The Agarthans as they appear in The Savior King, the Master Tactician and the Queen of Liberation. For other major antagonists, go here.
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The Leaders
Thales
- Big Bad: Is the ultimate architect of most of the evil that's befallen Fódlan, with Edelgard being both his wannabe would-be usurper and ultimately his victim.
- Berserk Button: Atra’s defection and all the problems she has caused because of it infuriates both Thales and Odesse so much that a captured Edelgard mentions that she can feel their rage for Atra even without naming her.
- Dirty Coward: How Rhea regards him during her and Byleth fight against him, being a Flunky Boss that hides behind his shield spells and his men throwing themselves at them while he strikes from afar.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Neither Odesse or Thales are able to comprehend how Dimitri, whom both consider a half-mad boy-king, is able to turn all of Edelgard's citizens against her through sheer kindness and charisma.
- Evil Chancellor: His title in Agartha is 'the High Chancellor'; to name some of his evil acts, he signed off on the Tragedy of Duscur, regularly deploys child soldiers to the field and shows no regard for their wellbeing or safety, teaches Shambhala's citizens a sham history and imposes Fantastic Racism on their understanding of the people of Fódlan, and runs his city as an Orwellian cult where any dissention gets you disappeared or worse.
- Evil Sorcerer: A capable magic user with a mixed range to spell and a monstrous and sociopathic attitude to match.
- Fantastic Racism: Regards the people of Fódlan as little more than animals and savages, and even that's more dignity than he affords the Nabateans.
- Irony: Despite essentially being the man in charge of The Agarthans and considering himself above everyone else who is not Agarthan, he's actually the first member of the main ruling council who dies at the hands of our heroes.
- Kick the Dog: In Chapter 73, Thales turns the resurrected corpses of Edelgard's siblings into White Beasts to sic on the advancing heroes.
- Know When to Fold 'Em: In chapter 73, when the heroes are Storming the Castle, Thales tells Edelgard point-blank that he is not going to piss away any more of his men on her completely lost cause.
- Off with His Head!: How he is killed in Chapter 99. Rhea manages to slice througth all of Thales's powerful shield spells and deal and substantial wound, which is fallowed by Byleth not wasting any time and slicing off his head with contemptuous ease.
- Oh, Crap!: Has a major one when Sothis manifests herself to him near the end of Chapter 97, recoiling in abject terror at her presence and later trying to block one of her attacks along Myson and Odesse to absolutely no avail.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Gives one to Edelgard in Chapter 73 that completely and utterly breaks her.Thales:: I know better than to apply the best of my men to a lost cause. You cannot win this battle. You lost long ago, you just refused to realize it. The Riegan boy outwitted you, the Fell Star drew in more hearts than you, and the Blaiddyd boy hits harder than you. I had been under the impression, when you outlined your plans to reunite Fódlan under yourself, that you had the drive and the intelligence to make it possible. Yet you failed at every opportunity. You failed to break apart Riegan and Blaiddyd's love affair with the Fell Star, failed to kill the Fell Star's vessel when she was in your grasp for months before reclaiming her full power, and failed to do anything but lose ground in the war you started, even with our assistance.
- Villainous Breakdown: Has a brief one when Lysithea declares during parley with the Empire that Sothis saved humanity by destroying ancient Agartha, attempting to order Riegan to shoot her and the other army leaders.
- Has another major one in Chapter 97, when several of out heroes give him multiple merciless "The Reason You Suck" Speech one after the other, completely countering his abhorrent and utterly disgusting rhetoric with cold, hard facts and proving quite redily than Thales and The Agarthan inner circle are nothing more than disturbingly myopic sore losers whose utterly sociopathic behavior makes them completely and utterly reprehensible in every sense of the world.
- In Chapter 99 he easily has his biggest one, pretty much loosing all of his composure and falling into a desperate, horrified and rabid rant when he notices that Shambhala is rising from underground without his permission and pretty much looses any dignity and his sanity takes a sharp turn downward when its revealed to him that Atra was responsible for said action.
- Villainous Friendship: For all their absolutely disgusting Fantastic Racism and utterly sociopathic attitude towards everyone who is not Agarthan, Chapter 73 shows that the trio of Thales, Myson and Odesse truly do consider each other close friends and allies, Thales openly admiring Myson's intelligence and resourcefulness and treating Odesse like an Honest Advisor with genuine grievances which he respectfully answers. Myson and Odesse in turn both advise and talk to Thales with open honesty and are perfectly at ease in voicing their opinions, even if it's a dissenting one.
- Villain Respect: By the end of the war, Thales considers Claude to be a Worthy Opponent and laments that his intelligence is, in his mind, being squandered by the Children of the Goddess.
- You Have Failed Me: After failing to conquer Fódlan, he violently subdues Edelgard and takes her to Shambhala to be turned into a Hegemon Husk while the Empire is left to burn.
Myson
- Arch-Enemy: Towards the whole Charon Line, considering he was the one responsible for the experiments that killed all of Lysithea’s siblings and granted her a second Crest at the cost of a drastically shortened lifespan. Julius can barely stop his body shaking from rage when talking about what Myson did to Lysithea and when she learns who was responsible for her horrifying experience she makes it very clear that Myson is hers to deal with.
- Casting a Shadow: A skilled user of Dark Magic, with his preferred spell being the infamous Bohr Χ spell, but he’s also more than capable of using other dark magic spells such as Hades and his own variation of Dark Spikes T.
- Faux Affably Evil: Polite, quite adverse of unnecessary cruelty and violence, very clearly in love with his fiancé and not someone who lets his temper get in the way of his work. And of course, an absolutely vile man who is just as utterly abhorrent, amoral and extreme as the other member of The Agarthan inner circle. He’s just a lot calmer and restrained about it.
- Geas: He placed one on the Ten Elites to ensure their obedience; unfortunately for him, it's not perfect. He mentions placing Edelgard under one during Chapter 73 to ensure they got what they need out of her with Adrestia falling to the Kingdom-Alliance-Church army.
- Karmic Death: Was "turned into mulch" by Lysithea, the only member among her siblings who survived his inhuman experiment.
- Killed Offscreen: Out of the triumvirate that currently lead Agartha, he's the only one whose death we don't get to see in the main story, but considering than Lysithea outright states that she "turned him into mulch", it's clear his death was a messy thing indeed.
- Mad Scientist: For the Agarthans as a whole, and an incredibly intelligent one considering Thales holds his intellect in incredible esteem.
- No Ontological Inertia: With his death, the Geas placed on the Ten Elites to ensure their obedience is broken, and they are allowed to be a lot more helpful and blatant in allowing the heroes to kill them for real.
- Oh, Crap!:
- Has a minor one when Blaiddyd lunges at him with clear intent to kill while he's showing him and Fraldarius off to Edelgard and Hubert.
- He mentions it only in hindsight, but he likely had one when Fraldarius openly said that she'd kill him if she got the chance, given that he pleads with Thales to put them back on ice while he tries to improve his Geas.
- Has a major one when Sothis manifests herself to him near the end of Chapter 97, recoiling in abject terror at her presence and later trying to block one of her attacks along Thales and Odesse to absolutely no avail.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Myson dislikes cruelty and suffering that doesn't serve a specific purpose. He stops Odesse's beating of Edelgard in chapter 80, telling him firmly that attacking a defeated prisoner is beneath him.
- Secret Police: According to Atra, he's in charge of it as the commander of the 'neighborhood watches' in Shambhala.
- The Sociopath: Played in the most unnerving and creepiest (yet textbook) way possible, when talking about the experiments done to Lysithea’s family. He knew on an intellectual level that what he did to her family was cruel and unconscionable, but as far as he’s concerned everything in the end was worth it because he learned and perfected his greatest successes. The Author goes to describe Myson as the kind of person who knows he's doing something horribly evil, but is able to do the mental exercises to convince himself it's necessary and he’s able to say with a straight face that the awful things he did do meet noble goals.
- Soft-Spoken Sadist: Unlike Thales or Odesse, he almost never looses his cool in any way and in most of his interaction with other people he’s calm, controlled and genuinely affably soft spoken and polite, which actually makes the atrocities he commits as Agartha main’s Mad Scientist all the more disturbing.
- Unholy Matrimony: With Bias, his fiancé. They actually seem to be genuinely quite in love, with Myson sharing a surprisingly tender moment with her, speaking with soft fondness towards her and its obvious that he holds her intelligence and competence with great regard and treats her as an equal partner in his work.
- Villainous Friendship: For all their absolutely disgusting Fantastic Racism and utterly sociopathic attitude towards everyone who is not Agarthan, Chapter 73 shows that the trio of Thales, Myson and Odesse truly do consider each other close friends and allies, Thales openly admiring Myson's intelligence and resourcefulness and treating Odesse like an Honest Advisor with genuine grievances which he respectfully answers. Myson and Odesse in turn both advise and talk to Thales with open honesty and are perfectly at ease in voicing their opinions, even if it's a dissenting one.
Odesse
- Angrish: His reaction towards the multiple "The Reason You Suck" Speech that drives Thales into his secondary Villainous Breakdown in Chapter 97? Snarling at Bernadetta and calling her a “bitch”. This turned out to be the wrong thing to do, as it just gave both Bernadetta and Glenn more ammunition for their respective speeches towards him and leaves Odesse verbally flailing.
- Arch-Enemy: Towards Dedue. Considering his actions led to the Tragedy of Duscur, it’s made abundantly clear that the normal Gentle Giant that is Dedue wants nothing more than to have Odesse head on a pike. And completely understandably so.
- Ax-Crazy: Utterly unabashed in his vicious and sadistic savagery and anything is capable of setting his volcanic temper off and has him resort to uncontrolled violence.
- Berserk Button: Atra’s defection and all the problems she has caused because of it infuriates both Thales and Odesse so much that a captured Edelgard mentions that she can ''feel' their rage for Atra even without naming her.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Neither Odesse or Thales are able to comprehend how Dimitri, whom both consider a half-mad boy-king, is able to turn all of Edelgard's citizens against her through sheer kindness and charisma.
- Evil Sorcerer: An absolute Ax-Crazy sociopath who turns out to be quite skilled at the use of both Nosferatu and Ragnarok.
- General Ripper: Atra reveals that he was the one who carried out the Tragedy of Duscur, among other missions. A captured Edelgard in chapter 80 compares the look in his eyes at his Rage Breaking Point to that of Maximus Varley.
- Honest Advisor: Serves as one to Thales, giving him his truthful opinion and criticizing some of his decisions while expressing concerns about Myson's desire to put the Einherjar back on ice.
- Jerkass: Unlike Myson he never bothers to hide his absolute unpleasantness, explosive temper and bloodlust and just how utterly disgusting, useless and counterproductive he finds working alongside Edelgard. Atra describes him to our heroes as a twisted General Ripper and in every scene he’s in he goes to prove her right, his absolutely vicious and horrifying assault on a captive Edelgard in chapter 80 just being the pinnacle of how twisted and unrepentantly cruel he normally is.
- Karmic Death: As the main architect of the Tragedy of Duscur, it’s utterly fitting that his death comes at the hands of the three main survivors of the horrific tragedy among the cast in Chapter 102: his arms get utterly ruined by Dimitri, he gets impaled by Glenn with his sword and ends up literally beaten to death in the most vicious way by Dedue. And it could not have happened to a more disgustingly despicable monster.
- Life Drain: A skilled user of the Nosferatu spell, according to Atra.
- Made of Iron: Much to the frustration of Dedue, the experiments every Agarthan gets preformed on them when they are children makes them a lot more durable than anything else outside The Nabateans and The Ten Elite, and Odesse is not different. He’s able to easily survive blows from Dimitri that would have turned any another human into paste ten times over, for one.
- Never My Fault: As Glenn darkly point out, screaming about how it's the heroes' fault that Nemesis has awoken once again falls short very quickly when one remembers that it was the Agarthans who not only made him the monster he became in the first place but also kept his body and made him a failsafe.
- Oh, Crap!:
- Has a major one when Sothis manifests herself to him near the end of Chapter 97, recoiling in abject terror at her presence and later trying to block one of her attacks along Thales and Myson to absolutely no avail.
- Has easily his biggest one yet in Chapter 102 when he realizes that Nemesis is awake once again, absolutely going pale white with horror and shriekingly blaming the heroes for the awakening of the slumbering warlord, to the point that at the end of his rant he weakly mutters that he’s as good as dead and goes into a burst of hysterical giggling…but then decides to take all the heroes he’s fighting with him along for the ride.
- Rage Breaking Point: In chapter 80, the captured Edelgard attempts to spit in his face and whip him with her chains. Having finally had enough, he begins kicking her and snarling insults in Agarthan (which is borrowed from German, in case certain parallels were too subtle):''"Hundin! Nutzlos hundin! Schwein! Inzuchtig kretin!"Translation
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Given to Edelgard after the aforementioned beating:"Your idiocy is only matched by your delusions of grandeur. Your mutt is dead, rotting from the obsidian poison. Your palace burns. Your lands have been surrendered, some of them happily welcoming, the Fell Star's army. There is no one left who is loyal to you, and there were precious few to begin with. You are nothing and no one, so cease your posturing and squawking and go to your cage with a little dignity!"
- The Sociopath: Chapter 98 goes a long way to show that he’s this beyond all contestation. At first he didn’t even remember the Tragedy of Duscur because in his eyes Dedue and his people were simply that unimportant in the scheme of things as far as he was concerned. But when he does remember The Tragedy he spitefully and sadistically tells Dedue that he was completely unrepentant about said disgusting atrocity and in his own words: “I'd do it again without hesitation for my home. I'll kill a thousand more Duscur surfacers if it will bring me to my goal – the world for Agartha!”
- Stating the Simple Solution: After the many setbacks due to Edelgard's actions Odesse, laments that they'd have been better off keeping her in a lab and just plain killing off Ionius and let the chaos run from there.“We could have simply spirited her off to Agartha, then killed the Emperor – it would have been easy. With him dead, those seven fat idiots would have torn each other apart to claim the throne for themselves. They would have dropped the Empire into a civil war that would have killed three times the surfacers this war has, and thrown the other countries into chaos as they tried to claim land in the aftermath.”
- Tautological Templar: As Glenn notes, someone like Odesse shouldn’t be able to use Faith Magic normally. The series implies that Odesse’s ability to use Faith Magic came from his uncompromising certainty, sociopathic fervor and faith in Thales and the Agarthan’s cause, which somehow counted as a kind of faith in its own right.
- Villainous Breakdown: Glenn makes him absolutely loose his shit twice and in Chapter 98 he breaks out into a rabid, furious rant about how Glenn utterly ruined all of his careful planning. He’s so utterly and viscerally enraged and furious that he sounds almost animalistic and Dedue notes that it’s almost as if he cannot contain his rage and sheer volcanic savagery and hatred. His tone of voice shrieking and inhuman.
- Villainous Friendship: For all their absolutely disgusting Fantastic Racism and utterly sociopathic attitude towards everyone who is not Agarthan, Chapter 73 shows that the trio of Thales, Myson and Odesse truly do consider each other close friends and allies, Thales openly admiring Myson's intelligence and resourcefulness and treating Odesse like an Honest Advisor with genuine grievances which he respectfully answers. Myson and Odesse in turn both advise and talk to Thales with open honesty and are perfectly at ease in voicing their opinions, even if it's a dissenting one.
Bias
- Evil Genius: The master of mechanics of Shambhala, Bias is described as the one who creates/maintains the Titanus and maintains the Ten Elites's cryostasis.
- Evil Mentor: It’s implied she’s this towards Pittacus, who actually calls her Sensei.
- Killed Offscreen: Like her lover Myson, but unlike him we as of yet do not know who did the deed itself.
- Pragmatic Villainy: She shares this attitude with her fiancé. She casts a basic healing spell at Edelgard after her beatdown by Odesse not because she feels any kind of realistic sympathy towards her but because Edelgard is needed alive in order to start the experiments on her.
- Unholy Matrimony: With Myson, her fiancé. They actually seem to be genuinely quite in love, with Myson sharing a surprisingly tender moment with her, Bias actually being openly loving, affectionate and teasing towards Myson and it’s obvious that she holds his own intelligence and competence with just as much regard and he holds hers and she consider him to be an equal partner in her work.
- Villainous Friendship: While her relationship with Myson is that of Unholy Matrimony, she also seems to share a relaxed one with Thales and Odesse considering she calls them “brothers” with open fondness.
Diado
- Adaptational Karma: Compared to canon Verdant Wind, where they were a full Karma Houdini, Cornelia is caught for her role in the Tragedy of Duscur and is executed offscreen.
- Adaptation Name Change: A minor example. Although "Cornelia" was always a fake name, canon had not revealed her real name at time of writing, so she is given the name Diado.
- False Friend: To Anselma/Patricia- while acting as a concerned and helpful confidant, she tricked her into setting up the Tragedy of Duscur.
- The Mole: Agartha's spy inside the Kingdom.
- Odd Name Out: Most of the core Agarthan leaders are named after the seven sages of Greece. "Cornelia", on the other hand, is given the name Diado.
Historical figures
Pan
- Defector from Decadence: He was sent into King Loog's army as sleeper agent with the expressed message of fueling the war and orchestrating it so it destroyed both kingdoms, so Agartha could swoop in and lay claim to the surface. Or that was the plan originally, as Pan would go on to have his loyalties divided almost as soon as King Loog welcomed him into his inner circle. His memoirs expressed a constant awe at the freedom the people of the north had, to travel where they wish without permission, to write tales without censorship, trials that operate on the possibility of innocence being declared...and he fell in love with it, with Loog and his kindness and his sense of responsibility to his people's well-being and happiness. It was so different from Shambhala, and Pan couldn't bring himself to destroy it. Instead he took the mask he had put on and made it his real face, helped Loog win the war, and threw out the plants meant to assassinate him. He and his men assimilated into the Kingdom and lived out happy lives there, never returning to Shambhala. This is actually why he's considered Agartha's biggest traitor, at least before Atra also defected.
- Heel–Face Turn: He was originally sent to Loog's side to use him to burn the continent to the ground, but developed loyalty to him and turned to his side legitimately.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: The author outright compares Pan's relationship with Loog as being similar to Robin's own friendship with Chrom in Fire Emblem: Awakening.
- Long-Dead Badass: By the time of the series he's has been dead for centuries, being The Strategist and Honest Advisor for King Loog, the creator and founder of Holy Kingdom of Faerghus.
- The Magnificent: Hilariously, one of his titles is actually "Pan The Magnificent".
- Spanner in the Works: For Agartha centuries ago. It's all but stated that Pan's original plan was to The Mole among King Loog's Court for Agartha...but Pan fell in to love with the outside world, developed Undying Loyalty towards King Loog and threw all those plans out the window, living the rest of his life as a loyal friend and legendary hero for the people of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus. It's strongly implied by both the narration and Atra that Pan was considered Agartha's biggest traitor because of this and it's only now that she herself has pulled her own Defector from Decadence act that he no longer is enemy number one in the minds of the Agarthan ruling power.
- Shrouded in Myth: While most of Agartha consider him to be their most legendary "traitor", the rest of the world just knows him as King Loog's most loyal friend, strategist and advisor. The fact that he was Agarthan in the first place was only known to the people of Shambhala at the time and Atra and Glenn only managed to piece it together when they found his memoirs.
- The Strategist: Legendary for this, he became King Loog's most skilled strategist and his most trusted advisor.
- Token Good Teammate: Granted, he was born several centuries before the current Agarthan ruling power, but he's the only Agarthan ruling power in recorded history who has completely turned away from thier xenophobic and sociopathic ideals and has chosen to live in the outside world in peace.
- Undying Loyalty: His fellow Agarthans at the time thought Pan had this for them, but in the end the developed this for King Loog.
Notable soldiers
Kronya
- Adaptational Expansion: A lot of more Backstory is given to her in this story to explain her character and her particularities outside being the rather flat Card-Carrying Villain she was in the original story. Her mother was arrested on suspicion of being a dissenter, causing her and her sister Atra to enlist in the Agarthan military. She took to killing like a duck to water, went Ax-Crazy, and now worships the ground Thales walks on. It actually makes her quite the Tragic Villain in hindsight despite how unrepentant and bloodthirsty she is and it does indeed makes her a considerably more pitiable figure in the end. At the end of day, it becomes quite obvious that she was just a tragic, utterly disposable Unwitting Pawn for Thales and the rest of The Agarthan leading powers.
- Cain and Abel: Is the Cain to Atra's Abel.
- Dies Differently in Adaptation: Instead of having her heart ripped out by Solon as a sacrifice for a dark magic ritual, Kronya is viciously stabbed to death by Byleth.
- Even Evil Can Be Loved: As seen in Atra's POV chapter in The Knights of Fódlan, while Atra is perfectly aware that her sister was an Ax-Crazy assassin that had gone too far to ever be saved or redeemed in any kind of way, she tearfully and heartbreakingly admits to Yuri that she still is mourning and a part of her is absolutly devastated at Kroyna's death because at the end of the day Kronya was her sister and she still loved her despite all the evil that she did for Thales. Yuri himself assures Atra that this reaction is perfectly normal and holds her in his arms while Atra break down and cries for the death of the sister she used to have before Thales got his hands on her.
- I Want My Mommy!: Her last words as she lays dying from Byleth’s brutal stabbing assault are to weakly ask for her mother and beg her to save her. In Kronya’s case this just paints her as the tragic, twisted figure that she is when we later learn that the Start of Darkness that shifted her from the playful and loving sister she used to be to the woman she became all started with her mother’s arrest and death in Agartha.
- Professional Killer: While in the Canon games its implied that her murder of Jeralt was more of crime of opportunity and part of a Batman Gambit by the Agarthans, both Asta and this series strongly imply that in this series Kronya is officially The Agarthans “Pet Assassin” and that she’s been greatly enjoying her role for a while now.
- Psychopathic Womanchild: How Dimitri describes her- skipping like a child, taking almost a childlike glee in her cruelty, having a disturbing amusement in the rage she causes and overall being someone who is clearly not right in the head.
- Super-Soldier: She was one, as it turns out. Chapter 79 reveals that all Agarthans soldiers are given general physical enhancements. It's a procedure, according to Marian, that was learned from studying dragon's blood and genetic editing. Everyone who enters the army is subjected to it after they pass initiation; it gives them peak human physical or magical performance depending on their proficiency. Said process is done when they are twelve years of age.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Atra's POV chapter in The Knights Of Fódlan tragically shows that Kronya used to be a mischievius and loving sister to Atra before Thales sank his claws in and turned her into the person she became. It's almost painful seeing the kind and playful sister Kronya used to be, the sister Atra dearly loved.
