Alejian Lokke

(WiP)

Lokke, Alejian (1592–). Imperial magister and 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. 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.

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.