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The Seven Black Emperors, The Lords of Infinity, The Gods of the Seven-Part World

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rsz_the_seven___2.jpg
From left to right: Gog-Agog, Mottom, Jadis, Jagganoth, Mammon, Solomon David, Incubus.

The main villains of the comic, The Seven are the last Demiurges left after the Universal War led to all the other Demiurges slaughtering each other. Made up of an assortment of victims and victors of the later stages of the War, the Seven were able to come together and find common cause, killing all their competitors and claiming all the remaining Magus Keys. Though tenous, this cooperation proved enough to see them stand triumphant at the end, and they subsequently divided all 777,777 Keys, and their attendant universes, amongst themselves as joint victors. They subsequently proclaimed the Pact of the Seven-Part World, putting an end to the Universal War and giving each of them unrestricted rule of their own universes with the understanding that none of them would directly involve themselves in the others' affairs.

As the comic starts, the Seven are the undisputed rulers of Creation, their power unassailable and their empires set in stone. However, none of the Seven truly trust each other, and millennia of phony peace and nothing that unites them has seen them devolve into a state of uncooperative cold war. The only thing that keeps that cold war from going hot again is that none of them are powerful enough to conquer all the others and they still have an almost infinite amount of universes under their stewardship they can turn their attentions to instead.

Each of the Seven command 111,111 of God's voices, which are combined into a single Key that carries one of the words that make up YISUN's full name. They each have an associated colour, and are associated with one of The Seven Deadly Sins.


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    General 

Tropes applying to all of the Seven:

  • Big Bad Ensemble: Of the entire setting, though Jagganoth is given special importance.
  • Boss Subtitles: They each have one, as shown during their Establishing Character Moment. The title includes their full name, their most well-known titles, which of the seven words of God they bear, and finishes with 'God/Goddess of the Seven-Part World'.
  • Demiurge Archetype: They zig-zag between being this and being closest to Archons, gnostically speaking. The Seven are all Gods of Mortal Origin who obtained a Key of Kings, one of God's voices, and between them now hold all of them. All of them are openly worshipped as deities (their titles include 'God of the Seven-Part World'), a pantheon of Mad Gods, and while they're not the original reason for the Crapsack World they rule (that is more on Zoss' hands) none of them have improved matters. Compared to the dead deities worshipped in the Atru religion they are essentially pretenders, lacking the creative impulses and capacity for self-sacrifice of true gods while being even more tyrannical and petty. The only element missing is that few of them seem to have deluded themselves into believing they are true gods, which is perhaps more difficult to do in a universe where looking outside your living room window lets you see God's corpse (and said living room is built into the skull of another God's corpse).
  • Dimension Lord: They each rule exactly 111,111 universes, having divided Creation in seven between them. The only thing keeping any of them from trying to become a Multiversal Conqueror is the Pact of the Seven Part World.
  • Dwindling Party: During Breaker of Infinities, Mammon and Mottom are killed by Jagganoth. Solomon pulls a Taking You with Me on Jagganoth and seals the latter away, and is later revealed to be crippled beyond repair by it.
  • Dysfunction Junction: According to Abbadon, none of them have ever been truly happy.
  • Early Installment Character-Design Difference: As most of the Seven appeared in the prologue, they've been adjusted over time as the comic has progressed, partially due to Art Evolution and subtle tweaks to their designs, partially because of their madness ebbing and flowing, and partially because their first meeting was in the Void, which alters the physical appearance of humans.
    • Incubus' envoy at the Demiurge council was a "First Consort", a woman who was later seen as a corpse by his throne, however Incubus' empire has since been shown to be a near total anarchy that has little to do with sexual lust.
    • Jadis' slab changed in size from towering over normal people to being modestly taller than her followers; she's also able to speak more clearly in the second meeting of the Demiurges and doesn't require an interpreter. Her followers changed from wearing hooded robes to featureless prisms.
    • Solomon David originally had a somewhat dumpy appearance and an unhealthy pallor to his skin; his later appearances have had a more natural skin tone and his design more clearly conveys that he is extremely muscular. The color of his robes also changed from purple and red to purple and white, in line with the Light Is Not Good motif he acquired in Book 4.
    • Gog-Agog was significantly more unhinged in the prologue compared to her later appearances, and more respected by the other Demiurges. She had a habit of mimicking other people's mannerisms when she spoke, which is no longer apparent. Her followers were also changed from strange infant-sized creatures to monstrous clowns.
    • Mammon had a somewhat more insectoid appearance with a flatter face, more in line with the other Kind People we see sometimes, but later appearances give him a more obviously draconic look with a long snout.
  • Enemy Mine: The Seven are not on the best of terms with one another, but due to the Pact of the Seven-Part World, they can cooperate to keep each other (especially Jagganoth) in check. Incubus aims to change that and start a massive multiversal war.
  • Enforced Cold War: As mentioned under Enemy Mine above, the other demiurges are cooperating to keep Jagganoth in check. Incubus even mocks Solomon for being the only one of them who even dares to think that the war is over.
  • Epiphanic Prison: Combined with Ironic Hell. At least two of them, Mottom and Solomon David, have very thoroughly created an Epiphanic Prison for themselves. Meanwhile Mammon struggles to complete the Impossible Task of counting his vault having long since forgotten why it ever mattered to him, surrounded by a cult that reveres and venerates his suffering while implicitly exploiting thousands of worlds in his name. Jadis succeeded at gaining tremendous understanding of the universe, and now her most sincere wish is to die but isn't being allowed that mercy. It is implied that they all suffer like this, in one form or another.
  • Even Evil Has Standards: Even the other demiurges find Incubus despicable, though it's because he failed to claim his throne properly rather than due to any sort of moral qualm.
  • From Nobody to Nightmare: All of the Seven rose to their positions of godhood from humble origins and took their Keys by force (save Mammon, who bought his first one): Two were children of farmers kidnapped from their homes (Mottom, Jagganoth), two were orphans, one by war and the other by killing their abusive father (Incubus, Jadis), one was a citizen-soldier whose home was destroyed in the Universal War (Solomon), one was a beast of burden (Mammon) and one wasn't even sapient (Gog-Agog). Now... well, just look at their titles.
  • God-Emperor: As the winners of the civil war between the Demiurges, they alone claim this title now.
  • Holy Halo: Or unholy halo, as the case may be, but each of them has a halo reflecting their power.
  • Holy Is Not Safe: They are all genuinely bearers of the power of God. The fact that they're delusional and cruel doesn't make them wrong when they say they're holy.
  • Immortality: All of them became immortal due to various techniques, though in Mammon's case (and perhaps Gog-Agog), he was naturally The Ageless. Some methods work better than others.
  • Immortal Immaturity: A repeated theme of the Seven is that, for all their age and power, most of them are still stuck as the people they were before they became living deities, no matter how much they pretend otherwise. And as they all used to be deeply broken and unhappy people, this has made them into a deeply broken and dysfunctional pantheon. Mammon is the sole exception to this case, as it's implied his age and senility genuinely changed him for the better and he deeply regrets his younger self's actions. Gog-Agog double-subverts it by being immature and whimsical as a coping mechanism for being a deeply cynical and tired being, but in truth she, just like Jagganoth, hasn't been able to leverage her continual memory of the plot to improve herself or the world either: She just prefers just not bothering.
  • Immortality Immorality: Immortality has proven to be a deliberately detrimental thing for some of them, with Mottom deeply regretful of her constant sacrifices to the corpse-tree of her husband and Mammon going senile despite being The Ageless and making a Heel–Face Turn from forgetting to be evil.
  • Ineffectual Loner: All of the Demiurges are said to be too obsessed with their notions of victory to achieve enlightenment, believing everything that matters to them to be on their shoulders alone and refusing to share their burdens with others.
  • Mad God: According to White Chain, they are all completely mad.
  • Magic Knight: According to Abbadon they are all "badass sorcerer god-kings". While each member of the Seven prefers either physical combat or use of the Art, all of them can use both. Mottom is seen getting physical in Seeker of Thrones despite being The Archmage of the Seven, using a flaming scourge to battle 00001, The Discordance contains uses of both physical might, magic and Magus Key use from all of them with Jagganoth notably mixing-and-matching, and Wheel-Smashing Lord shows that Solomon David, despite being depowered, half-dead and having given away his Key of Kings, is skilled enough in the Art to create a significantly-sized bubble of air at the bottom of a lake using only a gesture.
  • Multiversal Conqueror: They have already conquered it. Every last world. Each rules a seventh of the multiverse, taken by conquest from their countless rivals. Whether or not their presence is felt on a particular world is only a matter of whether they've turned their attention to it yet or not. Worlds low on the tech tree are crushed with endless waves in inhuman, sorcerous mercenaries. With higher level worlds they arrive to conquer it themselves.
  • Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: The Seven were explicitly not the most powerful Demiurges during the Universal War, but they were the ones who ultimately survived it while their stronger counterparts died. They have spent the centuries following the War to subvert the trope: While the lack of open conflict has in some ways weakened them, their large collections of Magus Keys (each having the largest collection of Keys aside from Zoss), worlds they command, and experience they gained during and after the War means they are currently way more powerful than any of the other participants in the War ever were at their peaks. Zoss is still their superior, but Zoss was everyone's superior.
  • Our Archons Are Different: Zig-Zagged. They style themselves as God-Emperors more than a single Demiurge's servants, and Zoss himself now actually opposes on the harmful doctrine they enforce, but their role as tyrants wielding power given to them by a false deity to spread his harmful, oppressive beliefs brings to mind the Hellenistic version of the Archons.
  • Painting the Medium: Each Demiurge but Incubus has unique speech bubbles. Solomon David's, Mammon's, and Mottom's text matches the colour of their power; Gog-Agog's speech is an unhinged green scrawl; Jadis whispers in drifting white-on-black bubbles; and Jagganoth has heavy red hand-lettered words on black.
  • Physical God: Their Boss Subtitles invariably includes their highest title: God/Goddess of the Seven Part World. It's not exaggerating in either power or genuine divinity.
  • Really 700 Years Old: The Seven have remained in power since the end of the Universal War, which is implied to have stopped centuries ago, and none of them seem to be keeling over from old age any time soon despite only one of them being a Servant (who are naturally The Ageless instead of having to develop work-arounds).
  • Rainbow Motif: They are each associated with a single color: Jagganoth is red, Mottom orange, Mammon yellow, Gog-Agog green, Jadis blue, Solomon David purple and Incubus pink. These colors correspond to their Seven Deadly Sins motif, except for Incubus as Lust, which is traditionally associated with indigo/dark blue.
  • Seven Deadly Sins: Each of the Seven is connected to them, though it's more obvious for some than others. Notably, the associations are not merely with the Seven themselves but also their followers.
    • Mottom represents Gluttony. Her empire is built on conquest, pillage, and tribute, and she proves her power to her court by Conspicuous Consumption. She fills a banquet hall with food just for Allison that nobody eats, and she devours fruit from the Tree of Woe in order to regain her youth. She tells Allison that she demands gifts so that she can give them to her court so they won't conspire against her, and that they demand more and more gifts every year.
    • Mammon represents Greed. He bought his power and used it to kill his family, paying pieces of silver reminiscent of Judas's 30 pieces. In the present, he's known for owning the Great Dragon Bank, and makes his home in its central fortress/vault of Yre-Ynamon. By the time Allison meets him, his greed is all he has left in the world, as he practically begs Allison to kill him. To top it all off, his followers hoard their safety in the confines of the vault, where their only duties are to protect Mammon and continue the Count.
    • Incubus represents Lust, which concerns itself with unhealthy desires rather than merely sexual ones. Incubus manipulates people's desires, conning them into taking a piece of him into their minds — the effect being akin to that of heroin. For his part, Incubus desires either the respect and acknowledgement from the other six kings — or failing that, revenge — but as an allegory for Lust, he never gets (nor can he ever give) what is desired.
    • Solomon David represents Pride. His name comes from biblical kings, and he's utterly confident in his own power and wisdom, which he demonstrates frequently by Blasé Boast. He rules his own, 'perfect', empire that mirrors his strength and physical perfection, and which he describes as the true successor to the kingdom of Zoss. He was humiliated by an invading army who killed family and destroyed his hometown, later murdered the martial arts masters who took pity on him, and has abandoned their teachings on how violence is a cycle. Solomon is incapable of seeing strength as anything but personal power, only intending for someone capable of wounding him in battle to succeed him as emperor of the 111,111 worlds he conquered, no matter how blatantly unsuited for the task such a person would be.
    • Jadis represents Sloth. She used to be The Archmage among the demiurges and the second-most powerful of them after Jagganoth, but has encased herself in a glass prism after learning the Shape of the Universe. Her followers recount her prophesies because she can barely speak above a whisper. According to Abbadon, her greatest desire is simply to die. And according to Jadis, even though she is omniscient, she can change nothing with her knowledge. Free will and agency are nothing but illusions, and all future actions, including her own, are already set in stone. Thus she only does what she herself prophesized she will do, without motivation or meaning. There is no point to anything. Absolutely nothing.
    • Gog-Agog represents Envy. If someone eats one of her worms, they will become her, and she insists that "being [her] is really fun," implying she's profoundly insecure. She controls the entertainment industry of Throne, which suggests she has a celebrity all her own outside of merely being part of the Seven, and celebrity inevitably leads to people coveting what she has. Moreover, it's implied that people willingly eat her worms knowing they will become her. Despite her ancient life and immense power — even the death of the multiverse doesn't faze her, since she will get to feed on its remains — none of the other demiurges respect her, and it's her fragile ego that motivates her to undermine and betray them. Her signature color is of course green.
    • Jagganoth represents Wrath. He is the most feared of the Seven, even by the other six kings, and his appetite for murder is well known. He forged divine nails from angel feathers in order to make himself more powerful, and angels are heavily associated with the wrath of God. Much like Zoss, he, too, wants to end the cycle gripping Throne, but as someone whose entire life consisted of violence, violence is all that he's ever known, and he believes the only way to end the cycle is burn everything to the ground and start anew.
  • Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Where they once were capable of at least some degree of cooperation, their current dynamic can be described as 'barely functional'. Incubus' plan hinges on breaking what little there is left of their cooperation, allowing Jagganoth to slaughter them all while Incubus gets to rule the rest.
  • Teleporters and Transporters: They are all capable of using their Keys to fold time and space, allowing them to teleport. During their mobilization moment in the final book they all show up in a manner of teleportation that characterizes them, from Jadis, Mottom and Mammon plain appearing from thin air in an appropriately coloured flame, Gog-Agog reconstituting herself from worms erupting from the soil, Incubus emerging from the mud of the aera, and Jagganoth cutting his way in through empty space, creating a city-destroying explosion as he steps through.
  • Time Abyss: They're all extremely old, as the Universal War was millennia ago. Some, like Gog-Agog, were ancient even before that.
  • Try to Fit That on a Business Card: It's implied each of the Seven have a lot more titles than their Boss Subtitles allow, and limit them to avert this trope.
  • There Can Be Only One: Part of why the number of Demiurges was reduced to just the seven of them; each time a demiurge killed another, they would claim the power of the loser's keys, reconstructing the fragments of the Universal Voice that each one contained. This ultimately forms a Divine Word (such as Mottom's GLORY), one-seventh of the name of God.
  • Trapped in Villainy: More than one of them are sick of the obligations that being a Demiurge entails, weary from their supernaturally long lives, but dare not risk destabilizing the fragile peace that exists among the Seven and ignite the Third War of Conquest.
  • We ARE Struggling Together: When the time finally comes for them to once again join forces after the war they turn out to be pretty bad at it, having zero coordination and outright disrupting each other's attacks through arrogance or disregard. The demiurges eventually manage to get their act together and come to the brink of defeating Jagganoth... up until Gog-Agog betrays them out of petty spite.
  • We Used to Be Friends: They used to congregate together at a table and Abbadon implies that they won the war because they worked together. Now they mostly bicker amongst each other every time they meet. This costs them dearly when their present inability to work together allowed Jagganoth to utterly defeat and kill them off one by one.
  • Wrong Genre Savvy: The Seven act on the assumption that Zaid is the Heir, and that Allison being given the Master Key was a fluke that needs to be corrected. And if this was a typical Hero's Journey narrative, they would be right, Zaid would be the hero, and Allison a love interest who gets Stuffed into the Fridge to provide pathos. Hell, this is even how things usually go, Zaid or people like him have been the heir in every previous incarnation, and Gog-Agog explicitly states that Allison's usual role in the cycle is to die to motivate the hero. Too bad for them, this story is a Deconstruction of that narrative, and Allison really is Zoss' true heir.

    Mottom 

Queen Nadia Om, The Blood Flower, Imperiatrix of the Gates of Fire, Bearer of the Word GLORY and Goddess of the Seven-Part World (Mother Om/Mottom)

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/mottom.jpg
Click here to see Mottom as a child.
Click here to see Mottom as a young woman.

"Wrong question, my dear. "Why" is a question of the weak. The proper question is "why not"."

The God-Queen Nadia Om, known better by her title of "Mother Om" or "Mottom", is the first member of the Seven introduced. A powerful and immortal arch-mage who takes the form of a wizened old woman, Nadia begun her life as a peasant girl on a world owned by the Demiurge Hastet Om, who forcibly married her and made her his queen. Nadia eventually took her husband's Key, court and empire and joined the Universal War. She rules her empire as a colonial overlord, demanding ruinous tributes of goods, luxuries and slaves for herself and her inner circle to live an eternal life of luxury.

Mottom controls the Key connected to Allison's universe, though she has yet to open it and as such has left its contents alone for now. Because Mottom is technically her 'liege', Allison seeks her out in Wielder of Names to obtain her help in her quest for Zaid.

Mottom's colour is orange. She bears the word GLORY, and is associated with the sin of Gluttony.
  • The Ageless: Mottom is the only one of the Seven to avert this — like the rest of them she is centuries old, but she is the only one of them that has visibly aged. Her peaches temporarily revert the process, but Mottom mentions they are getting less and less effective. Her last moments imply the fear of her own mortality was aging her, or at least preventing her from using her Key to arrest her aging the same way some of the other members of the Seven seem to have done.
  • Aggressive Negotiations: Downplayed. She spends the second Concordance openly hostile to Mammon and repeatedly attacks him with fireballs while being counter-attacked by the latter's Breath Weapon. Given the relative power both possess this is basically the equivalent of throwing paper airplanes during an office meeting, and Mottom's insistence that the two are engaged in diplomacy implies she sees it as nothing more than stress release necessary to stay in the room at all.
  • All for Nothing: Possibly. She has felt trapped by her court for thousands of years, thinking she needed to rely on the Peaches of Immortality and sacrifice women to maintain her power. If there is one thing that Allison destroying the tree has proven, it's that she truly is one of the most powerful beings in the multiverse and never had anything to fear. The Gilded Cage was mental all the time. Further, during the Discordance of the Demiurges she appears to revert in age through sheer Royalty, meaning she never really needed the peaches at all.
  • Ambiguously Brown: In her youth, she had brown skin and white hair. This doesn't match any Earth ethnicity, but of course she's not from Earth.
  • The Archmage: After Jadis' self-incarceration, she became the most powerful mage of the Seven, and mainly fights using her devastating magic regardless of how physically capable she presently is.
  • Aristocrats Are Evil: Oh yes, and with countless evil courtiers to attend her fancy parties.
  • Bad Boss: She uses people as literal furniture, strips worlds under her rule to the ground on whims, and engages in Conspicuous Consumption while her people starve. And then there's the matter of the regular human tithe of her worlds' best and brightest, young women trained from birth to serve as her handmaidens, who promptly get their throats slit to feed the Tree of Woe. Deep down, she's deeply embittered by how trapped she is and wants to stop being this, which is why she desperately wants Allison to take her place.
  • Be Careful What You Wish For: She begs Allison to usurp her and take her place so that she doesn't have to be a monster any more. It's not quite clear what she expected to happen, but Allison punches her in the face and destroys the tree that was the source of her immortality.
  • Better the Devil You Know: The reason why Mottom refuses to take Allison's key, despite it being remarkably easy for her to do so. Jagganoth is so powerful that only the combined power of the other six Demiurges could hope to stand a chance against him. While claiming the power would be a great boon to herself, it would threaten the balance of the already-precarious alliance, the sole obstacle to Jagganoth's mission to annihilate the multiverse.
  • Big Eater: Part of her Gluttony motif; she demonstrates it with gusto (though she mostly just wastes food).
  • Broken Tears: Mottom starts crying after Allison's escape. Not only did she lose her (supposed) source of immortality, who was also her abusive husband, but she is also called out by Allison on her self-pitying and left alone to face her own mortality.
  • Cannibalism Superpower: An odd example. While it's a fruit that's keeping her alive and allowing her to temporarily regain her youth, it's fruit grown from the tree-corpse of her husband... Who in turn feeds off the blood of countless young women.
  • Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Why Mottom hesitates to kill Allison during their final confrontation: She needs her to be the new Mother Om, and taking Allison's key would disrupt the fragile balance among the demiurges. Allison realizes this, though, and is able to use it to turn the situation in her favor so she and her friends could escape
  • The Chains of Commanding: She makes it clear, from the moment she starts speaking to Allison, that she feels burdened by the demands of her position, and has grown weary from the toll it has taken on her. She is also well aware of how tenuous the balance between her and the other demiurges is, and that she can no longer sustain her life with her husband's fruit. She wants Allison to preserve the balance; see Deal with the Devil, below.
  • Conspicuous Consumption: Her entire cultus is based around being a gracious queen who freely shares the luxuries and glories of her owned worlds with her inner circle. Her parties are extravagant beyond compare, and her apetites strip planets down to the bedrock.
  • Cruel Mercy: She seems fond of this as a form of punishment. Just ask Pryan Sor.
    Mottom: For thy valiant concern o'er hunger, I grant thee a power. The power to tend to the hunger of others. Eternally.
  • The Cynic: In contrast to Solomon David, in particular. She believes the Seven, including herself, are just waiting around for Zoss the Conquering King to return and kill them all. And while visiting her dead husband's tomb, she scoffs at the idea of The Power of Love and an afterlife. Considering that she was made the concubine of a monstrously abusive tyrant at a young age and forced to look after both his Decadent Court and the tree sprung from his corpse, one can see where her outlook comes from.
  • Dare to Be Badass: After a lot of bickering, outright animosity, a whole city dropped on his vault and a complete lack of cooperation against a common enemy, Jagganoth attacking them on Solomon's land leads her to finally realize that her petty quarrel with Mammon will have to wait. When Mammon, terrified of Jagganoth, is about to retreat to his vault, Mottom turns to him and urges him to fight:
    Mammon: I- I must retreat to the vault... I'll be safe there. The count-
    Mottom: No. Come on miserable worm! Are you a peasant? Or are you a king?
  • Deal with the Devil: She offers Allison the opportunity to take her place among the Seven, along with her source of immortality and all the riches that come with being ruler of one seventh of the multiverse. The price: Allion would need to satisfy Mottom's courtiers and keep Hastet Om fed with the blood of beautiful virgin women, while also keeping the rest of the Seven at bay. Allison elects to Take a Third Option: She just destroys Hastet Om's body, freeing Nadia from having to choose whether to keep feeding him or force the mantle on someone else.
  • Decadent Court: Justified. Mottom displays her power to her subjects by flaunting her extreme wealth at any given opportunity, encouraging her subjects to indulge in the name of divine inspiration, and demanding exorbitant offerings as a show of piety with dire consequences to those who refuse her. Among her faithful, they see these offerings as both necessary and appropriate because of the belief that all things rich and beautiful are born from her, and thus are owed to her.
  • Defiant to the End: At the end of the Discordance of the Demiurges, when the demiurges lay defeated after Gog-Agog abandoned them at the worst possible moment and Jagganoth is reaping their keys, her last actions before being crushed to death are to try one last attack against him and to assert that death will be a relief he will never experience.
    Jagganoth: Prepare yourself.
    Mottom: I hope you choke on it, you sad, broken little peasant. For me this is nothing but relief, while your suffering will continue forever.
  • Domestic Abuse: Hastet Om was a monstrously abusive husband who forced himself onto any young woman who caught his eye, and then discarded them when they grew old for his tastes. Eventually, Mottom had enough of his behavior and killed him, buried him in the palace gardens, then went to sleep... only to discover three days later, to her horror, that Hastet Om had turned into a tree that fed on the blood of young women.
  • Dragon Rider: In "Breaker of Infinities 1-25", after convincing Mammon to stand and fight against Jagganoth, she rides on her fellow demiurge's head, hanging on with a magically-conjured bridle while standing on the Grand Dragon's head.
  • Due to the Dead: According to her, she used to visit her husband Hastet Om's tomb often after he died, but presumably stopped visiting. She only does it again to tell Allison her history, and it's her bitterness in paying tribute that causes Allison to correctly deduce that she killed Hastet Om.
  • Dynamic Entry: Allison and company get into Mammon's infinite vault by traversing miles and miles of mazes and puzzles and treachery. Mottom gets in by crashing her floating palace-city into the exterior and breaking the infinite vault completely. As a result, Mammon's nearly endless wealth is spent spilling out into Throne.
  • Elderly Immortal: Her Crone form very much looks her age, though she is careful never to reveal it in front of her court. Only Allison, her servants and the other members of the Seven get to see that part of her.
  • Establishing Character Moment: Mottom is the Demiurge best established during their meeting at the end of book 1, serving as Ms. Exposition while openly mocking the other Demiurges for not participating and for their inability to work together towards anything anymore. Her comments about 'waiting' and how she immediately turns deferential the moment Jagganoth makes his entrance foreshadows her immense fear of the God-Eater, while her treatment of her servants during the meeting (eating food off their heads with a fork) establishes her feelings towards her subjects.
  • Even Evil Has Standards:
    • Mottom has a rare humanizing moment explaining Jagganoth's growing threat to Allison. While she fully embraces her role as a gluttonous tyrant god-ruler, she is truly terrified of Jagganoth and his relentless pursuit of the destruction of the Multiverse, and refuses anything that could cause their tenuous defense against him to collapse — even when it's the Master Key of Kings.
    • During her younger days, she also eventually became fed up with her husband, Hastet, and the horrific treatment of his increasingly large harem of wives, putting a knife through his eyesocket while he slept. Unfortunately, even death didn't seem to curb his perverse appetites.
  • Evil Costume Switch: Not that she's any less evil in her day-to-day life, but when she gets off her throne and goes to battle against Mammon, she switches to an all-black version of her usual outfit.
  • Evil Counterpart: To Allison. Mottom's role in the story so far seems to exist to show the audience who Allison could have been under different circumstances. They both struggled with the way physical beauty and the expectations of womanhood shaped their lives, had rather mundane upbringings, with mundane but achievable aspirations, only to have roles of greatness thrust upon them against their will. This is reflected in their appearances and respective color schemes during their time together in Wielder of Names — Mottom as a young woman is a dark-skinned platinum blonde, while Allison is a fair-skinned brunette, and their dresses are similarly reversed.
  • Evil Is Petty: Mottom is extremely prone to put-downs and petty acts of spite against her lessers and much less subtle about it than Solomon. At one point she puts on a banquet for at least a hundred people just to provide a 'proper' locale for Allison's audience with her, and doesn't care if the food is thrown away or wasted afterwards. Her quote is the reply when Allison asks why.
  • Evil Old Folks: Her true form is ancient and withered, which is particularly noticeable among the Demiurges, who are otherwise The Ageless. In her court, however, she appears as a beautiful young woman thanks to consuming peaches of youth.
  • Face Death with Dignity: After her last-ditch attempt to kill Jagganoth fails, she is just content to die, knowing that her death would be a respite of her suffering and misery.
  • Fatal Flaw: Fear. Mottom's fears of failure, powerlessness and her inevitable death traps her in an Epiphanic Prison that makes the universe a worse place, and makes her vulnerable to breakdowns and hesitance that ultimately lets Allison get the better of her in Wielder of Names. It also turns out to be the cause of her own premature aging; if she'd been able to master her fears, she had never never needed the fruits in the first place much like the other Demiurges. During the Discordance, Mottom gets so upset by Gog-Agog threatening to leave that she lashes out, which not only dooms her, but most of the principal cast, not to mention millions of others across the multiverse.
  • Faux Affably Evil: She's too powerful to really care to conceal her true nature as a corrupt Goddess-Empress, and few dare to point out her hypocrisy or vague attempts at playing the righteous ruler as insincere.
  • Female Misogynist: Symbolically, at least, she is this — She suffered under her abusive husband and ultimately killed him, but regularly sacrifices other women to his undead corpse to maintain her own power. She describes the role of women as performance objects who have to present as beautiful at all times to maintain some of their own power, and later in the story refers to Allison as a "whore".
  • Femme Fatalons: Wears golden ones over the lower joints of her fingers, to fit into the general chinese-like aestetics of her dress and furniture. At one point she uses them to incessently tap on a table just to psyche out Allison while pretending to mull over what to do with her.
  • Foil: She's set up as Allison's main foil in Wielder of Names and even openly given a "Not so different"-type comparison. Both are young women brought into the greater Multiverse against their will and (eventually) given powers they don't fully understand and cannot fully control. Their main difference is that Mottom let all her previous trauma and fears shape her, to the point that she's unwilling to change, whereas Allison (due to seeing how she could end up the same way) is able to overcome her fear and chooses "king" instead.
  • Forced into Evil: Plucked from a backwater world to become a bride to a tyrant when she was barely 13. And when she tried to kill him to stop the taking and abusing of more wives, she ends up burdened with his demonic corpse, instead... Along with his kingdom, his power, and his Decadent Court.
  • Freudian Excuse: It's implied many of her woes started when when she was between her pre- to early teens, as shown in her preference in appearing as a young adolescent girl. She was originally a farm girl plucked away from her family by Hastet Om for having beautiful hair, and was implied to have been raped by him. As she grew older, Hastet Om cheated on her with younger, more beautiful wives, and became increasingly abusive and hedonistic. She murdered her husband and took his key to stop the abuse and assumed all was well... until she discovered after three days that Hastet Om had turned into a demonic tree that feeds on the blood of young women. Not only that, she got saddled with the enormous task of looking after her husband's empire, and maintaining both her power and the accompanying Decadent Court. Her deepest wish is to be free of it all, and she's deeply embittered over her inability to do anything about it. However, it's deconstructed; even after Allison burned down Hastet Om's tree, she still clings to her dead husband's memory and her idea of freedom is to force another woman (Allison) to take her place as ruler, instead of leaving her husband's empire to rot like a bad memory. Allison calls her a "self-pitying turbo bitch", but also sees her as a scared old woman who's afraid to change and sympathizes with her on some level.
  • Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Allison describes her as nothing but a scared old woman afraid to change, after saying she can at least understand her view on performance and femininity.
  • Gilded Cage: She views her entire life this way, even now that she's one of the most powerful people in the entire universe, and it's a running theme throughout her story, from her forced marriage to Hastet Om to the way she forces Allison to participate in her feasts and balls.
  • Green Thumb: As befitting her title of "the Blood Flower", she has control over plants. However, in a unique twist she can turn people into plants. This seems to extend to anything that is/was living, as she demonstrates during her rant at Allison.
  • Hades Shaded: Her ancient, withered skin gives her a grey-black skin tone, though her younger form has much healthier and natural-looking brown skin.
  • The Hecate Sisters: She's all three on her own, due to the way her physical age and mental state shifts when using her peaches of immortality. Most of her on-screen time is as The Crone, though.
    • She shows this power in fine form here while spellcasting when she and Jadis collaborate to go all out against Jagganoth.
  • Immortality Immorality: And she knows it — when she's confronted with all the atrocities that sustain her, the best she can manage is a tearful "Look what I've become!"
  • I Was Quite a Looker: Her normal form is that of a shriveled, blue-skinned crone, but when she regains her youth after eating the fruit, she becomes a beautiful young woman. She says she was chosen by her husband, the previous bearer of her Key, for being the most beautiful woman in his entire domain.
  • Jerkass Has a Point: Her yelling at Gog-Agog for stepping between them and Jagganoth during the final strike was harsh and had extreme consequences, but was also completely justified. Gog was preventing them to saving the multiverse out of her own selfish need for acknowledgement.
  • Kung-Fu Wizard: According to Abbadon, she used to be this during the Universal War, and she can be seen wearing what looks like battle armour during some of the flashbacks. After centuries of ruling, she's become much more dependent on Powers Do the Fighting, though she does get somewhat physical with 00001 during the Siege of Yvre.
  • Living Legend: Her deed of murdering the abusive, tyrannical, and depraved Hastet Om has been immortalized as a statue as a triumphant young woman holding her husband's depacacitated head that's overlooking the entrance
  • Magic Wand: She wields a slim, fork-shaped wand as a focus for her powers. It can also extend multiple lashes made of magical energy for melee combat.
  • Meaningful Name: Om is the name of the sacred sound and spiritual icon in many Indian religions—ॐ. Doubles as an Ironic Name because as a Demiurge, Nadia Om isn't a particularly peaceful person.
  • The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: Subtle but a deliberate choice; as the dark-skinned hag first introduced, Mottom is crafty and acerbic. Immediately upon using the fruit to bring her age down to that of a child, she enthusiastically leads the way to a ball, and as it starts to wear off she displays melancholy and fear.
    • There's also subtle hints that this trope is actually inverted, as there is some evidence the efficacy of the peaches are based on her own state of mind: most of her more drastic jumps in age always seem to coincide with when age and/or reliance on the peaches to keep her youth being brought to her attention.
    • In the end, when facing death at the hands of Jagganoth and speaking her last defiant words, Mottom reverts to a relatively youthful appearance, indicating that her physical form was directly connected to her state of mind. In facing death and the peace and relief it would bring, her body shifted to reflect that.
  • Mind over Matter: Her city-sized palace complex floats in the sky and travels between dimensions through the force of her will alone. This power also extends to living beings; she sends White Chain flying into the horizon with a flick of her wand when they try to attack her.
  • Motivated by Fear: By her own admission. Mottom fears a great many things — Jagganoth, Zoss, her court, growing old and impotent, the extent of her own power and her husband — and it drives her to consume worlds to mollify her subjects and keep her glory eternal. Zig-Zagged in that the same fear has also led to her despondency and inability to change.
  • Mystical White Hair: It's a sandy white color, fitting both her orange-and-white color scheme and magical powers. Hastet Om apparently chose her as his bride as a young woman thanks to her hair.
  • Never Be Hurt Again: It can be inferred that Mottom's fear of disturbing the present status quo came from the last time she did so — when she grew fed up with Hastet Om's Domestic Abuse of her and her fellow Royal Harem members, she killed him in his sleep, stole his Magus Key, and buried him in the royal gardens. When Mottom woke up after three days of sleep, she found she was now Queen and her murdered husband had transformed into a corpse-tree that thirsted for the blood of young maidens. Hence, despite knowing she's trapped in a vicious cycle started by her abusive husband, Mottom spends much of her character arc consciously avoiding the issue out of fear of having something even worse happen to her.
  • One-Hit Kill: She is able to kill most people with a single word: "PERISH". That spell, however, has a vocal component, and Cio muting her is enough to stop the spell from taking effect. While the spell works on Gog-Agog, they are able to reform immediately afterwards. As for Jagganoth, his Nigh-Invulnerability and raw power protects him from the spell's effect completelya
  • Petal Power: Is often surrounded by pink petals, at least, in her youthful appearance, and has also weaponized the skill by dissolving people into petals with a whispered word.
  • Planet Looters: She strips entire worlds bare to sate her Decadent Court's hunger for slaves and luxuries.
  • Powerful and Helpless: Mottom believes she is this, but it's ultimately averted.
  • Race Against the Clock: After Wielder of Names, with her source of immortality gone, she's limited to only those peaches she'd previously stored and even they seem less effective than ever; with her limited time left, her sole motivation seems to take out her revenge on Allison, though even the other Demiurges know she doesn't have long left. However, Breaker of Infinites shows her as a young woman in her prime without the peaches, showing that she's always immortal like the demiurges and that her physical aging is purely psychosomatic.
  • Rapid Aging: The fruit she eats to stay physically young has less and less of an effect on her the chronologically older she becomes. During book two, it takes what appears to be a few hours at most to go from physically around seven after eating four whole fruit to around seventy during her final encounter with Allison. It is eventually reaveled in Breaker of Infinities that this was entirely psychosomatic; when she is at peace in the end while facing Jagganoth, she reverts to her youthful form.
  • Sanity Slippage: After Allison destroys the source of her immortality, Nadia becomes more and more unhinged as time passes, leading her to crush through Mammon's vault with her whole city on fire, demanding to know where Allison is, and assaulting Mammon despite the dragon calling out to their friendship. During a meeting with the rest of the Seven, she is very aggressive, attacking Mammon and blasting Gog-Agog's head repeatedly.
  • So Beautiful, It's a Curse: She describes her youth this way; she was chosen as (the horribly abusive) Hastet Om's wife due to her beautiful hair, which rendered all her other goals and desires and accomplishments meaningless.
  • Speak Ill of the Dead: She has nothing but bitter words for Hastet Om even as she pays tribute to his grave statue. Considering how Hastet Om was monstrously abusive to her and the rest of his harem, it's understandable. This is how Allison guessed that she murdered Hastet Om.
    Mottom: It was believed the love of their wives empowered the Kings' souls. So that when they died... they would be forever warm in the afterlife. Fools. There is no life after death. No solace at all.
  • Squishy Wizard: Her magical powers are devastating, but (most of the time) she's still a frail, elderly human woman, and Allison knocks her on her ass with a single slap without drawing on the Key of Kings. She was a Kung-Fu Wizard during the Demiurge War, but age and ennui have stolen much of martial combat abilities.
  • Surrounded by Idiots: Views the rest of The Seven this way, although given that she refers to them as "the other six idiots who rule the cosmos," she thinks little better of herself.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: In-universe. If Nyave is any indication, the women sent in tribute to serve Mottom are all exemplary figures of great potential. And then they're sacrificed to the Tree of Woe, their throats slit, bled into its roots, and then their bodies discarded.
  • Til Murder Do Us Part: She was one of Hastet Om's many wives who was plucked out of her mundane life because of her beauty. She ended up murdering her husband because she was disgusted by his horrific treatment of the women in his harem, and dragged his corpse to the palace gardens where she buried him. But after three days, she heard Hastet Om pleading for more wives.
  • Trapped in Villainy: To the point where she begs Allison to take her power and kingdom because she's so miserable.
  • Vain Sorceress: She never shows her true form to her court, stating to Allison that it's her duty as their god-queen to be eternally beautiful.
  • Villainous BSoD: After Allison destroys the source of her immortality, she only sits, eyes glazed, watching the wreckage burn and letting her palace drop out of the sky. However, once she has recovered enough to realize that Allison will likely be infiltrating the Vault of Yre to locate Zaid, she comes roaring back, looking for revenge with her still-burning city in tow.
  • Villainous Friendship: Once, long ago, Mammon and Mottom were friends, or at least trusted allies. Unfortunately, by the time they see each other in the story proper, any good feelings they had towards each other are long faded.
  • Villainous Glutton: She has her servants wear plates of food on their heads, and is constantly eating from them. In fact, her gluttony is so extreme that her desire for a particular fruit that grew in the forest around her home reduced the entire region to a scorched wasteland.
  • Who Wants to Live Forever?: Doesn't seem to mind that her death or that of her peers is coming. Made more explicit later when she's talking to Allison.
    Mottom: Do you have any idea how old I truly am? The days are like water.
    • Subverted when it becomes clear that despite her cynicism, she is utterly terrified of death and is willing to do absolutely anything, no matter how horrible, in order to avoid it.
    • Double Subverted when Jagganoth finally kills her, as her Last Words are how much of a relief death will be.
  • Wicked Witch: Several characters use the "witch" epithet against her; she leans heavily on magic in combat; and she looks like a withered old crone when she's not sustaining her youth with stolen lives.
  • Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: She became a demiurge when the demiurge Hastet Om noticed her beautiful hair and forced her to marry him... and, she implies, raped her repeatedly. This makes her bitter and cynical outlook on the nature of power at least somewhat more understandable.
  • Words Can Break My Bones: She is able to speak people dead, or turn them into trees or petals. It does not work on Demiurges; Gog-Agog simply regrows her body back, and Jagganoth No Sells it effortlessly.
  • The Worf Effect: Her PERISH spell is assumed to be an instant killer. Assumed, because it fails to work every single time it's used.
  • You Remind Me of X: She makes it clear that Allison reminds her of her younger self.
  • Your Head A-Splode: She splatters Gog-Agog's head with a word when she tires of her incessant gossip. Not that it does more than piss her off.
    Gog-Agog: Of course! Then it must be that awful witch, Motto—
    Mottom: PERISH.

    Incubus 

Incubus, Lord of the Golden Army, Sword King of the Middle Army, Bearer of the Word FLAME and God of the Seven-Part World

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/incubus_kos.png
Click here to see Incubus in the waking world.

"You and I will bring a reckoning to them. Then we'll truly see who deserves their throne."

A mysterious humanoid man with supernatural powers, Incubus rose from a starving war refugee during the Universal War to a walker of dreams, inflamer of men's passions and a master swordsman, becoming a Demiurge and one of the Seven by the war's end. He is the first of the Seven to contact Allison directly, and the one with the closest relation to her. During the course of the comic he serves as an on-and-off mentor to Allison, being able to interact with her in her dreams and encouraging her to take on the role of a new generation of Demiurge to challenge the Seven.

Incubus operates his worlds as "brutal anarchy" by visiting and granting his Keys to the most ambitious of its residents, turning them into mighty warrior-kings that conquer and plunder to their hearts content until Incubus sees fit do draft them into his own Golden Army. His home in the Spire of Lethyx is a diseased pit, filled with the empty vestiges of former clients begging for more of the God-King's power.

Incubus' colour is pink. He is the bearer of the word FLAME, and is associated with the sin of Lust.
  • Agent Peacock: Incubus adorns himself in makeup, piercings, revealing clothing, and is in general associated with the color pink. He also owns 1/7th of the Multiverse.
  • Ambiguously Human: At first glance he appears to be a human male with albinism, but his irises are abnormally large (to the point where there's hardly any white to his eyes), his ears come to points, and after being flayed in the battle against Jagganoth, it can be seen his canine teeth are twice as long as they should be. However, he displayed fewer of these traits as a child and a young man, meaning it's possible they're a result of the Blood Alchemy he practises to extend his lifespan.
  • Ambition Is Evil: His association with lust is expressed more through supreme ambition than through any real interest in people. The shortcuts he can provide for people to realize their ambitions without the hard work are the basis of the Deal with the Devil he offers.
  • Anarcho-Tyranny: Incubus' worlds. He intentionally keeps it that way by making deals with his subjects and turning them into his pet warlords, but never ruling anything directly.
  • Antagonist Title: Played with. The fourth book is named "King of Swords", and one of Incubus' titles is "Sword King of the Middle Army". While Incubus shows up very early in the book he is quickly overshadowed by Solomon David, and eventually Zoss (who always delivers the Title Drop in each book) makes it clear it's a reference to the The Philosopher Kingnote , which fits Solomon much better than Incubus.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: He is a master of a number of martial arts, including Head Of John. He greatly increases his strength with blood alchemy and other nasty techniques. But it is also strongly implied that he has missed the point of his master's teachings and that these are, essentially, party tricks. One of his master's first lessons was that there will always be someone better and stronger with nastier tricks. True violence is formless and comes from instinct, determination, and pure Killing Intent.
  • Beauty Is Bad: As his folder image shows, he's a Pretty Boy who's more well-groomed and immaculately dressed... in the dreaming world, that is. In the waking world, he is in truth a heavily scarred and modestly robed man who is constantly filthy. While he is still a warmongering Demiurge who conquered multiple worlds, he is among the worst of the lot due to being a selfish, unfettered sociopath who only cares about self-advancement, akin to a parasite who leeches off of others.
  • Berserk Button: One of the few things that makes Incubus genuinely angry: Being told that his throne was stolen from and belongs to Maya. The rest of the Seven brings it up against him repeatedly, which hasn't helped things.
  • Big Anime Eyes: When he was still a young and famished orphan, Incubus had big and wide red eyes, highlighting his youthfulness (though not so much his innocence). As an adult, his eyes are usually much more narrower.
  • Big Bad Wannabe: Initially set up as the manipulator playing Allison, Jagganoth and the other Five against each-other to re-ignite the Universal War, but Jagganoth jumps the gun at the end of King of Swords and reduces him to a bit player forced to ally with everyone else. And even his attempts to pull some Xanatos Speed Chess after Jagganoth wrecks them is cut short by Maya showing up to kill him.
  • Blade Run: Incubus uses one to reach Jagganoth, here. It helps that Jagganoth's sword is as wide as a road.
  • Blood Bath: The inside of Incubus' citadel contains a tower filled with blood to knee-height. The author jokingly refers to it as Incubus' beauty routine in the Alt Text.
  • Body Horror: After narrowly surviving Jagganoth's finishing move, Incubus has all of his skin flayed away and what appears to be veins growing from his body like coral. It's debatable if he qualifies as a human, even.
  • Card-Carrying Villain: While the rest of the Seven are in varying states of denial over their position as brutal tyrants, Incubus revels in it; and considers anyone else who doesn’t act the same way an idiot.
    Incubus: That's the thing, kid. We're the princes of the world. We take what we like. We break. We kill. We conquer.
  • Clean Cut: He shows himself more than capable of this trope by slicing Cio into several pieces in a single movement after the Discordance despite being the 'failed one' of Meti's two students.
  • Covered in Scars: His actual body is covered with numerous scars, in contrast to the immaculate body he projects in the dreams of other people.
  • The Dark Arts: It is implied that he practices Supernatural Martial Arts that cultivate evil atum, involving things like breaking the meridians, sucking the marrow out of other men, and using blood alchemy.
  • David vs. Goliath: While this is the case with everyone, he is the smallest Demiurge that's a physical fighter (Mottom is a sorcerer, and Gog-Agog's biology makes them... weird), yet he goes up against Jagganoth during the Discordance of the Demiurges, using his size to his advantage against the larger and stronger, but slower, opponent.
  • Deal with the Devil: Rather than offer his thralls power or wisdom, he offers them the determination to "unlock the hidden potential" in an individual by placing a small piece of himself in them, which gives them the motivation and ruthless ambition to carve out an empire with their own two hands. Allison decides to take the risk, though Incubus neglects to mention that all the previously people who took the deal have ended up puppet kings left to rot/bleed out in the filth-ridden cellars he calls home once their reign was over.
  • Demonic Possession: His Deal with the Devil operates through Powers via Possession, putting a fragment of his soul into them. If he so desires it, he can override his hosts' wills... though Allison is so powerful other parts of her personality start taking over instead.
  • Despotism Justifies the Means: He has no interest in actually ruling, and sees Solomon David as a loser for even trying. He just wants to destroy and conquer to his heart's content.
  • Determinator: Whatever else Incubus' vices, he is not a quitter. In his backstory he shaves his head with a dull rusted sword without hesitation if it means giving him more power, and after the Discordance he keeps insisting he and Allison can still win against Jagganoth even after the apparent deaths of the rest of the Seven.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: The rest of the Seven mock him for usurping his way to his throne, so he hatches a plan to destroy them all where the potential collateral damage expands to the entire multiverse and existence itself. Also happened in his backstory, where Maya choosing to abandon the Demiurge path of conquest leads him to track her down and kill her new family, and then (try to) do the same to her.
  • Dramatically Missing the Point: Of his master's teachings. It eventually becomes painfully obvious that not only was Maya the better student, he has completely misunderstood the essence of Sword Law and was most likely not even truly a student rather than a lesson aid/warning for Maya. While Incubus obeyed Meti's commands to the letter, only Maya understood the spirit behind them — and even then, too late for her.
  • Dream Walker: He has the ability to enter people's dreams and rummage through their subconscious without their waking minds remembering. King of Swords implies he's even done this to fellow Demiurge Solomon David, as the story he tells Allison contains a lot of sensitive info Solomon would be unlikely to share with anyone.
  • Dream Weaver: Incubus can also contact people directly in their dreams, and offer them a Deal with the Devil where he alters them in order to "improve" and bring out their potential.
  • Due to the Dead: He killed his and Maya's master and fed her to the dogs outside the city, which was exactly what she said she wanted to happen to her corpse. He and Maya are very divided on whether this was an appropriate, respectful thing to do, and it's genuinely unclear which of them is right - Meti's philosophy of swordsmanship is extremely strange and deliberately self-contradictory.
  • Early-Bird Cameo: Can be seen conversing with Praman Nand here.
  • Even Evil Has Standards: When Suuz betrays Allison during the Yre-Ynamon heist, his thoughts and Allison's converge for a single brief instant:
    Allison and Incubus: [In unison] That bitch.
    • He also urges Allison to flee when Jagganoth decides to destroy the world early. Even though Incubus has been trying to train and use Allison to defeat him, he knows at a glance that she's not at his level yet and plainly doesn't want her to die pointlessly.
    • At the end of the Discordance he's certainly willing to kill Allison and take her Master Key. But he'd rather not and makes an effort at a Rousing Speech instead. It doesn't go the way he meant it to.
  • Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": It's implied 'Incubus' is not his actual name, but rather a one he chose for himself because it follows his nature. Notably, none of the characters old enough to have interacted with him during the Universal War, like Maya, Zoss and the Seven, ever refer to him by name.
  • Evil Mentor: Becomes this to Allison, loaning her knowledge to utilize her power and attempting to guide her into becoming as evil as he is - though of course he doesn't see it like that. When Allison is utterly defeated at the Discordance he even tries to give her a Rousing Speech to get her back in the fight. Unfortunately it just makes things worse, and he was ready to kill her and take her key before he was stopped.
  • Evil Virtues: Despite his role as the biggest Card-Carrying Villain among the Seven, Incubus is also somewhat of a dark take on Heroic Willpower, having raised himself up from an orphan destined to die into a Master Swordsman, and being fully dedicated to his boundless ambition. While obviously up to no good from the moment Allison meets him, he also teaches her to act swiftly and decisively, so that she may thrive under the extremely dangerous circumstances she finds herself under.
  • Fashion Dissonance: In contrast to most other clothing styles seen by people from outside Allison's universe, Incubus' fashion when he appears in her dream looks very modern and trendy. It's unclear if this is an image he assumed from her memories or is another aspect of his general mystery.
  • Faux Affably Evil: Drops in on the woman prophesied to defeat him and delivers friendly, motivational pep-talks. Said pep-talks usually tend towards encouraging Allison to commit all manner of murder and violence, unfortunately. When the chips are down he makes it clear that he only cares about his own survival, and has zero hesitation about killing Cio and Allison when they try to kill him or aren't useful to him anymore.
  • Flaying Alive: He has the resilience and Healing Factor to survive a point-blank strike from Pankrator Jagganoth, but he has to regenerate his skin and outer tissue afterwards. His eyes and hair are unscathed.
    Incubus: Welp.
  • Foreshadowing: Incubus smirks when Alison asks what Solomon David does after learning all that he can from his masters. He kills them. Not unlike Incubus' own murder of his teacher, Meti Ten Ryo.
  • From Nobody to Nightmare: From a feral, starving urchin to a warlord ruling over one-seventh of the multiverse.
  • Freudian Excuse: Implied to have been orphaned and made a War Refugee at a young age; in Maya's flashback he appears to be a pre-teen, and also incapable of speech. He eventually explains to Allison that his experience with famine as a refugee shaped his worldview. Namely that the way to win is to watch while people fight to the death for scraps, and then kill the weakened survivor before eating both of them.
  • Gender Bender: One of the forms he takes in Alison's mind is of a female version of himself.
  • Good Is Impotent: The way he describes the more moral aspects of Allison's personality, as opposed to the Sociopathic aspect her Deal with the Devil with him brings out. Allison later proves him wrong by acknowledging her potential for sociopathy and reconciling with that aspect of herself.
  • Hannibal Lecture: He gives one of these to Allison at several points, but the most critical is at the end of the Discordance when she is already utterly defeated. Ironically he actually meant it as a Rousing Speech to get her back in the fight, but due to his worldview it wound up being a mix of this and a Breaking Speech piled on additional trauma.
    Incubus: There are no heroes. There is no 'strength' in others. There is only me... and you. And your ability to keep breathing the air you did not earn. Now get up and fight. Or die like the worthless trash you are.
  • Hard Work Hardly Works: Discussed — This is the pitch Incubus sells in his Deal with the Devil. As he explains to Allison, why go through all the effort of developing your own potential when you can let him into your mind and "Bam! Instant badass"? It's deconstructed a few pages later when it's revealed making such deals with him always come with a price. All of the people who dealt with Incubus before Allison are eventually left to rot in filth inside his palace of Lethyx once their reigns are up, becoming hollowed-out wretches who beg Incubus for more power like drug addicts. Allison, meanwhile, becomes a selfish, unfettered sociopath who appeared to be heading down the same path had her friends not been there to knock her back to her senses.
  • Hazy-Feel Turn: (Seemingly) turns against Jagganoth alongside the other six Demiurges during the Discordance, despite having previously allied with him. Jagganoth doesn't seem to have counted on his support in the first place, and openly attacks him alongside the others.
  • Healing Factor: He can regenerate major injuries within moments, and is unconcerned with being stripped down to raw muscle by Jagganoth's Fantastic Nuke.
  • He Cleans Up Nicely: Played with. In the dream world, he's gorgeous and styled with makeup and accessories, while in the real world, he's hunched, scarred, and dirty, like a drug addict living on the street. However, after he takes enough damage to fully regenerate, he goes back to looking like a White-Haired Pretty Boy, implying that Incubus just doesn't care enough about how he looks to bother cleaning himself up in the real world, and only puts on his handsome persona when he's taking care to manipulate people.
  • Hero Killer: Brutally kills Cio after she stabs him from behind, and would've also killed Allison and claimed the Key of Kings if Maya hadn't stopped him.
  • Heroic Willpower: Exploited. He offers a Deal with the Devil to those without self confidence, giving them pieces of his soul in order to fill them the strength of will to be heroic badasses. But in the process, he also turns them into his thralls.
  • Inferiority Superiority Complex: Despite being God-Emperor of one-seventh of the multiverse, his primary motivation seems to be revenge against the rest of the Seven for mocking him, because unlike the rest of them he inherited his key when Maya gave it up. Even with the power of a Demiurge, he might be stronger than Maya, but he still is nowhere near as skilled with the tools that allowed her to become one, which he finds galling.
  • Jerkass Has a Point: When he gives Zoss a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, calling him a traitor king who, for all of his power, abandoned his kingdom to rot, Zoss acknowledges that he cannot dispute it.
  • Let's You and Him Fight: He seeks to end the Enemy Mine among the other demiurges to weaken them and foment war.
  • Like Brother and Sister: Maya mentions that she and Incubus used to be rather close in their youth, and later she recounts to Allison in "Wheel Smashing Lord" that they "clung to each other like siblings" because they had no one else. However, a number of factors, like Incubus' murder of their master and Maya's growing disillusionment with being a Demiurge, eventually and irreconcilably drove them apart.
  • Magic Knight: In addition to his sword skills and his Dream Walker abilities, he is said to have mastered the dark arts and uses corrupted Atum to increase his own power. Amongst others she's shown to have a pretty impressive Healing Factor, regenerating wholly from whatever Jagganoth's finishing move did to him in a a matter of minutes.
  • The Man Makes the Weapon: Pointedly Averted. When we see him in truly serious combat, and he is disarmed, he panics and says he has to find a sword. To a Demiurge, or even a practitioner of Sword Law who can operate at this level, the weapon should be almost irrelevant.
  • Tarot Motifs: Several pages depict him sitting on a throne surrounded by empty chalices, bringing to mind the Inverted King of Cups; a card representing vindictiveness and a propensity for emotional manipulation.
  • Master Swordsman: Subverted. One of his titles is the "Sword King of the Middle Army" and he is a former student of the greatest swordswoman to ever live. But his skills, while superficially impressive, are flawed because he was never truly Meti's student. He was only a warning and part of the lessons to Maya, who far eclipses him in skill. Incubus, in fact, embodies all of Meti's lessons on what not to do from her sword manual, and all his physical skill doesn't prevent him from being a poor swordsman.
    • Essentially the difference between Incubus and Maya is what they are masters of. Incubus is a mighty swordsman of impressive skill, but Maya has mastered the very art of cutting itself, which has both practical and spiritual implications in this universe. Incubus is a master of killing, while Maya is a master of violence: A subtle but important distinction. During the Discordance Incubus is temporarily rendered useless due to lacking a sword, while Maya has cut buildings in half using only a hilt.
  • Meaningful Name: His name is Incubus, after the male version of the succubus: Like his namesake, he appears in people's dreams and tempts them (although with power instead of sex).
  • Might Makes Right: He calls the power to kill the only justice in their rotting world.
  • Myopic Conqueror: Both is one and inspires the same attitude in others. His worlds are "brutal anarchy" according to Word of God, and his emissary conquerors inevitably conquer to their hearts' content until they burn out lusting for more power. Incubus seems to have little but scorn for those who actually try to rule, like Solomon David. He also found it extremely insulting to his entire worldview when Maya, who was like a big sister to him, abandoned that path to start a family.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business: He usually has an air of smug self-assuredness about him, but that facade can slip when something manages to surprise him.
    • During one of their dream training sessions, Allison seemingly manage to land a hit on his head, which is supposed to be invulnerable. His expression changes for a single panel into a Death Glare, before he regains his composure and laughs it off.
    • When Zoss appears in person, he loses this and becomes visibly nervous and freaked out.
    • In the final book, when Jagganoth shows up on Rayuba, he drops all of his smugness and just tells Allison to run.
  • Overshadowed by Awesome: Incubus is by no means weaker than the other Demiurges, (Word of God states he's roughly in the middle ranked weakest to strongest), but he was only able to claim his throne because Maya, a swordsman of such unparalleled skill that she can kill Angels in one hit with a broken sword, chose to abdicate. While he mocks her for being a "fat, washed up drunk", he’s implied to be aware of the gap between their abilities and is incredibly frustrated by it.
  • Painting the Medium: Unique among the demiurges, Incubus Averts this and has normal speech bubbles. It's unclear whether this means he's hiding something or lacks some trait of the others. Zig-zagged: his speech is the same pink as his aura when he shows up ready for a real fight.
  • The Pig-Pen: His real-world appearance is unkempt, dressed in a rough robe stained with blood or mud, and goes barefoot spreading mud everywhere. In Breaker of Infinities he appears in Rayuba by literally erupting from the soot and mud of the arena from beneath, covered in the stuff, and leaves stains of black mud behind when he walks. When Jagganoth bullrushes him into the drink during the Discordance, the Alt Text notes that Incubus is finally getting to take a bath.
  • Pretty Boy: He appears in dreams as a young, beautiful man with pale hair and subtly unnatural features, described by the author as his prettiest character. While his physical form still holds a clear resemblance to his projection, in reality he is heavily scarred, modestly robed and notably unkempt. However, he later loses the scars when he regenerates his flesh, becoming closer to the projection.
  • Pet the Dog: He's the only member of the Seven who believes that Allison really is Zoss's Chosen One, and willingly states to Jagganoth that her potential is "limitless". During the Discordance he urges her to flee at the start, goes out of his way to save her life on several occasions, and even tries to pep-talk her after Jagganoth shatters the Seven — not that his methods are particuarly useful at that point.
  • Psychopathic Manchild: You don't get much more so than helping plunge the multiverse into an apocalyptic war simply becaue you feel your peers should respect you more. Indeed, between his Might Makes Right rhetoric and his disdain for anyone not willing to be as selfish and ruthless as himself, it becomes clear that the only fundamental difference between him now and the feral, starving urchin he was is that he learned how to swing a sword.
  • Psycho Pink: His eyes, skin, Atum and even his blood are all varying shades of pink, and he’s among the most dangerous men in Throne.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: Has pinkish-red eyes and is one of the most dangerous beings in the multiverse. Those who draw on his power to the point of Split-Personality Takeover have their eyes change to match.
  • Right Way/Wrong Way Pair: He is one with Maya in regards to swordsmanship. Incubus is the wrong way, having failed utterly to grasp Meti's teachings and become "an exceptionally poor swordsman", while Maya has become a student of the Principle art of Cutting in full. Several of Meti's teachings seem to point this out specifically; for instance, she criticizes people who rely on their swords - in the fight with Jagganoth, Incubus freaks out when he loses his, whereas Maya fights with nothing but a broken hilt. Similarly, she criticizes people who cling to victory, which is Incubus' entire motivation, whereas Maya long ago gave up on it. And she criticizes Blade Spam, which is Incubus' main way of fighting, saying that true swordsmen should defeat their enemies in one cut - which is Maya's entire thing.
  • Run or Die: He’s so freaked out by Jagganoth showing up that he can only urge Allison to do this.
  • Satanic Archetype: Though not a literal Devil, he carries many of the archetypes of Satan, such as appearing in dreams to sway people, a driving desire for the destruction of everything, and is heavily associated with FLAME, of course, which in this setting doubles as souls.
  • Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: He believes this in no uncertain terms. After Solomon David takes his battle with Jagganoth to another universe, Incubus tells Allison a parable about how during a famine one should always wait for the other victims to kill each other so you can feast on the remains, and asks what sort of foolish ideas of heroism and friendship Zoss has given her.
  • Smug Snake: While he avoids being directly disrespectful to Allison, his attitude towards the other Demiurges approaches this. He openly mocks Mottom and Solomon David for their weaknesses to their faces and is plotting with Jagganoth to drive them apart to kick-start the final war. Though in regards to Mottom he may be more justified as according to Abbadon, here he's more powerful than her.
  • Social Darwinist: Believes that the only ones worthy of life are the ones willing to kill to keep it, and that existence itself is a struggle where one has to kill themselves into the apex. He repeatedly tries to impact this lesson on Allison, and tries to kill her when she rejects it.
  • The Starscream: He was Maya's Number Two. When she abandoned her empire, he took command and used it to steal her key and kill off her family.
  • Underestimating Badassery: Subverted when it comes to Allison. He seems to be the only one of the Seven to realise that she, not Zaid, is the true heir. He even describes her potential as limitless.
  • Understatement: His reaction to Jagganoth winning the final battle, killing Mammon and stealing his key, costing Allison and Cio an eye and an arm each and leaving them cowering helplessly, cutting off all of Incubus' skin, and almost certainly being about to destroy the entire multiverse is a simple "Welp."
  • Use Your Head: The stars in his head are not part of his Holy Halo, but are nails embedded into his forehead as symbols of his mastery of the Head of John fighting style, where the head itself is used as a weapon, though Incubus has yet to be seen using it himself. It should among other things, make his head completely invulnerable to harm and allow him to survive decapitation indefinitely. He apparently displays it offscreen in the aftermath of the battle with Jagganoth in Breaker of Infinities - according to Maya he was able to thrash her within an inch of her life after she beheaded him, so it clearly does little to impede him.
  • Villainous Valor: With Jagganoth bearing down on him and every indication that he's about to die, Incubus' only response is to raise his sword with a simple "heh".
  • Villainous Breakdown: Despite his usually-composed ice cold image, he's prone to these.
    • He reacts extremely poorly when he encounters the remnant of Zoss that has been visiting Allison, since the old man is very much supposed to be dead.
    • He also obsesses over finding a sword during the fight against Jagganoth, in stark contrast with the teachings of his mentor Meti, who considered that a proper swordsman needs no sword at all.
    • And he tends to react this way whenever the subject of Maya comes up, especially when she saves Allison from him after the Discordance of the Demiurges.
  • Walking Shirtless Scene: When he appears to Allison in her dreams, he's technically wearing a button-down shirt and jacket, but they're wide open to expose his oh-so-toned chest. Averted in his appearance in the waking world, of course, where he almost certainly lacks the abs to pull it off.
  • War for Fun and Profit: It's implied that this is his overall goal, and is conspiring with Jagganoth to achieve these ends. He plans to use Allison as his Emissary in order to rekindle the Demiurge war, allowing Jagganoth to more easily pick them off. Interestingly, he doesn't seem to care where he ends up in the midst of it at all. Or anything or anyone else, for that matter.
  • White Hair, Black Heart: A blonde Pretty Boy with a subjugate-the-multiverse disposition. His true form is less conventionally attractive due to the scarring and his unkempt clothing, but has actually white hair.
  • You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: When Allison goes catatonic on him at the end of the Discordance of the Demiurges, he attempts to cut off her head, though he does make a brief effort to talk her out of it first.

    Mammon 

Mammon, the Grand Dragon, Scaled God of the Deep, Master of the Infinite Vault, Lord of Yre-Ynamon, Bearer of the Word TOWER and God of the Seven-Part World

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/mammon_64.jpg

"That stench...a visitor! Come here! Come to take from MY vault have you?"

The last Demiurge to be seen on-screen but the second to have significant plot relevance, Mammon is the sole non-human of the Seven. He belongs to a Servant race known to the Kind People, who see ambition as the ultimate evil and live lives of servitude. Mammon rejected the philosophy of his people, murdering his family and obtaining power and wealth, which he used to purchase his first Magus Key and join the Seven.

Mammon currently makes his home on Throne itself, his lair being the Infinite Bank of Yre which is built into the head of a particularly large and impressive God's corpse and contains a nigh-infinite amount of wealth. The bank controls the multiverse's economy, with its Guilder being the dominant coinage on Throne and most of the multiverse. As Mammon has not been seen outside his bank in centuries, refusing even to speak directly with the other Seven, Allison is forced to infiltrate the bank's infinite vaults and rooms in search for him during Seeker of Thrones.

Mammon's colour is gold. He is the bearer of the word TOWER, and is associated with the sin of Greed.
  • All for Nothing: Mammon destroyed everything and everyone he cared about for his money, and now he can't even remember why it was all so important to him. He misses his family deeply and keeps the bodies of his elders meticulously cared for in his vault.
  • Affably Evil: What sort of terrible wrath does Mammon bring down on Allison for breaking in and murdering her way through the fortress of one of the richest and most powerful monsters in existence? A stern scolding and a demand for an apology. That he immediately accepts. He then acts the role of a generous host, telling her to simply ask if she needs anything. He refers to Zoss as a "rapscallion", and even referred to Nadia as an old friend even as she was destroying his vault.
  • The Ageless: As a Servant, Mammon is immune from death by old age — he's still technically vulnerable to death by injury, but good luck trying given that he's a giant dragon with a Key of Kings in his head. Played with in that once we actually see him, it's clear that it either is Age Without Youth or his guilt and regrets have piled on him to make him age regardless.
  • Ambition Is Evil: His race thinks so, and he sort-of embodies it, since he killed his entire clan when they rejected his ambitions.
  • Amnesiacs are Innocent: A significant part of his treatment by others; while he's certainly done monstrous things in his past, his senility and affable nature means few even have the heart to attempt to kill him in the first place. In fact, many of his priests and guardians are people who tried to kill him but were so moved by his affable nature and senility (and sheer size) that they chose to serve him instead.
  • Benevolent Boss: As a result of his senility, he's one of the nicest and most hands-off of the Demiurges to his followers. The state of the worlds under his command is left unclear, but his treatment of 00001 and his other inner vaulters is generally that of a kindly, doddering old grandfather. Later comments implies he's genuinely upset about Mottom killing so many of them.
  • Beard of Evil: A non-humanoid version with a long goatee and Fu Manchu moustache.
  • Breath Weapon: He can exhale jets of liquid metal.
  • Dragon Hoard: His vault holds the greatest collection wealth in the universe in the form of an immense trove of gold stretching from horizon to horizon, which he swims through like a fish and spends his time obsessively counting and re-counting.
  • Elderly Immortal: Although being non-human makes it less noticeable Mammon has a long, grey beard and a cragged, scarred body and very much invokes the image of an old dragon. During his initial appearance he also shows every sign of being blind, though during later appearances he very much seems to have gotten his eyes back.
  • Even Evil Has Standards: Despite being a demiurge that has conquered a large portion of the multiverse he's shocked at the sight of the city that was utterly annihilated by Jagganoth and expresses moral outrage when fighting him.
  • Fiction 500: His bank encompasses 1/7 of reality and helps fund at least one of his fellow Seven's empires. The floor of his treasure chamber can't be seen for all the gold coins in it, stretching from horizon to horizon. He didn't win his first Key of Kings from a rival — he bought it.
  • The Fog of Ages: Centuries of counting the treasure in his endless vault have left him blind and senile. He can't even remember why he started counting in the first place.
  • Human Pincushion: Has countless blades lodged in his hide. They don't seem to inconvenience him at all, since they're human-sized and he's a massive dragon. Most of them were put there by his followers, who originally penetrated the vault to slay him, only to find that he was just so nice that they just couldn't bring themselves to do it.
  • Impossible Task: This is what Mammon's life has been effectively reduced to. He is endlessly counting every single coin in his infinite vault, by hand, while being blind — a ridiculous undertaking, even for a Demiurge. When Allison first encounters him, the number he recites has nine digits before he's interrupted, representing seventeen years (if one assumes a second per count), which can be longer by orders of magnitude if that's only some fragment of the true count.
  • Large and in Charge: The largest member of his own faction by a vast margin, Mammon stands at least twice as tall as Jagganoth and rules the Great Dragon Bank as its unquestioned God-Emperor and object of worship of the Priests of the Count. In reality, Mammon has long since gotten too senile to rule much of anything, but he's still unquestionably obeyed by the priests.
  • Lazy Dragon: He has spent the last few centuries holed up in a vast Treasure Room at the heart of an infinite, extradimensional labyrinth in his fortress of Yre, attended only by the Priests of the Count who run his multiverse-spanning bank. However their true nature is that of his guards. The vault does not exist to protect his riches from thieves, it exists to protect Mammon himself from the other six Demiurges. His Emissary even says that while her lord is frail, the bank he founded is immortal and its wealth serves to protect Mammon from certain death.
  • Mammon: The Demiurge Mammon represents the sin of greed amongst the seven remaining Demiurges. Driven by ambition to obtain power and wealth, he murdered his own family in order to have no distractions on his path to godhood. He presently controls much of the economy of Throne and mints its dominant coinage through the Infinite Bank that he rules as a literal Corporate Dragon.
  • Meaningful Name: Mammon is a corruption of a Late Latin word which roughly translates as "wealth". Mammon then became personified in medieval Christian theology to be a demon which tempted mankind with greed and avarice.
  • Moment of Lucidity: In the confrontation with Jagganoth during Book 5, Mammon is surprisingly lucid compared to his normal state. He keeps alert and effective up until torn apart by Jagganoth.
  • My Species Doth Protest Too Much: His race, the Kind People, are said to be docile and subservient by nature. Mammon's ambition led him to be shunned by them, and he in turn murdered his original family.
  • Nigh-Invulnerable: Of a sort. He's so old, large and tough that he's literally got dozens of swords sticking out of his neck from failed attempts to kill him, and he can fight toe-to-toe with the offensive powerhouse that is Mottom without serious injury, but he's not truly completely immune from damage in the way Jagganoth is.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: He is not a literal, reptilian dragon — rather, he belongs to a reptilian/insectoid race known as the Kind People — but he is referred to as "the Great Dragon" in-universe, he can spit jets of molten metal, and his habit of hoarding wealth obsessively to himself in a secret lair and then lurking within his stash of treasure are certainly strongly reminiscent of actual dragons.
  • Off with His Head!: He is killed after Jagganoth does his Finishing Move as Jagganoth is seen holding Mammon's severed head as he falls towards Rayuba and proceeds to rip his severed head apart to consume Mammon's Key of Kings.
  • Orcus on His Throne: In the extradimensional treasure vaults of Yre, so much that he's spent centuries seen only by his own acolytes.
  • Please Kill Me if It Satisfies You: After Allison has made it all the way into the infinite vault and confronted Mammon, she finds an old, blind, senile dragon and falls to her knees after realizing she can't bring herself to kill him in that state.
    Mammon: Oh! Ah. Hmmm. You thought to slay me?
    [He lays down and offers his throat, with dozens of blades already lodged in it.]
    Mammon: Well, go on then, give it your best. I'm just too damn big for that sort of thing now. Many have tried, certainly. They've mostly decided to stick around, for some reason. It's a hard journey in here, I suppose. And they do help out around the place.
    Mammon: Go on. I deserve it, I know. My brothers...
  • Pragmatic Villainy: His usual strategy is to stay in his treasure vault and let his money do the talking. Consequently, his bank is the universal standard, even in his rival Demiurges' territories. Or so it seems. In actuality, while this may have been an intentional strategy at the start, in the modern day he's so senile he's not even aware of what his bank is doing.
  • Prophet Eyes: He has pearly white eyes in the present day, thanks to centuries spent tallying his wealth and sinking into senility. They revert to their original vivid orange when he stirs himself to action and goes to war against Mottom.
  • Pyrrhic Victory: He murdered his entire family to escape his feelings, only to eventually realize that they were worth more to him than the money he got rid of them to make way for.
  • Sanity Strengthening: After Mottom's attack on his vault he's become much more lucid and aware of his surroundings.
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Money!:
    • Unique among the demiurges, Mammon bought his Key.
    • When the Ebon Devil Yabalchoath stole a small fragment of his Key of Kings to become one of the most powerful Guild mistresses in Throne, Mammon could have struck her down directly with the rest of his Key's power. Instead, he just sent his acolytes to bribe away her network of allies and minions (many of whom were already happy to sell her out due to being brutally mistreated), leaving Yabalchoath with no support when the Concordant Knights finally cracked down on her.
  • The Scrooge: He likes money and runs a bank that owns 111,111 universes.
  • Shoot the Builder: One of the defenses for his treasury is called the Prison of Air. According to the Alt Text, no one knows how it was built, not even Mammon, because its architect was burned alive in molten gold.
  • Stronger with Age: His race keeps growing steadily larger the older they get, and he's been around since the last Universal War- based on his size, he's the oldest member of the Kind People we've seen by far. That hasn't saved him from becoming blind and senile, however.
  • Sympathy for the Devil: Allison realizes she's not going to be able to kill him when she sees how docile he is. The vast majority of his followers also became his followers coming to the exact same conclusion that Allison did.
  • Tarot Motifs: The Tower, as represented by his name of YISUN and his literal tower in the Bank of Yre. It means ruin, the breaking of an old order/revolution or a sudden, destructive revelation.
  • Token Good Teammate: He currently seems to have become the most outright benevolent of the demiurges. We see that he cares for his followers and is enraged when some of them are killed by Mottom. Later on he rushes into battle against Jagganoth to stop his rampage despite admitting that he isn't a warrior by heart.
  • Token Heroic Orc: Inverted. His species, the "Kind People", want nothing to do with someone as avaricious as him. For that, he killed his own family.
  • Token Non-Human: Gog-Agog's personal strangeness notwithstanding, Mammon is the only one of the Seven who makes absolutely no attempt at a humanoid form, originating instead from a Servant race known as the "Kind People". This reduces his standing among the Demiurges for reasons unknown (likely related to his racial proclivities versus human adaptability).
  • The Tower: The name of YISUN he bears.
  • Tragic Villain: Most of his cult is built around the idea that Mammon is a creature worthy of pity and his vault is filled with both literal and symbolic figures of his 'sacrifice' — Never mind pitying the very real people that he murdered in cold blood for no other reason than to escape from his own feelings. When Allison finally meets him, however, we see the logic behind this characterization more acutely — Old, blind, and feeble-minded, he obsessively counts his hoard of gold but is unable to remember what any of it actually is.
    IÄ! IÄ! The Dragon! His scales as as hard as his heart. Pity him!
  • Trapped in Villainy: Of a sort. He's openly remorseful about his past actions, but his empire is more of a force unto itself now, and they dare not destabilize the tenuous peace of the Seven.
  • Treasure Room: His Inner Vault is said to be lined with gold.
  • Unskilled, but Strong: Isn't a natural fighter, but gets to fall back on the combat strategy of "Step 1: Be a giant dragon."
  • Villainous Friendship: Apparently, he and Mottom were once good friends, but any good feelings that might have once existed between them have faded with time.
  • Virtue Is Weakness: He is rather fixated on how he murdered his family to excise himself of weakness, and runs a wealth obsessed religion that praises it. Or rather, his cult is fixated on it. Mammon himself seems to regret killing his family, at least when he can remember.
  • Worthless Yellow Rocks: By the time Allison reaches the innermost sanctum of the Infinite Vault and meets Mammon, Mammon cannot recall why he has amassed so much money and assumes it must have been important to him at one point. He even demands an apology for stopping his counting, and is simply upset that someone would have stolen from him before he finished.
    • During the concordance with the other Demiurges when insulting Mottom, his choice of words seems to indicate that he's not actually angry about his lost wealth but rather the deaths of his followers at Mottom's hands.

    Solomon David 

Solomon David, God-Emperor of the Celestial Empire and Grand Master of Ki Rata, Bearer of the Word DIAMOND and God of the Seven-Part World

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/solomon_kos.png
Click here to see Solomon's appearance in Wheel Smashing Lord.

"I am my own justification. So say I. This is the law of kings. Either make it your own — or know your place."

God-Emperor of the Celestial Empire, Solomon David is the one of the Seven who takes their claims of godhood most seriously and has built a massive and centralized empire focused entirely on himself and his own deeds. Originally a citizen-soldier on the world of Rayuba, Solomon would find his homeworld ruined during the Universal War and only survived through apprenticing himself to the Order of the Silent Voice, an order of pacifistic warrior-monks who practiced Ki Rata, the most powerful martial art in the Multiverse. Rejecting their teachings, Solomon slew the monks, then the Demiurge who had burned his world, and swore to use his new godhood to restore Rayuba as the new center of the Multiverse or die trying.

Solomon David believes himself to be the hero, and is regarded as "just, even-handed and incredibly brutal" by his subjects. He is the most active conqueror of the Seven, constantly opening and 'enlightening' universes to join his perfect society. A fervent believer in the law of kings and the use of violence, Solomon regularly hosts the Ring of Power, a massive tournament that invites the strongest warriors of the Multiverse to Rayuba to battle for his favour, where the final battle is always against Solomon himself. He is the central antagonist of King of Swords, as Allison enters the Ring of Power to learn vital information about Zaid.

Solomon David's main colour is purple. He is the bearer of the word DIAMOND, and is associated with the sin of Pride.
  • The Ace: Being a paragon is more or less his shtick.
  • The Ageless: According to Abbadon, Ki Rata contains breathing techniques to arrest aging. Not only does Solomon not visibly age and does not require his Key to stay young, according to Seeker of Thrones a Sole Survivor of the Order of the Silent Voice is still alive on Throne and similarly does not age.
  • All for Nothing: After centuries spent building his empire, subduing and conquering worlds and enacting harsh laws on his citizens, none of it does anything to stop Jagganoth's attack on his capital world and the deaths of thousands of his people. When confronted by the fact that none of his measures could have helped against other Demiurges and all it did was oppress people for no benefit, Solomon decides to pull out a Dangerous Forbidden Technique and go all-out on Jagganoth, sacrificing himself in a last-ditch attempt to protect what is left.
  • Antagonist Title: For book 4, "King of Swords", and he does fit quite well with the description of the tarot card for which it was namednote . Zoss, Solomon's idol, calls himself the King of Swords, and shares the same Fatal Flaw as Solomon.
  • Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: He holds a regular tournament where the goal is to draw one drop of blood from him in a fight, with the prize being a single wish—which can be for his kingdom or even his Key. Not an easy feat by any stretch, but almost suicidally generous given that the setting has monstrosities like Jagganoth running around who could feasibly do that and then some.
  • Badass Normal: Of all the demiurges, he's the most "normal", in the sense that he's not a psychic, he's not a wizard, he's not a monster (at least not in the literal sense), deep down, Solomon David is just a guy, albeit an artifact-of-doom-empowered martial-arts-champion guy.
  • Bald Head of Toughness: Possibly deliberately invoked due to his vanity. His hairless skull just shows off more of the gleaming, unscarred physical perfection of the greatest martial artist in creation.
  • Bald of Evil: Solomon is one of two bald major characters in the comic, and one of the Seven Black Emperors (the other being Jagganoth, who also qualifies). Flashbacks to earlier show that he used to have hair, and given his status as The Ageless and the status of his beard he'd probably have no issues regrowing his hair should he wish to. Wheel Smashing Lord reveals that he can indeed grow it back, as his hair and beard have grown out completely untamed for years.
  • Bare-Handed Blade Block: Does this against Jagganoth during the Discordance of the Demiurges. The blade was swung with enough force to shatter the ground beneath him.
  • Beard of Evil: He adopts a beard in the Assyrian style after the War. After he surrenders his key to White Chain it doubles as a Beard of Sorrow - it's implied he hasn't shaved for years, regrowing his hair and mustache, and it all becoming far thicker and more unkempt.
  • Beat Them at Their Own Game: In the final round of his tournament, against White Chain, he fights by mimicking their fighting style, only stronger and faster.
  • Benevolent Boss: The most overtly benevolent Demiurge to his citizens, actively seeking to integrate new worlds into his empire and create a unified culture centered around his rule where he takes care of everyone. Subverted in that his paternalism means he ultimately does not view any of his citizens as companions or equals, and side-stories in The Rant and Alt Text implies the outwards benevolence of Solomon's rule is founded on just as much brutality and as many corpses as those created by the other Demiurges.
  • Blasé Boast: He calmly tells Zaid that his homeworld has two suns "Because I put them there."
  • Blood from the Mouth: As he approaches his limits against the lake monster on Svelben, he begins to cough up blood from the strain of maintaining the air bubble and trying to fight the creature off, all while trying to get White Chain to stop doubting herself and use Ki Rata to kill it and save them both.
  • Blood Knight: Drops his stoic demeanor with an ear to ear smile when given a proper fight.
  • Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: He succeeds in sealing Jagganoth within a black hole for a short time, but the technique burns centuries off his lifespan, De-Powers him, and leaves his right arm a withered mess.
  • The Chains of Commanding: There are hints that he's waiting for a worthy successor so he can leave his empire behind and continue to hone his Enlightenment Superpowers. Whether a guy like him could ever actually forfeit such a prestigious position is as yet unknown, but his Surrounded by Idiots expression when he's stuck mediating between Mottom and Mammon speaks volumes.
    Solomon: Hm. I wonder sometimes... Why I do this at all. Perhaps... for the faintest hope. That men like me need not exist.
  • Challenge Seeker: While, overtly, the primary objective of his tournament is to find an heir in the form of a fighter that can at least hurt him, the true objective is to find him a worthy opponent that can give him the thrill of a real fight.
  • Charles Atlas Superpower: While almost every character has at least a mild form of this, Solomon David is noteworthy because his are the best in the setting. Every other member of the Seven has an ability either rare or wholly unique to them (Jagganoth is indestructible, Jadis and Mottom are master sorcerers, Mammon is a giant dragon, Incubus practices The Dark Arts, and Gog-Agog is Gog-Agog), but David claimed his Key using a fighting style theoretically any member of any species in the Multiverse could learn...if they didn't risk tearing themselves in half at the slightest mistake.
  • Cold Ham: Solomon David pretty much never raises his voice, but he has the gravitas of a black hole. He speaks grandly and punctuates with even grander gestures.
  • Covered in Scars: Inverted — among the Demiurges he is the only one totally un-scarred. This is because he is one of the only living practitioners of Ki Rata, an esoteric martial arts whose chief tenet is being completely unassailable. This then gets zig-zagged over the course of Wheel-Smashing Lord—when he appears in White Chain's flashback, he's revealed to have survived his attack on Jagganoth, but has all but destroyed his own body in the process, which is now covered with wounds, glowing fissures and peeling skin. By the time White Chain finds him again, though, he has no such scars visible, although his face is far more heavily lined than before.
  • Crucified Hero Shot: While the "hero" part is dubious, Breaker of Infinities 93 shows him fallen in this position, with numerous cross-like objects in the background.
  • Dangerous Forbidden Technique:
    • Forbidden Temple Art SLAYER OF IMMORTALS. It burns away all of his Atum in exchange for a ten-thousandfold power boost. Once Solomon becomes desperate enough to perform it, he becomes strong enough to punch Jagganoth into another universe.
    • And then he throws enough energy into a single punch that it forms a black hole from a sheer density..
  • Deceptive Disciple: Was taken in by the Monks of the Silent Voice, who hoped that he would learn to let go of vengeance and hatred by training him. After having learned all he could from them, he killed them all and used Ki Rata to conquer his empire.
  • Dented Iron: His last-ditch shot at Jagganoth causes several centuries of stress to catch up to him all at once by the time White Chain finds him again. Though he is not scarred as he was in the immediate aftermath of Rayuba's fall, his right arm is extremely withered in comparison to the rest of his body, and he cannot use Ki Rata anymore, though a few esoterics are still within his grasp. When he forms a pocket of air for some brief respite against the lake monster he and White Chain face on Svelben, he states that the technique he's using will only last about 2 minutes before his internal organs fail; according to him, three years ago it would've been trivial for him to maintain it indefinitely.
  • Don't Make Me Destroy You: He gives this ultimatum to White Chain several times during their duel - offering to let her surrender and claim high honors and a lesser prize - rather than destroy herself in a hopeless effort to best him. White Chain refuses.
  • Don't Think, Feel: His advice to White Chain about using Ki Rata in her new flesh-and-blood body in Wheel-Smashing Lord basically boils down to this.
    Solomon: You performed it instinctively. Back at the Coliseum, when you struck me a blow. In a past era I would have been obligated to obliterate you on sight. Now I must pass on methods of its cultivation. Breathe, and you shall know it.
  • Doomed Hometown: Twice over. First, we see in his origin that his journey From Nobody to Nightmare began when his family was murdered by one of the many lesser demiurges. The entire world was strip mined to nothing, and even the sun was destroyed. He then rebuilt it as his capital to make a point, a Shining City that reflected his ideal civilization. And then Jagganoth announced his arrival with a nuclear blast in the grand Coliseum and used the city as a backstop for splashy AOE attacks, presumably just to rub salt in the wound. The narration drives home the point home, as he reaches his Rage Breaking Point. "Rayuba: Shining Jewel of the Celestial Empire. Throne World...and home... of Solomon David."
  • Dramatic Irony: Solomon confides to Zaid that he wants to find a successor to his empire so that he may continue meditating on how to be more like his idol, Zoss. Later in the same chapter, Zoss’ words make it clear that Solomon already is like him, but in all the worst ways; their respective downfalls are borne of them piling all the responsibility on their own shoulders, instead of sharing the burden with partners and/or apprentices. In other words, the thing they have most in common is their Fatal Flaw: pride. To make matters worse, he desires to have the time away from the empire to "practice Royalty", Dramatically Missing the Point that in the setting, Royalty is a binary: either you have it, or you do not; you can obtain Royalty, though the more you want it the more difficult it becomes to attain, but you cannot practice at it.note 
  • Epiphanic Prison: Solomon is too absorbed in his own pride to see both how he's stifling his own empire's growth and development by trapping it in stasis and dependent on him, or how this is stifling his own growth by keeping him trapped in the formalities of ruling and keeping him from developing further. In his more lucid moments Solomon is even somewhat aware of it himself, but is too proud to step aside. This is eventually lampshaded during King of Swords.
    White Chain: Some emperor. You can't even see... You're just a prisoner who's built his own prison. And you're proud of it.
  • Establishing Character Moment: The first chapter of King of Swords is more or less a multi-page one for Solomon (who had not been given much characterization at the end of book 1). Solomon holds court alongside his councillors (all of whom are his sons, given their positions through nepotism, but he has no familiar relationship to — or respect for — any of them whatsoever), showcases his capital to his ward (essentially humblebragging about his own power) and finally helping some of his citizens with the construction of his tournament arena by finishing their day's work for them while at the same time having forced them to build something the size of the Coliseum, using stone-age construction techniques, in the first place. Solomon could just as easily have willed the arena into being, or equipped his men with magic or industrial-age technology like those possessed by Mottom's forces, but implicitly has chosen not to.
  • Evil Counterpart:
  • Evil Is Petty: Solomon is nothing but polite and courteous on the surface, but constantly engages in petty instances of micro-dickery intended to demean those who gainsay him.
    • His Blasé Boast that Rayuba has two suns because he put them there. But we know from his backstory that Rayuba's original sun was destroyed. So when he rebuilt the world he threw a second one on there to make a point. Awesome? Surely. Petty? Indescribably.
    • He shatters the table at the concordance of the demiurges the moment Mottom questions his abilities. While he does it with a light touch of a single finger, which is impressive to ordinary people, given the awesome power they all possess it doesn't even prove his point.
    • He unleashes Ki Rata on the rest of the tournament participants to psyche out Allison and her crew because White Chain dared to call him a tyrant.
    • The Alt Text prior to his duel with White Chain notes that Solomon 'suspiciously' always has a better-looking gi than whomever he duels at the end of his tournament. Sure enough, his gi in the final match is a brighter white than his opponent's, and embroidered with golden lines that his opponent's lacks.
    • During the final match of the tournament, he first mocks his opponent by copying her style, and when demanded to fight at full strength constantly demeans them by throwing them to the floor.
    • After sealing away Jagganoth, he 'honours' his promise to White Chain to abdicate and let the people of the Celestial Empire decide their own future by handing her his Magus Key and not bothering to tell anyone else he survived, essentially sticking the latter with the headache of managing an 'Empire' now bereft of its central pillar and throne world. Predictably, it immediately tears itself apart.
  • Fatal Flaw: Under his stoic, confident shell, Solomon is desperate to be regarded as worthy of his godhood. When his own people turn against him, he flies into a reckless rage, trying to prove himself worthy of being their ruler.
  • Faux Affably Evil: As seen under Evil Is Petty, Solomon is nothing but gracious on the surface but is capable of incredible feats of pettiness and hypocrisy when the chips are down. Much like his code of law, Solomon's actions are based on following the letter of decorum rather than the spirit. While he may have the most intact moral code of the Seven, he views the rest of Creation (including his citizens, and the other members of the Seven) as children in need of his guidance.
  • Fights Like a Normal: Very rarely utilizes his Ki Rata skills, instead relying on his vast knowledge of lesser fighting styles or sheer brute strength to achieve his goals.
  • Finger Poke of Doom: The central tenet of Ki Rata - focus the greatest possible force onto the smallest possible point, then strike. Practitioners can vaporize bone or shatter stone with a tap of the fingers using only one point. With two, they can decapitate a man by snapping their fingers. A single ten-point strike is said to be capable of leveling cities.
  • Finishing Move: PALM OF THE ALMIGHTY. A 77-point strike that he immediately follows up with the Technique of Relief.
  • Freudian Excuse:
    • His small farmstead was burned, his wife and daughters were killed, and he was forced to flee to save his own life then spent years with monks training in Ki Rata as his homeland was looted to the point where not even the sun remained. The monks were well-meaning yet foolishly pacifistic. Little wonder that the moment his training was pronounced complete, he turned on the order that trained him yet did nothing to save his home.
    • His refusal to have daughters is almost certainly due to the trauma of losing his first family, though whether it stems from misogyny or mourning is unclear.
  • Full-Name Ultimatum: Solomon does this to Jagganoth when he declares the Pact of the Seven Part World against this, revealing his original name in the process.
  • Flying Brick: Solomon's Charles Atlas Superpowers are so great that he can lift a granite slab five times his size with his bare hand, and using his Key, he walk on thin air and fly fast enough to leave behind a gale force wind from the air displacement.
  • Generation Xerox: In his youth, Solomon became the Deceptive Disciple of the Monks of the Silent Voice and eventually killed them all to monopolize the style and become a Multiversal Conqueror, with the implication that he was partially driven by anger over the Monks refusing to get involved in the Universal War and letting his homeworld burn as a result. Come Wheel-Smashing Lord and Solomon has essentially become his old masters, considering his former drive for power to have been All for Nothing and willing to sit passively by while Jagganoth destroys The Multiverse.
  • Gone Horribly Wrong:
    • In King of Swords, Solomon states that his ideal is to create a stable empire that can survive his absence, so that he can make an attempt at reaching Royalty. However, Solomon currently believes his citizens cannot rule themselves without a strong leader, so he refuses to let any of them take on the burden of leadership while micro-managing and centralizing everything himself. Solomon rules as a God-Emperor with the entirety of the state invested in him as a person, while waiting for the Ring of Power to produce a contestant suitable as an heir. As a result, Wheel-Smashing Lord reveals that the moment Solomon was taken out of the picture his entire empire collapsed immediately: with no one else being able to speak with his authority, no line of succession, all the military and bureaucracy focused in his hands and his Satrapies run by distant family and previous champions from his Ring of Power (which only measures one's personal power) there was an immediate power vaccuum and a Civil War took place. Jagganoth's attack and the War of Rayuba also destroyed his throne world, decapitating what little organization was left and leaving the Celestial Empire with no rallying point at all.
    • In Wheel-Smashing Lord, he eventually reveals that his decision to pass on his Key to White Chain was meant to rectify the previous point by virtue of choosing her as the strong leader to replace him, answering her previous (and correct) criticism that his arrogance and Control Freak nature stifled Rayuba's growth. The main problem is that he basically dumped all the responsibility on her without her consent and left her with no guidance on how to use her Key or even the entirely instinctual Ki Rata she used on him in King of Swords, shackling her to the remnants of the Celestial Empire as its de facto leader whilst she continually defers to Nyave and Zaid. By the time he expects her to unleash Ki Rata or get them both killed by a giant lake monster, she's too preoccupied with her own limitations and her discomfort in her new body to even think she can.
  • Heroic Build: As befits a man who makes a point of exemplifying physical and metaphysical perfection, he stands head and shoulders over most other humans and has a broad-shouldered, chiseled physique.
  • Heroic Second Wind: After being beaten down by Jagganoth during the Discordance, Solomon gets a "The Reason You Suck" Speech from one of his subjects, which motivates him to get back up again and continue the fight.
  • Holy Halo: While all of the Demiurges have halos (representing power rather than goodness), Solomon David's halo is notably larger and gaudier than the others', reflecting some mix of his power and his pride. It also flares up when he's annoyed.
  • Holier Than Thou: He is the only one of the Seven who believes himself to still be a hero, and therefore constantly radiates this.
  • Hypocrite:
    • He scolds Mottom and Mammon for disrespecting the Concordance of the Demiurges by sniping back and forth at each other, then shatters the stone conference table as a show of force — and a rather petty one, given the feats they're all capable of.
    • States to Zaid that his goal is to leave behind a stable empire to outlast his own rule while he seeks Royalty, while at the same time demonstrating he has created no way for anyone from said empire (who would presumably be more invested in its existence) to succeed him. Despite owing his power from the Monks of the Silent Voice teaching him Ki Rata as an act of kindness, Solomon insists that anyone succeeding him has to do so through Might Makes Right while monopolizing and refusing to pass on the (very teachable) source of his own might.
  • Hunk: When your whole schtick is total physical perfection, this trope goes with the territory. He's a wall of immaculately-chiselled muscle as sternly handsome as a Greco-Roman statue, and stands out as the only demiurge whose good looks exist without a single caveat or qualification. His fateful battle with Jagganoth ultimately pushes him to the point where fissures open up all over his body, and even once he's finally recovered from that effort some years later, his right arm is completely dessicated and he has appeared to age significantly.
  • Impossible Task: It eventually becomes clear that the Ring of Power is one of these, specifically the prize it offers if a combatant can draw a single drop of Solomon's blood. The full depths of Solomon's power are so ludicrous that no one who would enter such a tournament could ever hope to injure him, though he's deluded himself into thinking it's a fair offer.
  • I Will Fight No More Forever: When White Chain's three-year search for him finally bears fruit, she demands that he take back the Key he gave her. His answer is a tired, but firm, "no", followed by a brief history lesson of Yulvur Ironblood, the man who used to rule Svelben before Solomon destroyed him and everything he built—the implication, by the time the story is over, is that Solomon sees his own pursuits as being equally pointless, and has no interest in fighting or even involving himself in current events. This becomes more literal when White Chain tries to actively provoke him into a fight and he refuses her—he flat out states that he can no longer use Ki Rata, and his withered right arm gives truth to the statement.
  • Just Toying with Them: He very rarely uses Ki Rata openly, apparently even in his duels.
    • When fighting White Chain, he starts off by demonstrating he’s mastered all the same martial arts styles she uses and then soundly beats her with each.
    • The subsequent battle with Jagganoth sees him utilise far more powerful techniques, making it clear he could have ended the duel with White Chain any time he really wanted to... and even then he's holding back his full strength, as he doesn't want to destroy Rayuba beyond repair.
  • A Lesson Learned Too Well: Solomon spent his training under the Monks of The Silent Voice watching his beloved homeworld Rayuba gradually strip-mined to nothing while fully aware his masters could have easily saved the planet, yet chose to do nothing. The resulting trauma appears to be why he's obsessed with micromanaging the Celestial Empire.
  • A Lighter Shade of Black: Provides and cares for his subjects to a greater degree than any other Demiurge... but that is a very low bar to surpassnote . By any kind of objective standard, his reign is still horribly tyrannical and oppressive.
  • Light Is Not Good: His base of operations is a planet drenched in the light of a binary star system. He put it there as a show of power, even though it's uncomfortably bright.
  • Meaningful Name: Plainly. He's named after the Biblical kings Solomon and David. Although, it is entirely possible that he might actually be those kings.
    • In a side story on the author's Tumblr account, the questioner comes to them saying that even some Insignificant Little Blue Planet untouched by Solomon David's glory had heard of his wisdom, and then loosely describes the Bible tale of Solomon and the Two Mothers. The response gives the "true account" of that story. So yeah, he's most likely the basis of at least the biblical Solomon.
  • Medieval Stasis: He maintains this in his empire. Despite the possibility of both innovation by his own subjects and importing technology from conquered worlds, or even Throne, we see structures like the Grand Coliseum being built by hand. Also Played With, in that while they seem to have no transportation or construction technology they do have televisions.
  • Mentor Archetype: Briefly transitions to this role for White Chain, passing on Ki Rata to his unexpected heir when she finds him to express her frustration with the hand he dealt her.
  • Might Makes Right: Fundamentally believes in this trope, no matter how much his system pretends otherwise, as can be seen by his quote under the Nepotism entry.
  • Modest Royalty: Superficially. He walks around his kingdom in high-quality but simple clothes with no bodyguards. Of course, this is actually a function of his pride—he knows no one would dare attack him, and has absolute confidence in his invincibility even if they tried.
  • Nepotism: On the one hand, he gives generations of his sons important places in his kingdom's bureaucracy, where they can administrate entire worlds. On the other hand, he refuses to name any of them his heir, bluntly telling them that none of them are worthy.
    Solomon David: Contemplate these words, counselors: If you desire the crown—why here it is.
  • Nigh-Invulnerable: Of the Made of Diamond variety, being basically immune to physical harm. Alone amongst the demiurges, Solomon has absolutely no battle scars or signs of having ever been physically harmed, and when he gets serious even Jagganoth's weapons shatter against his naked skin.
  • Not So Stoic: It takes a lot to break his stoicism, but Jagganoth blowing up his arena with a Dimensional Cutter and killing a good chunk of his people does it. Afterwards, he shows nothing but pure, undiluted rage.
  • Obliviously Evil: According to Mottom, he is the only Demiurge who still believes himself to be a hero.
  • Oh, Crap!: Jadis teleports straight into the tournament room, and Solomon is confused for a few seconds before he realizes why. Then he starts sweating and screaming for the city to be evacuated because Jagganoth is about to arrive and level it.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The stoic Solomon David absolutely loses it when Jadis appears and whispers to him about what - or rather, who - is heading towards Rayuba.
  • Passing the Torch: Wheel-Smashing Lord reveals that during the Time Skip Solomon passed the torch to White Chain after surviving the Technique of Relief, giving her his Magus Key and leaving for parts unknown. His words imply he did not see it as a positive thing to do to her at all. He doubles down on this later on in Wheel-Smashing Lord, stating his intent to teach her the entirety of Ki Rata in eight days before ensuring that she kills him at the end of it.
  • Pet the Dog: When Jadis shows up in Rayuba, his immediate reaction is to evacuate the city. This could be for many reasons, but the most likely is simply that he wants to protect his people.
  • The Philosopher King: Aspires to be this and views Zoss as the only man who come closer to Royalty than he. Zoss' own words to Allison imply Solomon has learned exactly the wrong lesson, seeing only strength in itself and not the strength that can be found in trusting in and inspiring others.
  • Politically Incorrect Villain: The children he fathers to administrate his Celestial Empire are exclusively male, which Abbadon says is intentional on Solomon's part. It's unclear if this is because he believes women are incapable administrators or because he's still traumatized by the death of his daughters but the result is excluding women from the government.
  • Purple Is Powerful: In keeping with his regal and powerful nature, Solomon's color of choice is purple, from his clothes and throne room wall hangings to his halo and speech bubbles.
  • Rage Breaking Point: Solomon goes completely ape-shit at the beginning of Book 5 in response to Jagganoth murdering over a million of his subjects in less than five seconds by using Division as a nuke. In stark contrast to his duel with White Chain, Solomon spends the ensuing battle with his face completely twisted with pain and fury, to the point he looks to be on the verge of tears.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: He gets one from a random citizen during the Discordance, asking him what the point of his tyranny was if he can't even save them from Jagganoth. He seems to take it to heart, motivating him to unleash his ultimate attack.
  • Retired Badass: Following his last attack on Jagganoth and ceding his key to White Chain, Solomon has retreated to Svelben, a fringe world of his former empire, and spends his days ice fishing. He did, however, perform one last feat of badassery by coming down from his seclusion in the mountains to beat the unholy shit out of a number of miscreants attempting to subjugate the people of Svelben. As a result, the people, unaware of his true identity, refer to him as the "Mountain God", and the woodcutter that guides White Chain to Solomon's location carves statues and leaves them in tribute to Solomon at a nearby shrine.
  • Roaring Rampage of Revenge: His family was killed by the demiurge Yemmod when conquering his homeworld of Rayuba. He then spent an undefined amount of time learning Ki Rata with the monks who stood idle while his world was being destroyed piece by piece. Upon attaining mastery, he promptly killed his old masters for their inaction before going out and slaughtering Yemmod, taking his godhood, and rebuilding his homeworld.
  • Running Gag: A meta one. When Abaddon is asked how Solomon David does any of his impossible feats the answer is invariably "Bullshit Martial Arts Breathing Exercises".
  • Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Solomon David’s dearest wish is to leave the ruling of his empire to someone else, so he can focus on Royalty. He does this in the most roundabout way possible- a tournament with the explicit intent of finding someone who can defeat him, or even draw a drop of blood from him- instead of something far more straightforward, like training an apprentice up to his level, or, as one of his sons points out, simply naming a successor. His pride prevents him from sharing his knowledge and power, each tournament only makes him look more invincible, and he’s no further to his goal than before. Wash, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum. Solomon eventually escapes this cycle in Wheel-Smashing Lord, though at that point it's because his empire is gone, and ironically enough it brings him closer to contemplating Royalty than he has ever managed to get on his own.
  • Single Sex Offspring: He only has sons, apparently on purpose. He did have two daughters in his previous life, so the implication is he keeps from having more to avoid reminding him of their deaths.
  • Slasher Smile: Shows one to White Chain when White Chain manages to overcome his ability to move at hyperspeed.
  • Smug Super: He's almost always seen with a small smirk. Like most examples of the trope, he can more than back it up; his smugness comes from his genuinely unmatched strength.
  • Sphere of Destruction: His Finishing Move against Jagganoth, 'Technique of Relief'. Given that it dominates the skyline of Throne, a city half the size of California, the Technique probably annihilates anything within a several hundred-mile radius of Solomon.
  • The Stoic: Very rarely emotes, apart from annoyance when dealing with his sons and the other Demiurges. White Chain keeping up with him during their duel causes him to actually grin on two occasions, and the arrival of Jagganoth well and truly manages to make him lose his calm.
  • Supernaturally Young Parent: He brags that he has outlived 25 generations of his sons, all of whom look much older than him at the time. It's one of the benefits of being The Ageless.
  • Supernatural Martial Arts:
    • A master of Ki Rata, the most difficult and dangerous martial art in the universe — which is saying something, considering the "less dangerous" martial arts forms seen so far include the skill of eviscerating enemies with one's bare hands. The Manual of Hands and Feet describes it as a form of Hokuto Shinken, except everything in existence is now a pressure point; the reason for its danger is that the overwhelming power makes it incredibly easy for the user to press themselves to death by mistake.
    • The author has implied that he gained immortality though breathing exercises, though what it entails is unknown.
  • Tarot Motifs: Inverted King Of Swords, which represents excessive pride in one's ability and abusing authority.
  • Time-Passage Beard: When he reappears in Wheel Smashing Lord his hair and beard have grown wildly, with the implication being he's been letting it grow for years.
  • Time Stands Still: He can freeze time for everyone except himself through a breathing technique. It’s not clear if he’s literally halting the flow of time or just moves that ludicrously fast, but not even Jagganoth can react to it.
  • Technicolor Eyes: He has purple eyes, keeping with his overall color scheme, and a trait he passes on to his sons. His From Nobody to Nightmare flashback obscures his eyes, so whether the colour is natural or a side effect of his Enlightenment Superpowers is unclear.
  • The Greatest Style: The sole living (by his own design) wielder of Ki Rata in the Multiverse. It's described as using one's Atum to generate a massive amount of internal force and channeling it through the smallest possible opening. Aside from the obvious application, Solomon can use it to do things like like shatter blades against his bare skin or freeze time.
  • Utopia Justifies the Means:
    • In this case, the means being total subjection to a delusional God-Emperor. Abaddon describes his domain's justice system with a twisted version of the Judgment of Solomon: the case is delegated to an imperial clerk, who heavily scrutinizes the lives of both women to determine who might have conceived a child in the time frame. The liar is executed. The actual mother is punished with hard labour for having an illicit relationship with an acting military officer - although she later becomes a clerk, her education having been paid for by the state. The child is made a ward of the state and never sees either parent again, while the father is dishonorably discharged. Brutal laws, but scrupulously applied with no corruption or misinformation.
    • Also subverted: Solomon's empire is a better place to live than most through human history, and some aspects of it could be favorably compared to modern civilizations. But even on our world better places exist without the brutal tyranny or having been crushed by a Multiversal Conqueror. Meanwhile his rule has caused a stagnation of technology, such that a coliseum is being built by hand.
    • We later get small passages that show just how restrictive the laws of his utopia are; apparently, drinking can get you locked up for 25 years due to "moral depravity".
  • Villain Respect: He shows it for White Chain's skill in Supernatural Martial Arts. When White Chain manages to surprise him, and actually made him struggle for a moment, he shows an enthusiastic Slasher Smile and compliments her as magnificent.
  • Villainous Breakdown: Enters a prolonged one from the moment he realizes that Jagganoth is coming. He spends the entire battle in a state of fury and despair that Jagganoth is wrecking his homeworld despite his best attempts to stop him, culminating when one of his subjects chews him out for his inability to protect them, which triggers a flashback to his dead family and pushes him to hit Jagganoth with literally everything he has, all but destroying himself in the process.
    Solomon David: EVACUATE THE CITY!
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: He is the only one of the Seven to build a functioning nation-state (though a Hidden Elf Village exists around Mammon), while Throne is a state of Guild-run anarchy and the remaining members of the Seven run rampant through the multiverse. Unfortunately, his empire is an oppressive ultra-conformist hell in its own way, as White Chain points out.
  • Wild Hair: Once White Chain manages to find him after years of searching, his hair has grown out into a wild mane.
  • World's Best Warrior: While Jagganoth is the World's Strongest Man, capable of tanking on anything in creation and winning through sheer brute strength and durability, Solomon has the useful consolation prize of being the most technically skilled warrior in existence, the sole master of the greatest martial art in the multiverse. It's the source of all his (considerable) superpowers.

    Gog-Agog 

Gog-Agog, Queen of Worms, The Great Devourer, Scourge of Worlds, Bearer of the Word BEAST and God of the Seven-Part World

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/gog_agog_kos.png
Click here to see Gog-Agog's appearance in Wheel Smashing Lord.

"The mass remembers! The mass is immortal! And most of all - the mass always wins."

Described only as "a walking tragedy", the entity known as Gog-Agog ("Your pal, Gog-Agog" to friends and worshippers) is the oldest of the Seven and one of the most dangerous of their number. Her true nature is a massive, worlds-spanning colony of worms united under a single mind and identity, who frequently fractures and develops its own micro-identities within the whole; normally an impossibility as animals lack the coherent will and soul flame to maintain a Key of Kings. Gog-Agog, somehow, manages to do it anyway. Shiftless, vain and mad even by the standards of the Seven, Gog-Agog regularly changes her look and style to fit her mercurial moods, and her Key allows her to keep a nigh-infinite number of humanoid-looking bodies wandering the Multiverse, spreading her influence.

Outside her own worlds, Gog-Agog has claimed a monopoly on media and entertainment in Throne, making her the Demiurge most visible to the everyday inhabitants of the Red City. Her ability to infect and assimilate others has given her a massive cult that worships the Worm-Queen as a god, imitating her current style and aspiring towards being eventually assimilated by her. As a sucker for a good hero's journey narrative, Gog-Agog becomes an important bit player in King of Swords when she, as Allison's "greatest fan", decides to directly intercede and aid the latter towards her final goal.

Gog-Agog's main colour is green. She bears the Word BEAST, and is associated with the sin of Envy.
  • Affably Evil: When she calls herself "Your pal, Gog-Agog!", she seems to genuinely mean it. Even in a tense meeting of Demiurges she happily admits that she thinks Allison's "so cool", and she's nothing short of perky when she proposes an Enemy Mine deal to Allison. During her appearance in Wheel-Smashing Lord she is surprisingly polite to Allison, revealing herself to be a lot deeper than her childish surface reveals and freely speaks to her as an equal.
  • all lowercase letters: Gog-Agog speaks in all lowercase, stopping only when she's deciding to be lucid once in a blue moon.
  • Amusing Injuries: In her clown incarnation, Gog-Agog suffers these during practically all her appearances. Mottom blows her head up twice in the second Concordance of the Demiurges, Allison gives her a Sunken Face and she decapitates herself (and kicks her own head off-panel) later during the meeting, one of her gets strangled by another one during the Ring of Power, and Jadis impales her on an icicle during the Discordance. Given that she's Nigh-Invulnerable, the physical damage doesn't bother her at all — the fact that people keep harming her due to a lack of respect does, however.
  • Animalistic Abomination: A trillions-strong Hive Mind of worms that somehow gained a soul (despite an animal with a soul being impossible in Throne's cosmology), the ability to morph it's flesh into the most horrific forms imaginable, and a fragment of the creator of the universe she uses as a battery.
  • Animal Motif: Worms, of course. Beyond that, her reunion with Allison in *Wheel-Smashing Lord* takes place at Gog's Leviathan Revue, a theater shaped like such a sea monster where she celebrates the coming end of the world. The symbolism fits in several way:
    • Leviathan in demonology is, like Gog herself, associated with the sin of Envy,
    • The Leviathan is used as a metaphor for the power of the collective against the individual, most notably by Thomas Hobbes, though Gog favors the mob rather than the state,
    • And finally, the Leviathan of The Bible is supposed to emerge during the Apocalypse.
  • The Assimilator: Anyone who eats one of the worms she's composed of becomes an extension of her. It's implied that she has spread through a lot of people this way.
  • Beware the Silly Ones: Presents as a scatter-brained, ditzy and eternally cheerful clown (or at least, one of her bodies does) and runs all the entertainment on Throne because she wants to make people feel good. Also, a nigh-unkillable, world-eating, person-infecting, universe-conquering monstrosity and one of the Seven. In Wheel-Smashing Lord she claims to have almost rivalled Zoss in power during the first cycles, and has possibly wielded the Master Key several times before as well.
  • Bloody Hilarious: She has a tendency to make cheery dynamic entrances as a cute monster clown in bursts of gore from her consumed followers. Her slapstick involves getting her head blown up, gruesomely, and graphically reconstituting from worms. It's both hilarious and incredibly disturbing.
  • Body Horror: Gog-Agog is walking body horror, although it's just as often played for laughs as not; she can erupt without warning from within the bodies of anyone who's taken one of her worms, will casually maim herself to make a point or disintegrate into her component worms when teleporting, often leaving behind leftover blood and organs she hadn't fully assimilated. During the Discordance she combines trillions of her own bodies into a hollow moon made entirely of Gog-Agog, trapping the other combatants inside of her.
  • Butt-Monkey: As much as a Goddess of the Seven Part World can be considered such, but none of the other Demiurges seem to respect her in the slightest. Mottom especially has a habit of blowing up her face regularly enough that even with her limited attention span, Gog-Agog seems really annoyed by it.
  • Childish Tooth Gap: Downplayed, but she has a slight gap in her front teeth when she reappears in Book 4, coinciding with the appearance of her childishly super-enthusiastic persona.
  • Clone by Conversion: Anyone who ingests one of the many worms that makes up Gog-Agog, becomes another Gog-Agog.
  • Cloudcuckoolander: While all of the Seven have descended into madness, they can at least keep themselves together enough to make plans and put up a good front. Gog-Agog can't even manage that; at times, she's barely able to follow the thread of conversation.
  • Color-Coded Eyes: She seems to be associated with envy and is literally a green-eyed monster when she shows up to say hello to Allison.
  • Combat Tentacles: This is a rather... understated way to describe what she does when she gets serious, but it's technically accurate. After forming countless bodies into a hollow moon made of faces in the sky she starts sending out tentacles. Ones composed of heads vomiting out other heads, all biting, with the smallest large enough to swallow a human in a single bite. It is both awesome and incredibly disturbing, which is very on brand for her.
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Is an absent-minded, barely lucid entertainment mogul... and a God-Emperor who survived the Universal War. If she could pull herself together and focus, she could actually be the strongest Demiurge. The Alt Text of one comic lampshades this, pointing out that Gog-Agog has several million times more brain cells than all the other Demiurges combined, even if she usually just uses three of them.
  • Deal with the Devil: Offers people to consume a worm and become part of her, offering simple happiness, or, when that doesn't work, the chance to be part of a demiurge. Her deal is effectively a knock off of Incubus' deals, which only leaves people spiritually consumed instead of literally.
  • Driven by Envy: Gog-Agog is associated with the sin of Envy, but exactly what she's envious about (besides anyone else in the Multiverse grabbing her attention) is harder to unearth. Wheel-Smashing Lord finally gave a partial answer: Gog-Agog is driven by the knowledge that she tried becoming Zoss' equal and failed, repeatedly, and is currently overshadowed by the Successor and Jagganoth. She's currently stuck being a mere observer to the constant time loops, and she hates it.
  • Dynamic Entry: Gog-Agog sometimes eats her servants alive from the inside-out while they're introducing her to the audience.
  • Early Installment Character-Design Difference: Of the Seven, her design shifted the most dramatically between the prologue and her proper introduction in King of Swords, changing from a nihilistic vanity obsessed madwoman to a Monster Clown who none of the other Demiurges respect in the slightest. This is shown to be justified by her nature as a lunatic, shapeshifting, attention-obsessed diva of a deity who regularly changes personas to entertain herself and others: In her next appearance in Wheel-Smashing Lord she looks like Marilyn Monroe.
  • Evil Diva: She's a major celebrity in Throne's entertainment world and has a distinctly theatrical bent. She also looks like one in Kill Six Billion Demons, but later switches to a clown aestetic.
  • Evil Is Petty: As the Demiurge associated with the sin of envy, it should surprise no-one that Gog-Agog can be incredibly petty. King of Swords is basically set in motion over a grudge Gog-Agog carries against Solomon for talking over her, and in Breaker of Infinities she's willing to doom the Multiverse because she doesn't feel appreciated enough.
  • Facial Markings: As of Book 4, she has pink arcs across her eyes and chin, which are copied by people who have "become her" by eating her worms.
  • Good Thing You Can Heal: She's had her head blown up in two consecutive on-screen appearances, both of which were supposed to be peaceful meetings. Since she can reconstitute herself, she more or less treats decapitation like a Wardrobe Wound:
    "I was working on that face!"
  • Green-Eyed Monster: Literally green-eyed, and she is heavily associated with the colour as well. Her most prominent bodies in King of Swords wear green, and her Key manifests with a sickly, green colour.
  • From A Single Worm: She can heal fast enough to effortlessly reconstitute from an energy attack that instantly blew her apart while the attack is still going on.
  • Funny Schizophrenia: It's unknown whether or not Gog-Agog has an actual split personality or is just constantly pretending to do so to keep herself and others entertained, (She implies its the latter, as she admits to Allison that she has a "strong sense of whimsy" after killing one of her other selves.) but either way, bickering and infighting between her bodies is a frequent source of comedy whenever she's on-screen.
  • Hidden Depths: Gog-Agog's "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Solomon David shows that she has more wisdom and cunning that she currently displays.
  • Hive Mind: Gog-Agog is less of a distinct entity composed of worms, and is more akin to a sapient disease that propagates itself by promising hosts happiness and power, only to consume them. Anywhere her hosts go, so can she, physically and gruesomely replacing them with herself and her Key.
  • Horrifying the Horror: Gog-Agog clings on Jadis like some bizarre security blanket when she realizes they're gonna have to fight Jagganoth. She's also disgusted by missing body parts on other people, apparently.
  • Holy Halo: Hers drips like some kind of ooze, reflecting her... strange nature. Like the other demiurges, it symbolizes power, not holiness.
  • Hypocritical Humor: Chides Solomon David that "Gods don't get punched in the face", even though people destroying her head is a Running Gag. Of course, Solomon is one man who presents himself as untouchable, while Gog-Agog is a troupe of clowns.
  • Ignorance Is Bliss: She holds this opinion on the other members of the Seven. At least most of them (except Jadis) have the luxury of experiencing everything for the "first time", as even Jagganoth, who has Ripple Proof Effect Memory, has a flawed version. Gog-Agog, meanwhile, has been forced to participate in the exact same play for countless loops. Only the first few and the current have had any meaningful variation.
  • Inexplicably Awesome: Since only Humans, Servants, Angels, and Devils are supposed to have souls, a parasitic disease not only achieving intelligence, but ascending to Demiurge status is weird even by Throne's standards. This seems to be reflected by her halo: as animals have very weak soul flames, her halo doesn't burn so much as sort of ooze like hot wax.
  • Iron Butt Monkey: An instance where an explicit Healing Factor justifies slapstick, a Running Gag centers on her face being blown up.
  • It's All About Me: As can be expected of someone who represents the sin of Envy, Gog-Agog is very self-absorbed.
    • She's taken over all of Throne's media and entertainment, meaning that practically everyone sees — and envies — Gog-Agog above all.
    • In King of Swords, she tries to put Allison through a ridiculously convoluted (and very dangerous) plan to get revenge over Solomon David over a slight that only 'succeeds' because of White Chain's Character Development.
    • During the Discordance in Breaker of Infinities, she loafs about and refuses to get involved until Solomon asks her to, and even then starts fuming over how no-one takes her seriously. Just as Allison and the other demiurges are about to deal the finishing blow on Jagganoth, she gets in the way to force them to admit that they need her, and promptly betrays them the moment she's gainsaid by claiming she'll be fine even if Jagganoth kills all of the others.
  • Jaded Washout: To the extent that this trope is appliccable to multiverse-conquering God Emperors, Gog-Agog is this, dominant-colour-based-puns aside. Wheel-Smashing Lord shows us that Gog-Agog used to go all out during earlier cycles in an attempt to become the new god after Zoss, and possibly filled the role of Destroyer of the Seven-Part World that Jagganoth currently does, but never succeeded. She has currently lost interest even in trying, and considers herself "stuck in the audience" while the Successor and Zoss and Jagganoth play out their leading roles.
  • Leitmotif: The Alt Text of pages in which she appears is often a youtube link leading to a song by Susumu Hirasawa.
  • Let's Get Dangerous!: When she finally joins the Discordance of the Demiurges and skips straight from Monster Clown to Eldritch Abomination.
  • Literal Metaphor: Gog-Agog delivers a line to Solomon David that sounds like it's about humanity as a whole... but applies equally to her, as an endless mass of worms.
    The mass REMEMBERS! The mass is IMMORTAL! And most of all – the mass always wins.
  • Literal Split Personality: Downplayed but present. While multiple versions of Gog-Agog can be in the same place at the same time, they have starkly different personalities from each other and from Gog-Agog normally, and even seem to have different interpretations of her overall goals.
  • Made of Plasticine: She appears ridiculously fragile compared to the other Seven, as Alison effortlessly punches her face in when they first meet, and relies on her Healing Factor and near-infinite supply of spare bodies to make up for it. Later subverted, as it's revealed that she's also every bit as resilient as her fellow Demiurges, possibly even more so — she just exaggerates her injuries as a twisted gag.
  • Meaningful Name: Gog-Agog sounds intentionally similar to the biblical Gog and Magog. "Agog" also can mean "excited" or "eager", befitting her presentation as a chipper Monster Clown in book 4. It also sounds very similar to "demagogue", fitting her role as the controller of the multiverse's entertainment industry and her belief that "the mass always wins".
  • Me's a Crowd: Not simply are all of her followers extensions of herself, she can also have multiple herselfs running around at once.
  • Monster Clown: Her look during King of Swords and Breaker of Infinities is of a clown, and her cult followers dress the same way.
  • Murder by Inaction: In Breaker of Infinities, during the Discordance, she first doesn't bother to get involved until Solomon demands it, then she leaves the battle at a critical moment just because she got annoyed at Mottom. One Time Skip later and Jadis reveals she's still refusing to get involved, even as Jagganoth's armies have begun the omnicide. She reveals in Wheel-Smashing Lord that this is because she’s really not worried about Jagganoth succeeding, since Zoss will just turn back time before he does. Again.
  • Nigh-Invulnerable: A combination of made of rubber, regeneration and multiple bodies (lots of bodies). Gog-Agog is made of worms and can shape-shift/regenerate herself back to normal form on the drop of a hat, to the point that she will casually decapitate herself just to make a point. Put it on top of Gog-Agog being more of a multiversal infection rather than an individual and we get someone who is practically impossible to permanently kill. According to Abaddon, even Omnicidal Maniac Jagganoth would face trouble trying to remove Gog-Agog from the cosmos. She is even able to survive the Reset Button physically, with all her memories and self intact, which is something even Jagganoth's invulnerability can't protect him from.
  • No Celebrities Were Harmed: In her appearance in Wheel-Smashing Lord she has taken the form of Marilyn Monroe.
  • No-Sell: When she finally steps up against Jagganoth, she reforms immediately after being pulped by his Five Hundred Arm Mantle. All it does is make her mad.
  • Noodle Incident: Gog-Agog's origins are simply referred to as "a living tragedy" by Abaddon. It’s likely because she remembers everything about the Wheel and its countless resets, and she was already ancient by the time the multiverse in its current form came to be.
  • Oh, My Gods!: In an interesting aversion, Gog-Agog is shown during Breaker of Infinities using the exclamation 'jeez!', which is very much rooted in 'our' Earth's mythology (being a corruption of 'Jesus!'). This means that, unlike her fellow God-Emperor Mottom (who suffered Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure when Allision said it in Wielder of Names), Gog-Agog has visited or conquered at least one Earth where Christianity is present.
  • The Older Immortal: Gog-Agog is the oldest of the Seven by a large, large margin.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When her dialogue shifts from its usual wobbly scrawl to more standard lettering, it means that she's dropped her clownish behavior. At these moments, everyone around her would be wise to listen very carefully to what she says.
  • Running Gag: In every appearance she's made so far, she has had her head blown up or damaged; while this was at first used to reveal her nature as a pile of worms, later recurrences have been far more comedic, with Allison caving her face in within seconds of meeting her for the first time. She even gets in on the action herself, decapitating herself barehanded to punctuate a point.
  • Sad Clown: Played with. Gog-Agog has a lot of reasons to be just as sad and miserable as the other Seven, and comments on the author's tumblr notes she is deeply in denial about her own nature as a Hive Mind Worm That Walks. She is also suffering from severe Time Loop Fatigue from being one of the only beings in the Multiverse who has lived through almost every reset. However, being a Mad God, her uses of 'comedy' to cope with this goes way beyond the normal trends of this trope, and her layers of self-delusion and self-denial are implied to be so deep that getting to a genuine 'her' in the middle of it all would be impossible for Gog-Agog.
  • Sinister Scythe: Used to wield one during the Universal War.
  • Technically Naked Shapeshifter: "Naked" might be an overstatement, but she can form her worms into clothing as well as flesh. Most frequently demonstrated with hats.
  • The Worm That Walks: Beneath her superficially human appearance, her body is a mass of worm-like creatures that can reconstitute themselves after injury or disperse when she wants to leave an area quickly. Flashbacks show her with a far less human form.
  • That's No Moon: It's Gog-Agog, fusing uncounted bodies into a hollow moon lined with faces for the boss fight.
  • The Dog Bites Back: After eons of being mocked and belittled by the other Demiurges, she demands that they admit they need her before she will help them strike the finishing blow on Jagganoth. When Mottom yells at and insults Gog-Agog rather than admit that she needs her help, Gog simply departs and lets Jagganoth destroy the rest of the Demiurges.
  • Time Abyss: Even by the standards of the Demurges, who are all this to one extent or another. As a result of being the only one to remember every iteration of the Time Loop, she is older than the universe itself - so old that she says the centuries of her life would outnumber the sands on a beach miles long. The reason she became a Hive Mind is simply because she needed the massive amount of physical brain matter just to store all her memories.
  • Time Loop Fatigue: She reveals in Wheel-Smashing Lord that she remembers every reset Zoss has performed on the universe… and she was already ancient when that happened. In her own words, her lifetime spans not centuries, millennia, or even eons, but so much time that not even she can accurately say.
    Gog-Agog: Imagine a beach, Allison. A broad and beautiful beach many miles wide. And once every one hundred years, you take a single grain of sand away from that beach. When that beach has been reduced to nothingness and is scoured to the sheet rock and the surf My lifetime still will not have passed.
  • Uplifted Animal: She's essentially a sapient parasitic disease, and it's been implied that she wasn't always sapient.
  • Villain Takes an Interest: Allison's self-described "biggest fan", and given comments she makes even when Allison isn't around she might even be genuine. Unlike Incubus she doesn't get personally involved in Allison's journey until King of Swords, where she tries to manipulate Allison into fighting Solomon. She reveals later in Wheel-Smashing Lord it's because Allison is a genuine novelty, and having lived through as many resets as she has she craves novelty.
  • Wrong Context Magic: Her nature is described as one In-Universe. Animals have no soul flame, and Gog-Agog is worms, hence it should be impossible for her to have the willpower to keep a Magus Key. Gog-Agog does it anyway. In one of her more lucid moments, she tells Allison that her nature is a direct defiance of God (possibly YISUN themselves) and that she might not always have been such.

Gog Agog: Gog Agog it's Gog Agog. Once again with Gog Agog. Here we are with Gog Agog, it's our good pal, Gog Agog. What would we be without Gog Agog, she's such a swell gal it's Gog Agog. Gog of the Agog and Gog of the Gog Gog Agog.

    Jagganoth 

Chakravartin Jagganoth, Wheel-Turning King, Red Eyed Heir, Pankrator, The God Eater, Bearer of the Word BLADE and Destroyer of the Seven-Part World, also known as Yaun ten Jantris

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/jagganoth_kos_8.png
Click here to see Jagganoth without his mask.
Click here to see him using the Yenenman Mantle - The Five Hundred Arm Mantle, The Wheel Strength, The Door Crusher, The Blood Drinking Sword Soul

"HE THAT SUPS ON DEATH BUT LITTLE WILL FIND IT A BITTER DRAUGHT. YET HE THAT DRINKETH DEEP — SHALL TASTE ONLY THE SWEETEST NECTAR."

Known throughout the Multiverse as "The Red God" and "God's Monster", Pankrator Jagganoth is described as "his own fortress of blood and horn" and rightfully feared as Creation's ultimate warrior, a brutal and world-destroying monster-tyrant and the most dangerous member of the Seven by far. Originally a child soldier during the Universal War, Jagganoth butchered his way to godhood and the top of the universal power rankings and joined the Seven in the proclamation of the Pact of the Seven-Part World.

Finding himself unable to exist without a war, Jagganoth was visited by an angel of YISUN who entrusted him with a new purpose: The annihilation of Creation itself. To this end, Jagganoth endlessly drills, equips and prepares a massive army for his "Great Work" of multiversal destruction, conquering and 'cleansing' worlds under his care to fuel the war-machine. The closest thing to a Big Bad of the series, Jagganoth's ultimate goal puts him in direct conflict with both Allison and the rest of the Seven; even in his absence from the narrative, his existence hangs over much of it. He makes his main entrance into the plot in Breaker of Infinities, at which point things truly start going to hell.

Jagganoth's main colour is red. He bears the Word BLADE, and is associated with the sin of Wrath.
  • Animal Motifs: His character design takes some visual cues from elephants, such as the shape of his mask and his sheer size and build.
    • His Genius Bruiser qualities and ability to recognise that the universe is looping might also be a reference to how elephants tend to have fantastic memory recall.
    • During the Universal War, Jagganoth was associated with lions: His title as Yaun ten Yantris was 'Lion of the Dead Men' and he had a truly impressive lion-like mane of hair and fangs.
  • The Atoner: In an incredibly twisted sense. His ultimate goal is to destroy and then recreate The Multiverse in a better form free of suffering, apparently as penance for allowing the other Demiurges to turn it into the absolute hellhole it currently is. Tellingly, he intends to erase himself from existence once he is done so that the reborn denizens of the Multiverse no longer have to suffer under any sort of God-Emperor.
  • Badass Boast: Drops them from time to time, as befits a Genius Bruiser omnicidal warlord.
    Jagganoth: All will be held to account, even the world, and if I find it wanting, IT TOO SHALL BURN.
  • Bald of Evil: The other major character in the comic who is bald (the first being Solomon), and is an omnicidal god of destruction. Unlike Solomon, flashbacks reveal he used to be bald even during the Universal War and he's never seen having a beard either. However, Maya's flashback in Wheel Smashing Lord shows him with a long mane of hair and heavy stubble.
  • Big Red Devil: He isn't a literal Devil, but you definitely wouldn't catch that from looking at him.
  • Blood Knight: Mottom says outright that "peace wasn't for him" and he seems to be eager to restart his 'great work' of wiping all life from the Multiverse. In contrast to most examples of this trope, Jagganoth doesn't seem to enjoy war, he simply seems incapable of existing in a state of not-at-war. His only comment once the other Demiurgues begin fighting back during the Discordance is "finally".
  • Bring It: He loves his dramatic challenges, but his most dramatic is when he goes full One-Winged Angel: "Come! We have hardly begun our battle. Summon your sword arts! Mantle your transcendent core! Or... have you already reached your limits?"
  • Brutal Honesty: Perhaps unsurprisingly, he's not one to mince words and is all too happy to tell the other Demiurges what he thinks of them to their faces. They do not impress him. Even his Dragon Incubus gets bluntly told that Jagganoth does not consider him a true Demiurge. The fact that Jagganoth is Nigh-Invulnerable likely contributes to this attitude; you'd probably be brutally honest to if you had literally nothing to fear from speaking your mind.
  • The Brute: Averted. Despite his all-consuming wrath, he engineers and plans his onslaughts.
  • Child Soldier: According to supplementary materials, Jagganoth served as a child soldier in something called the "Corpse Legions" during the Universal War. King of Swords retells the story of a young boy who is forcibly drafted into one such Corpse Legion and put through intense dehumanization. That boy is implied (and then later confirmed) to have been Jagganoth.
  • Complete Immortality: Per Word of God, thanks to nails that he forged from angel feathers and drove into his flesh, he cannot be harmed. Combined with his terrifying destructive power, it makes him the ideal object of worship for the Belligerent Knights.
  • Covered in Scars: Both his face and body are heavily scarred. Given he's currently said to be invincible, the scars are probably from the Universal War.
  • Desecrating the Dead: Due to his view that the body is nothing but a shell once one's death has overtaken it, Jagganoth isn't one for respectful corpse disposal. Most of his victims in King of Swords are left as ashen statues burned from the inside out, and he destroys both Mammon and Mottom's corpses to extract their keys as quickly as possible.
  • The Dog Bites Back: The demiurge, Jantris, massacred Jagganoth's family and village, conscripted him as a Child Soldier, and subjected him to horrific abuse in order to beat any hope of a normal life out of him. After some time of being forced to act as Jantris's tool of conquest, Jagganoth became strong enough to take his Revenge, slaughtering his twenty-five thousand man army in the process.
  • The Dreaded: Even by the standards of the Seven, mad god-kings of infinity that they are, he is infamous and widely-feared. His arrival at the end of Book 4 thoroughly freaks out The Stoic Solomon, and even Incubus, who is conspiring with him in Incubus' palace, briefly hesitates when Jagganoth stands up in his presence.
  • Dynamic Entry: At the end of Book 4, he makes a probably the most insane, destructive, and over-the-top Dynamic Entry in the history of fiction, using his Dimensional Cutter Flaming Sword to teleport into Solomon's arena and trigger a small-scale nuclear explosion in the process, killing everything in the arena that isn't either a fellow Keybearer or shielded by one.
  • Empowered Badass Normal: Jagganoth was once a regular human, became a nigh unstoppable warrior under the tutelage of a mad demiurge, before turning on him, slaughtering his armies singlehandedly, and finding himself in the posession of a key that made him effectively a Physical God
  • Evil Is Burning Hot: His body heat is hot enough to boil blood, and he leaves fiery footprints behind when he walks.
  • Evil Versus Oblivion: The struggle of other demiurges to keep him from destroying all of creation can be seen as this. Until he himself turns against Metatron, the actual culprit of multiversal destruction, who turns out to have been the one who manipulated Jagganoth in the first place.
  • Expy: His backstory is surprisingly similar to one account of Mehrunes Dagon's. Having started off as a benign deity before becoming a threat to the entire universe as the result of an encounter with an Angelic Abomination. His One-Winged Angel form only furthers the similarities: transforming him into a red-skinned, multi-armed giant similar to the avatar Dagon usually manifests as whenever he manages to escape Oblivion.
  • Fangs Are Evil: He has extended canines that look like small tusks or fangs.
  • Feel No Pain: Inverted. White Chain sees proof of his complete immunity to harm, and yet notes that he still dodges avoids and blocks blows. Jagganoth does feel pain.
  • Finishing Move: He wipes out one after another in the Discordance, though his most impressive so far is Supreme Divine Art BLOOD-SATED SWORD SOUL, which slices up the entire planet, and even manages to separate The Fool - and cut off most of Allison's right side. The description of what the attack actually does is an entire paragraph interspersed with illustrations of the attack's brutal effect.
    "80,000 blows are struck at once. Leaving no space that is not a sword. Men and horses will be split in two. And the land will be put to waste. Since there is nowhere to evade - be they man or immortal - all will be cut - and be slain instantly."
  • Flaming Sword: Is seen wielding one at the end of King of Swords, which he uses to cut the space inside the Rayuban arena to make his grand entrance.
  • Formerly Fat: His 'first appearance' in the first book is that of a fat man in an elephant mask - his present-day look is that of an incredibly buff 30-foot-tall, half-naked warrior. That said, it is fairly likely that appearance is inaccurate, given that Cio is telling the story at the time, and Allison is listening to it.
  • Foreshadowing: In King of Swords, a series of Rants reveal the tragic upbringing of a young boy named Yaun, whose time as a Corpse Legion soldier during the Universal War had a few similiarties to the few hints given on Jagganoth's backstory at the time before Solomon addressed him by the name "Yaun Ten Jantris" in the opening confrontation of Breaker of Infinities, revealing that the two were one and the same.
  • Freudian Excuse: Once an ordinary body called Yaun, Jagganoth's hometown was massacred by a savage warrior cult called the Corpse Legion, who enslaved him as a Child Soldier and slowly abused and dehumanized him until he forgot his own name and could conceive of nothing but war.
  • Full-Frontal Assault: Being totally indestructible means he doesn't need to bother with armour. Or any other clothing, for that matter. His only normal accoutrement consists of his mask, a gauntlet of unknown function, and what looks to be a speedo for modesty. By the end of Book 4, when the time comes for him to finally restart the Universal War, he's wearing some loose plate armor, but the left half of his torso and groin are thoroughly exposed. The armor is quickly shattered by Solomon David, leaving him in the buff. some Scenery Censor and a One-Winged Angel transformation keeps the comic Safe For Work for a while, but Jagganoth eventually returns to his naked human form and ends up fully exposed, with only blood, gore or distance slightly hiding the shape of his genitals.
  • Genius Bruiser: He's a lot smarter than he acts; one example being that he's the only member of the Seven who actually works to reverse-engineer and understand the technology of the worlds he conquers.
    • As White Chain observes, when he restarts the Universal War his opening move of attacking Rayuba was chosen carefully - in doing so he managed to disorient Solomon (his strongest opponent on the field) by destroying his beloved city and slaughtering his people, and further preventing him from utilising his full power out of fear of doing more damage.
  • God-Eating: It's right there as one of his Boss Subtitles, and it's likely Not Hyperbole. "The God-Eater" was the the first name given to him by the author, with his actual name being added later.
  • Gone Horribly Right: As a member of the Corpse Legion, Jagganoth's "war-father" Jantris subjected him to brutal, nightmarish training to improve his usefulness as a one of the cult's many disposable warriors. Jagganoth would eventually become the greater warrior in the multiverse, a step of which consisted of slaughtering the Legion to the last man.
  • Hades Shaded: Deep red. A pair of flashbacks show that he once had a normal brownish skin tone, implying both it and growing to his current size are changes he did to himself during the Universal War. It's implied to be literal ashes, as the Corpse Legions painted their "dead" soldiers with the ashes of their home.
  • Hero Killer: In every time loop he's aware of, Jagganoth has killed the Successor after the Successor came into their power and met Metatron. Jagganoth is unaware of why the job always falls to him, but he knows that he has done it a near-endless number of times and has never lost.
  • Heroic Willpower: Heroic is a stretch. But White Chain deduces that he still can feel pain despite his invulnerability and yet can endure endless punishment without flinching. The willpower this implies is truly terrifying.
  • Hidden Depths: Despite being an indestructible warmonger, he likes tinkering and writing poetry.
  • Holy Halo: Usually not, but he gains one when attacking the Celestial Empire. His is even larger than Solomon David's (although proportionally they are about the same), and burns like barely contained fire. As with the other demiurges, it symbolizes power and not virtue. When he goes One-Winged Angel it becomes much bigger, and expands from his head in concentric circles.
  • Human All Along: Given Jagganoth's monstrous size and the general aura of menace coming off him, one could be forgiven for initially assuming Jagganoth to be something other than human and the elephant/skull-mask he wears as his actual face. Word of God confirms that he's a human, albeit a gigantic one, and his human face can be seen in some of the in-story flashbacks.
  • Hypocrite: He accuses the other Demiurges of having let the the Universe degenerate into it’s current, awful state while revealing in their success; and considers himself to be fighting for the sake of freeing it and all it’s inhabitants from their tyranny. Yet Jagganoth himself has spent what’s implied to be eons worth of Zoss and Metatron’s resets trying to Restart the World, and it's never occurred to him that his refusal to use any method but multiversal destruction may be why he keeps failing.
  • I Am Not Left-Handed: After the Demiurges temporarily seal him at the end of their first fight, he explains to Allison that all of the Demiurges were holding back because they didn't want to break the planet they were fighting on. Now that the battle has been moved to outer space, they will be going all out.
  • I Did What I Had to Do: For all of his extreme brutality in combat, Jagganoth never lies, gloats, or toys with his foes, instead clearly explaining why he is doing what he feels must be done - namely, that everyone in the Multiverse needs to die - to his would-be victims. He's capable of being erudite and polite, and when he has to, kills his opponents swiftly and cleanly to minimize their suffering: He gives Mottom a moment to prepare herself before he crushes her entire body in an instant, and all of his normal human victims are killed instantaneously during his Dynamic Entry at the start of Breaker of Infinities. His writings on death implies he respects the process as a natural part of life, and holds a buddhist-esque view that death means the end of suffering.
  • I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: His home base on Throne is the red fortress of al'Mumit, which is named after one of God's 99 titles in Islam and roughly translates to "The Destroyer".
  • Impossibly Graceful Giant: He is ludicrously agile, and not just for someone of his size — he’s capable of dashing and leaping around at speeds that rival Solomon David and Incubus.
  • Inexplicably Awesome: While some aspects of his awesomeness (like his invulnerability) are explained, other are presented without comment or elaboration; it isn't said, for example, why he is roughly twenty feet tall or why he has orc-like fangs, he just does.
  • Invincible Villain: In his current form, Jagganoth is literally invulnerable to harm and the most powerful amongst the Demiurges. Mottom claims in Wielder of Names that the other six are required just to contain him, a claim that is proven false in Breaker of Infinities when they try to do so... And completely fail. According to Jagganoth himself, his invincibility even makes him immue to causality and has turned him into a universal constant, meaning that no matter how many times Zoss resets reality through Time Travel Jagganoth will be a part of it, though Jagganoth losing his memories of previous cycles means he is, at the moment, contained by it.
  • In Their Own Image: More or less his goal. He basically intends to scrap the entire Multiverse and restart it all from scratch, forging a better world that is free of pain,fear, and suffering. Interestingly, he plans on erasing himself from existence once he's done so that the recreated Multiverse can be truly free.
  • Killing Intent: Jagganoth breathes and lives violence, to the point that his presence unnerves even fellow members of the Seven during negotiations. During the Universal War he scared a pair of Master Swordsmen into backing off the moment they saw him, both calculating any battle with him meant death a thousand times over.
  • Knight of Cerebus: While the comic has never been humorous per se, and what humour that was there was almost always black as pitch, it had its moments of levity. His arrival on the scene marks a shift in the comic away from comedy and into straight drama, up to and including putting Allison through a Trauma Conga Line that seemingly utterly destroys everything she's gained on her journey - from relationships, to physical strength, to the very scars on her face.
  • Knight Templar: Appears to sincerely believe that the the best way to free many of the denizens of the multiverse from suffering is to kill them in whatever way he deems necessary, as all of creation will be reborn anyway.
    Jagganoth: DO NOT MOURN THE DEAD. WHEN THE STAIN OF THIS WORLD HAS BEEN STRIPPED FROM IT - IT SHALL BE FORGED ANEW AND THEY SHALL BE FREED FROM SUFFERING. THEIR DEATH IS A BLESSING.
  • Large and in Charge: He is thirty feet tall and the strongest reigning demiurge by a huge margin.
  • The Law of Diminishing Defensive Effort: Averts this, spending much of the opening of the Discordance on the defensive side and dodging, parrying or intercepting the other Demiurges' attacks. When it is made very clear his invulnerability is not just a story, White Chain deduces that the fact that Jagganoth doesn't fight like someone who is invulnerable means he still feels the pain of incoming attacks despite them doing no physical harm to him.
  • Magic Knight: Jagganoth is not only a physical attacker but also skilled in magic, capable of Mind over Matter and creating blasts of energy from his attacks. He has also shown the ability to counter or steal the energy manifested by someone else's Key of Kings.
  • Meaningful Name: Has several of them, all of whom he might have taken for himself according to Solomon.
    • Jagganoth is derived from Jagannath, which is Sanskrit for "lord of the universe", and is the name of a Hindu deity and the source of the English word "juggernaut".
    • Pankrator means "all-power", from Greek (pankration being a type of ancient fighting sport similar to Mixed Martial Arts, allowing strikes and grapples).
    • His Boss Subtitles title, Chakravartin, is Sanskrit for "one whose (chariot) wheels are (always) moving" (literally) or "ruler of all" (figuratively). It was the title used by the Maurya emperors of India.
  • Mercy Kill: More or less what he feels he is doing to the multiverse and all of his victims.
  • Multi-Armed and Dangerous: His One-Winged Angel form has a seemingly infinite number of arms all holding a sword each.
  • Names to Run Away from Really Fast: As far as titles go you don't get much more threatening than "The God-Eater", especially when its owner happens to be a nigh-immortal, warmongering colossus with a reality-warping superweapon implanted in his forehead.
  • Nigh-Invulnerable: Of the God/Reality Warper variant. Jagganoth is conceptually incapable of being harmed thanks to nails forged from angel feathers that he drove into his flesh, to the point that even YISUN could not directly harm Jagganoth. He can, however, hypothetically be bound or subdued by a greater power as long as the binding doesn't depend on physically harming him, and is also not immune to pain... Not that the latter seems to bother him much.
  • No Indoor Voice: His text bubbles are huge, booming red text, and his words tend to match. Whenever he takes off his Rage Helm, he tends to become quieter.
  • No Place for a Warrior: Jagganoth took the end of the Universal War extremely badly; in Mottom's words he became sullen and withdrawn, and entirely cut contact with the other six. It was only when the angel of YISUN gave him his Great Work that he was able to shake himself out of his funk.
  • No Place for Me There: Once he's done reforging the universe into something better, he intends to erase himself.
  • Omnicidal Maniac: According to Mottom, his goal is to annihilate the entire multiverse. He claims during the Discordance that his ultimate goal is to slay Metatron (and presumably Zoss) for good, destroy the Time Loop, burn The Multiverse to cinders and reforge a new universe free of suffering from the ashes.
    Allison: Give you the Master Key? Are you kidding me? So you can do what? Destroy the world?
    Jagganoth: NO. SO I MAY DESTROY ITS SLAVER. METATRON. ONCE HE THOUGHT ME HIS DEIGNED EXECUTIONER. THE DUST MAN OF HIS FAILURES. SNUFFER OF INFINITE ILLUSIONS. NO LONGER. I REALISE THE TRUE DESIGN OF HIS MONOMYTH.
  • One-Winged Angel: When Jagganoth goes all out, his shape becomes even less human and more monstrous than it already was. Specifically, while his body remains humanoid, it turns bright, glowing red with an exaggerated musculature of the sort seen on Buddhist warrior/guardian deities, with about a hundred extra pairs of arms extending horizontally behind him, a head made of horned elephant skulls fused together into a sort of crown, and a pillar of fire at the very top. Also, he’s several orders of magnitude bigger than he already was. Incubus points out later on that Jagganoth can only maintain this state temporarily, so it is possible to wear him down if one can survive long enough... but that in and of itself is incredibly difficult.
  • Orbital Bombardment: Supreme Divine Art Blood-Sated Sword Soul allows him to unleash 80,000 blows of energy, destroying the target planet's entire surface and killing everyone on it with a single technique.
  • The Quiet One: Jagganoth speaks very little for the first four books, generally only vocalizing in short, ominous sentences of Brutal Honesty. Subverted when he gets the limelight in Breaker of Infinities and is revealed to be very eloquent and fond of talking, at length, as long as he's not busy killing someone.
  • Rage Helm: A pretty monstrous-looking one. He never seems to go out in public without it and is only seen unmasked while inside his own fortress.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: At the start of Book Five he delivers am absolutely vicious one to the other Demiurges, accusing them of having become decadent and dulled in their victory, made all the more biting by its accuracy:
    Jagganoth: YOU HAVE ALL FORGOTTEN THE TASTE OF DEATH. FEEBLE PRETENDER KINGS OF A FALSE WORLD: KNOW THIS, I WILL FINALLY HAVE THE MEASURE OF YOU. THE TIME HAS COME TO SEE YOU AS YOU ARE. REDOLENT IN YOUR EXCESSES. FEEBLE AND PATHETIC IN YOUR POWER. WITHERED AND IMPOTENT. WRUNG OUT OF THE PURITY OF VIOLENCE. ROTTING IN THE FILTH OF YOUR INDULGENCES. DIVIDED AND WEAK. BY GOD! THERE IS WORK TO BE DONE, AND I AM FINISHED WITH THIS FARCE. LET US HAVE ONE MORE CONTEST.
  • Red and Black and Evil All Over: His speech bubbles are red on black, and his colour scheme is heavily dominated by red and his dark, shaded skin. He's also presented as the most outright destructive of the Demiurges.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: His remaining eye is solid red.
  • Red Is Violent: Jagganoth is associated with the color red, and is a world-destroying War God.
  • Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Due to being bound to Metatron, he retains vague impressions of the "Groundhog Day" Loop that Metatron and Zoss have trapped the multiverse in. While he remembers very little of it, his understanding of it grows just a bit clearer with each cycle. There have been a lot of cycles.
  • Scary Teeth: His teeth are unusually large and long, and his canines curve outwards. It's particularly unsettling given how human he otherwise looks.
  • Shell-Shocked Veteran: According to Abbadonnote , Jagganoth suffers an intense, ongoing form of PTSD. note 
  • Spikes of Villainy: His helmet is quite spiky. The gladiatorial armor he wears into battle is extremely spiky. This being Jagganoth, said spikiness serves a practical purpose in addition to looking extremely evil - since he's totally invulnerable to all damage, he doesn't need armor to keep himself safe, but spiking up the dominant right-hand side of his body offers him a number of useful offensive options.
  • Stealth Expert: Despite his enormous size, he is entirely capable of sneaking up on and ambushing even other demiurges.
  • Stout Strength: In contrast to Solomon David and Incubus's Heroic Builds, Jagganoth is built more like a power lifter.
  • Story-Breaker Power: His total invulnerability has made him impossible to defeat in a normal fight. With only the collective effort of the rest of the Seven only barely keeping him in check for most of the series. Interestingly, Jagganoth implies he’s actually one In-Universe; none of Zoss’ innumerable successors have ever managed to complete the Heroes Journey and defeat him.
  • Super Mode: Yenenman Mantle - The Five Hundred Arm Mantle, The Wheel Strength, The Door Crusher, The Blood Drinking Sword Soul, which turns Jagganoth into a five-hundred armed, multi-skull headed glowing red giant.
  • Time Loop Fatigue: He is one of the few beings to realize that Zoss has imprisoned the multiverse in a "Groundhog Day" Loop.
  • Tarot Motifs: Reversed Wheel of Fortune, which represents resistance to change and ill omens.
  • Ultimate Blacksmith: Among the Seven. He’s shown forging multiple weapons, actually reverse-engineers the technology of the worlds he conquers, and while the feathers he forged his nails out of were provided by an Angel, he himself is responsible for creating the means of his Complete Immortality.
  • Unsound Effect: Jagganoth's footsteps and physical attacks all create a 'DOOM' sound effect, which appears to be unique to him.
  • Unwitting Pawn: He apparently was one to Metatron 1, but now that he understands Metatron's true intentions, Jagganoth plans to slay him.
  • Walking Armory: His war-fighting get-up includes no less than six swords, a warhammer, and a very large composite bow, plus a set of spiked gladiatorial armor that is more for offence than defense.
  • Walking Wasteland: His body temperature is high enough to boil people's blood at a distance. A section of The Rant states that only the bravest Knights Belligerent get personally dubbed by him, and those who do tend to be horribly scarred by the ordeal.
  • Warrior Poet: Jagganoth is a practicioner of Aam'ya'ke, or "Death Poetry". He even proclaims a few lines during the Discordance. It's likely he composed them on the spot.
    O Tiger, o lord of beasts, rage! Strain every sinnew till the marrow shakes - bend thy brow towards the horizon and cry victory.
    O piteous lord, e'en against thy molten command still the last light's sliver shall fall, till darkness quencheth thy feeble cries and all is smothered.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: When you get down to it, all Jagganoth really wants is to make a world where nobody will ever have to suffer under the cruel whims of insane demigods like his fellow Demiurges, or suffer at all really. When his work is done, he plans for the Multiverse to be a utopia, a place where mortals can truly be free and live without fear. Too bad that his plan to make all this happen involves butchering the entire Multiverse, taking it on faith that they'll all just be recreated anyways.
  • When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Jagganoth is described in-universe as having become an embodiment of violence and mastered it (hence, why he cannot be harmed by it). Unfortunately, this also means he's incapable of thinking in terms that does not involve violence: 'Non-violent' solutions are alien to him and all his problem solving basically involves either 'violence' or 'use it for violence'.
    "The law of kings... Is the law of the sword! The lord of the world cannot rule! He cannot grasp anything but a hilt! He must subsume and become violence itself! All else is frivolity!
  • World's Strongest Man: Jagganoth was already the greatest warrior among the Seven, but after becoming immune to harm, he's now the most powerful active entity in the entire Wheel, as strong as all six of the other rulers of creation combined (who've only managed to remain co-rulers of creation by banding together into a loose alliance against him).

    Jadis 

Jadis, The Witch in Glass, The Prophet, The Lady of Infinite Repose, Bearer of the SHAPE and Former Bearer of the Word MIND

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/jadis.jpg
Click here to see Jadis's original appearance.

"Action itself is an illusion. The totality of time and space is a beautiful piece of amber, in which we are frozen. A speck... of a speck of a speck of a speck of a speck of a speck. Upon this amber, all our decisions, all our triumphs, all our sins - in all possible worlds - are permanently engraved. Perfect, and perfectly still. Forever."

The last of the Demiurges to be properly introduced, and an enigma for most of the time before it, Jadis is the speaker of the Prophecy of the Successor and barely little else before Breaker of Infinities. Once a beautiful and powerful Sorcerous Overlord, Jadis was born into a family of Emperor Scientists whose family goal was to unlock the True Shape of the Universe and obtain all the secrets of Creation, a task she was prophecised to complete. Joining the Seven during the end of the Universal War, Jadis would use the peace wrought by the Pact of the Seven-Part World to finish her family's great work.

The attempt destroyed her. While she was once the second-most powerful of their number and a terrifyingly powerful mage, the Shape proved to be a thing beyond mortal ken and Jadis was shattered in both mind and body. She now exists inside a block of glass, a decaying, unmoving corpse, whispering prophecies with her perfect, terrible knowledge and worshipped by a cult devoted to recording and intepreting her whispers (and occasionally mis-interpreting them) while keeping their God-Queen alive.

Jadis' main colours are blue and black, with the former associated with her Word MIND and the latter with the SHAPE itself which is now fixed in her mind. She represents the sin of Sloth.
  • Abusive Parents: We see through a vision at the tail end of Book 5 that Jadis' father Janus was an abusive monster, cruelly berating her for the crime of tending to commoners and mortals, telling her to her face that she should have been born a son instead of a daughter, and forcing her to brutally beat herself in the face with books.
  • Achievements in Ignorance: An inverted example. As someone who is ignorant of nothing, Jadis' limits are absolute and she is incapable of anything she hasn't already predicted will happen. She can't choose to do anything, because her decisions and their outcomes are already known to her.
  • Affably Evil: A conquerer of thousands of worlds who in the present has no motivation for anything she does anymore other than it's what's supposed to happen and yet is quite cordial and awkward when you can actually communicate with her, trying to make what she knows will happen, what must happen, as pleasant as possible.
    Jadis: ...Why don't we both get cleaned up and go up to the atrium? I'll have breakfast brought up. It's nice in there. And it has plants!
  • All for Nothing: All of Jadis' efforts and dedication towards unlocking the True Shape of the Universe proved fruitless: In getting what she sought, she lost all ability to use it productively. She also lost the ability to use the power she had prior to seeing the Shape productively, as implied by her loss of the word MIND.
  • And I Must Scream: After untold centuries sealed in glass with nothing but her terrible, perfect knowledge of the Universe for company, her most sincere wish is to die. "Breaker of Infinities" reveals that she can make astral projections of herself to interact with others, but it's far from perfect and even then, her projections are mostly confined to her palace. Allison was possibly the only person she was able to talk to in a meaningful way since her entombment.
  • Animal Motifs: During the second half of Breaker of Infinities, Jadis is shown dressed in lavish blue robes decorated with images of koi fishes. Koi are highly revered animals in both Chinese and Japanese cultures, and depending on their color patterns, can symbolize things like good fortune, success, longevity, transformation, and ambition. Jadis in her prime was an extremely powerful sorceress who, through conquering 111,111 worlds, became one of the seven immortal demiurges. According to Abbadon, Jadis was an extremely ambitious Emperor Scientist who treated everything as an experiment to study — a mindset that completely backfired when she tried viewing the Shape of the Universe, driving her mad. The flowing drapes of her robes also resemble waterfalls, referring to the legend of a koi fish leaping up a waterfall and transforming into a powerful dragon, echoing Jadis' divinity.
  • The Archmage: In her prime, she was an even more powerful mage than Mottom, so much that Abbadon ranked her as being just under Jagganoth in terms of raw power and skill (she was ranked above even Solomon). But after she tried witnessing the Shape of the Universe (something that burned a goddess's eyes out), she went mad and entombed herself, with Mottom replacing her as the Seven's archmage.
  • Astral Projection: During Breaker of Infinities, Jadis finally enters the narrative by using a mental projection to communicate with Allison coherently despite her true body being locked in glass. She says that Allison is pretty much the only one she can communicate with in this way and it is one of the few times she will have had any real company throughout her entire existence.
  • Because Destiny Says So: Her explanation for why she saved Allison has no real justification behind it other than it's what she foresaw.
    Allison: ... Why did you save me?
    Jadis: Oh!- Uh... it's what I do.
    Allison: It's what you do? Save people? Well good fucking job.
    Jadis: No... Not like that Allison. I'm omniscient.
  • Blessed with Suck: Perfect, omniscient knowledge doesn't seem so good in practice when you're constantly seeing everything to the point of being driven insane. Jadis tried seeing the shape of the universe seemingly For Science!, leading to her spending much of the story being a shriveled corpse whispering prophecies from within a glass tomb. Even after she is freed from her glass tomb, her perfect knowledge left her a deeply jaded, nihilistic woman who feels her actions, choices, and even her own identity (and everyone else's) are rendered completely moot when compared to the full shape of the universe. Alison eventually realizes that Jadis is unable to change or recover from the traumas of her past because she no longer has a past - instead she's perpetually reliving all her worst moments, as well as every other moment, forever.
  • Brilliant, but Lazy: Justified. Jadis used to be the second-most powerful Demiurge of the Seven after Jagganoth, a princess hailing from a long-lasting dynasty of philosopher-kings with supreme command over the sorcerous arts. She was so powerful that in her prime, she was the Seven's resident Archmage, making her a Sorcerous Overlord. But after witnessing the Shape of the Universe, the knowledge Jadis procured utterly broke her and sent her into a state of near-totally nihilistic apathy. It's not that she's lazy because she chooses to be, it's that she can't, because she can and is always seeing everything that can and will happen. Whatever choice she makes, it's because she foresaw it happening and acting according to her own prophecies.
  • Cheshire Cat Grin: During her first encounter with Allison in Breaker of Infinities, Jadis presents Allison with an extremely broad and unsuitable-for-the-occasion grin.
  • Condescending Compassion: In a sort of twisted interpretation of her original benevolent goals and desires, Allison's final conversation with Jadis implies that part of why Jadis rescued Allison, healed all her wounds, and then tried to get Allison to accept the inevitability of fate was to try and keep Allison safe, comfortable, and "still" so that Allison wouldn't be hurt again.
  • Dark and Troubled Past: She was prophesied to be the one who would witness the Shape of the Universe, and was indoctrinated by her emotionally abusive father to see it as an opportunity to gain more power — even having her beat herself bloody with books to make her lose any compassion and empathy she had for her family's downtrodden subjects. In defiance, she eventually killed her father, and resolved to use her power as both a Demiurge and Bearer of the Shape to be the benevolent goddess her people needed. But when she actually witnessed the Shape, she saw that all she did would amount to nothing, completely breaking her. By the present, she became a deeply nihilistic woman who is constantly fixated on her perfect, omniscient knowledge, unable to let it go no matter how much she wanted to die.
  • Dark Lord on Life Support: She was entombed after witnessing the Shape of the Universe, which granted her unerring knowledge of the future and hit her with a Brown Note of literally cosmic scale. She wears a white mask to hide the fact that her real face, once quite beautiful, is now completely desiccated and corpse-like.
  • A Day in the Limelight: After four books as little more than a bit character stuck in a glass prison whispering prophecies, she's set up to be significantly more important in Breaker of Infinities, getting a prominent place on the cover and being Allison's host for the second half of the book.
  • Death Seeker: Even in her glass block of a prison, she is constantly tormented by the perfect, omniscient knowledge granted by the Shape of the Universe. According to Abbadon, here, she just wants to die now.
  • De-power: She used to be "terrifyingly" powerful among the demiurges, until she decided to try to look at the Shape of the Universe, which once made a Goddess' eyes boil in their sockets. It left her the ruined husk she is now.
  • Despair Event Horizon: Seeing the Shape of the Universe pushed her to and past her breaking point, as it completely crushed her belief that she could make any kind of choices at all—even the choice she believed she was making for herself to use her power responsibly. Given Allison's comments in Breaker of Infinities about how "there is only...everything. Now. Forever" for Jadis, it's even worse: her perfect knowledge of everything that ever is, was, and will be means that she is constantly, continually reliving the complete and total despair that hit her when she saw the Shape and realized the futility of everything, and will do so for as long as she exists.
  • Discard and Draw: Her Boss Subtitles in Book 5 describe her as "Bearer of the Shape and former Bearer of the word Mind", implying that gaining her knowledge of the Shape cost her access to her Key's powers. Exactly what, if anything, happened to her Key once Jadis lost the will to control it is still unclear; it is possible Jadis still holds the Key but is simply unable to use it in any meaningful manner.
  • Dissonant Serenity: During Breaker of Infinities she very much lives up to her title as "The Lady of Infinite Repose" by describing to Allison the severity of her injuries and the methods taken to heal her... all while calmly asking Allison with a smile, "Does it [still] hurt?" Later, she casually talks about how she became the Sole Survivor of her family in their attempt to bear the shape of the universe like one would talk about the weather.
  • Dramatic Irony: According to one flashback, Jadis used the Survival Mantra "I'm free to choose my own path" to guide her back when she was alive. It was her last words as she turned on the machine and was shattered by the Shape.
  • Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Back when she was a healthy, living young woman, she had black hair and the starkly pale features of a noh mask.
  • Emperor Scientist: Of the Seven, she represented this the most. She was the Seven's most powerful spellcaster prior to her entombment, and in Book 5, she's revealed to have a personal bedroom full of bookshelves, manuscripts, and scientific equipment. It evokes ironic parallels to Emperor Qin Shi Huang and his search for immortality. There's also a ginormous machine she and her family built to try see and comprehend the shape of the universe, stored within her domain/palace.
  • Empty Shell: Witnessing the Shape destroyed her mind completely; having experienced complete or nearly complete ego death, "Jadis" views herself as little more than an automaton acting out a fate predestined for her, indistinguishable from the universe.
  • Expy: Of Sotha Sil. She is a godlike scientist whose perfect knowledge of the future has left her frozen in place with utter uncertainty and inability to move forward. Unlike Sotha Sil, who is still able to work in the world despite possessing "terrible certainty," Jadis is unable to look past her perfect knowledge of the future and build anything new.
  • The Fatalist: Jadis already has perfect knowledge of the entirety of existence, including all her own future actions. She is no longer on speaking terms with any sort of belief in 'free will'.
    Jadis: All things in their totality are immutable. We simply do what we do.
  • For Science!: Deconstructed in how this pertains to Jadis' Sloth motif. Jadis came from a family of philosopher royalty who saw the Shape of the Universe as an experiment to study and dissect, and deemed the idea of using power to help others as beneath them. They were so obsessed with gaining power from witnessing the Shape that ten generations wasted their own lives trying to find ways to comprehend it in a way mortals could. Young Jadis was indoctrinated from a young age by her cruel, abusive father to see the act of gaining the Shape's power as its own goal, and while she tried devoting herself to using her power for good, she ultimately couldn't handle the omniscient knowledge granted by the Shape, or the soul-crushing revelation that none of her choices mattered in the grand scheme of things.
  • A Form You Are Comfortable With: During Breaker of Infinities, she communicates with Allison using a projection that looks alive and healthy, and speaks entirely coherently. Since the other Demiurges never see this side of her, the projection is possibly either bound to Jadis' palace or it's a mental image that only Allison can see.
  • The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: During her segment in Breaker of Infinities she narrates Allison's reactions to her speech that will happen several strips later.
  • From Nobody to Nightmare: Stands out as the sole aversion of this trope amongst the Seven. Jadis' father was a Demiurge, and she grew up as royalty and under a prophecy to succeed his title and be the one of their lineage to finally locate the Shape. That said, her childhood was horrifically abusive and Jadis attempted to rebel against it, which was part of what motivated her to join the Seven.
  • Glamour Failure: Jadis' projections can look extremely lifelike, but she occasionally forgets to make them cast shadows. When Jadis activates The Machine, the projection reverts to her true appearance inside the crystal and appears as an eyeless, dessicated corpse, and when Allison begins sinking into despair Jadis becomes physically bigger the closer Allison gets to death. When Allison finally rejects her, the projections begin wearing all black and their facial features begin distorting.
  • God Is Good: In Breaker of Infinities it's revealed that Jadis wanted to be one in her youth, using her power as both a Demiurge and chosen Bearer of the Shape to become a benevolent goddess who tended to the downtrodden mortals she always sympathized with. Sadly, upon witnessing the Shape of the universe, she gave up on her goals because she came to believe that all her choices don't matter in the grand scheme of things.
  • Go Mad from the Revelation: Prior to her entombing, she was the second-most powerful amongst the Seven, being right under Jagganoth. But after witnessing the Shape of the Universe, she went mad and entombed herself in a block of glass, and subsequently shriveled up into something resembling a corpse that does little beyond whispering prophecies. During her A Day in the Limelight she's shown to be a very jaded, nihilistic woman who, because of her perfect knowledge, believes action and choice are both illusions, and that the point of everything is nothing.
  • Gone Horribly Right: Jadis wanted to become omniscient. She succeeded, only to understand that it was a the worst case of Blessed with Suck imaginable.
  • An Ice Person: Similar to her namesake, Jadis appears to have some control of ice, conjuring a huge amount of it during the Discordance to shield the Seven from Jagganoth's Rain of Arrows. The first projection she uses to contact Allison on Rayuba resembles a Yuki-Onna.
  • Ignorance Is Bliss: Jadis very much believes in this, stating outright to Allison that her not knowing everything means she can still have some form of agency through her ignorance because she can't tell beforehand what she's going to to do anyway.
  • Impossibly-Low Neckline: Tends to wear her kimonos around her shoulders, leaving the majority of her neckline bare... not that its particularly noticeable when she's a desiccated corpse. Once we see Jadis's form in her prime though, in some panels it even looks like she's disrobing from how low that neckline is.
  • Intelligible Unintelligible: Her priests are quite good at interpreting her "SS- ssss- ss..."
  • I Was Quite a Looker: In her youth, she was a beautifully regal young woman who wore colorful kimonos and elaborate hairstyles. Presently, she's an insane, shriveled corpse whose face is thankfully covered by a mask. Her projections look quite normal, putting aside the impracticality of their outfits.
  • Lady of War: In her prime, she resembled a beautiful noblewoman in looks and clothes, and she's also a powerful Magic Knight who ranked just below Jagganoth in terms of raw power and combat skill. But after witnessing the Shape of the Universe, she's presently little more than a withered corpse who can only whisper prophecies from inside her glass prison.
  • "Leave Your Quest" Test: During Breaker of Infinities She gives Allison the option of a painless death, or failing that living a sheltered and peaceful life inside her temple until Jagganoth undoes Creation, as an alternative to going back outside and facing the world. What exactly her motivations for offering are — or if 'motivations' are even applicable to Jadis any more — is anyone's guess.
  • Loss of Identity: The alt text and some of her lines in her section of Breaker of Infinites discuss how if you can see everything, anything in it just becomes meaningless, unidentifiable noise in the infinite detail of it all, and how she can't tell where the lines between the Shape of the Universe and even her own mind are anymore. Jadis straight-up tells Allison that she, Jadis, does not exist in any meaningful sense.
    Jadis: Where do I fit? Where's the lines? I can't even see my own mind!
  • Mad Oracle: After witnessing the Shape of the Universe, she is granted perfect, omniscient knowledge of everything, and can foretell everything with perfect clarity. In the process, she became little more than a corpse entombed in a block of glass, eyes staring out unblinkingly while she struggles even to whisper "SS- ssss- ss...". During Breaker of Infinities she's quickly revealed to be a Straw Nihilist to Allison.
  • Magic Knight: She can be seen wielding a sword during flashbacks before she was entombed, and it's been stated by Abbadon that all the Demiurges are skilled in physical combat, even the ones who were primarily mages. Obviously, in her current state she's not much of either any more.
  • Magic Mirror: She is one, essentially, as an unmoving, omniscient piece of glass that can tell you literally anything you wish to know.
  • Masking the Deformity: She wears a plain white noh mask over her face ever since she was sealed in glass. It seems more for presentation's sake than to hide the fact.
  • Meaningful Name: She shares her name with Jadis of The Chronicles of Narnia, known as the White Witch. Both of them hold terrible power, except Jadis of Narnia used it to wipe out everything in sheer spite, while Jadis of KSBD was driven insane by her perfect omnisience and entombed herself in glass.
  • Mirror Monster: She's in a block of glass, and can do nothing but make prophecies from within it.
  • Non-Linear Character: Being The Omniscient, Jadis has firsthand experience and memory of, well, everything, including everything that has, is and ever will happen, to anyone, anywhere, at any time, including events that happened before her body was born and everything that will happen after said body dies. Consequently 'causality' and 'time' are somewhat meaningless concepts to her. Jadis is presumably fully aware of the Time Loop the universe is stuck in, but she evidently doesn't even care about it because it's basically a drop in the bucket in the total age of everything that is or is not.
  • The Omniscient: She once tried to witness the true Shape of the Universe purely For Science! — effectively punching through a You Cannot Grasp the True Form of literally cosmic scope. Omniscience came to her in a Brown Note that scoured her mind and body, leaving her de-powered, entombed in glass, and capable only of whispering unerring but semi-coherent prophecies, which her priests are prone to misinterpreting in small but crucial ways. Even outside her glass tomb, she's a deeply jaded, nihilistic woman who believes actions are illusions and everything else (including people's identities and minds) are moot compared to the vastness of the Shape. According to Abbadon, Jadis knows the most, in fact. Of anyone. Ever.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business: For her entire tenure in the comic, Jadis has been defined by her perfect, infinite knowledge, her imprisonment within a glass tomb, and the agony that both of those things cause her. Her entering the story at all after the Discordance and interacting with Allison directly just underlines how much things have gone to heck.
  • Patricide: According to Abbadon, she killed her own father at a young age. After we're shown what he was like, it's not hard to see why.
  • Prescience Is Predictable: As The Omniscient, Jadis suffers from this trope to the extent of 'prescience will drive you mad and make you abandon all hopes and dreams and your ability to care about everything'.
  • The Prophecy: Communicates mostly through these, and thanks to being The Omniscient, is never wrong. Jadis, however, cannot talk very much, and those that interpret her writings are fallible.
  • Prophecy Twist: As is said before, Jadis is never wrong. The priests in charge of interpreting her prophecies, however, very much are. Jadis' Prophecy of the Successor, delivered in Kill Six Billion Demons, is revealed to have some major holes in it: The major one being that Zaid is not the Successor, Allison is. Exactly why the prophecy was misdelivered is one of the ongoing mysteries of the comic, and may involve anything from a translation error by Jadis' priests to Jadis outright lying. It is also possible the Prophecy was valid for every other reset of the Eternal Recurrence, but Allison's story does not involve her filling the role the Successor normally does. Whichever it is, Jadis herself is quite clear at the end of Breaker of Infinities that Allison is the Wheel-Smashing Lord, and likely the one who will fulfill Zoss' designs for someone who can break the Wheel where he could not.
  • Screw Destiny: Despite her family's wishes for her to become the Bearer of the Shape so they could experiment with its power and increase their own standing as a royal family through her, she tried defying them by vowing to use whatever power she gained from the Shape to help tend to her downtrodden subjects. Sadly for her, it's deconstructed once she actually witnesses the Shape — while she gains perfect, omniscient knowledge from it, she came to believe all her choices don't matter in the grand scheme of things, causing her to give up on acting on her benevolent goals.
  • Shout-Out: Jadis shares her name with another Sorcerous Overlord, the White Witch from The Chronicles of Narnia.
  • Slouch of Villainy: Does this during her Establishing Character Moment in Breaker of Infinities by lounging in the operator's chair of the machine she used to see the Shape. She then turns the machine on Allison.
  • Sole Survivor: According to her, her family devoted ten generations to building a machine that would allow them to perceive the shape of the universe. When it was finally turned on, it obliterated everyone except her.
  • Stepford Smiler: She's quite expressive outside of her cube, but her smiles are either uncomfortably wide and stiff or closer to pained grimaces.
  • Straw Nihilist: Causality and free will are nothing more than illusions. According to her apparently perfect knowledge of the universe, everything that has happened and will happen are already frozen in amber. She no longer benefits from the illusion of choice, with everything she does being done because that is what she is supposed to do. When Allison asks what then the point is in anything, her answer is nothing.
  • Support Party Member: Downplayed, but she doesn't use any offensive abilities during the Discordance, preferring instead to use ice magic to protect her fellow Demiurges from Jagganoth.
  • The Tape Knew You Would Say That: Demonstrates the extent of her omniscience to Allison this way, with increasingly detailed levels of precision in calling out the latter's words and gestures moments before they happen. It takes barely a minute to have Allison begging Jadis to stop.
  • The Theocracy: According to Abbadon's tumblr, her conquered worlds are run by a church dedicated to worshipping her, which has a very active inquisition and little tolerance for 'heresy'. Jadis herself has little input on its rule given her problems with communication.
  • Thousand-Yard Stare: Her eyes are constantly staring ahead, showing how much witnessing the Shape of the Universe has driven her insane. Even her projections have a tendency to stare uncomfortably.
  • Token Good Teammate: Well, good may be a stretch considering how low the bar is among the Demiurges. Still, Jadis is the only Demiurge that helps and treats Allison with genuine (if unhelpful or even unhealthy) kindness and compassion. Even her trying to convince Allison to give up her fight seems to be motivated entirely by wanting to spare her from seemingly needless suffering. Even when Allison ultimately rejects her help and makes it clear that she won’t be dissuaded from her path, Jadis demands no recompense and makes no real effort to stop her from simply leaving, and can be seen praying for Allison during the final panels of the book.
  • Threshold Guardians: In Breaker of Infinities Jadis offers a final temptation to Allison, giving her the option of leaving her pointless quest and live out a peaceful life inside Jadis' pyramid. After Allison makes a final refusal and leaves, Jadis is seen praying for Allison and all the suffering she will undergo in the future.
  • Tragic Villain: Driven in her youth by her ambition and now finding herself with no ambition at all and no way to escape what she has become, Jadis' circumstances are so miserable that Allison can't help but genuinely pity her. Jadis describes herself as lacking in will and identity, and one who has failed completely, but her self was so shattered by bearing the Shape she is powerless to be better.
  • Used to Be a Sweet Kid: "Breaker of Infinities" reveals that Jadis used to be a genuinely good person, a rarity among demiurges, who thought power was useless if she didn't use it to help people, much to the dismay of her cruel father who thought power was its own purpose in itself. Despite her father's verbal and physical abuse, she was determined to chose her own path and become a kind divinity. Then she saw the shape of the universe, and realized that there is no choice because everything is predetermined, becoming the Straw Nihilist she is today..
  • Villainous Rescue: She teleports a pleading Allison away after the latter runs afoul of Incubus. She has her extensive injuries healed afterwards.
  • White Mask of Doom: She wears one to cover whatever's left of her rotted, desiccated face.
  • Who Wants to Live Forever?: She is a Demiurge, who in the setting are immortal Physical Gods for all intents and purposes. However, she is so tormented by her perfect, omniscient knowledge that she truly wants to die.

The Emissaries

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/ksbd_emissaries.png
Solomon David with four of his Emissaries.

As the Seven currently monopolize all the Magus Keys in the Multiverse, they have power to spare. As such, they occasionally grant one of their many Keys to favoured servants or ambassadors, turning them into an Emissary. An Emissary is essentially a lesser version of a Demiurge, possessing a Key of Kings and some of its attendant power, but is dependent on the patronage of their god to stay that way.


    Saharus of the Celestial Empire 

Emissary Saharus of the Celestial Empire

One of Solomon's emissaries who comes to the Harvest to pay tribute.


    Mottom's Emissary 

An Emissary who stands next to Mottom's throne.


  • Badass Longcoat: Wears a long coat and is extremely powerful.
  • Color-Coded Characters: Wears bright orange and dark blue clothing which is typically worn by servants of Mottom's empire.
  • Covered with Scars: Downplayed as we only see 2 or 3 scars on his head.
  • Flat Character: All we know is that he's an Emissary of Mottom.
  • No Name Given: Not so far.
  • Uncertain Doom: In King of Swords, its mentioned by one of Solomon's councilors that Mottom has executed several of her guild leaders to centralise power. It is possible this also included her Emissaries.

     000001 

000001

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/00001_blank.png

"Tis' only a little creature. A wretch who has mistaken strength for power".

The Head of the Priests of the Count and Bank of the Grand Dragon. Mammon's Emissary, and representative in all business and political deals.


  • Asskicking Leads to Leadership: The Priest-Martyrs of the Holy Count obey those of a lower number, and 00001 has the lowest number of them all simply by dint of being the one who survived everything that killed anyone who had a lower number than her.
  • Custom Uniform: Where all other Priests of the Count wear number plaques around their necks, she has a sliver coin, presumably one of the pieces that Mammon paid to assassinate his family. It's later revealed that her number is tattooed directly onto her chest, since having reached the top of the Priest-Martyrs' hierarchy she could only ever lose her position through dying.
  • Deliberately Painful Clothing: What 000001 is wearing underneath her nun's habit-like-frock turns out to be dozens of piercings, a needle-filled bra, a chastity belt, and dozens of belts resembling bondage gear. Word of God is that he was trying to create an outfit implying self-flagellation for horror rather than BDSM titillation.
  • The Dragon: Obvious pun aside, she's Mammon's right hand woman who represents him in all deals, even those between him and the rest of the Seven.
  • Dragon-in-Chief: Mammon...has issues. Issues that prevent him from doing anything other than repelling assassins and rolling in acres of gold. As such, she's in control of everything that Mammon has, but she's also extremely devoted to him — the moment Mammon orders her not to attack Allison 00001 immediately obeys and tells the latter that she has a Mercy Lead for as long as Mammon remembers her presence.
  • Early-Bird Cameo: She makes an appearance very early in the comics representing Mammon at the Concordance of the Demiurges and is dismissed by Mottom as a "paper pusher" which implies that the other Demiurges don't realise how significant she is in keeping the stability of Mammon's empire.
  • Flaming Sword: Well, flaming axe. Her Axe of Judication is an enormous axe made out of fire that she pulled from her Key of Kings. She has a flaming katana too, for Dual Wielding with the axe.
  • Hammerspace: She summons her axe from nowhere and literally pulls her flaming katana out of her forehead.
  • The Heavy: It's she, not Mammon, who directly opposes Allison and Cio's heist to enter the Infinite Vault. Mammon is not even aware that anybody was trying to get in until Allison finally faced him.
  • Holy Halo: "Holy" being an extremely relative term, her bronze halo marks her either as someone with exceptional Enlightenment Superpowers, someone exceptionally favoured by her patron Demiurge, or both.
  • Knight Templar: She sees it as her holy mission to protect Mammon no matter what, and judges anyone who tries to enter the vault extremely harshly (and lethally). The only thing that could stay her hand is Mammon himself, who is generally more amicable and reasonable when it comes to visitors.
  • Meaningful Name: The Priests of the Holy Count are given numbers which designate their relative strength and position within the hierarchy of the priesthood. 000001 is the highest rank possible within the system, and means 000001 either killed her way to the top or simply survived everything that killed the ones above her when she first joined.
  • Parental Substitute: She describes herself as Mammon's "nursemaid", making her the closest thing to a parental figure Mammon has. Much of her interactions with him are very similar to a mother looking after her young child; whenever danger arises, she tells Mammon to "avert [his] ailing eyes" in a motherly manner before going to deal with the threat herself.
  • Pet the Dog: While she is the most trusted Emissary of a Demiurge, much of her interactions with Mammon are very motherly despite him being both her boss and much older. She also gently leads two frightened children away from Allison and Cio when they approach.
  • Purple Is Powerful: She has purple skin, and is the second most dangerous entity within the Infinite Bank of Yre. She fights Mottom in hand-to-hand combat during the battle of Yre, though Mottom is later seen having defeated her.
  • Rage Breaking Point: It takes Mottom attacking Mammon for her stoic facade to break, but when it does, she is clearly furious.
    000001: Pity the dragon! Praise the count! IÄ!'
  • The Stoic: Even in the midst of combat, she always has a perpetually serene look on her face. However, once Mottom makes an attack on the Bank, her serene facade breaks to reveal pure, unadulterated fury as she readies herself for battle and rallies the armies of Mammon behind her.
  • Villain Teleportation: Despite having led the forces of the Priests against the heist crew, she somehow manages to escape to and is already by Mammon's side when Allison finally reaches him. Justified unlike most examples of this trope in that she would presumably know the fastest route to Mammon as his Dragon-in-Chief, and could even be able to teleport with the White Art.
  • You Are Number 6: She has no name that we know of, only a number that represents her place in the hierarchy of the Priests of the Count and Bank of the Grand Dragon. The Rant in a comic where she readies for a battle against Mammon's invasion of Yre reveal the truth about her status as 000001:
    In the vault of Yre, the servants of the god of the Deep number only ten thousand. They venerate the holy ranking of martyrs, by which each is shown by his own number. Once a martyr dies, all below him are risen in rank and automatically promoted, thus are the priests an eternal body. To make it to the top of the holy order to the very first rank, a servant must be practically bathed in blood.
  • Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: She has an archaic speech pattern that's heavy on the "thee"s.

    Incubus' Warlords 

The Emissaries of Incubus are made up of former would-be warlords from his many, many owned worlds. They command the Golden Army of their God from his headquarters in the Spire of Lethyx.


  • Alas, Poor Villain: They may be tyrannical warlords but they all used to be normal people who were manipulated by Incubus into accepting his power and razing their home universes.
  • Beard of Evil: Several of them have beards and are tyrannical warlords who tear apart worlds.
  • Body Horror: Mixed in with Facial Horror as many of them have several festering sores on their bodies and faces.
  • Crown of Horns: One of the Warlords wears a horned crown.
  • Enemy Mine: In Wheel-Smashing Lord, the fact that Incubus is mentioned to be leading Jagganoth's forces in their planned invasion of Throne, there's an implication that the Golden Army has now allied with or is at the very least not fighting with Jagganoth's forces.
  • Equal-Opportunity Evil: A few Humans of color and Servants are among the Golden Army Warlords.
  • The Faceless: One of the Warlords wears a helmet that occurs her face.
  • From Nobody to Nightmare: They all used to be ordinary people that were failures, drunks, and washouts. Then Incubus gave them his Key of Kings and they all became powerful warlords. Then they're reduced to wretches living in filth, essentially going back to being the same nobodies they once were, in addition to being addicted to Incubus' power.
  • Hard Work Hardly Works: Deconstructed. All the Warlords sought out Incubus and made deals with him in exchange for godly power and prestige, becoming warriors, rulers, sages, and other great individuals. However, Enlightenment Superpowers in the setting are gained through years of hard work and training, which means Incubus' Super-Empowering is only temporary and eventually leads to physical, mental, and spiritual rot the more power the Warlords try to take without working for it themselves.
  • The Hedonist: All of them are, indulging themselves in conquest and destruction.
  • How the Mighty Have Fallen: Once powerful warlords, they now are mad kings who are left to rot in the filth of Lethyx and beg Incubus for more power.
  • Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: The same Warlord who wields a spear also wields a shield.
  • Our Goblins Are Different: A goblin is among Incubus' Warlords.
  • Psycho Pink: All of them have pink eyes and are hedonistic warlords who tear apart worlds for anything of value there.
  • Puppet King: They are this to Incubus, who doesn't care about the worlds under his control and just leaves them to their own devices most of the time.
  • Purple Is Powerful: One of Incubus' Warlords seen in his explantation wears purple clothing. Subverted later once it's revealed that all the current Warlords have become mad and weak while rotting in Lethyx.
  • Sinister Minister: One of Incubus' Warlords is dressed like a bishop or pope, implying this trope.
  • Uncleanliness Is Next to Ungodliness: All of the current Warlords spend their days rotting away in the filth of Lethyx, looking like hollowed wretches who beg Incubus for more power like a bunch of drug addicts.
  • Walking Shirtless Scene: One of the four Warlords first seen doesn't wear a shirt, revealing his muscles.

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