Dionus

Dionus was a House Military soldier during the War in Heaven who defected following the Battle of Golgalith and founded a clinic for the study of temporal diseases on Gulliver's Rest. As a Homeworlder, he had a level of innate skill at telepathy.

Early life
Dionus was "churned out" by a breeding engine of the Great Houses. (AUDIO: Eternal Escape) By the time he came to Gulliver's Rest, he had already lived through several lifetimes; he recalled being familiar with the original identity of "Nari" when they both lived on the Homeworld. (AUDIO: Me & My Ghost) He also had a wife, Susit, and two children, Meren and Egar. (AUDIO: Eternal Escape)

In the House Military
After War broke out, he spent some time as a mindless drone of the House Military, (AUDIO: Eternal Escape) working as an Interrogator. He committed a number of atrocities against prisoners on the order of his superior, not even considering the question of whether they were innocent. The victims of his interrogations included a number of Homeworld deserters who had been tracked down by agents of the Houses and returned to the Homeworld for trial. (AUDIO: Call Me Ishmael)

However, he was traumatised by General Sandus's lack of concern about the natives during the Battle of Golgalith. He developed a conscience and ran away in a stolen timeship with his wife and children. (AUDIO: Eternal Escape)

The physician of Gulliver's Rest
They settled on the planet Gulliver's Rest where Dionus began to run a clinic for those affected by temporal diseases as a result of the War in Heaven. He was visited by a Mother and Father of Faction Paradox who offered to help run his clinic in exchange for sole ownership of a "temporal anomaly" which they had predicted would materialise on Gulliver's Rest someday. He refused them, and in retaliation they erased his wife from history; Dionus carried on with his life believing himself a single father of two. A member of the Friend later arrived on Gulliver's Rest and offered to help run the clinic, something he accepted. (AUDIO: Eternal Escape)

Dionus was once unexpectedly visited by a man calling himself Ishmael who travelled in a strange egg-shaped ship. Ishmael was a member of the Order of Tarth'Rioshim who had been having strange dreams of the life of a noble "doomed lover" straight out of a fairy tale, Dra'Heem. Delving into buried memories inside Ishmael's mind, Dionus revealed to him that his memories were simply of his original life, while, as a result of the War's impact on Urok'Sharn's timeline, in the current version of history Dra'Heem had been abandoned as an infant and raised by the Order of Tarth'Rioshim as Ishmael. As a result of this revelation, Ishmael broke off from the Order and swore to protect beings from parallel timelines, instead of hunting them down as was the Order's practice. (AUDIO: Call Me Ishmael)

Once, after having cured and discharged all of the patients who had been in his care, he tried to take the opportunity to settle in and finally write a detailed record of his past actions as an Interrogator. However, he was interrupted by the arrival of Nari, a mysterious woman whom he seemed to remember from a previous lifetime. It soon became clear that she was a Homeworlder herself and suffering from some kind of amnesia. He became infatuated with her, not realising why. Shortly after more patients arrived, Nari blacked out in the night and brutally murdered one of them, only to wake up with no memory of this.

Locking her up in her room, Dionus hacked his way into the Great Houses' mainframe and realised Nari was an infamous wanted fugitive, with whom he had been familiar while he was living on the Homeworld, and that she had tricked him into liking her using artificial love pheromones. After confronting her in her room and then using a mind probe of her, however, he realised the innocent Nari persona was not an act, but a real artificial personality the Renegade had buried herself within. Though she was aware of her true identity, whenever she tried to access the memories of her criminal past, Nari passed out — though she sometimes experienced bursts of violence as her concentrated "evil side" briefly returned to the front. Having done her job too well, Nari was unable to free her real personality, as much as she wanted to.

As Nari still had access to her original self's knowledge of advanced biochemistry, Dionus offered to work on curing her of her self-imposed personality disorder, in exchange for her agreeing to stay locked in her room for the safety of the other patients, and putting her knowledge of chemistry to use helping Dionus prepare various medicines for his other patients. They settled into this routine, with Dionus coming to genuinely enjoy Nari's company with no need for brain-addling chemicals, to the point that he ultimately trusted her to cook a meal for the two of them. This proved a mistake as Nari drugged the meal and escaped from Gulliver's Rest. Dionus held no grudge, however, and was somehow happy to know that Nari was once more out there in the universe, not expecting to ever meet her again. (AUDIO: Me & My Ghost)

Flight from Gulliver's Rest
Eventually, however, General Sandus's Fifth Time Fleet arrived on Golgalith, followed in short order by Enemy timeships and the Faction's ritual barges. Running out of the clinic with Meren and Egar, Dionus tried to make his way to the warded bunker where he had hidden his timeship. They encountered the Faction Paradox Mother whom Dionus had met earlier. Erasing Egar from time with one blow of her shadow-weapon, she taunted him with the idea that it could all have been avoided if he'd agreed to the Faction's earlier offer, but, having forgotten Egar, he dismissed her retort as meaningless lies.

By the time he made his way to the timeship, his one surviving child Meren had briefly been replaced by one called Tara before disappearing from his mind completely. He departed in the timeship unable to remember anything but the Battle of Golgalith he believed he had just run away from — poised to start all over again by settling "somewhere nice", "out of harm's way, where the War can't find me" and building a family there, which he would believe to be his first. (AUDIO: Eternal Escape)

Return to Gulliver's Rest
During V-Time, however, Chris Cwej was able to visit a "medical centre" on Gulliver's Rest which "specialised in afflictions of a temporal nature" after he sorted out the shifting timelines in the planet Golgalith. The staff of the clinic agreed to help the people of Golgalith finish healing from the aftereffects of the timeline shifts. (PROSE: Crushing Reality)

Behind the scenes

 * The unproduced Dionus's War audio story The Diplomat would have given Dionus's full name as Dionusavarnapexiandal.