Among the highest echelons of the Lineages, none are truly expected to risk their lives anymore, much less for something as simple and trivial as combat. The chosen warriors of the Sovereign’s Lineages stride through the battlefield safely projecting their consciousness into their Avatara: outlandish creations bedecked in all sorts of ornament and Biomantic enhancements, whose lithe, androgynous frames bely the speed and power they can bring to bear.

With almost no personal risk and minimal skill needed to become a deadly foe, many scions of the Lineages have taken to decorating their Avatara as ostentatiously as possible, for the body-vessels have made them such proficient killers that a tally of the slain foes is simply no longer a practical method by which to distinguish oneself.

To date, only those Lineages directly descended from the Sovereign have displayed the capability to deploy Avatara surrogates. If any among the Directorate or the minor Lineages possess the capability, they keep it well hidden for they know the Sovereign will stop at nothing to ensure their destruction, as he already did when the surrogates were first displayed.

The sheer ruthlessness with which he culled the project and any records of it outside his control suggest that this technology somehow represents an existential threat to the Sovereign but few, if any, have been able to grasp why. The military advantages are of course tremendous, but that alone does not justify his response.

What nobody knows, except for the long deceased creators of the Avatara and the Sovereign himself, is that unlike current surrogate suits that have a maximum projection range of a few dozen miles, early testing of the original specifications had revealed no measurable limit to the projection range of these suits. The Sovereign grasped the significance of this technology instantly and, with his characteristic ruthlessness, acted to acquire it and ensure that only he would possess it among the Spires. A great deal of the Sovereign’s reputation as an infallible leader and intricate plotter could very well be based almost exclusively on the advantage provided by his advanced surrogates, that allow him to act on information that he has no right knowing as it occurs halfway across the world.