from Raeli Oliems, The Two Prophets: Nicator Before the Empire

Seleucar is inseparable in our minds from its founder, the legendary Nicator. But who was Nicator, truly?

The Church once held that he was a deluded man who claimed the blessing of Sarapis in order to conquer the world. However, the Chrysalis Basilica quickly realized that Nicator's new empire was proving far more peaceful and even more friendly to the Church than the previous regimes - and so they quietly revised their stance to fully support the new order. And when armies of Seleucar threw back the Black Wave in the War of the Deeps, Nicator was posthumously accorded the honor of Fire Saint, a warrior of righteousness.

According to the old Cactus Clans of Hashan and the Upper Urubamba, Nicator was a sehakii, a holy spirit sent by Gaia to preserve the world against the Corrupt Ones, the Tsol'teth. As the Selucarian Empire continued its reign, it began to wither, exactly as a plant plucked from the ground withers.

And so who is Nicator? A heretic whose empire gradually came to prove good? Or an avatar whose empire gradually rotted?

The truth begins with a young man - a farm boy named Nikolas.

Nikolas lived on a farm far on the outer limits of the lands called Thera, almost in the wastes. Possibly through some agreement with the local brigands, his family was able to survive, even so far from the town proper. However, whatever immunity his family had from the local bandits, they had none from the armies of Ashtan and Shallam, which at the time were nothing more than militarized bandits themselves, wandering the lands looking for loot first and enemies second.

Nikolas lived 'a very boring, very typical life', as he put it, until the day his parents were killed. In the Sermon on the Rocks, he described the event:

When I was fifteen, war burst in through my front door. It killed my father with an offhand blow from an axe, and after having its brutal way with her, it killed my mother with a long-bladed spear. If I hadn't been too frightened to do more than hide, it would have killed me as well. And let me say that it was not soldiers who did this, nor was it the underlying conflicts that led to war... it was war itself, most monstrous of man's inventions, that hideous force that possesses man and his beliefs alike and turns them inside out.

After the deaths of his parents, Nikolas began what was known as the Time of Wandering...