Of the creature, Orphan, but little can be said. Marlowe’s mammoth autobiography—if indeed it is an autobiography—remains our only primary source attesting to the creature’s existence at all. If Marlowe’s tale is accurate, and the creature did make landfall on Gododdin, no copies of the security footage from Fort Din have been handed down to us.

It is possible the creature did not exist at all.

Per Marlowe’s account, the creature was born of the Mericanii machine lifeform, Brethren. Marlowe asserts—and later revelations from the horde discovered at Sarpedon have corroborated—that the Mericanii machines were primarily organic in substance. According to Marlowe, the Mericanii intelligence required human neural tissue to operate, and began as a network of pod-grown humans—bred without the capacity for full normal function—that occupied a series of sleeper creches in the heart of the old fortress on Vorgossos. In time, the demands of Kharn Sagara’s cloning practice saw the Mericanii system transplanted to the reservoir beneath the palace on Vorgossos. Breakthroughs in genetic science carried out by Sagara and his surgeons saw the Mericanii machine transformed into something resembling a living organism: a single mass of human tissue—the result of Brethren’s several hundred component bodies merged together—built around the original machine core.

This, Marlowe said, was Orphan’s mother. In his account, Marlowe describes the creature’s birth in lurid detail: the vast organic computer lying on the shore of its prison like a beached whale, the ogre clawing its way out from within. Marlowe tells us that Orphan was entirely human, without any trace of the machine whatsoever. This, Marlowe speculates, endowed the creature with free will, whereas its “mother” was bound to observe the commands and strictures placed on it by its programming. It was this freedom, Marlowe indicates, which permitted the creature to aid Marlowe in the theft of the starship Demiurge from Vorgossos—something Brethren itself could never have permitted.

It was Orphan, Marlowe says, who piloted Demiurge in the final years of the Cielcin Wars, and that it was Orphan who fired the weapon that slew the sun at Gododdin. While Marlowe makes no effort to distance himself from the act, there are those among his adherents who hold the creature up as a kind of scapegoat, insisting on Marlowe’s innocence of the murder of those billions who remained on Gododdin and in Gododdin system. It was Orphan who killed those people, they say, not Marlowe.

And yet we have no evidence the creature even existed, leading others to conclude that Orphan is an invention of Marlowe’s, conjured in order to absolve himself of some measure of the guilt he bears for his crimes. Many cynics have been quick to cite the convenience of the fact that Orphan’s entire life is encapsulated by Lord Marlowe’s narrative. Any who might have ascertained whether or not the golem ever existed are now either fugitives…or dead.