Zimimar

Part the First: A Prelude

The bearded one ran through the bogs, looking behind itself occasionally as if fearful of pursuit. What it expected - a batallion of narzugons? The hounds of Mammon himself? - it did not know.

Instead, it found its fate already ahead of it, all gleaming bone and night-edged armor. It rose its segmented tale over its head. "Sedition is your crime," it hissed, formally, in the greater caste-tongue that neither of them fully understood. "Your sentence is death."

It struck, and that was all for the bearded one.

Part the Second: A Myth

In the beginning of time, there was only the Lord of Darkness, who is known to mortals by such names as Asmodeus, Satanas, and Melchiresha.

Then, in the dark and the void, shapes began to form. They were dim, fragmented reflections of the Lord of Darkness, unable to harm the Lord, but still they annoyed him/her/them/it.

The Dark Lord discovered that the desire to dominate the shapes was stronger than the desire to destroy them. So it was that it created eight servants to divide the shapes between them, the better to conquer.

The eight servants rounded the shapes in the darkness into eight groups, and imprisoned them in eight realms created in the servants’ image.

And then, after making the shapes understand exactly how helpless and dominated they had become, the Dark Lord and the eight servants slaughtered them.

After that, the eight realms were hollow and vacant for a long time, and the Lord of Darkness was content. But the infinite power of the Dark Lord continued to wax, and new shapes were reflected further out. They saw the eight realms created by the servants of the Dark Lord, and, enviously, they began to create realms of their own.

The Dark Lord saw that these too would need to be conquered, shown their weakness, and destroyed. So it created a new realm in its own image, a realm of darkness, and created eight new servants to live within it - the Dark Eight. The Dark Eight were commanded to create a race of warriors to conquer the shapes in the far darkness. Pearza designed the forms the warriors would take, Zaebos determined when they would be ready to assume them, while Cantrum coordinated the whole effort.

The shapes grow stronger - Cantrum was slain - Zimimar was created to restore the confidence of the Dark Eight.

"It is because of your lack of belief that the corupt shapes were allowed to grow in power," Zimimar sternly told the warriors of the Dark Lord. "I will teach you to believe."

And it was so. Thanks to the teachings of Zimimar, powerful thanks to the Dark Lord, the corrupt shapes in the darkness - now called tanar'ri - returned to their true, weakling state. The weaker shapes further out grew weaker still, and soon they will all be ruled by the warriors of the Dark Lord, and then disappear entirely.

Part the Third: An Everchanging Reality

If Baalzephon fuels the Blood War's physical needs, then ZIMIMAR fuels its will. Her ministry weaves epic stories of victories won and traitors suppressed, of conspiracies unraveled and foes outwitted. If you believe Zimimar's propaganda machine (and you will, one way or another), Baator is on the very brink of victory, always and continually. History is flux, perpetually rewritten to create an image across the planes of a Baator slowly, steadily progressing toward inevitable multiversal domination.

The present Minister of Morale is not the original Zimimar. The original was a duke in the service of Count Minauros. This original Zimimar, a male pit fiend, won fame in Minauros' court as head of the Count's osyluth secret police, eclipsing even the terrible Duke Bael in esteem. As a result, he was easily able to win the right to command Minauros' armies during the Siege of Dis. What no one at the time knew was that Zimimar had been drawn into the fold of Cantrum of Nessus, as all the great generals were. Exactly when Zimimar was assassinated and replaced, and indeed how many times, is unclear, for the present Zimimar has rewritten all records. She is now the original - she has made herself so by controlling Baator's belief. She has been Zimimar since the dawn of time. In the names of the Lords of the Nine, the Dark Eight have always ruled, Zimimar among them.

Zimimar's appearance changes continually, but official press releases assure us that it has always been the same. To better inspire the troops, she is usually a pit fiend of perfect symmetry, a paragon of strength and scaly beauty, but the details vary radically. Her human guises are always neatly attired and attractive, but still strong and formidable in their way. In any shape, she is always seen with a fixed, manic smile that she sees as reassuring, but which inspires terror in all who witness it.

The arrest and removal of dissidents is still a major duty of the Minister of Morale. It sometimes happens that a baatezu will begin to get ideas that are neither correct nor useful to infernal society. Then it must be corrected, or the uncorrectable must be made to disappear so that its ideas will not infect the confidence of the others. For this purpose, Zimimar has assassins at her disposal. Many of these are osyluths, but not all. Many of them have been altered to be nearly invisible. For special purposes, she is permitted the use of a company of the dreaded ashmede.

The Faceless are beyond her control, beyond the command of any of the Dark Eight. They are kept separate from the rest of the baatezu, with their own rules and customs.

Part the Fourth: Weaknesses

Perhaps Zimimar is mad. Perhaps the stress of manipulating the beliefs of the entire baatezu race has unhinged her brain, making it as twisted and contrary as her propaganda. Alone of the baatezu, she must remember all past narratives, keeping them straight in her mind in case they are needed again, or in case previous stories reemerge to become a threat. Perhaps the zealotry with which she urges the baatezu to battle and hunts down thought-criminals is fueled by the terror within her that someday she will forget, and become a prisoner of her own lies, created rather than creatrix. Such a fate, slave to her fictions like everyone else, is perhaps too much for her to bear.

Zimimar’s Goals:

1. To convince Baator and the rest of the multiverse of Law’s inevitable victory in the Blood War.
2.  To convince Baator and the rest of the multiverse of the importance of the Dark Eight and herself.
3. To convince Baator and the rest of the multiverse of the unchanging, eternal status of herself and the rest of the Dark Eight.
4. To keep her ever-changing stories straight in her own mind without going completely mad.