Ikavi Garkim

Ikavi Garkim was the chancellor of Doegan and right-hand of Emperor Aetheric III in the late 14 century DR.

Description
Ikavi, like most Mar, was small statured, brown-skinned, and with a flatter nose than the Ffolk of the Utter East. He was over thirty years old.

Personality
As the agent of Aetheric III, he proved himself to be both loyal and patriotic, but also driven and ruthless. He was well educated and articulate.

Abilities
Ikavi had some psionic powers—he could read minds but only do so easily with people of weak mind.

Relationships
Garkim was aide to the mage-king and a member of Chamber of Councilors. However, nobody in his family and the quarter of the city where he grew up would tolerated him, owing to his powers.

History
Ikari Garkim born to a poor family among the tarok, the lowest of the Mar social classes. His father had hoped he would work as a carpenter like him and Garkim helped his father in his work. But during his childhood it became clear the young Garkim had psionic powers—he even learned carpentry by reading his father's mind—and in time his family and neighbors came to dislike him and his powers. One day, a drunken Ffolk soldier wandered into the family home and ended up trying to kill the young Garkim and his mother, but instead Garkim killed the man. More soldiers arrived and wanted to avenge their comrade by killing Garkim, when suddenly a voice from nowhere said to take the boy to the royal palace. The soldiers, knowing the voice was of the mage-king, complied and Ikavi Garkim entered his service.

At the palace, Ikavi was trained as an official by military officers and priests. Ikavi steadily acquired increasing military and political responsibilities. Eventually, he became the personal agent of Aetheric III, who granted him a place among the lords of the Chamber of Councilors as the Councilor of Internal Investigations.

Sometime in the, Ikavi Garkim found a lair of cultists of the Fallen Temple in his childhood quarter that had abducted and killed Captain Taergen. He entered alone, killing all of them bar one in an attempt to find a hint about their leader, but without success. Afterward, he made a report to the other lords when Aetheric III's voice instructed Garkim to go to the Vault of the Stone Arch greet people just arriving from the gate in the Sargauth Level of Undermountain—Miltiades, Kern Desanea, Jacob, Trandon, and Kastonoph Nesher.

Ikavi guided the paladins though the trap-ridden Vault of the Stone Arch while offering his best hospitality. The paladins agreed to being escorted to the palace to request help (or find the culprit) in retrieving the missing Eidola of Neverwinter. On their elephant ride to the palace, Garkim gave the guests a short, albeit unreliable, version of the region's history, culture, colonization, and the Bloodforge Wars. The bloodforge was the reason the paladins had come to the Utter East, as its basal golems were the creatures that had kidnapped Eidola. According to their guide, all of the Five Nations of the Utter East had one of the bloodforges of their own, and possibly, the mysterious faction called the Fallen Temple, one of the five churches that had come to Doegan from the Moonshae Isles during the colonization.

During a welcoming meal, the paladins and Garkim were invited to an audience with Emperor Aetheric III, who was a telepathic monstrosity in a giant tank of black poisonous liquid. The emperor shared with the paladins that the cost of use of the bloodforges was not just draining of the land and its people of life, but also altering their shapes; Aetheric III was altered the most because of his heavy bloodforge use. The emperor also told them that the bloodforges were created by the Mar's ancestors to seal otherworldly forces and influences on the region away and that use of the artifacts had weakened the barriers. He also revealed that Eidola was employed by the Fallen Temple. Aetheric III asked Miltiades, the group's leader for help against the common enemy and after a communion with his deity he agreed to destroy the enemies of Doegan. After the paladins departed, the emperor explained to Garkim that among the enemies of Tyr were the Fallen Temple, the bloodforges, and also the emperor himself. Garkim was tasked to be ready to assassinate the newcomers if they moved against the emperor.

After the paladins fought against a team of mercenaries led by Artemis Entreri in front of Eldrinpar's Fountain of the Kraken, Ikavi Garkim and his guards, the few not suffering from the Gray Malaise, arrived to clean up the mess and gather information about the event but Aetheric III informed him via mind communication that he had seen it all.

Soon after, the Emperor summoned Garkim to explain that he was the one who'd abducted Eidola, hoping to attract more armies from Faerûn to the Utter East to help, and it had worked with the arrival of the paladins and mercenaries. However, Aetheric III needed greater armies for his plan to eradicate the fiends.

Later, Enteri and his mercenaries sneaked into the palace and found Aetheric's chambers and his poison-filled tank. Entreri used a magical item to create a small silver portal in the tank's wall, which injured the emperor and flooded the castle with the tank water and his tentacled carcass.

As that happened, the magical barriers around Eldrinpar failed, flooding the city with fiendish monsters, hordelings, and tanar'ri. So the mercenaries decided to re-enter the dungeons of the imperial palace, with Entreri and Sharessa Stagwood both insisting on recovering the bloodforge, before the fiends could seize it.

After the bloodforge was stolen from the Fallen Temple cultists, Ikavi Garkim decided to follow Entreri, Sharessa Stagwood, and Ingrar Welven together with paladins Trandon and Kern Desanea. However, Ingrar sensed Ikavi following them with his guards and they stopped to speak with him. Offering a temporary alliance in order to save his city from the fiends, Garkim joined the assembled group of mercenaries and paladins. Using a secret passage built by the Mar known to Garkim, they managed to exit the palace without a fight and told the others that the cultists had installed the bloodforge inside the Temple of Umberlee. So they entered the Fallen Temple's hideout to stop the devious plot of the cultists to summon their deity Ysdar and Entreri and Sharessa attempted to claim the bloodforge as their own but were stopped by the now-monstrous Aetheric III. In the process, the deity Tyr revealed himself through his new Chosen, Ingrar Welven. The deity manifested himself through ominous red skies and collapsed part of the temple's dome. Disgusted by the cult that claimed to be his worshipers, Tyr incinerated many and forced the survivors to flee. After the mad Mage-Emperor was also defeated, Garkim and Ingrar took control of the forge in order to defeat the fiends and save the city. Garkim explaining he gained the knowledge to how use the bloodforge from the mind of the dead emperor.

Appearances

 * Novels
 * Errand of Mercy
 * Conspiracy
 * Uneasy Alliances