Tuesday, 10 March 2015

Mekhios Graveyard at Sarum Prime

The first time I went to Amarr I bought something that happened to be residing in the Sarum Prime system, birthplace of our great Empress Jamyl I the Cloned Capsuleer (my title), who always looks slightly weary in the holoportraits I've seen of her, and who I'd love to take out on a bar crawl with my Ni-Kunni lot back in Conoban. I'm absolutely certain she'd be up for it, if I could get near enough to her to ask (at least the alleged peaceful half of her would be). An incognito Empress in a bar - what a coup that would be. The kudos I would get: hi everyone, this is Jamyl. Does she look familiar?

Jamyl's home of Sarum Prime itself is the site of the Mekhios Graveyard, available to visit and marked on the star map under DED Agent Site Reports. The Battle of Mekhios was the climactic event during the brief Elder War in YC110, when the Minmatar Elder Fleet showed up at Sarum Prime with the intention of releasing all the Minmatar slaves and doing some damage at the same time.

Unfortunately for them, Jamyl Sarum arrived - or "came back from the dead" (she had been presumed dead after the Succession Trials at least two years earlier) in an Abaddon and single-handedly laid waste to the Minmatar by using a doomsday weapon of unknown origin. Rumours still circulate that the weapon was derived from recovered Old Earth tech, far in advance of ours. The site of this final battle is memorialised and retained in orbit around Sarum Prime. It's a damn impressive sight - whole battleships ripped in two.


Of course in the eyes of pious and gullible Amarrians, Jamyl used her magical divine power as handed down to her from God. There was an Old Earth cultural figure called Arthur C. Clarke who said: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Look at what the Drifters are doing with the "Prong Drive" on their battleships. It's not magic, it's just advanced tech; but you can make people believe it's magic if they're receptive enough...

Mekhios Graveyard is all the more impressive for having the incredible Domain Nebula as a backdrop: