The Architects and their machines hold the sealed underground Sanctums and the orbiting station Skyhold.
Speed 100% · Health 75%Favorite foods:
An Architect is unmistakable: an enlarged, dome-like skull, blue skin translucent enough to show the veins beneath, and long, thin limbs too frail to lift, climb, or run. Nearly every Architect ever encountered wears a plain red shirt. An Architect is dangerous out of all proportion to its frailty — it reads patterns, predicts an opponent’s actions before they are taken, and presses on an unprotected mind until that mind hesitates, fumbles, or simply obeys. In its own halls it commands doors, fields, lights, and machines without lifting a hand.
The body is the weakness: a single clean strike fells an Architect. Reaching the moment when that strike is possible — past the robots, the prediction, and the pressure on your own thoughts — is the whole fight. Varying your tactics, breaking your habits, and disrupting the machinery around them all help. Above them all stands the Conductor, a gold-shirted Architect of Skyhold said to be grown into the station itself. No one has ever defeated it.
Speed 100% · Health 100%
The Sonari are the Architects’ androids: humanoid figures in yellow striated metallic shells, with smooth featureless faces that are the same in every emotion. They do not tire, sleep, blink, or bluff, they are immune to threats and persuasion, and under an Architect’s direction a group of them moves and fights as a single body, learning an opponent’s habits within the engagement.
Their metallic plate is strongest at the center and weakest at the joints — strike the seams. Drawn far from a Sanctum their power slowly fades, and a unit cut off from any directing Architect becomes a “drifted” Sonari: still dangerous, but predictable once observed, and sometimes — if approached slowly, without weapons drawn — willing to answer with something other than violence.
Speed 100% · Health 100%Favorite foods:
Scouts are small flying fixer robots, built for maintenance rather than war. They mend the machinery of the Sanctums and Skyhold, reach places a walker cannot, and in a fight join the Sonari as part of a coordinated defensive cordon directed by the resident Architect. They are lightly built — fixers, not soldiers — and like the Sonari they lose their dangerous coordination when cut off from the Architect directing them.
An old Aelfar named Aerendyl once told this cautionary tale:
“The Architects are the descendants of the old world’s most gifted people, who remade themselves in pursuit of a higher form and paid for their brilliance in bone, blood, and strength. When the old world fell they withdrew into the Sanctums and Skyhold, and there they have remained ever since — a small, dwindling, long-lived people, listening obsessively to a signal they believe to be Vox Maxa.
They hold that every mind is a fragment, and that all minds will one day join together into a single great voice. They do not preach this, they rarely explain themselves, and they treat uninvited visitors as adversaries: their machines are authorized to use lethal force. Of all the peoples of the world, they are the most dangerous, and the least often seen.”