Architects of the Awakening

The Architects of the Awakening are a duergar cult who believe that the natural psionics duergar are known to be capable of are but a sliver of the power they have the potential to unleash. They believe that powers their ancestors gained through their suffering at the hands of the mind flayers has the potential to be honed and better harnessed. Their mission is to figure out how to accomplish this and provide these enhanced abilities to the duergar en masse, putting their psionic powers of on par with those of the mind flayers themselves. With that power in hand, the duergar people will be able to rise up as the masters of all the Underdark. And perhaps all of Nexus as well.

History

Pre-Founding

The ancient Clan Duergar were a group of mountain dwarves who lived in isolation, which left them alone when the mind flayers came to enslave them. This was their peoples fate for thousands of years, during which time they were slowly transformed into the dwarven duergar of the modern age. Though they eventually rose up and won their freedom, they were forever changed by their ordeal and gained a semblance of natural psionic power.
Many years later, the duergar queen Duerra launched a campaign against the mind flayer colonies that had survived the collapse of their empire. But wanton slaughter was not the goal of her campaign; she ordered mind flayers to be captured and dissected, performing experiments to discover the secrets of the mental powers her people now possessed. It is said that she succeeded, and what few know is that it was Duerra's experiments that led to the development of her people's psionic powers. She enacted a powerful spell that gave psionic power to all duergar everywhere, though to a much lesser degree than Queen Duerra had hoped.
Despite this limited success, duergar nonetheless have much greater innate psionic power than most other humanoid races today. Why this is the case, and the true story behind Queen Duerra's actions, is a question that few modern duergar have asked. Only one asked this and cared enough to devote themselves to the truth of the matter. One who has ensured that though the Queen is long dead, her legacy lives on.

Founding of the Architects

Queen Duerra's descendant, Astali, was always fascinated by her natural psionic abilities and growing up wished to learn more. She needed to learn more. It took decades of research, but eventually she found enough ancient records to piece together the truth of the matter. More than that, however, she studied and understood the base principles of Duerra's original research. The psionic essence present in mind flayers was not, in fact, the source of their power. Rather, it was something in their blood that acted as the necessary catalyst. Duergar blood had this same catalyst, but the psionics granted to them by Duerra's ancient spell were not potent enough to release the full fury of this power. They had the fuel, yet their flame was too weak to ignite it.
Astali believed that she could finish what Duerra started and complete the research. The means to do so would be great and terrible; surely the Deepking would have her executed should he find out. But the rewards...yes, the greatness that her people would rise to should she succeed was surely worth such risk. The other denizens of the Underdark would bow to their power, and the surfacers would soon follow. Surely, that was worth any risk to herself. After all, she wasn't doing this for herself but for her people.
She began by finding like minded individuals. Those who had been on the tipping point of asking the same questions Astali had, who could easily be drawn to support her. They established a base that would later become the Halls of the Awakened and began their experiments.

Early Experiments

Astali believed that the secret in unlocking her people's full power lay in the ceremorphosis process by which an illithid tadpole normally overtakes a host body and transforms it into a mind flayer. Notably, dwarves normally cannot survive this process; should it be attempted, it would result in the death of both the dwarf and tadpole. That is what Astali sought to change. She used a process she dubbed "psionic surgery" to alter her test subjects, both duergar volunteers and illithid tadpoles she and her followers had taken by raiding small and more vulnerable mind flayer settlements.
The ultimate goal of her experiment was to allow the host to survive the ceremorphosis process while also remaining in control, allowing the duergar to make use of the illithid tadpole rather than the other way around. The preventative surgery on the duergar subjects mainly involved ensuring their brains would be protected from the tadpoles and that their reproduction systems would remain undamaged during the transition.
Though her first two experiments failed, resulting in the deaths of two of her followers, Astali found success in the third. Equal parts pleased and horrified by what she'd done, she kept her new "hybrid" isolated for further study. While her subject had survived the experiment, they had not retained their sanity. This was merely the first of many trials for Astali to begin perfecting her art. She created three more hybrids and had them & her unaltered followers mate, hoping that the offspring would be more stable than their hybrid parents. The children conceived through these efforts had the appearance of normal duergar babies with one key exception: they had far greater psionic power than any conventional duergar.

Recent Activities

These new children were dubbed the Awakened and Astali began to celebrate this success with her followers. Unfortunately for her, the celebrations were premature. More Awakened were created over the next 40 years and it was then that Astali made a horrifying discovery: the children of the Awakened were normal duergar. The future she envisioned of an all-powerful duergar empire would never come to pass if her Awakened couldn't pass their gifts to their descendants!
For the last several years, Astali has worked to try and find a way around this problem. And she believes she has found a solution to her problem: the aboleths. Aboleths are known for their psionic abilities but, more importantly, also for their perfect genetic memory. Anything an aboleth knows, its child is born knowing. Astali believes she if she can learn to duplicate this process, she can find a way to apply it to the Awakened's psionic abilities.
But no aboleth would willingly help them, Astali knows this, and it would be foolish to approach one underprepared. Her quarry would be a difficult prey. And so, she and the Architects of the Awakening plan their next move as they attempt to locate and capture an aboleth, ever so carefully. They have come too far to stumble in their last steps now.

Type

Religious, Cult