YMMV / Drenai

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Caessa being revealed as a Serial Killer in Legend. This isn't a spoiler because it has no effect on the plot; the other characters don't even find out about it. It's just this bizarre backstory detail that she liked to have sex with men, though she felt no desire for them, so that she could murder them in their sleep later because weeping over their dead bodies made her feel alive.
• Complete Monster: Emperor Ceska, the mad ruler of the Drenai people in The King Beyond The Gate, is a ruthless tyrant. Using a cult of chaos priests, Ceska mutates humans by fusing them with animals to create The Joinings, and enslaves them mentally to serve as an army. Ceska taxes and brutalizes the populace, answering any hint of defiance by massacring people, including entire villages. When a rebellion arises, Ceska attempts to have everyone in the vicinity, man, woman or child, killed so that the lands will run with, in his words, "oceans of blood". A bloated, insane, cowardly tyrant, Ceska is remembered as the greatest shame of the once proud Drenai history.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Legend: Ulric is the great Khan of the Nadir. A brilliant leader who forges the Nadir people into a unified strong in a series of dynamic campaign, Ulric intends to expand his dreams of conquest and take even the mighty Drenai. Overrunning most of the known world with his own will and might, Ulric lays siege to Dros Delnoch, the stronghold of the Drenai, and challenges the defenders to their limits. Stating how much he loves the defenders for their resistance, Ulric shows his honor when he allows the gates to open in a temporary peace so the defenders might give a worthy funeral to the legendary warrior Druss.
  • The King Beyond the Gate: Tenaka Khan, Ulric's descendant, is a half-Nadir warrior who helps to challenge the mad Drenai emperor Ceska. Helping the Drenai to route Ceska's forces and hold the line strategically, Tenaka travels to the Nadir to unite them with his own skill and charisma, leading them back to destroy Ceska's power and kill the evil emperor. Later conquering the Drenai after taking Dros Delnoch, Tenaka later returns from the dead to help Drenai heroes bring down his own evil son Jungir, before accepting his final fate and following Jungir into the afterlife.

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