They don't get much worse than Lucia (L) and Nyarlathotep (R).
Image by shamiana
. Used with permission.
Image by shamiana
. Used with permission."Give yourself to me, Monica. Fulfill your daddy's desires at last. You are marked as mine, as so many others are. In Italy, a man is plying a woman with drink to lay with her, and that is mine. In a prison in Russia, a man is forced by another prisoner. I am there for both of them again. I am there for every ravishment. It is mine, as you are mine! I am The Defiler, rapist of billions! I have taken worlds entire unto myself, savaged them until they begged with one voice for more! I have devoured and devoured until nothing remained save my own carnality. Join the revels you are meant to!"
—Y'golonac the Defiler, to Monica Duvalier, Only A Lonely Heart
Hardestadt Delac, Eliza Cortly, and their allies have faced countless foes. Here are the worst.
When applicable, entries in each group are listed in chronological order.
All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
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Series-wide
Examples
- Nyarlathotep, Arch-Enemy of Hardestadt Delac, is a wicked, spiteful, and endlessly sadistic entity thoroughly worthy of the moniker of the "Crawling Chaos". Once the nameless emissary of the Outer Gods who went from world to world to drive entire civilizations to madness before offering them up to be devoured by Azathoth, Nyarlathotep was given hope of a more meaningful existence by the angel Aleviel—before instantly reneging on that once Aleviel was cast down and vowing out of spite to annihilate the world Aleviel desired to protect. Among his more notable deeds, Nyarlathotep has manipulated the start of wars and slaughters uncounted, driving countless people to insane violence in Venice during his "Masque of Madness"; plays with the minds of a Cthulhian cult he invades as "Taylor Hapten" before driving them and an asylum full of people hopelessly mad; and has served as the benefactor for countless wicked cultists such as Eliphas Coyte.
- Empty Memories and Cold Graves: Nyarlathotep teams up with the Consultant in order to break Hardestadt's spirit for fun. Capturing one of Eliza's students, Vicente, and corrupting him into hating her, Nyarlathotep would later bring about The Black Death that resulted in the death of Hardestadt's lover, Maria. Massacring the town of Blatna with Lucia, Nyarlathotep would either kill the town's inhabitants or send them to the Consultant to be tortured, sending Hardestadt to the City of Never to have him partake in a deadly maze to rescue Blatna citizens. Desiring to break her spirit as well, Nyarlathotep takes Eliza to the graveyard of her fallen students while blaming her for their deaths; drives Eliza's mansion's servants to the brink of insanity; and paints Hardestadt as a monster who can't be controlled, before sending Vicente out to kill Eliza.
- Nights In Lonesome Arkham: Nyarlathotep drives the entire city of Thinis to murderous, chaotic insanity, driving the populace to slaughter the city's children and restoring the sanity of the surviving populace their solely to bask in their suffering and horror; slaughters hundreds of thousands across the world, some merely as distractions; rises up the Great Old One Ithaqua in an effort to doom the planet to its deathly cold; keeps the populace of entire towns frozen in eternal agony as trophies of his previous conquests; and, at the end, reveals his intent to devour the other Outer Gods and come astride the rest of creation, devouring all in his way and keeping whatever is left to torment forevermore.
- "The Shadows' Consultant", real name Lucia, is the Arch-Enemy of Eliza Cortly. A member of the ancient, godlike race of Daydreamers, Lucia, exiled by her own people for her cruelty and wickedness, allied with the imprisoned being Draynak, to use him as a way to get revenge. Requiring a child from the bloodline of the Seers, Lucia takes countless guises and manipulates endless bloodshed and pain so she can find a necessary host for Draynak. Using monsters from the City to annihilate entire towns and villages, Lucia takes potential hosts and infests them with leechlike creatures in a horrific violation that inevitably results in their deaths.
- Empty Memories and Cold Graves: Lucia first appears stalking Eliza's former apprentice Vincente, killing anyone who harbors him and blaming Vincente. In the 1700s, Lucia teams up with Nyarlathotep to break the spirits of Hardestadt and Eliza. In the City, the Consultant sics a creature known as the Scrambler, using it to form a hideous conglomeration of thousands of still-living people. She casually admits that she, along with Nyarlathotep, caused The Black Death which killed Hardestadt's wife, among countless other people. The Consultant then tortures Eliza while Nyarlathotep forces Hardestadt to watch.
- The Wolves of War: Lucia, deciding to collaborate with the Nazis and supplying them with connections to the City of Never, disguises herself as the wife of Dietrich Boehmer, Helga. Forcing Eliza to leave Hardestadt forever in return for sparing everybody she loves, including Aisling, Lucia disguises herself as Eliza and rapes Hardestadt for no other reason than spiting them both, later razing a village.
- The City of Never: In 2001, coming to the Mexican village of Onolo after having marooned the Irish psychologist Hansel in the City for years to track down where he ended up, Lucia finds a suitable host in one hero Daniel's daughter Crystal, putting her through days of mutilation and violation to prepare her while turning her infant brother Mark into an agonized abomination that Daniel is forced to put down, later mocking Daniel that she did it all in his form to break them further. Revealed to have murdered a potentially perfect host—a 13-year-old girl—along with the rest of her town and killing a survivor, Edison, in the City, Lucia later murders Onolo's headman Christian when he attempted to attack her as well as her "once-brother" the Blind, in between attempting to set up the destruction of both Earth and the City for Draynak's purposes. After she's foiled, Lucia attempts to torture Crystal's sister Alessa to death, revealing she has always intended to annihilate all that lives as punishment for her humiliation, viewing everything below her as a toy to torture.
Examples
- Rich Jacobs, the illegitimate son of Wallace Malcolm Hargrove, is a young vampire who figures that having the wealth and resources of his father means he can excuse being as vile as he can possibly be. Operating with no regard of the standards of his own kind, Jacobs sets up a snuff porn ring where hundreds of women are kidnapped by the criminals he's turned for the purpose of raping, torturing, and murdering them within the confines of one of his father's prisons, selling the films on the dark web for a profit and disposing of the bodies by feeding them to starved ghouls. Kicking off the plot by kidnapping a woman named Emma West, Jacobs turns her into a vampire and uses her for his "special" films by having her tortured and maimed by his men for countless days on end, a fate he's already bestowed on several other unlucky women. When the supernatural investigator Hardestadt Delac invades his operation, Jacobs captures him and forces him to endure physical and psychological torture for days on end for the glee of breaking him, while intending to finish him by letting the blood-starved vampire women tear him to shreds before Jacobs personally finishes him. When resurrected by Nyarlathotep, Jacobs sells out all humanity to destruction and kills thousands in service to his new master. Reviled by even his own kind, Jacobs is little else than a swaggering, entitled brat and a blood-hungry sadist underneath his weak facade of charisma and control.
- Siegfried Gunmarsohn, introduced in Under The Cold Moon, is a brutal, red-furred werewolf who terrorized Soissons, Gévaudan, Chalons, and countless other areas with a slew of victims, with a particular sweet tooth for children, some of which he forces into sadistically lopsided battles to the death with himself as their opponent. Concerned only with his own notion of pure-blooded werewolves and seeking to put all humanity under his claw, Siegfried murdered his own mother, brother, and sister in succession over a course of centuries, and, during The French Revolution, attempted to enact a scheme to turn hundreds of people into vicious, mindless lupine killers to drown Paris in blood. After his seeming end at the hands of Hardestadt, Siegfried gave himself over to Ithaqua at the prospect of vengeance, resurfacing decades later as the leader of a town called Pine Creek. Siegfried uses his position to select dozens of innocent people from the village as fodder for his hunts and as sacrifices to Ithaqua, and hands over more of them for vivisection and experimentation at the hands of Sieglinde Nomura. Uncaring even to the deaths of his own children—which he's bred solely as Cannon Fodder for centuries after having murdered their mothers—Siegfried plans to raise up Ithaqua and freeze over the entire world, ruling over the remnants of humanity to cull and hunt them as his own leisure forever.
- Dr. Sieglinde Nomura, also introduced in Cold Moon, is Siegfried's daughter and a Mad Scientist who takes pleasure in experimenting on innocent people. Under Siegfried, Nomura experimented on hundreds of thousands of humans and werewolves alike in hopes of creating a horde of werewolves loyal to only Siegfried, or destroying their minds so they'll be easier to control. Those who perished were merely disposed of or eaten, and records of how long they lasted were recorded in various notebooks. Whenever Nomura isn't trying to perfect her serum, she's vivisecting innocent humans and slowly eating parts of their body alongside her father-—sometimes while they're still alive—-or torturing humans she paralyzed just for the thrill of it. After Hardestadt and Erin Hasegawa are captured and Nomura finds out Erin escaped, Nomura willingly allows her to try and run away, all so she can take pleasure in hunting her down like a predator. Even after her death, Nomura sets up a posthumous gambit to resurrect her father's old plan to make Paris devour itself through his mind-destroying serums, taking Grete's old comrade Frederick and another werewolf and warping their minds through year-long torture to make him believe they're Siegfried and Nomura. Ultimately, Grete concludes Nomura, despite being raised by Siegfried, would have turned out a monster regardless.
- Reign in Hell:
- High King Azazel Baal is the absolute leader of Hell, lord of House Baal and a monster who treats atrocity as casual hobby. Azazel manipulates Hell ruthlessly for his own ends, purging Houses not loyal to him and employing the savage Morviak to butcher side worlds in Creation for the purpose of expanding his territory. Behind closed doors, Azazel is even worse, keeping a gallery of countless beings whom he's shattered the minds of as slaves for his pleasure he calls the Court of the Broken. A monstrously Abusive Parent on top of all of this, Azazel inducted his eldest son Dasrian into the ranks of the Court's ranks, uses his daughter Vinea as a figurehead to expand his influence and threatens to add her to the Court as he did her mother, and tears off Orias's head for defying him. Never satisfied with the power he already has, Azazel schemes to use the eldritch influence of Wormwood to devastate Heaven to rule Creation unopposed, experimenting with it in horrific ways on angels he leaves to the whim of House Loremaster Zhavaral. Azazel ruthlessly executes the dissenting former Kings of Hell when he declares absolute authority, wipes out swathes of Hell, and in the final battle with Lucifer, Azazel decides to obliterate all of Hell itself to leave it to his rival "with his compliments".
- Morviak is Azazel's pet warmonger, a savage Blood Knight who rules the Malebolge as a tyrant with a propensity for massacring everything around him. Under Azazel's rule, Morviak's job description is genocide, a job he approaches with glee by wiping out billions across alien worlds to expand Azazel's rule. Always seeking a challenge, Morviak directs his assaults across Hell while engorging himself on the death of all those he slaughters, wiping out entire Houses defying Azazel and intending on spearheading his master's assault on Heaven to carve a path of butchery across the cosmos.
- A Conspiracy of Serpents: Yamada, aka the Yamata no Orochi/Orochimaru himself, is a sadistic serpentine scientist working for Apophis. Once a mortal sage, Yamada made a deal with the Great Old One Serpent Father Yig to become a destructive serpent Yōkai. Supposedly defeated by Susanoo, Yamada survived thanks to the power of Yig, and was later taken in by Apophis because of his cruel reputation. Working with Apophis to replace the afterlife with being eaten by Apophis, Yamada hopes to have the entire Teraverse serve as his own personal laboratory, hoping to experiment on countless humans and Fae. To feed Apophis, he infects countless planets with venom and offers the inhabitants a false cure that causes them to go crazy and kill everyone, with Yamada feeding their souls to Apophis, and using others to create agonized warriors who serve his every command. Seeking more power, Yamada has Yig captured and painfully experimented on as he extracts his power into Apophis, while also using his energies to create the drug Cobra, which Yamada hands it to countless humans who end up poisoned, their souls easier to extract. Tasked by Apophis to feed him the souls of gods, Yamada has countless sun gods captured and tortured to death in order to create more Cobra. Yamada later has serpent Jormungandr cause natural disasters to sell Cobra as an aid, reveals to Kaliya that he killed his wife and son before ripping his heart out; kills Susanoo with his bare hands; poisons millions while attempting to turn the world into ash; and attempts to destroy Valhalla and Hell itself before his death.
Crossovers (includes The Lonely Dreams Cycle)
Examples
- Y'golonac is the god of depravity and a cruel Great Old One with a love of violating others. Fully capable of understanding human thought and emotion, Y'golonac lures a depressed Leon Duvalier to his cult in order to eat away at his soul as he possesses him. Using Duvalier's body, he rapes, murders, and eats countless people while forcing his daughter Monica to watch, while also making her believe herself to be Duvalier's deceased wife Rachel in order to rape her himself. With the corpses, he keeps their heads in jars to scare Monica for fun. Luring Hardestadt Delac to his hideout in order to eat him, he later tries to make him say his name in order to break free from his prison and turn North America into his playground of chaos and violation. When Hardestadt refuses, he taunts him with the fact that Eliza had been raped by her husband, all while savoring his anger. As he departs, he teases Hardestadt that the latter might have been raped himself. Decades later, he is revealed to have mated with Helen Valentine, spawning a new batch of offspring hellbent on harnessing enough lust energy to free him from his prison, with the intent of personally murdering the revelers unwittingly responsible for his newfound freedom and everyone who stands in his way before attempting to claim the Earth as his own. A putrid, disgusting sadist, Y'golonac truly earns his nickname of "the Defiler".
- Valentine; Valentine Man; Stories Never Told ("By Blackest Will"): Helen Valentine, the head of the commune of Bacio, Italy, defines love only as much as it can hurt others. Having made an Eldritch Abomination known as Il Padre her husband—actually her unwilling Sex Slave—several centuries ago, Helen, since at least the 1500s, has produced children to fill Bacio's ranks while savaging the minds of visitors in Bacio to turn them into dark shells of themselves, even her own children who she uses to participate in horrific and bloody orgies where the citizens of Bacio tear each other apart every Valentine's Day. At one point, in a fit of excitement, Helen even bites out the throat of one of her infants. In "By Blackest Will"—which takes place in the 1500s and has Helen painfully torment various people while working for Nyarlathotep, and also planning to turn Paris into a large-scale Bacio—it is revealed that Helen is even older, and was possibly responsible for Caligula's depravity. In addition, she "cheated" on Padre, willingly mating with Y'Golonac and bearing several of his children. In 1970, when hero Henri Barrow returns to Bacio one year after escaping in order to stop Helen, he meets one of her children, Bruno. Bruno reveals that Helen encouraged Brother–Sister Incest, and even trafficked her own children to pedophiles. Henri later finds his friends Doug and Anita, transformed into pain-stricken abominations for nearly an entire year, along with others who had visited, in her "animal pen". During the final confrontation, Helen bites Bruno's tongue off, before declaring her plan to spread Bacio's horror across the entire world.
- Sangue Serenissima: Eliphas Coyte is a wicked seeker of knowledge whose ambition led him to study The Dark Arts, which he used to make his own father brutally kill himself. Coyte subsequently turns to the worship of dark gods, beginning with the Ending Eye Ix Nagoth which he brings to his hometown to devastatingly mutate his fellow villagers. Switching loyalties at his own convenience and eventually coming to serve Masque, Coyte cannibalizes the brains of Seers to steal their connection to the Remeditary, aiming to devour the souls of everyone in Venice as part of his deal with Masque to ascend to godhood. Learning how this will annihilate large swaths of the Teraverse, Coyte remains apathetic as long as he gets to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. Creating minions by having their bodies warped by otherworldly powers and horrifically killing or mutating everyone in the Venetian Li Fonti manor, Coyte also consumes the minds of more Seers by boring into their skulls, getting "high" off the energies while their brains crumble to dust. Kidnapping the young Julio, a friend of Eliza's, Coyte threatens him to draw Eliza to his manor, then kills the boy anyways before she arrives, keeping his head to mock her over his death.
- The Unquiet Grave: Lord Silas Ruthven is the uncle of Carmilla Karnstein and a wicked, vampiric sorcerer who once studied by the side of Eliphas Coyte. Ruthven has empowered himself off the cruel death of thousands throughout the ages, with a special predilection for destroying everything his victims value to make them utterly his. Ruthven even repeats this to put Carmilla under his heel, forcibly turning her into a vampire and making her kill innocent people, even starving her until she turns on the ones she loves. A former worshipper of the Scarlet Saint-—an embodiment of Hardestadt Delac—Ruthven orchestrates the grisly Jack the Ripper murders to distract from his own feedings, while also harnessing the power of a City-beast named the Nocturne to enthrall more innocents to their doom. Ultimately seeking not to become a god but to create his own, Ruthven attempts to use a dark ritual to twist all of London's population into a writhing, agonized web of flesh through which he'll channel the energy to forcibly twist Hardestadt into the Scarlet Saint. Through the Saint, Ruthven intends on nothing less than to plunge the world into a hellscape reveling in violence and terror.
- The Wolves of War:
- Reinhard Heydrich himself is the primary orchestrator and face of the Nazi regime, making his mark as far worse than the likes of his superiors. A stout believer in Aryan supremacy and his own perfection, Heydrich regards all others in the world—namely Jews—as filth needing to be eradicated, and commits mass extermination of them in a variety of ways, from hangings to passing them onto Josef Mengele to be experimented on, notably having any and all captured creatures be tortured into brainwashed soldiers. Heydrich oversees the incorporation of the "slag-fathers" in prison camps across Germany, having countless innocent people thrown to the City-beasts to be violated and butchered in the name of resource expansion, and also has the minds of dozens of Seers harvested and put into perpetual agony to boost Nazi power, and later casually murders his own son just to prove a point. Himself a Seer, Heydrich plans to ascend to godhood using the corpses of countless people worldwide, shattering the minds of any and every living thing until the whole world is under a Reich of Heydrich's design.
- SS Gruppenfuhrer Dietrich Boehmer is a battle-loving Nazi with connections to the City of Never. Partnering with the Consultant, disguising her as his wife Helga, Boehmer orders camps to be filled with slag-pits, feeding the slag-beasts Jewish captives and Nazis who failed him. Seeking to turn the world into his very own Fourth Reich, Boehmer has hundreds of women raped to breed slag-beasts who die upon childbirth, while also contaminating water supplies in numerous villages with a substance that causes the beasts to grow inside people. Planning to backstab Heydrich after serving him, Boehmer later on participates in Heydrich's plan to unleash a psychic bomb on Sicily, infecting Eliza's camp with the slag-beast substance, and personally murdering 378 soldiers with his own bare hands. Finally having enough, Boehmer is revealed to have infected every Jewish prisoner and every member of the German army with his substance, planning to infect the entire world, have billions murdered, and rule over what's left.
- Josef Mengele is a Nazi scientist with an important role in Heydrich's conspiracy, forming a Seer network to combine their mental abilities, doing so by extracting their brains, leaving them alive in agony. He performs cruel experiments on humans and inhumans alike, being introduced showing off various creatures either dead or in agony, later torturing them into submission, while also freeing a group of naked prisoners to be fed to the ravenous beasts. Getting sent to Auschwitz to experiment with the brains of Seers, Mengele has test subjects injected with the cranial fluids, which causes them to shake, bleed, and die, and then kills hundreds of people with a psychic blast, all while sending people not fit for experimentation to be gassed. After Heydrich's death, he flees Germany, still proud of his atrocities, and disappointed he could not commit more.
- Stories Never Told's "Shadows in the Ice": Knygathin Zhaum is an intelligent, billion-year-old Voormi with a tendency to Rape, Pillage, and Burn. Zhaum was a plague upon the ancient city of Commoriom who, after a sadistic game he played with the city's executioner Athammaus, devoured the entire city and plunged its entire populace into screaming agony for 10 billion continuous years as it slept in the Antarctic cold. Zhaum later makes a deal with the wicked necromancer Nathaire to come astride on the Earth and glut itself upon the cities of the modern world, to fill the shrieking chorus within it and become as powerful as it can.
