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Killer Instinct
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Aganos
Over three thousand years ago the legendary Mycenaean people flourished in Greece. Their thriving citadel stood high atop a hill, surrounded by a Cyclopean wall—a bastion made of enormous boulders so huge that men who came after believed only giants could have moved these rocks into place.
The Mycenaean culture was rich with inventors, military minds…and sorcerers. And together these men and women crafted powerful warriors made of gears and bronze armor—hulking automatons that went to battle and crushed their enemies. At night these war-golems stood guard beneath the great walls they had built, as silent and still as graven figures carved in marble, their eyes glowing blue.
But these creatures were sentient, and the most powerful among them bore a mask with three faces—each representing one of the people who had helped craft him: warrior, inventor and sorcerer. Embedded in his forehead was a crystal called the Eye of the Ancients: a relic that connected the war-golem to a power that stood outside the boundaries of this world—an invisible tether to the Astral plane.
But then Mycenae, like all great civilizations before and after it, was brought low by its own devices. The culture fell into a state of decadence and decay, the ideals turned on themselves; and the automatons were caught up in this downfall…used against each other as Mycenae crumbled. Eventually, there was only one war-golem—the bearer of the Eye of the Ancients, which was handed down from vicious despot to petty tyrant as a display of power and a tool of war.
Mycenae was finally overrun by nomadic raiders who came from the sea. The conquering general trapped the war-golem in a narrow canyon, hemming him in with a thousand warriors. Tying down the automaton, they pried loose the crystal in his mask, thus subduing him to their will. Down through the centuries this machine was put into action as a secret weapon by those that desired power or feared the loss of it. His eyes changed from their natural cyan color to a murderous red while under the sway of these evil men.
Deployed in many battles as the turner of the tide, the unstoppable juggernaut was used as a cold, heartless tool of destruction, physically losing more and more of the spark of life that remained from his former union with the Eye of the Ancients. And over time Aganos’s bronze body started to break down. He replaced his parts with stones knitted together with vines, pieces of armor…anything else that he could find to make himself whole again.
Five hundred years later he came into the possession of the King of Babylon—a wise and visionary man who saw that this being was much more than a mere automaton. The King put the Eye of the Ancients back in the war-golem’s forehead, and renamed him “Aganos” (meaning gentle/kind), teaching him about nature and the many wondrous ways the earth functioned. And the golem came to know about compassion and kindness. When the King’s vizier Kan-Ra plotted to kill the monarch, Aganos was the one who stopped the traitor from assassinating his beloved master. Kan-Ra was cursed by the King and exiled; and Aganos stayed by the ruler’s side watching as he grew into an old man.
Learning that Kan-Ra was still alive and spreading chaos and death, the aged and dying King sent Aganos to hunt down the hated former vizier and execute him. Grateful to his master for all of his kindness, Aganos promised to fulfil his last wish. Time after time Aganos would catch up to Kan-Ra only to have the dark sorcerer escape. And then Aganos would retreat to a hidden grotto in the Mediterranean to mend, dreaming of the glory of Mycenae and his long vanished war-golem brethren.
Aganos never gave up in his quest. Many centuries passed before he tracked Kan-Ra to the Andes mountains. Their age-old battle was interrupted by the Night Guard who defeated the sorcerer, burning him alive and locking his ashes in a vault. Aganos sat in silence for hundreds of years in the jungle, as still as a statue, trying to make his soul leave his corporeal form, thinking about the King of Babylon and his teachings. Moss and vines grew on him. Flowers sprung up like a crown upon his head. But he could not enter the Astral World.
And then, once again, he was brought under someone else’s sway, for Ultratech found Aganos and devised a way to manipulate him; and ARIA made him fight for her cause. But he was freed from this modern-day slavery by the warrior-brave Thunder, and Aganos has once again taken up his quest to snuff out Kan-Ra after the sorcerer escaped from the Night Guard’s subterranean prison. But now he must decide if he will use his freedom to fight the Astral being Gargos—a creature spawned from the very wellsprings of power that supplied Aganos with his spark of life.
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