Calen Harendotes

Calen Harendotes is the self-styled Monarch of Latarra and one of two surviving incarnations of the ancient immortal Kharn Sagara, who has lived for a thousand generations and built his power in the Norman Expanse over centuries. His body is almost entirely cybernetic -- nearly all mortal flesh replaced by machinery -- and incorporates weapons including energy beams fired from his eyes. He chose the title Monarch as a repudiation of his sister-self, the other Sagara incarnation who ruled Vorgossos.

Harendotes built Latarra into a major power, commanding nearly half a million ships, conquering worlds including Ashklam, and maintaining a long alliance with MINOS -- providing human prisoners as test subjects for the plague experiments that became the lethovirus, in exchange for which he received the location of Vorgossos. He sent Lorian Aristedes to Forum as his apostol and entered a calculated accord with Emperor William, seeking to strip the Norman provinces from Imperial control while presenting himself as a partner.

Harendotes leads the assault on Vorgossos personally and orders the massacre of its entire population to deny his sister-self any vessel for her consciousness. In the Tree of Life laboratory, he reveals that he sold the Mericanii the cornerstone of what became the lethovirus in exchange for the location of Vorgossos. He then connects himself physically to the Tree of Life system and awakens all of his scions as full, independent copies of himself, intending to scatter his essence across the galaxy so that Kharn Sagara survives as a distributed, plural existence. He announces his intent to destroy Vorgossos so that no single copy could return to claim it. He is killed by his sister-self's drones during the assault's climax and falls. He dies having set in motion the proliferation of himself across the universe.