
More gullible Alchemist grotesques were enrolled onto the ever reforming Cabal over the decades and Nephilim Limoux-Karel watched with astonishment at just how ruthless and brutal this race of humans could be when seduced by the promise of such prizes as immortality and unbridled power. Greed and egomania was their dominant characteristic.
In the twentieth century Eckhardt’s ruthless brutality was much in evidence in his pitiless treatment of Morgau Vasiley. To him she was little more that an instrument enabling his long deferred plans to bring forth the Golden Lion of prophesy – himself, transformed and made glorious.
Karel meanwhile continued to behave with the staggering patience of his race knowing that very soon he would dispense with the upstart Alchemist and come to control the Morgau Lilith child. She was an invaluable asset, a match for the extraordinary Croft amazon he was taking such an interest in these last years. Now there was someone he could make use of, not an asset to be squandered on a deranged solipsist like Pieter van Eckhardt. How could an insane throw-back like this worn out medievalist ever have the gall to imagine he could become more than merely mortal.