Born the eldest son of Aleister Marlowe, Archon of Meidua Prefecture and Lord of Devil’s Rest, Hadrian Anaxander Marlowe is most famous for his devastating victory over the combined forces of the Cielcin Empire at the Battle of Gododdin, which culminated in the destruction of Gododdin’s sun and the near-total annihilation of the Cielcin species.

As a young man, nothing could have been further from Hadrian Marlowe’s mind than a military career. An avid student of history, languages, and inhuman cultures, young Hadrian desired to join the order of scholiasts, and dreamed of an assignment with the Imperial Office’s Expeditionary Corps, where he hoped to explore the galaxy.

His father had other plans, and intended to force Hadrian into the clergy. But Hadrian—with the help of his Lady Mother and a small group of retainers—escaped his father’s intentions. But the ship that had been engaged to carry him to the athenaeum on Teukros inexplicably arrived at Emesh—about as far from Teukros as one can imagine. By Marlowe’s own account, he spent the next two years destitute on the streets of the Emeshi capital before enrolling in the coliseum as a myrmidon pit fighter. Of these years there is remarkably little written. Coliseum records do not reach back so far, and aside from Marlowe’s own account, there are very few sources relating to the period, though apocryphal treatments on the period abound (one particularly lurid account, written by the historian Michealis—ostensibly with input from William of Danu, formerly a companion to Marlowe himself—details an account of how Marlowe murdered an enemy gladiator for revenge, an account notably absent in Marlowe’s own biography, if indeed it occurred at all).

In Marlowe’s account, an encounter with a Cielcin prisoner in the coliseum earned him an invitation to the Count’s service. This story has never made much sense, historians agree. How Hadrian Marlowe came to be in the service of Count Mataro then is the subject of much discussion in the academy. Some have suggested that he had already seduced the Count’s daughter, others the Count himself. Others have suggested some more fanciful tales, involving a plot between himself and the witch, Valka Onderra, to suborn House Mataro into funding the latter’s work. Most likely, it is believed that Hadrian Marlowe simply introduced himself to the Count, and made with him some deal relating to his genetic inheritance. There are those who believe that Count Mataro’s grandchildren are, in fact, intus bastards gotten on his daughter, Anais, by means of Marlowe’s genetic material.

When the Cielcin attacked Emesh in ISD 16172, Hadrian Marlowe offered his services to the Imperial Legions as a translator, hoping to lay the foundations of a lasting peace between mankind and the Cielcin. It is one of history’s great ironies that his career should begin thus, in light of how it ended.