Elias Grimshaw

Elias Grimshaw, was the last leader of the Dark Order on planet Altronis.

History

Elias Grimshaw was descended from the Leeford family of the Grey Temple. After the Necromanic Wars, his forebears adjourned to Altronis after their defeat by the Alliance. His parents, Justin and Paige, were contributors to the war-effort, in a Dual Continental War on that planet: Justin was an artilleryman, and Paige was a factory-girl. At the end of the First Half of the War, Justin came home with a limp and a lot of bad memories, and married Paige; and their sons and daughters were born in the following years. Both of them, and some of their children, were killed in the subsequent bombardment of their city, in the Second Half of the War. This left the surviving son, Elias, a lifelong misanthropy and distaste for idealism and goodness. Therefore Elias, as a young man, was something of a libertine, and lived by cheating people.

The next turning-point in his life, was his emigration abroad, where he met and married a criminal mastermind named Elvira: a vintner, drug dealer, procuress, confidence-woman, pickpocket, murderess, and blackmailer. After their marriage, the Grimshaws “conned happily ever after”: they killed, they lied, they stole, they cheated, they schemed and swindled everyone they met; they sold non-existent stock and phony remedies; they embezzled, they robbed, they bribed, they blackmailed, they bullied; and as a result of all this vice, became very rich, and set themselves up as financiers, and multiplied their wealth until nobody bothered to ask its origin.

In time, Grimshaw collected every descendant he could find of the Grey Temple, and trained them, under assumed names, in the art of Necromancy. These became his Dark Order.

Multiple Identities

Like any Dark Lord, Leeford relied on the semblance of invincibility to control his followers. At times, he pretended to be three people contending for power; evidently to accomplish more than one could. His identities are described here:

–– Grimshaw, his preferred name: a vindictive sorcerer bent on World Domination.

–– Leeford, his ancestral name: mysterious, powerful, serene, and merciless. Seldom seen.

–– Collins, his most distant alias: an apologist for vampirism, sadism, misogyny, and other sexual perversions. The creator, and therefore called the 'father', of some near approximations of Vampires, Zombies, Ogres, and other monsters, in experiment toward the Real Thing.

None of the Dark Order knew or suspected that these three leaders "were one and the same", in so far as they often saw two or three of these together, and heard them disagree; this accomplished by a sophisticated graphic-projection apparatus, similar to that used by Laytami Gudersnipe on the Blind Consul. The triple identity was exposed by Marcus Ransom, following the capture of Nicole.

Career

Very little is known, on Altronis or elsewhere, what crimes Grimshaw and his Dark Order committed; but they secretly influenced the local structures of power for almost 400 years, and were associated with the Altronis Corpocracy. It is likely that nearly half the crimes committed on Altronis were connected to them in some degree.