Lizardfolk Cleric 20 · Challenge Rating 20
MONITOR
Balance Incarnate • Highest Cleric of Iüdex
"Balance is not cruelty. Balance is simply cruelty distributed evenly."
"Balance is not cruelty. Balance is simply cruelty distributed evenly."
He goes by nothing else. Not a title, not a chosen name, just Monitor, after the lizard he resembles and the role he claimed for himself. His true name is lost to history, and he has never bothered to correct anyone who assumes he never had one.
Monitor was, by every measure of devotion and raw power, the greatest cleric Iüdex had ever raised to his service. But greatness bred arrogance, and arrogance became his undoing, or rather, the undoing of everyone else.
As high cleric, he grew certain the cults of Caro Vanta had multiplied beyond what the world could bear. In the name of balance, he set out to correct it, and he succeeded, brutally and completely. But erasing one faith left a vacuum, and into that vacuum poured another cult, hungrier and bolder than the last. So he balanced that one too. And the next. And the one after that.
Each purge fed the next. The more he burned away, the more desperate and dangerous whatever grew back became, and the more convinced he grew that only he could see the pattern, that only he could hold the scales steady. By the time the last handful of survivors went into hiding, dreading a reckoning they knew would eventually find them, Monitor believed the work was finished. In his own mind, he had achieved perfect balance.
Certain his purpose was fulfilled, he founded a militant order in his own image, the Monitors, sworn to enforce the balance he had bled the world to create, in Year 52, and spent the next decade completing what the order still calls the Balancing: the eradication of rival worship across Voir, convert or die. He never gave them his name, some say he no longer remembers it himself. The soldiers who served beneath him took to calling him "Monitor," after the reptile he so closely resembled, and after the role he had appointed himself: watcher, judge, and executioner of the world's balance. The name stuck. His true name remains lost to history, for now.
The militant order Monitor founded still bears his name, see the Monitors for their history, ranks, and the modern order's activity across Voir.
Among his own order, Monitor is spoken of only in hushed reverence, the founder, the first and mightiest of the Monitors, a standard no cleric since has matched. Few outside the order have seen him directly; fewer still have lived to describe the meeting.
Iüdex entrusted him with Verdict itself, and with it, the terrible authority to decide, on the god's behalf, when balance has tipped too far. It is this same authority, and this same order, that the militant Monitors who serve beneath him carry into every town they deem imbalanced, with no court to answer to but his.
