Zaebos’ Goals:
1. To elevate the most deserving of the baatezu to greater forms.
2. To change the nature of the Blood War to focus on testing the worthiness of baatezu.
3. To humiliate and slay Dagos, Marshal of the Pits.
The story of Zaebos
He was a loyal soldier in the service of Belial - Belial who was prince of darkness in the service of the lord of light. He was exquisitely competent and wise, clever and ruthless, honorable in a way. He rose through the ranks as a trusted acolyte of the cleric Barbatos, who the Lord of the Flies had put in charge of organizing raptures in praise of the Perfection the Lord was creating. Zaebos was given as a gift to Belial, then an ally of the Lord of the Flies, in return for a legion of the finest smiths to complete the ironwork of Maladomini's finest city.
Zaebos never made a mistake. Always he was precise, methodical, and exact, planning out his actions long in advance. As a gelugon he was noted for it, completing his purgatory of ice the first time through.
The Nybbas was not like that. Nybbas was neither loyal nor particularly wise. Contemptuous and a bit reckless, still a skilled diplomat, completely brilliant in its field, but not precise. It thought itself above all the other baatezu, existing in a rarified place of pure information. But it had skills that Zaebos needed, skills with which to hide himself for those who would be coming.
The intervention of Set was not needed. The archetypes were stolen in the eternal night, and Levistus was allowed to take the blame. This was Baatorian diplomacy at its most pure.
And so Nybbas became Zaebos, and Zaebos became hidden. And the new Zaebos put himself about the task of dragging the rest of Baator, kicking and scheming, into a higher level, while the former one continued to develop his plans.
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Perhaps the most ambitious of the Eight, the treacherous ZAEBOS is the Minster of Promotions. Zaebos appears as a stern-faced, humorless man; he is hairless, with skin of slate gray. He wears a formal suit, and keeps a crocodile as a pet. The crocodile is said to contain the spirit of his predecessor, the Sweet Soldier.
The Sweet Soldier, the original Zaebos, once served as the right-hand devil of Cardinal Barbatos, a powerful noble of Maladomini. He was an extremely intelligent, efficient, and loyal follower of the Cardinal. Zaebos was also known for his uncanny ability to get points across, even by executing other pit fiends.
The original Zaebos' greatest claim to fame prior to the Reckoning was what he termed the Game of Chaos, a great purge of baatezu opposing his liege, even among others in Triel's nobility. The organization involved so impressed the Fallen One that Zaebos was put in charge of all of Maladomini's armies during the great war, when he was recruited by Cantrum to become part of the then-secret Dark Eight.
How this Zaebos became imprisoned in the form of a crocodile is unclear, such things not being commonly discussed in Baator. After all, the official line is that the original Zaebos still rules. Does he, indeed? Zaebos had many enemies, to be sure, and some misdirection would have been welcome. The interference of the fiend Nybbas, a member of the Ministry of Immortal Diplomacy studying the petitioners of all planes, seems to have been responsible. Perhaps Nybbas became the new Zaebos, having disguised the Sweet Soldier in a manner modeled after the phylogeny of the Minions of Set, and not offering a way to change back if he even wanted one.
In what he called, with a nod to his predecessor, the Game of Law, Zaebos and his ministry took over the castle of a rival in Nessus in order to punish his fellow minister Dagos, Marshall of the Pits. "The Marshalling is inefficient," he complained, in what was the cumulation of centuries of plotting begun immediately after his ascension to his current position. "The true purpose of the Blood War is to prepare warriors for future promotions, and to provide a practical environment within which to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. As such, the troops should be led into battle with this larger purpose in mind. Dagos' techniques concentrate instead on the entirely irrelevant goal of winning battles. I mean to put a stop to that."
The Dark Lord did not intervene. It is possible he really cares as little about the War as is rumored.
Before the results of the Minister of Promotion's experiment could truly be known, Dagos returned to Nessus and defeated Zaebos, reclaiming his fortress. Zaebos spent some decades as a nupperibo before being reelevated to pit fiend status by his own ministry. In the meantime, it seems that his crocodile ran the operation from behind the scenes.
Zaebos is cynical and embittered, convinced that no baatezu deserves promotion. He considers it to be the dark secret of his ministry that promotions are given not because they are earned, only to compete with the tanar'ri. "Perhaps if I were permitted to wait a few more millennia, the evil and brilliance that I expect might have time to truly ripen. As it is... ah, we do the best we can with excrement to work with."