Narkissos the Recursive

One of the Narkissoi. Possibly Narkissos Prime

Narkissos is an exceedingly old Eldar. Records are spotty, but it is known full well that he was alive during the fall. He was old during the fall. When it is discussed, numbers as ridiculous as 20,000 years are thrown around, which would make him one of the first Haemonculi, alive before they even became known by that word. Of course, knowing ‘Narkissos’s age is even more difficult than most, because of his practice of cloning. Every single Wrack within his Coven of the Recursive is a clone of himself, and every Haemonculus as well. Even his grotesques and pain engines carry a cloned version of his own face. Which, if any vessel holds the ‘original’ soul of Narkissos is impossible to know, it could be the current leading Narkissos, it could be any of the other Haemonculi Narkissoi. It could even be that his soul, as tortured as it has been over the millenia, is fragmented and distributed amongst all his flesh.
Narkissos is old enough that he was living in Commoragh by the time of the fall, old enough to recall Vect's rise to power, and the rather smart decision he made early on to pledge his support for the young Asdrubael. While never within the Kabal of the Black Heart Proper, he had been known, in those earlier centuries, for providing them with some rather excellent pain engines and fleshcrafted slaves.
Even back during the Empire, he was an odd one, intelligent, but utterly sociopathic, to a degree that Aeldari society, even at the height of their debauchery, thought him strange and discomforting. This does not bother him: the centuries and millenia since the fall has taught him that the only company he truly appreciates, the only being truly worth his time and attention - is his own. Hence his creation of the Coven of the Recursive, to be surrounded always by his own visage and company. The Haemonculus has remained in his mansion, even as the shapes and delinetations of Commorragh changed around him, his manse a strange gem within the Old City.
The Haemonculus makes his way chiefly through fleshcrafting, and many of Commorragh's finest have travelled through his studios, paying greatly for the master to work on their bodies, tweaking things to be just right. But he doesn't limit his art too much, and does have decent training in the technology of the Dark Eldar, a weapon crafter of some skill, if a little inefficient for more mass-oriented people. Despite his copious selves, he is still an artisan at heart, and will take his time on projects of flesh or metal, honing them to be as good and deadly as they can possibly be.

## History

While most of the Narkissoi History is very much lost to time, they claim to pin their origin during the heyday of the Aeldari Empire, sometime during the latter centuries of the 20th Millenium by Mon'Keigh Calendar. The First Narkissos was one of the leaders of the Empire, a powerful and cruel Lordling possessed of intelligence and cunning, and drawn to the pleasure cults that had begun their inexorable conquest of Aeldari society. He became one of the forerunners of the Haemonculi, utterly devoted to nothing less than his own apotheosis, his own pleasurable existance. He understood, in a way that few others could, that the only thing that mattered in the world was himself. He had few friends during those first few millenia, other scholars and artisans mostly, drawn to his unrelenting selfishness through strange attraction. One of these friends, they say, he keeps still, a soul trapped within a stone, kept close, or perhaps even within the Prime Narkissos' flesh.

By the time of the Fall, he was everything he wished to be. The Coven of the Recursive had been created, he had a fully-fledged community of himself, his own substance threaded and woven in many different ways. For over several millenia, since M27 in fact, he had been living in Commorragh, his palace one of the mainstays of the City of Freedom, leveraging his prodigious knowledge and skills to grant the Followers of the Dark Muses anything they could desire. The fall itself, well, it barely touched him, so well enscorced within his manses, his soul, as it were, anchored between hundreds of bodies, his face a constant reminder of his own superiority. If anything, the Fall granted him even more power, for his knowledge of cloning and soul manipulation was in as much supply as all of his Haemonculi colleagues. He remained however somewhat of an oddity, the Coven of the Recursive staying within the Old City even as Commorragh grew.

When Vect began his campaign to rise to the top of Commorragh, Narkissos swiftly saw his potential. From a distance, the Coven gave its support, their skill with pain engines in particular of great use during the struggle to control the city. Never central to the politics, the Recursive nevertheless gained some degree of protection and patronage from the Black Heart, minor Archons of the Kabal entreating with him. Come the current day, Narkissos stirs from almost a century of contemplation and quietness, to persue a new thought and opportunity in this shattered sector.

## Description

Tall but disturbingly narrow, the Prime Narkissos of the Recursive Coven is a strange and frightening thing to behold. The chief part of his body, or rather, the distance from his dangling feet to his bare head is about six feet, though when resting on the coils of his snakelike lower spine he rises usually to eight or so feet in the air, looking down imperiously on those beneath him. He is thin, even for an eldar, with a long, strange-proportioned torso and withered, barely-there legs, up to an aristocratically-cast face, high cheekbones and a sharp nose along with glittering black eyes. His upper body is wide, his shoulders placed a little too-far apart for normal growth, and with good reason, for he has two pairs of pale-skinned, delicately muscled arms emerging from them, ending in the hands of a surgeon, lithe and sparse-fleshed. Of course, those are only his more ‘normal’ looking arms, since from his hips reach out a third pair, these ones almost insectile in their chitinous thin look, the six-fingered hands more like bundled twigs of dead, blackened trees, twitching and curling. The last pair of arms emerge from his back, each one three-elbowed and sickeningly long, curving above or around his shoulders, the armor on them light but strong and glittering black. His body is covered also with a naturalistic, shiny black carapace, beetlelike in some respects, a slight green iridescence visible only when one looks with a tilted eye. Three spinal sumps protrude upwards directly behind his head, forming a kind of crown as they brush against the rear of his skull, small vials of bright green \*somethings\* running tubes into his body.

## Abilities and Resources

Character Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QgYlMWC74-0H9f6CbQH8WT5H70uacIZDZqD11NefYYk/edit?usp=sharing

## The Coven of the Recursive Visage

Small in influence, but nevertheless powerful, the clones of Narkissos are united within a single organisation - the Coven of the Recursive Visage, and having lasted since well before the fall, it seems unlikely to crack any time soon. Each Wrack and Haemonculus of the Coven is a clone of Narkissos, each one also named Narkissos it would seem in a strange Aeldari joke. They claim that the soul of Narkissos is spread out between all of them, and as such all of them have a right to be named and to be seen as the Ancient Aeldari.

In terms of structure, the coven is much like others, with each Haemonculus-Narkissos overseeing a number of cells, each cell containing between 10 to 50 Wrack-Narkissoi, with Acothyst ranks and all. In addition, the coven boasts an impressive number of Grotesques and Pain Engines, and while these lesser beasts are not clones themselves, they are given cloned faces of Narkissos, the better to demonstrate his egocentricity. The pain engines in particular are something of a theme for the coven, as they have in the past half-millenia at least taken to designing and creating new and better engines. It is useful to understand that this is a recent affectation - the coven and clones have lasted for so long that they have run the gamut of 'hobbies'.

While the Haemonculi of the Coven have great independence, each Narkissos taking their own path and persuing their own interests, even among this highest echelon there are degrees of primacy. Only one of the Haemonculus-Narkissoi have the full memories of their primogenetor, the Narkissos-Prime as he is sometimes called. The others of that level have large amounts of knowledge and memory, several of them also stretching back before the Fall, but only one is blessed with the full unrestrained history. The Wracks are less fortunate - while their flesh is genetically identical, and their souls are, according to the coven still that of Narkissos, they only have their own memories proper, gaining only snatches and flashes during their dreams, or when intoxicated.