The Hive left the Crown of Sorrow on one of their war moons, and my Shadows waged such a campaign to take it. We did. And we converted it into an Athenaeum world. But the Crown was a trap. A trap for me. I suspected as much. Which is why I did not wear it. After initial tests, my Psions determined it was a seeing device of sorts, feeding all sorts of data to someone or something deep in the Ascendant Plane. But seeing devices look both ways. I had to have it. And I had to have someone wear it. Because I believed I could control the Hive through a Shadow surrogate. The Hive are not true darkness, not what I saw at the black edge. But they would provide an army just the same. Proud Gahlran was bred specifically to bring them under my control.