Protea

Protea has no Leverian; her story is told in the Deadlock Protocol, and it is older than the Corpus that forgot it. Parvos Granum — the grain farmer who rose from nothing to found the Corpus as a creed of desire and self-reliance — struck a bargain with the Orokin, and part of what he bought was time. Not the metaphor: the Entrati's stolen research into time itself. "The Entrati have violated time," he says, "and I have violated them."

He supplied the design; a reluctant Ballas did the building. When Ballas asks what to call this child of two fathers, Parvos names her Protea, and makes of her his own bodyguard — a frame who could turn back the moment itself.

When the Corpus Board moved to murder their own founder — sabotaging the Void drive of his transport — Protea's power over time saved his life, and the saving was the trap. It cast Parvos into a pocket of the Void that would be called the Granum Void, a prison outside of time, and froze Protea herself into a Specter, held forever in the instant of protecting him.

Millennia later the modern Corpus, grown slothful under men like Nef Anyo, had forgotten what Parvos meant. The Tenno went into the Granum Void and recovered Protea's blueprints from the Errant Specters there — and Parvos returned, unimpressed by his heirs, to reshape or replace them. His guardian's fate is still bound to his; when her Prime was revealed, it was Parvos, not Ballas, who spoke over it.