The Taq Corporation
Location: Enoch, HKE
Specialization: Energy production, raw resource extraction, arcane-powered utilities
Overview
Taq Corporation does not compete for control of Enoch's energy supply. It already has it.
Every utility. Every industrial pipeline. Every arcane-powered system drawing current in the city traces back to Taq. This is not a market position — it is a structural fact, reinforced over decades through a combination of political leverage, strategic contract capture, and the quiet disappearance of competitors who pushed back too hard.
Publicly, Taq presents as a civic institution: an energy provider aligned with HKE's religious authorities, a stabilizing force in a city with complex needs. The face they show the public is clean, managed, and carefully calibrated. What happens below that surface is an open secret in certain circles and a dangerous truth in others.
The Prophets of Ohrmam have named Taq Corporation a moral cancer on Enoch's soul. They are the only institution in the city with the standing and the will to say so publicly. The tension between them and Taq is one of the defining fault lines in HKE's social landscape.
Leadership
Emran Doud — CEO, Taq Corporation
Emran Doud is, by most visible measures, exactly what a CEO of a dominant civic energy corporation should be: polished, articulate, inspirational in front of a crowd. He gives good speeches. He understands how to make a room feel like he is on their side. He has maintained Taq's public alignment with HKE's religious establishment through a combination of strategic generosity and careful image management.
Behind closed doors, the calculation is simpler and colder. Doud's actual priorities are monopoly maintenance and rival elimination — in that order. The tools he's willing to use for the former include policy capture, selective blackmail, and contracts written to be technically legal and functionally inescapable. For the latter, the Taq Security Forces handle what policy cannot.
He does not need to raise his voice. He does not need to threaten directly. He has structured things so that the consequences arrive without him needing to be in the room.
Products & Services
- Municipal Energy Supply — Primary provider of all utility-grade energy across Enoch; no competing infrastructure exists
- Industrial Power Contracts — Long-term energy agreements with major industrial and commercial clients; terms are non-negotiable
- Arcane Resource Extraction — Raw extraction of arcane-powered natural resources; the upstream source for a significant portion of Enoch's energy economy
- Private Energy Infrastructure — Custom power solutions for high-value clients requiring off-grid or secured supply
Corporate Structure
| Role | Function |
|---|---|
| CEO — Emran Doud | Public face; strategic architect; the man who decides which rivals get crushed through policy and which ones get a visit from security |
| Taq Security Forces | Corporate enforcement arm; operate under sealed contracts that exempt them from standard legal oversight; used for asset protection, dissent suppression, and competitor discouragement |
| Corporate Intelligence Division | Maintains a network of embedded operatives across Enoch's political, religious, and commercial institutions; the source of most of Doud's leverage |
| Policy & Contracts Office | The legal arm that converts intelligence into favorable regulation and binding agreements; Taq's primary tool for eliminating competition without violence |
Corporate Culture
Taq employees understand the implicit rules quickly or not at all. The company rewards loyalty, punishes curiosity, and treats both outcomes as natural selection.
At the operational level — the engineers, the grid technicians, the field crews — the culture is functional and largely insulated from the company's darker operations. They do a difficult job, they're compensated adequately, and most of them have no reason to look too closely at what the upper tiers are doing.
The closer you get to Doud's inner circle, the more the culture shifts from professional to complicit. The people in the room when real decisions are made have made a choice about what they're willing to know and what they're willing to do. The ones who didn't make that choice cleanly don't tend to stay in those rooms.
The Taq Security Forces operate in their own ecosystem entirely — loyal to the corporation by contract, accountable to no external authority, and compensated well enough that most questions about their work stay unasked.
The Prophets of Ohrmam
No institution in Enoch has taken a harder public stance against Taq than the Prophets of Ohrmam. They have called the corporation a moral cancer, named it a corruption of the city's soul, and said plainly what everyone else negotiates around in careful language.
Taq has not moved against them directly. The Prophets have too much standing, too much public legitimacy, and too many eyes on them for a direct action to be clean. Instead, the relationship between the two institutions sits in a state of structured hostility: the Prophets speak, Taq absorbs, and the city watches to see which pressure eventually gives.
It has not given yet.
Influence & Power
| Area of Influence | Details |
|---|---|
| Energy Monopoly | Total control over Enoch's power supply; dependency is absolute and infrastructure alternatives do not exist |
| Political Capture | Taq's Policy & Contracts Office has shaped HKE regulatory frameworks for decades; most energy-adjacent legislation benefits Taq by design |
| Intelligence Network | Corporate spies embedded across Enoch's institutions provide leverage against political figures, religious leaders, and commercial rivals |
| Extralegal Enforcement | Taq Security Forces operate outside normal legal constraints; their existence is known, their contracts are sealed, and their actions are not investigated |
| Black Market Connections | Taq's public alignment with HKE religious authorities masks rumored deep ties to Enoch's shadow economy; the specifics are not publicly documented |
Reputation
For most of Enoch: Taq is the company that keeps the power on. The monopoly is uncomfortable to think about, so most people don't think about it. The rates are what they are. The alternatives don't exist.
For the political class: Taq is a fact of life, like weather. You work with it or you work against it, and working against it has historically not ended well for the people who tried.
For the Prophets of Ohrmam: Taq is the clearest example of what happens when power accumulates without accountability and calls itself civic service. They have said this publicly, repeatedly, and at personal risk. The city is still deciding whether to agree with them.