Alejian Lokke

Alejian Lokke
Physical information
Species	Human
Race	Sxiro
Gender	Male
Biographical information

Lokke, Alejian (1592–1696 AN). A former Imperial magister and, at one time, the most senior Shirerithian officer on the Benacian continent. Born in Monty Crisco, into one of the moneyless families of the blood, forgotten by-blows of the great houses, which traditionally supplied the Imperial Forces with so many of its officers, Lokke entered Imperial service with the Apollonian Guard in 1612, where he first attained prominence as being one of the first to attend upon Kaiser Mo'll after a botched Amokolian assassination attempt.

A favourite of Kaiserin Isa IV Kassandredottar on account of his willingness to perform acts that reminded her of her childhood, he secured advancement in the palace guard followed by a transfer to a special operations group wherein, under the nom d'guerre of "Foxhole", he was to play a prominent role in the extrajudicial execution of Aasmund Vigeland, a notorious Elw firebrand who had somehow attained high office in the Imperial Republic. His reward for his endeavours was to witness his patron fall dead at his feet.[1]

He attained the rank of Legate during the reign of Raynor Jacobus Loki, a distant relative by shared descent from the Line of Grifos, and participated heavily in the River War (1635), participating in the assault on Islus in lower Elwynn, and covering the retreating Imperialist forces as they retired to the capital in the face of a vengeful counteroffensive by local forces. Finally Lokke was able to secure the credit for rotating the sentry pickets of the besieged forces in such a way as to open a gap which the paramilitaries of the King of Elwynn were able to exploit. By this act of treachery Lokke secured his magister's baton.

In 1636, Thorgils Tarjeisson began his rise to prominence in the Ministry of Military Affairs, setting in train a period of breakneck military expansion that continued well into the 1660s. Although not personally close to the ascendant Minister, nor induced into the web of patronage spun around the omnipresent ESB corporation, Magister Lokke enjoyed an abundant opportunity to shape the Imperial Army, formally re-established in 1637 out of the hodgepodge of feudal militias that had existed before then, as he saw fit. As the army expanded, the necessity of appointing other staff officers to the grade of magister became pressing. Determined to maintain his seniority, Lokke made known that all were to address him henceforth as the Magister Primum. This conceit became so all pervasive that his true name only became known outside of Imperial circles in mid to late 1663.

The subordinate magisters, of the Field Army (Exercitus Comitatenses), the Frontier Army (Exercitus Limitanei), the Riverine Army (Exercitus Ripenses), and later the Army of Arboria, were subordinated to Lokke through the College of the Magisters, which served effectively as a general staff and general headquarters combined. A source of perpetual irritation for the Magister Primum was the habit of successive MoMA's to by-pass his office and issue orders to field commands directly. This issue was only partially resolved when the Sxiro-Alexandrian & Natopian Entente (SANE), later to be known as the Raspur Pact, instituted Continental Theatre Commands answering to a Joint Military Council.

The role played by the Magister Primum in the events of 1644 and the assassination of Thorgils Tarjeisson, reigning then as the Kaiser Dominus, has not yet been fully ascertained, nor - barring some singular occurrence - is it likely to given the prevailing attitude towards Freedom of Information in Shirekeep. The Imperial Army followed the orders of the usurper during the Year of the Four Kaisers and the Shirekeep Garrison certainly contributed to yet another round of fighting between Imperial and State forces, the latter of which backed the ultimately victorious Kaiserin Noor. It has been strongly suspected that the College of Magisters sheltered various coup-plotters, including the "anti-kaiser" himself. The wealth of institutional knowledge acquired by the Magister Primum by this point insulated him, to a certain extent from the threat of reprisal. That the Chamber of the Crypteia, Shireroth's secret police in all but name, had similarly been compromised by association with the coup did much to ensure his safety in the following years.

The Magister Primum's last active field campaign was in the delicate matter of trying to mitigate the worst excesses of Noor's frequent descents on the Tellian Mandate, so as to avoid a diplomatic incident with the surviving city states which the Kaiserin believed ought to be under her rule already. Catastrophe was avoided by distracting her attention onto various bands of recalcitrant Cedrists who had refused to heed her edict against the sacrifice and eating of Deep Singers.

Whilst he was not present in the campaign, the Magister Primum's finest hour came in the swift suppression of the Elwynnese Monarchy in 1651, which represented a long overdue settling of accounts for the drubbing received by the Imperialists at the hands of the perfidious Elws and Froyalaners in 1635 and 1644.

The Magister Primum was known to oppose the Octavian Reforms, begun in 1652, which had rationalised force compositions, unit structures, the ranking system, and generally removed much of the neo-classical flippery which had encrusted around the Imperial Forces during the reign of Kaiser Dominus.

As the War of Lost Brothers swept over the globe after 1653, the Magister Primum was actively opposed to various aspects of the Steward, Zinkgraven's, war policy, particularly the so-called Great Enterprise of Keltia which ended in infamy and the squandering of manpower and resources needed elsewhere. Moreover the Magister Primum, with the support of the MoMA and the Natopian Secretary of Defence, directly sabotaged the planning work being undertaken on the apocalyptic Fall Endsieg, ensuring that the plan never even reached the Steward.

Relations between the Magister Primum and Zinkraven's successor the Count-Palatine of Kezan were known to be less than cordial, especially as the latter got drawn into a murderous power struggle with the Imperial Mother that would lead to a further civil war in Elwynn and a purge of the officer corps aimed at removing N&H sympathisers. With the assassination of Mira in 1663, the Magister Primum was known to be quietly supportive of the attempts of the Prince of Modan. The leaking of his name, and rumours concerning the less savoury aspects of his career, to the reformist press is believed to be in part a belated payback for that hostility by the House of Octavius.

The Magister Primum was felt, by those critics, and some of his braver underlings, to be increasingly out of touch with an era of asymmetric conflicts, push-button warfare, the disappearance of the "frontline" as a meaningful expression, and the domination of the battlespace by network centric systems where platforms deployed are only as useful as the timely information they receive to inform the notorious decision making loop. Nonetheless, by his venerability, his presence, and his sheer refusal to die, the Magister Primum continued to cast his baleful glare over all levels of the Imperial Army, shaping its outlook and doctrines for years if not decades to come by virtues of the institutions shaped in his image with their overriding fixation upon achieving a decisive battle.

In the end the reform-minded Prince of Modan, Daniyal Simrani-Kalirion, having finally engineered his ascension to the position of Minister of Military Affairs (MoMA) had no desire to be constrained by the innate conservatism of the Magister Primum who, in consequence, found himself transferred to supreme command over the frozen hell of southern Cibola in 1665 AN. There the Magister Primum saw out the final years of his service career, drawing to himself a small coterie of ultra-conservative Imperial officers willing to share his exile but ultimately obliged to watch the unravelling of the Imperial Republic to which he had devoted his entire life in impotent fury as a spectator an entire hemisphere away from where the fate of Benacia was being decided.

After his retirement, spent in grace and favour apartments provided by the Honourable Company, Alejian Lokke perished in 1696 following an adverse reaction to longevity serum.