Garuda

Garuda has no Leverian either. Her origin surfaced late — four first-person tablets, the Archimedean Records, hidden in Pontis Tower and readable only after Jade Shadows: Constellations. They are written in the hand of the woman who became her: an unnamed Orokin Archimedean, once a Lorist's aide, hardened by war.

She was summoned to the perfumed atrium of an Executor famous for cruel whimsies — the kind who had living birds stripped of their mating plumage and thrown, still shrieking, into gilded bins. The Executor wanted a Warframe: a red, clawed, gore-thirsty thing modelled on an old-Earth demon called Garuda, and she wanted it made from her own consort. When the Archimedean warned that the frames come with madness and offered to temper it, the Executor took her by the throat. The madness, she said, was the best part.

Sealed under Dax guard, she worked by the Ainikki method — Ballas never shared his subtler art with the Collegium — and used the consort's blood to model the result: a sleek scarlet death-bird, a fit assassin for a gore-queen. And in the same model she read her own end. Once the work was done she would be plucked for what she knew and discarded, left to writhe like the Executor's birds.

So she chose the serum for herself. For nine days she injected the Garuda strain and sealed the inner doors to burn behind her, so the change would finish before anyone could break in. She judged she had spared the consort a grotesque fate; she hoped he would be far away at her hatching. There was no regret in the tablets — only a cold freedom. A condemned woman, choosing the shape of her own execution, and hoping one of the dead she left in that hall would be the Executor herself.

(The archive marks the edges: the Executor is only implied to be the Envoy Nitokh, and the consort only likely Roathe — neither is named in the tablets.)