Khaaestra zahd Machkin, the Grand Architect (Khaa-es-tra)

Summary

Born from an illicit love affair, Khaaestra was thrown out as an infant, only saved from death by a conniving human servant of her mother's. Kept around as a bargaining chip, her youth wasted away in horrid conditions; a sickness struck during it, resulting in the amputation of her right arm and left leg below the knee. Worse, domestic abuse from her parents resulted in her right eye being lost entirely, and one of her curved horns being broken off. Yet, in spite of these great hardships, Khaaestra's cunning mind refused to yield.   Enamored by the sights of artifice, machines, and more, she saw in them the answers to her problems. Absconding from her 'family', she took to a trade caravan and stopped over in a distant city, signing on as a child-apprentice to a mechanic. There, she devised a way of restoring what she'd lost: mechanical prosthetics for her arm and leg. Though there was nothing she could do for her eye or horn, she pushed onward.   Desiring more than what life had given her, she conspired to enroll at a prestigious academy--one many high-born would attend. Her technical accomplishments captured the academy principle's attention; and so she enrolled under the name of his niece, whom otherwise died in battle years before.   Living a quiet life in the academy, Khaaestra's increasing innovations drew great attention from her high-born fellows. Through them, she found ever greater gifts and resources coming, all trying to capture her vast intellect. Each of them, unwittingly furthering her ambitions. In her final years of the academy, a scandal broke out: the principle's actual niece had returned suddenly, blowing up their entire scheme.   Stripped of identity, the principle cast Khaaestra out as an imposter of the worst kind, and so she vanished from the public eye in an instant. While she'd lost much of her contacts as a result, one notably continued to try building a bridge. Much to their delight, it was them that Khaaestra elected to use in full.   Venturing out of Lophern's southern reaches, she joined her patron's family in their city at the northern end's mountains, bordering on Immensio. There, her years of preparation and education came to fruition. Freed of political maneuvers, given a blank book to build anything she desired, Khaaestra pushed her skills to the limits.   More than being a simple esoteric mistress, she opened an engineering school of her own, training dozens upon dozens in her exotic form of magi-tech. In mere decades, her adoptive city transformed from a cold mining location into a thriving, thrumming city-fortress that no one has any hopes of assailing.   The grandiosity of it lured in all sorts of envious and intrigued persons, even as far away as Sa-kemet. Soon, queens, empresses, and otherwise were petitioning her for aid in redesigning their own locations, all of them offering wealth even a dragon would balk at.   Sending out her students, they spread her machkin school of engineering farther and farther, and soon all of Lophern could trace their latest innovations back to her. To some extent, the great push back against the Relentless on Lophern is attributed to her as well.   Still, Khaaestra's ambitions are endless.   The more success her creations have, the greater she pushes their limits. While it falls to her underlings to translate her works into something mass producible, her own 'personal work' is a world in and of itself. Self-moving automata, body-to-armor interfaces that can give metal sensation, magic enhancing apparatus, and even more bewildering items define her workshop. For, as anyone who knows her would attest, Khaaestra is driven to create and perfect; and perfection is unobtainable by her own admission.   She tries all the same.