Villain Critique Thread (Because Its About Damn Time!)

I love the aspect that this really formidable and crazy, dangerous predator ultimately has his own feared adversary. That he was ultimately a crazed, greedy human at the start, desperate to hold on to the things he obtained through raids and carnage - and ultimately, how despite being a vampire at the story's start, his behavior now versus his backstory isn't terribly different. He wants so he takes - whether he's a human or a vampire. And the vampires around him aren't different, only chafing at the restrictions he imposes. Not the immorality involved.

• Name: Satori, "The Many-Colored Bird", "The Mad Instigator", "The Master of The Locus".

• Age: Satori's exact age isn't clear, and he may even be from a different planet. He hints toward a Gaean Origin.

• Personality: Satori likes to make himself seem a lot more eldritch and imperceptible than he really is. He talks like his plans and ambitions are incomprehensible, impossibly convoluted and outside your feeble mortal mind's ability to grasp... And in reality, he's far less incomprehensible once you get to the brass tacks of his plans. He despises his own deity, Vicelogia, for concealing knowledge from him, and schemes to spread his power and name through the youth in order to one day acquire knowledge not even Vicelogia will know. He's jealous, cruel, petty, and vindictive on that. As far as he's concerned, there is a proper use to everyone, and they exist purely for that use. "My purposes are of course of the highest priority, and being used for that purpose should be your highest honor." His plans and ploys are of the highest importance to him, and he is loathe to actually fight unless his plan calls for it or he's backed into a corner. He unlike many other Demons exults in and utilizes modern day technology extensively, in particular attempting to make his "game", Locus of Orpheus, go viral enough to spread his name across the entirety of America's youth. Satori primarily focuses on corrupting and subverting young people, due to his belief in the future being the most important thing.

• Abilities:
  • Satori can duplicate and then fire his many colored feathers like missiles at his foes. These feathers induce temporary paralysis in any foe they hit.
  • Satori carries a black staff called the Staff of Mayhem, ending in a spider web that acts as a focus and channel for the power of the "Ocean of Mortal Hatred". Letting him unleash a dizzying wave of attacks that impact the mind as well as the body.
  • Satori like many of Vicelogia's minions is a master spellcaster, demonstrating keen and almost instinctual control of Elemental Magic, and can even perform an attack reflector to bounce any spell cast on him back on the opponent simply by manipulating the mana in the spell.
  • He is a capable telepath, being able to read un-guarded minds very easily, and taking little concentration to blow past even most mental guards. Using this, he can read what you're going to do before you do it.
  • While magic using mortals seem to be less easy for him, he can also use Mind Control on Muggles very easily indeed.
  • His Ritual Magic in particular can, with the right set up, achieve some rather spectacular things.

• Weaknesses: Fatal Flaw - arrogance... and cowardice, in a way. He's overconfident in the innate brilliance of his plans. He does also have a hole in his mind reading ability - he can and does get caught off-guard often by someone moving purely on emotion and instinct.

• Goals: Satori desires to spread his name and knowledge throughout the young, first and foremost, so as to collect their knowledge, experience, and thoughts, to eventually collect something known by them that Vicelogia does not know. He also has a whole host of minor plans and schemes undertaken at various points.

• Motivation: As far as he's concerned, Vicelogia created him for a purpose, but then denied him the whole of that purpose. If he's to be a Demon of the cause of Knowledge, Spells and Void, why wouldn't he know all the above?

• Role in the story: Big Bad of "The Raven's Game", one of many villains in the New Dawn IV era.

• Backstory: Precious little is known about his backstory, except it hints at another planet called Gaea through the name of a nation that he served before being Ascended - Phoebonon. What is clear is that Vicelogia Ascended him, and then some...harsh words and discussion took place between the Demon and its master. From there, Satori turned toward one day upstaging Vicelogia in the grandest of ways.

• Relevant Tropes:
• Animalistic Abomination: Satori is more or less a giant avian monstrosity that concocts multiple plans and has an innate understanding of magic.
• Attack Reflector: Due to his pristine command of Mana, he is capable of redirecting spells cast at him. Often showing his sheer ego by mockingly doing so with a single finger pointing where the spell's going.
• Bad Boss: Vicelogia's sterling record of how he treats his underlings continues, and in turn, Satori doesn't particularly care what advancing in his Game does to his prospective Chosen Ones - just that they can get patched back up and serve him as vectors for his knowledge.
• Badass Bookworm: In the New Dawn IV times, he's one of the most magically adept and intelligent villains in the Umbral Horde under Caine, second only to Reiji. He gets a promotion, ending up one of the Grandmaster's coterie leading up to the final battle.
• Bad Influencer: Owing to his modernity motif, he sponsors a bunch of them to covertly put signals in short videos that have certain effects when viewed enough times.
• Believing His Own Lies: The thing is, he honestly seems to believe that he's an eldritch being of impossible motives and ideas - and doesn't even think it's a lie, even though it's obviously not true.
• Body Horror: One of his spells, The Unbinding of Kar'kasa, works by manipulating someone's cells into dividing, reconstructing and even evolving at an accelerated rate. Those afflicted by it near universally turn into screaming, insane-from-pain abominations.
• Bright Is Not Good: Known as the Many-Colored Bird, and a narcissistic, conniving Demon with aspirations of showing up his own Patron God.
• The Chosen One: He selected six potential candidates to be his chosen vessel of his terrible knowledge and his name. There was also however Daniel, an outcast who tried to complete the Locus of Orpheus, who Satori absolutely despised for being "unworthy" of the honor, owing to Daniel not being popular enough to lead. Satori grew to much prefer Ericksen as the list narrowed down and candidates dropped out for...one reason or another. A popular jock, he was seen as the best possible candidate - a trend setter, a popular student, someone everyone knew and most people liked. Ironically, Daniel survived the final, harrowing portion of the Game, whereas Ericksen tore himself apart due to the nature of what was imposed on him.
• Creepy Crows: Looks for all intents to be a bright red eyed raven-person of enormous size and cruel intellect.
• Creepypasta: One of his plans involved concocting an enchanted creepypasta that causes people to suspect others of having the "Ghouly Man" influencing them, growing more and more desperate for help to exorcise the "Ghouly Man" from increasingly many people in their orbit. The spell, sent to them by Satori, would in fact do something vastly more diabolical.
• Dark Messiah: The way that he depicts himself in relation to young people; "I will spread my Name and my darkly wisdom, that the young turn their parties into my ritual sites, speak my name over fires, and allow me to harvest their experience and make of them my initiates. I will guide them into a future of my own design."
• Dirty Coward: Played With - he isn't entirely cowardly, he just prefers not fighting when he doesn't strictly need to. He only fights when his plan requires it, or if someone's managed to corner him.
• Eldritch Abomination: Subverted - he may talk about how incomprehensible his plans and ideas are, but at the end of the day he's an ambitious warlord attempting to upstage his boss. Nothing particularly incomprehensible there.
• Evil Virtues:
  • Determination: Despite pulling away from most fights, he's nothing if not completely determined to undertake his plans.
  • Patience: He watches, waits, and doesn't directly intervene unless absolutely necessary. Why expose himself to scrutiny and potential alerts when a member of his sect, or a sufficiently advanced individual in the Locus Game will do just fine?
  • Creativity: He did all of the research and innovated from there, creating a game with the full intention of it going viral and spreading. His Game is both monstrously immoral but brilliant in how it feeds off of and plays into youth culture.
• Faux Affably Evil: Viciously terrible, but he puts on an affect of academic pleasantry that if anything accentuates what kind of character Satori really is.
• Feathered Fiend: An 18 foot tall bird-man of distinctly corvid appearance, particularly resembling a raven in many of his shapes with many-colored feathers, which shift and change by the moment.
• HA HA HA—No: His response when Daniel summons him up after Ericksen's death when the boy asks if he truly "won" the spot of Chosen One. Satori takes great glee in basically telling Daniel all his efforts to win were for nothing.
• Manipulative Bastard: Unwilling to take the outcome, and eager to recoup some losses, he made a deal with Ericksen's parents in which he misrepresented what happened, and promised to utilize a ritual to bring their son back from the dead...while extracting quite a few demands of the parents in exchange for him reversing a death he more or less caused. He plays on their grief and desperation to get them to agree to it.
• Narcissist: In part why Satori hates that Vicelogia keeps knowledge from him. His ego demands being given the totality of these sorts of things.
• Necromancer: His Ritual, pitched to Ericksen's parents, promised to bring their son back from the dead. Requirements? Blood. Lots of it. Body parts to replace the ones too damaged in the Brown Note incident. And a sufficiently isolated place to do the Rite. What he doesn't tell the parents is what Ericksen will be like after he comes back.
• Number of the Beast: 6 is Vicelogia's number, and despite disliking his overlord heavily, he adheres to the convention. Satori is eighteen feet tall - six by three. His hands have six digits rather than a more human five. He selected six of his human chosen ones. The Staff of Mayhem is 6.66 feet long...
• Poke in the Third Eye: Do not attempt to psionically scan an area he's in.
• Post-Modern Magik: Satori is nothing if not an innovator and an adapter. He concocted a number of spells and magical effects by manipulating computer code, even sneaking a Demon Summoning Spell into a line of NFT's.
  • He at one point brainwashed a group of Scandinavian children into taking control of their town and spreading this dominion outward via mind magic...sent to them via image files on email. When Matthew realizes the connections, he quickly realizes only one Demon so thoroughly integrated itself into the modern technological age.
• Sinister Surveillance: Due to managing to get the Locus of Orpheus classified as a ritual, he can spy on anyone undertaking it or who has participated in it in the past.
• Smug Smiler: somehow manages to give the look when he has a beak.
• Smug Snake: He vacillates between legitimate master planner and a very, very high functioning smug snake. While his plans are usually all very impressive, they have a way of failing to account for something based on his own evaluation. For example, he simply had no way of accounting for the fact his chosen one might...not take to his plan as well as he thought.
• Sore Loser: Interestingly, on behalf of someone else. Satori was no limits of pissed off when Daniel "won" and Ericksen "lost". He didn't even care that Daniel was now mutilated and Ericksen was dead. He just cared that the wrong person won his own game.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: One way he does fit his own self conception is that his knowledge imparted tends to have negative effects on those who take too much. Ericksen in particular had a spectacular Brown Note response that led to him eviscerating himself in total silence to just try and get it all out of him.
• Urban Legend: How Locus of Orpheus works, along with...
  • Social Media Before Reason: His Game is both an old fashioned "challenge" among young people, and a social media "challenge" kind of undertaking. The fact that it is disfiguring and potentially deadly in its later stages has no stopping effect on the young people chasing it.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: He seems to start building up to it at Daniel, talking about how any "meager usefulness" he may have possessed is gone...but then averts it, stating he can't be bothered to finish Daniel off, that he's so pathetic that it would be a "courtesy he doesn't deserve". So instead, he tosses Daniel a knife, blatantly suicide daring him and then leaving a mentally shattered Daniel to whatever fate he chose.

Edited by NickTheSwing on Jan 30th 2023 at 9:24:36 AM

@ Nick The Swing:

So, something that I kind of forgot (since it's been a while since I've followed the lore of your setting) is how much your demons remind me of the Apostles from Berserk—-in the sense that they were once ordinary--or not so ordinary---people who became immortal monsters in service to a dark force.

It may seem odd, but it adds a human element to them, in spite of their inhumanity if that makes sense. The reason I bring this up in Satori's profile is because of how much this paradigm is turned on its head with him. He was never human, he was something we would already consider somewhat "supernatural"—-an alien. So in a way, he's sort of a Hybrid Monster. I just find that fascinating and thought I'd start out the review with that observation.

Anyway...

This probably won't be explained well, so I do apologize but Satori's whole thing reminds me of that meme of a man in the white suit laughing and joking and then abruptly snapping into a murderous glare.

At first one gets the impression of a parody—-yes, this entity is powerful, ancient and possessed of terrible knowledge, but he's also a blowhard who takes himself far too seriously and seems to ham it up when playing into his nature as a dark eldritch being. Again, this would fit perfectly into a character and setting made to draw humor from the genre.

And yet...then we have the evidence of what he can do. His eldritch knowledge is real and damaging, he is an ambitious and deadly creature, and he is devoid of empathy and compassion, a monster right up there with Berserk's denizens. He lashes back and forth from parody to true horror and it's amazing.

He is in fact going to be heavily involved in an upcoming roleplay of mine, the sequel to my Shadows of Sandfield Roleplay, which is nearing its conclusion.

One thing I'll include is going to be "The Orpheus Game", a short story chronicling Ericksen, Dan, and the manipulation by Satori they can't even perceive.

Edited by NickTheSwing on Mar 19th 2023 at 10:40:12 AM

Hi, ~Merseyuser1, I have no idea if you're even still working on this story or how much your character's changed, but since it looks like no one ever provided any feedback on your villain, I'd be more than happy to critique her for you.

I actually really like Carla, I love how she's not just a Flat Character and has her own little quirks and idiosyncrasies; she's feels like a person I might meet in real life.

That being said, her relatability is both a blessing and a curse. You said that she was just supposed to be Janey's rival, and if she's meant to be part of a more lighthearted work, then she should be just fine for that role. However, I didn't really get the sense of why we're supposed to consider her an antagonist. She seems more like a Hero with Bad Publicity than a villain, and even her Prima Donna tendencies are kinda offset by her self-awareness and refusal to let her family's money go to her head.

Since you plan on having her undergo a Heel–Face Turn anyway, I wouldn't consider it to be too big of an issue, but if you plan on having her be an antagonist for a good amount of the story, I think she'd be more compelling if she had more antangonistic flaws that result from her personality. Maybe she's rather abrasive toward others (she does seem to have quite a few Berserk Buttons). Maybe she's a bit of a one-track mind — ambitious to the point of neglecting or harming others, which could make things difficult for Janey and your other main characters. In any case, Carla has a lot of potential to be an interesting character.

Name: Maia Simmons (a.k.a. @Aaliha2179)

Age: 16-17

Personality: Has a crass, laid-back, sociable exterior, but is actually quite anxious, an obsessive plotter, and an unempathetic Jerk with a Heart of Jerk on the inside.

Abilities: Is a Master of Disguise who can blend in seamlessly with the crowd, and an adept researcher who can unearth the deepest, darkest secrets of her former classmates. She keeps her team in line by being a shrewd manipulator, knowing just what buttons to push to make her underlings carry out her bidding. She also possesses a valuable aquamarine gem she believes grants her clairvoyance, but it's just a rock and it doesn't do anything.

Weaknesses: Sincerely believes herself to be one of the greatest minds to exist, which leads her to underestimate her enemies and law enforcement (although she isn't too far off the mark concerning law enforcement in this universe). She also believes that a literal rock possesses psychic powers, so she often changes up her plans for no discernable reason in order to appease said rock.

Goals: She wants to expand her Knowledge Broker business beyond her school district and establish a monopoly in the city, with a vast database filled with intel on everyone within its borders.

Motivation: Deep down, she believes that some mysterious entity is out to get her because of her intelligence and the powers of her aquamarine, so she wants to know all the secrets of as many people as possible in order to prevent this. She also mistrusts her parents, who belong to a powerful and influential fraternity, and making her business successful allows her to live independently from them.

Role in the story: She starts off as a neutral party and a helpful source of information for the protagonists, but she eventually slides into villain territory as the main characters butt heads with her and attempt to find out her identity, and ultimately becomes the Big Bad of the story.

Backstory: Maia's been bullied by her peers for much of her life because of her paranoid behavior and her belief in a local spiritual leader, and her parents were rarely around because of their service to the fraternity, which they would pressure Maia to join when they were around.

After starting high school, Maia decided to improve her social standing by making herself useful to the petty, vindictive popular kids as an informant. Using an obscure encrypted messaging app under the user handle @Aaliha2179, she eventually began running her own Knowledge Brokerage and hiring her own informants to spy on the student body.

After two successful years of running the @Aaliha2179 channel, tragedy struck when an arsonist burned down Maia's high school while classes were still in session. Maia was already planning on running away from home, so after escaping the building, she took the opportunity to skip town and mobilize her informants across the district as the student body was split amongst the remaining high schools (and one middle school), exploiting the tragedy by swearing to find out who was responsible.

Relevant Tropes: Companion Cube, Jerk with a Heart of Jerk, Knowledge Broker, Lack of Empathy, Manipulative Bitch, Master of Disguise, Opportunistic Bastard, The Paranoiac, The Runaway.

Edited by Kahibalo on Apr 7th 2023 at 9:13:49 AM

I like the idea of an anxious but brilliant villain. I also think this is a good use of a sympathic backstory that explains her attitude and motivation without trying to justify her — I think it makes sense and she feels like a realistic person. All and all, good job!

@ Kahibalo:

An interesting character to be sure. I haven't seen many of them (not really my genre) but Maia would be perfectly at home in computer-based dramas like Person of Interest and Mr. Robot. She definitely has sympathetic roots, but as with any good villain, those are only roots. They provide a motivation and understanding as to what drives her, but ultimately do not bely or excuse her actions. Still I cannot help but feel sorry for her. It seems like she was a truly exceptional talent and could have been so much more, so much better than what she became if her parents had just been there for her.

• Name: The Guardian Beast/ The First of Wyrms

• Age: He came into existence during Kishlaith's Age of Dawn, making him only slightly younger than the world itself.

• Appearance:

The First of Wyrms is a colossal reptilian beast; from the tip of his long jaws to the end of his tail he is the length of several cities and is many hundreds of feet in height. His entire body is covered with gleaming white scales, so rough-edged and hard that they are more akin to stone than flesh. The First's two front legs are disturbingly like humanoid arms, ending in five "fingers" equipped with razor sharp claws, although his back legs are digitigrade. Thus, although he spends most of his time on all fours, he can rise up for brief periods to stand upright. He possesses a barrel-chested body and long sinuous neck. His jaws are wide like a crocodile's and lined with rows of razor-sharp teeth, and a forked tongue darts in and out of mouth as he smells his surroundings. He has two large yellow eyes, set in deep sockets on either side of his head, their pupils slitted and reptilian. He is equipped with two pairs of wings, a huge upper pair that protrude from his shoulders and a lower pair that erupt from around where his tail starts. The membranes of his wings pulse with deep golden radiance, as if still retaining the eternal light of the Bright King, ages after his creation. The four backswept horns that grow around his head are similar; they appear crystalline in nature rather than constructs of flesh and let off a faint golden glimmer that pulses like a heart. When the First of Wyrms was in the midst of battle, a hideous red glow spread across his entire body, shimmering from underneath his white scales. This gave him the horrifying appearance of something burned so deeply that it had become white ash, while retaining traces of devastating heat. When doing this for long periods of time, spirals of bright yellow flame would outright erupt across the length of his neck and back, giving the appearance of shifting and malleable "spines".

• Personality:
  • Upon his creation, the First of Wyrms was known as the Guardian Beast, designating his assigned task. He felt nothing but gratitude and deep reverence for his creator, the Bright King. He was fully dedicated to the purpose for which he was made, protecting the souls of the deceased on their journey to the Bright King's realm. Simply doing his job and fighting off greedy, hateful hordes of Nameless Gods as they tried to devour souls brought him great satisfaction, and he would often cheerfully try to connect with his "partner" the Corpse Hound, and saw the other god as a valued friend, perhaps his only friend.

  • However, as time went on, the Guardian Beast was consumed with longing and desire for the same meaningful contributions to life and existence that the Bright King and his mortals were able to bring about. This longing grew into raging jealousy as he witnessed more and more of the King's effortless power to shape and create with merely a thought. He came to understand both his own powerlessness and the fact that his job was an eternal role. From there, deep resentment churned as the Guardian Beast blamed the Bright King for intentionally leaving him without the ability to create anything of his own, and for seeing him as mere tool to be used without thought for his emotions or feelings.

  • By the time he betrayed the Bright King via his twisted methods of creating life in his own image, he felt nothing but satisfaction that he had beaten his creator at his own game. The Bright King's fury and horror at his actions only fed the Guardian Beast's smug sense of triumph and deepened his determination to ensure independence and cement himself as a creator in his own right.

  • His hostility towards his master carried over to anyone or anything created by the Bright King as well. Upon invading and burning much of the newborn Kishlaith to a cinder, he gloated at how weak and poorly made the lifeforms of the world were, nothing like his superior and expertly crafted "children". If anything, the Guardian Beast saw the mortals of Kishlaith as trash to be cleared to make room on Kishlaith for his brood. He gleefully embraced the title mortals had for him, “The First of Wyrms”, finding that it perfectly suited who he was and what he stood to accomplish, and saw the shedding of his former label as his final rebellion against his uncaring and selfish master.

  • When the Fae rose up against him and violently severed his control over his creations, the First of Wyrms underwent a vast personality change. He became first enraged and then frantic as he sought to reestablish his mental hold over them. The sudden loss carved a hole of emptiness within his consciousness, and he sought to remedy it by any means necessary. Eventually he sank into a mindless frenzy, his lofty ambitions and plans lost in desperation to simply regain control over his creations once again. This broken mindset was his to bear for all eternity, and due to the Bright King quarantining him from wider Kishlaith, it is his to bear alone forever.

  • At least it should have been.

  • The possibility is slim, but there are disturbing signs that the First has slowly but steadily undergone an evolution of some kind, either through the improvement of his mental state or perhaps developing an entirely new persona that can better adapt to the loss of his creations and seek solutions to his broken state. Either option is a horrific prospect, since it is clear that he has concrete plans to escape his prison…an event that would be devastating if not outright apocalyptic for modern Kishlaith.

• Abilities:
  • The First of Wyrms was made to combat the infinite masses of Nameless Gods who attacked and ate the souls being escorted by the Corpse Hound. As such, he had a number of powerful abilities and attributes that made him a potent foe to the elder siblings of the gods, and eventually a nightmare for the people of fledgling Kishlaith.

  • There was nothing he could not hurt; even higher beings such as Fae, and the avatars of the gods were not immune to being grievously wounded or killed by his natural armaments. The First's teeth and claws were capable of ripping through any material, no matter how hard or expertly crafted. No armor could stand against him, no barrier could keep him out. Even magical reinforcements and shielding meant nothing in a prolonged assault.

  • The size and strength of his body meant that just his movement caused devastating windstorms through the beating of his wings. When he flew close to the ground, waves of powerful air currents blew apart buildings, sent people and animals flying, and caused boiling tidal waves, all of which slaughtered thousands.

  • The First of Wyrms' most devastating and infamous weapon was his fire breath. He could exhale endless torrents of searing yellow flame, so hot that it could melt stone and steel and reduce even the most flame-resistant material to ash. The potency of this fire combined with the vast amounts of force the First used meant that a single breath could transform untold miles of land into a blazing hellscape, and multiple breaths could reduce whole civilizations to wastelands populated only by blackened corpses.

  • When the searing touch of his deep yellow flame met any body of water, large or small, it would violently evaporate into a cloud of scalding steam. Nothing caught by his fire could survive; all life that met the flaming breath of the First of Wyrms died a painful but rapid death. Even the undying Fae of the World-Spine were not immune to this burning horror and experienced immense suffering as the resiliency of their towering and stalwart physical bodies condemned them to lingering torture.

  • The heat from his fire could burn away the air itself, causing massive, shattering thunderclaps as it rushed back together. This noise could carry for miles and was yet another herald of his imminent arrival to the terrified hordes of Kishlaith’s mortals as they watched the ash and smoke of his previous victims rise into the sky.

  • Providing another heat-based attack, the First of Wyrms' body temperature could rise to unimaginable levels. The very air around him would distort into deadly heat waves, and anything that tried to approach him would burn alive or melt long before they were within range for attacks or even pleas for mercy. When flying low to the ground, he could immolate land and life alike without even employing his fire breath.

  • Similar to his partner the Corpse Hound, the First was capable of devouring the souls of the dead and containing them within his stomach. Unlike the Corpse Hound who would later employ this method as a unique punishment for those who have been touched by a subversion the cycle of life and death, the First of Wyrms used this as a horrific mockery of "creation". Within the confines of his belly, souls eaten by the First were at the mercy of the god's whims.

  • He could break down their very structure and forcibly remold them into any shape he found personally pleasing. Not only that, but those victims were also branded with a deep mental link that allowed the First to invade their minds as he saw fit, use them as puppets and even supplant their original personalities. Using this power, the First was able to create the wyrms, a legion of beings made in his image and used them as both his weapons against Kishlaith's people and as proof that he had "ascended" into a creator himself.

  • Even after his control over the wyrms was severed and he himself was imprisoned by the Bright King, he retains the ability to reach out to their descendants from his prison. He can still see through their eyes and feel their memories and experiences as if they were his own. However, that is all he can do, since the ruined and mangled state of his former connection causes nothing but madness and fatal bodily mutations in those unfortunate enough to be ensnared by his attempts at actual communication.

  • The scales that covered the First's body were nearly indestructible. No mortal weapon, no matter how strong, could even hope to so much as scratch his unyielding hide. The Nameless Gods and other higher beings could damage him, but even then, his natural armor was highly resistant to trauma and whatever wounds inflicted on him were quick to heal.

  • Finally, as one of the eight deities of Kishlaith's Exalted House, the First of Wyrms is completely immortal. He has not aged from the moment the Bright King brought him into existence and he will remain until the unlikely event the King decides to unmake him, or he is destroyed by the Father of the Void or the Gray Maiden who are respectively equal or stronger than the Bright King.

• Weaknesses:
  • Like all life made by the Bright King, the Guardian Beast/First of Wyrms is technically subject to being dominated and controlled by the King, or even unmade completely. However due to the Bright King being bound by his own nature, this is a highly unlikely event. On the other hand, the Father of the Void or Gray Maiden are very capable of destroying him should either of them choose to do so.

  • The First of Wyrms’ biggest weakness is his connection to the the creatures he forged from the souls he abducted. His mental link with them was so strong that they were essentially extra bodies through which he enacted his murderous will. The severance of that link caused him to experience a form of sensory deprivation that eventually drove him insane. In this state he is nothing more than a mindless monster, incapable of plans, strategies, or even dialogue.

  • Finally, the First of Wyrms is trapped within the endlessly churning currents of a monstrous storm that rages over Kishlaith's lost fifth continent of Thasmia. He is incapable of navigating its unnatural wind currents or its pounding barrages of rain and hail, and his efforts and body temperature only serve to worsen the storm. This creates a vicious cycle that has actually strengthened his prison. Even with full possession of his wits he would be hard-pressed to escape, and his current mental state puts it beyond the scope of possibility.

• Goals:

Currently the First of Wryms' only desire is to dominate the minds of his creations again, forcing them into being mere extensions of his will. Prior to his current predicament, the First wanted to become a creator-deity, and as his jealousy and frustration grew, his desire devolved into wanting to upstage the Bright King and ensure his creations triumphed over his master's. Furthering this goal, he wished to reduce the lush and life-filled newborn world of Kishlaith to an endless expanse of flat black wastelands and smoke-darkened skies where he and his creations flew forever. It is a goal he has every intention of continuing, with the intervening eons meaning nothing to his relentless malice and hatred for the Bright King and his mortals.

• Motivation: What started out as slight jealousy and a desire to be like his master deepened into resentment for both the Bright King and those he had made. The First of Wyrms felt as if he was nothing more than a beast of burden, seen as unworthy of making even small contributions to the world he was helping to protect. His intent to burn away all life on Kishlaith was born from this seething stew of negative emotions that allowed him to rationalize bringing about a horrifying end of days.

• Role In the Story:
  • The First of Wyrms is one of the eight members of the Exalted House, Kishlaith's pantheon of gods. He is a malevolent deity who almost killed the world in its infancy and was subsequently imprisoned within an endless storm for all eternity, as both punishment and to protect the people from his madness. His rebellious actions against the Bright King made him the progenitor of the original form of the Thasmian people. His rebellion and the devastation it brought was one of the factors that led the Father of the Void to decide that his brother made a horrific mistake by creating any lives outside of themselves—a mistake he would take it upon himself to rectify.

  • In most cultures on Kishlaith, the First is portrayed as the highly unpleasant god of chaos, a stupid, petulant creature who engages in destructive tantrums and is continually punished by the Bright King. He is associated with natural disasters, accidents/misfortunes, and occasionally mental illness. This is a vast underestimation of his role in Kishlaith’s history, with the true story having been lost over the ages. He brought a horrific end to the Age of Dawn, Kishlaith’s formative years, and ushered in a period of hardship and rebuilding that lasted for centuries, during which the elven empire of Ancient Ilesti rose to power over the world. The methods the Fae were forced to use in order to stop him resulted in the Bright King brutally destroying their ability to communicate with mortals and influence Kishlaith outside very strict circumstances, thus starting the decline of the elven race’s ability to reproduce…although this would take hundreds of thousands of years to become noticeable. The First’s permanent departure from his intended role is the reason why the Nameless Gods have the ability to reach out to mortals and offer them deals or otherwise lure them into situations where they can devour their souls.

  • In the Thasmian Dominion, the First of Wyrms is worshipped as the civilization's patron. Their state religion incorrectly believes that the First of Wyrms was a dedicated subordinate to the Bright King, and that the First was rewarded for his faithful service to the King by being allowed to create a race of beings in his own image. From there he would rule his children with wisdom and justice until the Fae maliciously severed his connection to them in an attempt to convert them into their own children, something that broke the First's mind, necessitating his imprisonment. The Thasmians are determined to once again reach their "former" glory, and this goal was part of what motivated their scattered and primitive tribes to unite in order to conquer Ancient Ilesti, form a thriving and powerful civilization, and usher in a lasting golden age for their people. Faithful Thasmians believe that once they have conquered all corners of Kishlaith, the First of Wyrms will awaken from his tortured state and leave his prison. From there he will bless them with his wisdom, free their bodies of the Fae's influence, and guide them as their god-king. Fortunately, this isn't a concrete goal, as much as it is the idealized outcome of their faith. With that said, the Dominion also recognizes the First of Wyrms as the source of the “Wrym-Touch”, a horrific and fatal Mystical Plague that solely afflicts the Thasmian race and leads to the destruction of the victim’s body and mind. Many of their prayers to the First of Wyrms are wishes for him to avert his attention from them until they have brought about the conditions for him to become the wise lord they desire.

  • Unfortunately, certain individuals have taken steps to bring about this mythologized reunion. One of the darkest examples is the Thasmian mage known as Dr. Xever, a man who has possibly deluded himself into thinking he is the First's Champion entrusted with enacting his will in Kishlaith. Whatever the truth of his beliefs, Dr. Xever would willingly give his body and mind to the First’s Wyrm-Touch corruption in order to grow "closer" to his god. While following what he thinks is the First of Wyrms’ bidding, he would become an important member of Erwist and Serumia Cavar's gruesome "Project Savior", before slowly escalating into an international criminal and existential threat to the current age by using the powers he gained from participation in the couple’s dark endeavor.

  • Apart from all of that, the First of Wyrms is the only one of Kishlaith's gods with a permanent physical presence on the mortal plane, despite being largely isolated from the world itself.

• Backstory:
  • Untold eons ago, Kishlaith was still a work in progress. Although the Bright King had finished shaping most of its structure and appearance from the infinite material of the Great Potential, vast parts of the world remained in an unfinished and ever-shifting state, only settling into concrete reality when the Bright King planted a Fae into the land to administer the area and force its reality to hold to his vision. Despite this instability, the mortal inhabitants of the lands led a largely peaceful existence, broken only by far-flung clashes with one another as they constructed fledgling societies under the wise tutelage of the Bright King or found themselves host to visits from the avatars of Fae who would walk the land to take in the wide-reaching areas of the Bright King's work, while they maintained their place in it. All of this took place beneath an eternally ruby-pink sky, dominated by a soft reddish light that illuminated the world from corner to corner. It was the Age of Dawn, the very first era Kishlaith would know.

  • However, the birth of the world soon drew attention from the second generation of life, those who would come to be known as the Nameless Gods. Initially Kishlaith’s creation had only worsened their envy of their younger siblings as they witnessed the full extent of the Bright King’s inborn command of the Great Potential. But something about this strange construct instilled a sense of curiosity, an alien emotion to simplistic minds that were dominated by negativity and wrath. This curiosity drew the Nameless Gods to the world’s borders in droves, but when they were close enough to perceive its nature, their interest degenerated once more into hatred.

  • Kishlaith seemed to mock them—it was a construct of pure order, filled with multiple systems bound by consistent and rigid natural laws. But even worse than that, it was a cradle of new life that surpassed them in ways they had not even considered. Their outrage had always been aimed at the twins, the Bright King and Father of the Void. But the creatures of Kishlaith were something else entirely. Mortal bodies were physically balanced and followed their own unswerving internal rules; in many ways they were just one more manifestation of the total order that governed Kishlaith. But there was another component of these creatures that the Nameless Gods could scarcely comprehend.
  • The world’s denizens were each imbued with a tiny fragment of the Bright King, frail sparks that animated their flesh and bone.

  • Those embers of the King had their own individual wills, and they were capable of something the Bright King himself was not, and something they certainly were not. These creatures could undergo rapid and astounding mental transformations; their minds were complex and highly adaptable—they could change in response to their environment or interactions with others of their kind, all while keeping a solid sense of self. They used this incredible ability to make continuous leaps and bounds, and they produced creations of their own with just as much of the Bright King’s ingenuity. Looking at the mortals of Kishlaith, the Nameless Gods understood that they had been pushed even further beneath the younger siblings they despised.

  • This last realization pushed the gathered multitudes to rush the infant world in hopes of snuffing out this affront to their existence. But the moment they reached out in sheer hatred, they were effortlessly swept back from Kishlaith by a simple beat of one of the Bright King’s nine wings. They gathered themselves again and tried, with the same result. Their younger brother did not even acknowledge their existence, merely brushing them aside again as mere annoyances. This cycle repeated in a seemingly endless loop of failed invasions, until they noticed a weakness, not in the Bright King, but in Kishlaith’s growing offspring.

  • Their wondrous and complex souls were at odds with their flesh. Masterfully crafted though it was, their physical form had a limited shelf life, subject to degeneration and eventually destruction. And when their physical bodies inevitably shambled to a halt, the fragment of the Bright King that animated them was instantly released. These glittering sparks crossed the border of Kishlaith towards the Bright King’s wings to rejoin him. That was the time of utmost vulnerability, because even though they were being guided by yet another creation of their younger brother, this entity was no match for them.

  • The Corpse Hound was entirely unprepared for the violent assault and was shoved aside as the Nameless Gods seized the souls in his care. His protests and eventually his meager attacks did nothing to dissuade them as they coiled around these tiny cores of consciousness that dared to stand above them. At first, they were unsure of what to do with them now that they had their prize. It was only when one of them decided to absorb a soul it was holding that things changed. The soul of the consumed mortal was a window into their singular mind, a gateway into their experiences and unique way of thinking. It was a way to steal everything that defined these apex lifeforms and make that blessing their own. Time and time again they began to prey upon the souls of the dead. They gorged themselves on the essence of Kishlaith’s people, melding these unfortunate souls with their bodies and using them as living instruction manuals and masks to hide their inner emptiness.

  • The Bright King was aghast at this victory, and he grieved over the loss of the souls fallen into the Nameless Gods. He could feel their unending suffering through his connection to them and knew there was nothing to be done; they would serve as prosthetic minds for their captors for all eternity. He deliberated for some time on what to do; his foul older siblings had seized upon a weakness in Kishlaith’s system and there was little he could do to fix it. But there was something he could do to prevent them from capitalizing upon that weakness ever again.

  • Reaching into the Great Potential, the Bright King concentrated and once again infused the ocean of molten reality with his will, forcing it into a solid shape. He fed it his anger and outrage at the Nameless Gods, his desire to protect Kishlaith’s souls from their jealousy and greed. He formed a perfect representation of those ideals—a ferocious creature who could wage never-ending war against the Nameless Gods. Finally, he lavished this newborn creation with the weapons he would need to fight his battles, named him, and sent him on his way.

  • Upon coming into existence, the Guardian Beast immediately thanked the Bright King for his birth before he flew off towards the site of his duty, his mind already fixed upon his mission. From the moment he arrived at Kishlaith’s periphery, he knew his work was cut out for him. Hordes of Nameless Gods, drawn by the promise of attaining perfection at long last, were eagerly clustered at the world’s edges, some of them actively in the process of eating their terrified prey. Seeing the souls’ distress and the cruel enjoyment of the Nameless Gods—or somehow worse, the way some of them emotionlessly assimilated their “meals” before moving on to more—enraged him as he thought of the Bright King’s grief over the fate of his children.

  • He plunged into their ranks and let loose with his full power, subjecting them to all the devastation he was capable of. His teeth tore through gelatinous flesh, his claws shattered hard shells and tore off hundreds of grasping limbs. He breathed out a wide blast of fire that seared or melted the probing and predatory organs of a million nightmarish horrors. At first the Nameless Gods reacted with dull surprise—they had never known anything akin to physical pain, their affliction being entirely of the mind, and they did not know what to make of this new sensation. Nevertheless, even the most grievous injuries would never take their lives, and they soon began to fight back. Some mindlessly tried to push past him to resume feeding, but the Guardian Beast was disgusted to find others starting to use their stolen intelligence to formulate plans for counterattacks against him.

  • He evaded many of these attacks and was struck by others. Sprays of acidic mucus eroded his scales, gnashing rings of teeth tore at his wings, and claws made of sharpened bone tried to pluck out his eyes. Yet each time he rose up to fight again, shaking off the physical pain to press his assault against the enemies of Kishlaith’s life. For every wound he took, he returned the assault thousandfold. It was the purpose for which he had been given life, and with every Nameless God who retreated away from Kishlaith, he felt a surge of the Bright King’s satisfaction through the connection he shared with his master, encouraging him to do better.

  • For how long he fought the hordes of Nameless Gods was unknown, but it soon became clear that their time of easily feeding upon Kishlaith’s ascending souls had come to an end. A potent obstacle now stood before them, and it was just as dauntless and eternal as they were. Most began to retreat into the chaos of Fannai Space. Their baleful gaze never truly left the world and its people but they chose to bide their time to use whatever amount of complexity and intellect they had stolen to acquire more of it one day.

  • Giddy with his victory and reeling with the additional approval he could feel from his master, the Guardian Beast turned to the Corpse Hound. His fellow servant of the Bright King had long since freed himself from the Nameless Gods and resumed his work. Seeking anyone to share his triumph, the Guardian Beast eagerly regaled the Corpse Hound with words of greeting. To the Guardian Beast’s dismay, the Corpse Hound did not share his overwhelming joy and simply acknowledged their good fortune before concentrating once again on his task of guiding Kishlaith’s dead to the Bright King’s waiting embrace. When the Guardian Beast pressed the issue of their mutual fealty to the Bright King and suggested friendship now that the threat was over, the Corpse Hound merely sighed and responded that nothing lasted forever, and that this applied to his “victory” as well…before going back to his task.

  • The Guardian Beast did not give up his newfound quest to befriend the Corpse Hound, although it bore little fruit. The only responses to his attempts at conversations were short and terse and it was clear that the Corpse Hound was far more enamored by his task of guiding the dead than associating with the only eternal being in his vicinity. It…bothered the guardian in a way he could not name or understand, but soon he had more to worry about as some of the bolder Nameless Gods began to slink back to Kishlaith’s edges. The sight of them and the stirring of alarm from his connection to the Bright King was all the guardian needed to launch himself back into battle once more. He fought once again, with the same results. The Nameless Gods fought back, but they were no match for his overwhelming power, and they slunk away, defeated and resentful.

  • It repeated in a cycle, seemingly without an end. The Nameless Gods would invade, the Guardian Beast would beat them back, and would attempt conversation with the Corpse Hound but be disappointed by the results. It grew to be a tedious and mind-numbing affair, and at times the only thing keeping his spirits afloat was the sensation of pride and satisfaction in him that radiated from the Bright King through their connection. But even this could only do so much, and in the tedious lull between Nameless God invasions, the Guardian Beast began to study Kishlaith, if only out of curiosity about why his enemies had such a strong pull to the world and the people.

  • He could immediately understand why the Nameless Gods were so jealous and eager to destroy them. They were truly amazing creatures, formed by the genius of the Bright King, and just like their maker, they were also capable of creation. It was not mighty control of the Great Potential, but it was impressive all the same—they used the materials of the land to form vast structures and dwellings. Whole civilizations spread across the world in the blink of an eye, all of them created in this manner. And while he was enthralled by their ingenuity, he was also slightly jealous. The Bright King could mold the Great Potential into anything he willed through thought and motion. The mortals he made could use the world’s matter to improve the land and augment their way of life. Yet…he was an outlier, an observer who protected this ever-evolving world but left no mark on it, not even so much as a sign that he existed.

  • As he tore through yet another failed invasion of Nameless Gods, the Guardian Beast mulled this over within his mind. Although he deeply wanted to make his own imprint on the fascinating face of Kishlaith, he could not think of what that imprint would be. The desire burned deeply, but he could not think of a single invention, tool or even structure to bring into being. Eventually he decided to ask the Corpse Hound for advice, thinking that perhaps his only “friend” would have some insight. He had expected the usual minimal answers, but the Corpse Hound unpleasantly surprised him. In no uncertain terms, his fellow servant of the Bright King advised him to put notions of creation out of his mind and focus on the task their master had given him. Their duties were their existence and were all that they needed. There was no animosity or reproach in the Corpse Hound’s words, merely surprise and some confusion as if he could barely comprehend the Guardian Beast’s mindset.

  • Finally unable to stand his longing, the Guardian Beast turned to the Bright King himself, directly addressing his master for the first time since he had been woven from the Great Potential. In a nervous rush he expressed his deepening want, his need, to participate in Kishlaith’s evolution the way its growing population did. As he spoke, he found opinions he’d barely been aware of rising to the surface. He continued by telling his master that he felt trapped by his role, that the endless cycle of fighting the Nameless Gods while watching the world unfold was starting to weigh unbearably on his mind. He finished by asking the Bright King for permission to enter Kishlaith at last and start his own creative works, perhaps even mingling and procreating among mortals the way he had witnessed the Fae doing in spite of their own vital tasks.

  • The answer he received shook him to his core, as did the emotion he sensed from his master. The Bright King flatly told the Guardian Beast that his contributions to Kishlaith were his teeth, his claws, and his scorching breath. He was the shield that protected the world—it was his reason for existing and there was no greater meaning for him than to follow the path laid out in front of him. The connection between the two of them was heavy with the Bright King’s deep disappointment with the guardian, as well as the same confusion the Corpse Hound had expressed. He ordered the Guardian Beast to think no more about deviating from his destined path, and the beast turned back to his tasks, numb with shame at invoking his master’s disapproval.

  • The Guardian Beast continued his work with contrite diligence for an unknown amount of time, slightly soothed by the echoes of approval and satisfaction he felt from his master with every Nameless God banished. Yet the pain and jealousy within him seemed to grow worse. He was addicted to watching Kishlaith’s people build their structures, their animal-drawn vehicles, their weapons, their instruments of music, and even their toys to entertain their offspring. He could not tear his eyes away from the sight of new souls coming into the world and bonding with their waiting flesh. Although he still hated them, the Guardian Beast began to understand the Nameless Gods and their overwhelming lust to possess even some of the miracles just beyond reach.

  • The pain within him slowly devolved into something worse, something bitter. He no longer felt shame at the Bright King’s disapproval of his requests but simmering resentment as hot as his own fire. It was clear that his creator had not even considered his feelings in that short conversation; he had decided his answer before it had even begun. The Guardian Beast was little more than a tool to his master, a means to an end to protect the selfish King’s prized possession. That was all he was, and it was all he had ever been, from the very start. He even began to resent his connection to his master—it seemed like a leash around his neck, tantalizing him with positive feelings and punishing him with negativity when he strayed from his “path”. That was not even beginning to touch the frustration he felt at his inability to even conceive of an idea of what he would mark the world with, even if he were given permission.

  • Then, a great natural disaster ravaged one of Kishlaith’s five Sister Continents, a narrow landmass known as Thasmia. The Guardian Beast could not tell what exactly the disaster was, but he bore witness to its effects instantaneously. Millions of people were killed within a short span of time, and their souls were expelled from their broken bodies en masse. The Corpse Hound was unfazed as usual and began his paradoxical process of guiding each soul individually, yet all at once. The Guardian Beast was amazed; he had never seen so many of Kishlaith’s denizens on his level before. But there was little time to ponder the sight—the Nameless Gods came in greater amounts than they had in some time, drawn by the lure of a feast.

  • As usual the Guardian Beast set to work driving the world’s enemies away…but his heart was not in the task, and it showed through his work. He took more damage than usual, and more than once a Nameless God slipped past him and devoured one of the many souls making their way towards the Bright King. For the first time, seeing the bright spark of one of Kishlaith’s privileged inhabitants being eaten by a mass of hateful flesh did not bother him. In fact, it fascinated him, and he wondered if maybe the Nameless Gods had figured out something that had eluded him. Before he could think it through any further, a soul nearly snatched by a Nameless God evaded the monster’s paralyzing tentacles and flitted next the Guardian Beast’s head. The decision was made almost before he was even aware of it; he swung his head around and caught the tiny spark of light between his teeth and forced it down his throat.

  • In that instant, everything changed. The memories and experiences of the eaten soul flooded the Guardian Beast’s mind and crashed against the walls of his skull just as the soul itself struggled within the prison of his stomach. This unique and rich life first stunned and then enraged the Guardian Beast as he saw just how much Kishlaith offered to those who lived there, and the endless opportunities that were presented to this soul throughout its journey. And worst of all, he still could not think of a single thing to construct if given the chance, even with this stolen perspective of the world. He thought back to the Bright King’s words that his “contributions” to the world were what he provided with his teeth, claws and fire, and he instantly blamed his inability to truly create on his master. Of course the selfish and manipulative Bright King would ensure that he and his chosen creations were the only one with the ability to bring forth beauty and variety.

  • As these thoughts ran through his mind, the soul within him, which had been fighting this whole time, ceased its movements. It began to change, growing heavier and more solid than before until it was a squirming mass within the Guardian Beast’s stomach. Acting on instinct, he vomited up the grotesque weight within him and was shocked to find something like himself emerging from his jaws, coated in the juices of his stomach. It was much smaller than him, and differently colored, but it was a complete replica of his shape and form. This new replica of the Guardian Beast looked up at him, and the Beast saw himself through its eyes. The remains of the soul he had devoured were still within him, binding him to this new body he had formed. He willed his creation to come closer and it did without hesitation as if pulled by those invisible strings.

  • Triumph and pleasure erupted within him, and he knew what the Bright King felt when he gazed upon Kishlaith. Contemplating the other souls unhoused by the disaster of Thasmia, the Guardian Beast made his decision. He tore into the Nameless Gods in his fiercest assault ever, not to defend…but to destroy his competition. He flew headlong into swarms of souls and swallowed them whole. Each of them bombarded him with their lives, and each of them slowly fell apart as he unmade them and vomited forth living models of himself.

  • There were so many souls, and soon an innumerable amount of his children surrounded him, their enforced devotion giving him more satisfaction than anything else in his long existence. He quickly felt the Bright King’s overwhelming horror and confusion slithering down their connection. Once, these emotions would have stopped him in his tracks and had him begging for forgiveness at offending his master, but now it only made him sneer. The Guardian Beast gathered his children close to him and taunted the Bright King by saying that he had simply followed his words, that he fulfilled his desire to create using what was given to him.

  • The Guardian Beast now viewed Kishlaith through the lens of a million lives, and his jealousy was still not satisfied. He had created offspring of his own, but nothing could stir and shape the Great Potential the way the Bright King could, and he would never be allowed to even try. And so, the Guardian Beast decided that he would seize the Bright King’s world for himself and his offspring. His master could create a million worlds if he wanted, all populated with their own people. Let him make replacement toys and endure the loss of his firstborn land as a painful lesson in conceiving a servant bound to protect something he could not even participate in.

  • Taking all his newborn subjects with him, the Guardian Beast flew through the borders of Kishlaith and into the skies above mortal lands. Seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting the world was astounding even with his repertoire of stolen memories. It further stoked the anger that this could never be truly his, so he let loose his flames upon everything he saw beneath him, blanketing the land with the yellow fire once meant for the Nameless Gods. He gave no warning and no mercy; everyone who looked up at him in awe were turned to ash where they stood, their remains washed away in the sheer force of his flaming breath. He was not alone either; his children scorched Kishlaith with their own flares of potent fire.

  • For the people of Kishlaith, this was nothing less than the end of the world. So many people had lost their lives in Thasmia’s devastation, only for their souls to be corrupted by the Guardian Beast in his moment of rebellion. Now those millions occupied the skies and snarled down at the cowering masses. The varied human societies and their equally diverse environments, the solemn and secluded forest refuges of the elves, the dwarves who made their homes upon Kishlaith’s mountains—all these people looked in wonder and unease at the airborne invaders…emotions that quickly turned into terror as they unleashed their aggression upon all life.

  • The sheer force and volume of their flaming breath set forests and grasslands aflame, turned fields of snow into miles-high clouds of scalding steam, and reduced the slopes of mountains into curdled heaps of magma. This blazing reshaping of the land condemned anyone caught in the upheaval to death. The heavy blasts of their wings fanned advancing firestorms that sent flesh-searing winds and tidal waves of flame on collision courses with settlements. The Guardian Beast himself was the worst of all. The winds of his wings tore buildings apart and flattened entire cities, sending horrific downpours of rubble and corpses crashing to the ground far away. His searing breath burned miles of land and ensured the instant death of thousands with even the smallest of puffs. His mere passage left whole territories lifeless in his wake, their people, histories and cultures reduced to ash and rubble, lost to time forever.

  • Caught off guard, there were very few organized attempts at fighting, only a mass panic greater than anything the world had ever seen before. The once orderly streets of cities and villages, the roads between bastions of civilization and even tiny personally-made paths turned into seething masses of terrified mortals. People trampled each other, shed blood as they fought over wagons and horses, or simply threw their lords and even their own families aside in frantic attempts to put distance between themselves and this unknown force of annihilation. Their efforts were in vain—the Guardian Beast and his children could outpace any escape attempt, no matter how desperate, and the air rang with the screams of pain and horror from their victims. The destruction continued unabated, and the never-ending windstorms eventually swept aside the charred and crumbling remains of what had once been thriving land. It whipped the world’s ashes into the air and clouded the once ruby-pink sky into a dull orange. Devoid of trees, buildings or the moving forms of animals and sapient mortals, flat black wastelands stretched as far as the eye could see, made even darker by the state of the sky.

  • The connection between the Guardian Beast and the Bright King was filled with harsh and increasingly distressed commands for him to stop at once. But the Guardian Beast savored his master’s anguish at what had become of his precious creation. He looked down at the charred wastelands beneath him and felt more satisfaction than he had ever known in his everlasting battles against the Nameless Gods. He was reshaping Kishlaith as he saw fit, using his natural abilities, just as his master had said so long ago. He let out a laugh at the irony of the situation and the Bright King’s despair over it all, and his creations laughed with him. They were him, he felt through their senses, directed their violence against the world, and lived through their bodies just as much as he did his own.

  • He used them far more wisely than the Bright King did with his own creations, and he had made them far more carefully and durably than the poor wretches he now subjected to his powers. He could hear the mindless wailings of the mortals below though the ears of his offspring, their terrified pleas for help from the Bright King, and their dishonest promises to one another that everything would turn out for the best. He even knew they had their own title for him and his brood.

  • At some point “wyrms” became a name for his legion of remade souls, and it had spread among Kishlaith’s multitudes as rapidly as the fires that raged around the world. And as their leader, the original who had made his presence known in Kishlaith’s skies, he was known as nothing less than “First” among the invaders. When he understood their reasoning, the Guardian Beast decided to embrace the title, casting aside the name given to him by the Bright King. It had been a mark of his slavery, and he saw the fearful title whispered among Kishlaith’s cowering beings as one more announcement of his freedom.

  • Nonetheless, small pockets of order and even resistance began to rally amidst the chaos. Groups of refugees from nations that had simply ceased to exist now banded together to find food, shelter and anything that offered even the promise of safety. Agitated heads of state demanded answers from their counselors or addressed each other in grim conferences, in hopes of finding some solution to the shared crisis. These meetings were always tense and the rooms where they were held were often hazy with the smoke of other burning lands. Still, plans were hatched, and carried out by those still collected enough to obey their rulers or determined to save their homelands by whatever means possible.

  • Catapults loaded with the biggest and hardest stones possible launched their projectiles into the flights of wyrms that sought out the few societies that clung to life. Magical attacks erupted from the land as nests of hidden magic-users—recruited or forced from their isolated existences by disaster—tried their best to down the monsters. And they were successful—rocks punched holes in thin wing-membranes, enchanted bindings encircled gigantic reptilian bodies. The wyrms crashed to the ground where the soldiers of mankind leapt into action, hacking at them with their weapons in desperate attempts to destroy them as quickly as possible.

  • But the First of Wyrms ensured they shared as much of his undying nature as possible. Wounds closed, broken bones and dented scales repaired themselves, and magical bindings were shaken off as he sent his strength through the bonds he had formed from the mangled remains of the souls he had eaten. That was more than enough to overcome the stumbling attempts at fighting back, and the defenders and their lands were subject to the same destruction that had befallen their less prepared counterparts.

  • In the end, it would be the Fae who saved mankind and Kishlaith itself. When the First of Wyrms and his offspring had begun their decimation of the populace, the Kishlaith’s pillars had been united in horror and confusion. They could feel the devastation through the World-Spine and how Kishlaith’s soul had begun to strain as unnatural amounts of lives were taken. Though they were unanimous in their negative feelings towards the invasion and the monster responsible, they were deeply divided about how to respond. Many wanted to clash against the First of Wyrms and his army to end his unhinged threat to the world. Others stood against the idea of rising to any action apart from the passive preservation of Kishlaith’s order and protection of its soul, the duties they had faithfully performed since the inception of the world itself.

  • Those Fae who remained cautious and conservative reminded their fellows of their past mistake—the liaisons with humans and alterations to the world that had allowed the elven race to blossom—and of the Bright King’s grim warning to never forget their place as simple caretakers and command to never interfere with his creation in such a way again. They were afraid of the King’s wrath if they ever strayed from their ordained purpose again, even in these terrible circumstances.

  • But as the situation grew worse, it became harder and harder to ignore that Kishlaith’s situation was not just terrible—it was an unprecedented catastrophe. Soon it was not simply what they felt through the World-Spine but what they could actively see and sense around them as the civilizations built around them burned to the ground.

  • It was the elves who finally forced them out of their deadlock. Their children were just as victimized by the wryms as everyone else on Kishlaith and the Fae could feel their terror as their secluded forest realms were set ablaze and the flames consumed everything around them. Their pleas to the Bright King and then to their Fae ancestors to save them cut deeply into the minds of every Fae. More than heartrending sorrow at their fates, the meaning of these losses was grimly clear. The elves were the least populous of the races, secluded mostly from the eyes and attention of humans and dwarves, keeping to their own closed societies unless necessary. The burden of such mass casualties could spell their extinction before they had ever had a chance to truly live and seize their place in creation.

  • United in their decision the Fae used their power over Kishlaith’s reality to halt the march of death. As the wyrms flew over their fleeing victims, the land itself sucked their prey in, only to expel them in areas free from the First’s children. When people fled to the rivers and seas or dove headlong into the waters in panic, the wyrms’ attempts to boil them alive by heating the water with their flames were met with no change at all. The wind refused to blow the ever-burning fires towards cities or retaliated by actually pushing the searing storms away from habitable lands. It was not much, but it increased the odds of surviving in the chaos that had descended upon the world.

  • The First of Wyrms was annoyed and confused by this development. He knew that the Fae were responsible for the faltering of his extermination campaign, but he was baffled as to why they were acting against him. He knew their importance in maintaining Kishlaith’s structural integrity and so he left them alone—he avoided them entirely due to the damage his mere presence caused to an area, and he instructed his children to spare their towering bodies even when they brought death and destruction to populations who built homes at their roots. He assumed the Fae would stand on the sidelines of his affairs out of respect for the mercy he had shown them, but as the land and elements protected more and more from fiery death, it seemed he had been mistaken.

  • But even if he did not understand their motivations, he was well aware of how to solve the Fae problem. The memories of his children’s former mortal lives contained countless intimidation tactics and complex strategies to break an enemy’s will. He allowed those memories to guide him to the best plan of action and sent the wyrms to teach the Fae the terrible price of entering the conflict between him and mortals. Where the creatures had once ignored the Fae, they turned the full force of their destructive nature onto Kishlaith’s pillars.

  • No mortal weapon could harm a Fae, but the First of Wyrms had been made to combat immortals and his children were crafted in his image. Their fire charred and cracked the Fae’s impenetrable and flawless skin, it withered their proud plumage, and their golden blood boiled so furiously that it blew apart their limbs. The claws and teeth of the wyrms tore into what remained until many Fae crashed to the ground as mutilated husks of their former glory.

  • Pain wasn’t something the Fae really understood; it had occasionally afflicted the avatars they used to walk among mortals in the days before the Bright King had forbidden them. But that had been nothing but a distant sensation, just one more experience among many to discuss and dissect in their endless conversations within the World-Spine. This was something else entirely, inescapable suffering that broke the minds of its victims well before their bodies expired. The Fae targeted by the wyrms shifted their minds away from their upper aspects and fled deep into the World-Spine, abandoning their bodies and their assigned posts in a desperate attempt at relief. Their minds languished within the massive root system that wrapped around Kishlaith’s soul, nearly unconscious with trauma.

  • Without Fae minds to hold firm the memory of creation, Kishlaith began to lose its cohesion. Charred lands became putrid oceans of ash and then barren deserts, before distorting into incomprehensible shapes. The remaining Fae pried memories from their incapacitated comrades and extended their influence over the out-of-control reality in those areas in a desperate attempt to stem the tide of chaos. If they had been splintered into factions before, that was nothing compared to the discord that divided their ranks now.

  • The Fae who had warned against interfering with the wyrms raged against those who had presented it as the only option. They cursed them as fools who had angered an overwhelming threat and condemned their fellows to a horrible fate through their stupidity and risked the Bright King’s wrath all for nothing.

  • Many of the Fae who had called for action refused to disavow their words. They demanded to know if the “cowards among them” would have stood by and allowed this invasion to consume the world while they stood idle. The arguments sapped the Fae’s concentration and endangered their now tenuous hold on Kishlaith’s form. For his part, First of Wyrms was oblivious to Kishlaith’s precarious new position, completely preoccupied with his smug satisfaction at having broken the Fae. His renewed savagery was worse than before, as if to make up for lost time, and life on Kishlaith was truly backed into a corner.

  • It was at this point that a Fae named Seanlaoch the Oath of Burdens demanded to be heard above the voices of its fellows who retained their sanity. It told the other Fae in no uncertain terms that unless the First of Wyrms was struck down, there would be no future for Kishlaith. The world was unstable now, and even worse, they could feel Kishlaith’s soul beginning to fade as it struggled to replace the astronomical amount of lives lost. Seanlaoch mourned the suffering of its comrades but stood firm that this was a battle that had to be fought, the Bright King’s orders and wishes be damned. Their master was too stunned by this sudden horror to gather himself, and he had not once lent his aid to the people during the crisis. Kishlaith was on its own and as its custodians they were its only hope.

  • Seanlaoch outlined a desperate plan to stop the First of Wyrms, having observed the monster and his army for longer than most other Fae. It only asked that the others lend their aid as a united front, for only then could they hope to win.

  • Reluctantly its comrades agreed and the Oath of Burdens brought forth an avatar to walk Kishlaith for the first time since the Bright King had banned the Fae from doing so. It crafted this incarnation in the form of a powerful male elf, a warrior in fine armor and bearing a wooden sword made from the flesh of its true body. Gathering its courage, Seanlaoch shouted a challenge at the First of Wyrms that could be heard around the world, pouring from the land and sky. He challenged the enemy of Kishlaith’s life to single combat, in the name of all the Fae.

  • The First heard Seanlaoch’s challenge and was intrigued; he had assumed his violent retaliation had deterred the Fae from further interference, but it seemed the spark of resistance still lingered in at least one foolish individual. He had seen such incidents before through the lifetimes of his offspring, but like Kishlaith itself, being in the situation was a whole new experience, and he decided to savor it. The First of Wyrms answered Seanlaoch the Oath of Burdens’ challenge and flew to the Fae’s location immediately. He knew that he faced a simple projection of the Fae’s will and he ordered his children to begin hunting for the true body of his opponent and reduce it to ash and splinters.

  • As the First landed, his observation was confirmed—the “elven warrior” before him was not blown backwards by the wind of his wings, nor incinerated by the heat of his body. Even its armor and weapon remained untouched. The First sneered and called Seanlaoch a coward for not facing him directly and mocked the Fae’s previous bravado. Seanlaoch did not respond to this taunt whatsoever. Looking into the yellow eyes of the towering monster, the Fae quietly but sincerely asked the First to cease his rampage against Kishlaith’s people. The First of Wyrms was taken aback by the audacity of this creature’s request…but then he grew angry. The Fae were slaves of the Bright King, much the same as he had been, and of course they would plead in favor of their master and his property. Rather than respond, the First simply ravaged the area before him with a blast of fire.

  • Seanlaoch melded with the wind and flew above the inferno and studied the First of Wyrms from above, as it had from the moment the creature entered Kishlaith. It knew that the monster it faced was of the same undying nature as the Bright King, the Corpse Hound, and even itself and its comrades. It was utterly impossible to kill such a being, but he had at least some weaknesses ripe for exploitation. Looking closer, Seanlaoch was disgusted to see millions of strings stretching outward from the First of Wryms’ body, gossamer-thin threads of flesh with infinite length. It knew that each of these nearly invisible strings ended in one of the wyrms, and this was the weakness it had staked everything on. The Oath of Burdens called out to its comrades, and the Fae acted at once. The wyrms around the world, whether flying towards fragile signs of life, ravaging the scraps of habitation that remained, or in the midst of hunting for Seanlaoch’s body, were at once caught in a trap sprung by the Fae as a whole.

  • The air solidified around them, forming impenetrable barriers that trapped them in place. Every single one of them, no matter where they were or what they were doing was imprisoned in a uniformly crafted bubble of solid air that was as malleable as it was inescapable. The wyrms raged and fought against their constraints but there was nothing to be done. This was an effort of every single Fae but one, acting all at once and they had complete control over Kishlaith’s very fabric.

  • The First was shocked; there had never been a disconnect between the orders given to his wyrms and their obedience or capability, and he felt terrible rage as he realized what had happened. The First cursed all of the Fae for tricking him, biting his tongue in his anger so that each of his words was accompanied by a jet of boiling blood from his jaws. He promised Seanlaoch that he would burn every Fae on Kishlaith except for it, leaving it alone forever with only the task of maintaining the world and the tortured moans of its wounded comrades as company. But the Oath of Burdens ignored him, devoting everything it had to the window of time the others had provided. Seanlaoch weaved around and across the First of Wyrms’ massive body, its sword swinging faster than any mortal could. It avoided the First’s scales entirely, knowing that was pointless—the real targets were the strings that connected this evil thing to the souls he had corrupted. Each time Sealoach’s blade made contact it severed the bond the First had with each soul he had consumed, swinging ceaselessly until it was done.

  • The severance of his connections to his offspring was unlike anything the First of Wyrms had ever felt before. No wound from the Nameless Gods, no rebuff from the Corpse Hound, no scold from the Bright King had ever been so overwhelming and horrific. Where there had once been a never-ending plethora of sensations, sights and sounds, there was only the battlefield in front of him. His hearing was muffled, his sight narrowed, his senses forced into the tight shell of his own body.

  • But worst of all, the thoughts and memories of his children were no longer able to freely flow through his mind; their mortal recollections lingered like a stale aftertaste, but there was no living connection whatsoever. The First demanded to know what Seanlaoch had done and in the same breath commanded the Fae to reverse its trickery or face unimaginable suffering. But the Oath of Burdens simply disappeared, dispersing its avatar and leaving the First to his torment.

  • Disconnected from their maker, the wyrms underwent their own torture. They were no longer thralls of a greater will who used them as instruments of its desires, but they were also no longer the people they had been before the First had mutilated their essence. Some of them fell from the sky, catatonic without a sense of purpose and easy prey for vengeful people who vented their hatred and fear upon the comatose reptilian bodies. Others vainly mutilated themselves, consumed by an instinctive loathing and realization that they were trapped in a prison of alien flesh even if they did not fully understand why they felt this way. Still others roamed the land mindlessly killing anything they came across, obeying a half-remembered command from a higher power. Whatever memories of who they had been before the First had eaten their souls were a painful tangle of half-formed thoughts that would never be whole again.

  • The First of Wyrms himself still rampaged through the world. He spit fire at vainly fleeing mortals and destroyed everything he came into contact with, but there was no longer heart or purpose to these actions. He roared for his children to come to his side, but even when the few that heard him obeyed, he could not truly connect with them. In desperation he ate some of these unfortunates in hopes of reestablishing his hold through rebirth, but all it did was take their lives, ending their misery at long last.

  • The failure only worsened the First’s anguish as he faced the possibility that he was condemned to constrained senses forever, and his mind began to crack under the strain of this realization. He tried to hold onto his hatred for the Bright King and his dream of lordship over a domain scoured clean of all trace of his former master’s work…but it was rapidly slipping away from him as he grew more and more irrational.

  • Although the threat posed by the First of Wyrms and his children was still potent, they were no longer the inescapable wave of death they had once been, and the people of Kishlaith felt faint hope for the first time in too long. As for the Fae themselves, their desperation had now turned into triumph, and they celebrated their victory amongst themselves, praising Seanlaoch as a hero for its quick thinking and determination to save Kishlaith. For its part the Oath of Burdens was simply content to return to its post and oversee Kishlaith as it slowly healed its wounds, and perhaps adapted to the presence of these monsters. But Seanlaoch was disturbed to realize that its fellow Fae did not share the same sentiments, and this uneasiness turned to horror as it understood the nature of their new ambitions.

  • In the eyes of the Fae, too many elves had died in the First’s burning rampage across the world, lowering their already scarce species to nearly irreplaceable numbers. They had been forbidden by the Bright King to mingle with humans, so that method of ensuring more were born was barred to them…however, creating more elves using their powers was not out of the question. They had never even thought such a thing was possible, but what they had been able to achieve when combining their might showed them just how strong they could become when needed. And there would be no shortage of material for them to make their newborn elves—the discarded wyrms were prime candidates to be transformed from world-destroying abominations into the Fae’s new children.

  • Seanlaoch was speechless with shock and disgust and found itself once again arguing against its fellows. It warned them that everything about this plan was wrong—this was not desperate defense of Kishlaith but actual attempts at creation. The wyrms were already victims twisted into a new shape by a selfish higher power, there was no reason for the Fae to follow in the First’s footsteps. But the others stood by their decision and put forward a number of arguments, ranging from insisting this action as one of mercy to the harsher sentiment that the wyrms were nothing but weapons and that transforming them into elves would be making them something constructive at the very least.

  • There was no thwarting the overwhelming majority, and so Seanlaoch reluctantly joined in the endeavor. The Fae focused upon all the wyrms in the world, much like before, and forced their will upon them. It was harder than the simple task of trapping them, but since the wyrms lived in Kishlaith now, they were subject to its reality. The Fae visualized the children of their unions with humans and forced this image onto the First’s discarded weapons and without the monster’s hold on them, it succeeded.

  • The massive bodies of the wyrms shrunk, their scales faded away, their bones twisted and reformed until they stood in the aspect elves. All that seemed to be left was removing the unsightly remnants of the First’s image before they would be indistinguishable from the elves naturally born of the world. The Fae were already celebrating their act and engaging in mild debate over whether they would give these new elves personas of their own or let them develop them naturally when the modification process stopped on its own accord, leaving their objects of their focus stranded somewhere between wyrm and elf.

  • The ashy orange of the dirtied sky gave way to searing white light as far as the eye could see, and the Fae could feel the Bright King’s emotions—shock, grief, and ultimately deep rage at those who had strayed from their tasks and brought chaos and devastation to Kishlaith. The Fae were frozen in shock both because of the presence of their master and because of their inability to use their powers, something that had never happened before. But the First of Wyrms felt only rage at the “intrusion” and flew towards the brilliant sky, screaming threats and curses at his former master.

  • Coldly, quietly the Bright King demanded of the First as to the reason for his attack on Kishlaith, but the First was beyond reason. He blamed the Bright King for sending the Fae against him and stealing his connection to his children. He unleashed all his grievances, hatred and vitriol in a stream of words and flames directed right at the luminous manifestation of his master. But it was pointless as the Bright King simply repeated the question, only for the same result. His anger mounting, the Bright King pronounced his sentence—furious though he was, he wanted to hear from the First of Wyrms’ own mouth the reason for his actions, and until he was ready to speak, he would be contained to where he could cause no further harm.

  • Seizing the First’s body, the Bright King threw him across Kishlaith and onto the already-barren land of the devastated continent of Thasmia. From there he wove a tremendous storm around the land, an impassable barrier that not even a creature crafted for immortal battle could pass. The moment he recovered from the impact of his landing the First tried to escape. He breathed his flames out in instinctive hope of destroying the barrier, but it only whipped them into an uncontrollable inferno that burned him and forced him backwards. No attempt he made could navigate the swirling column of wind around the dead land…and it would be that way forevermore.

  • As for the Fae, the Bright King reprimanded them for their attempt at creation and demanded to know what they had been thinking. Though most Fae shrunk from this anger, others felt that the wyrms were their property, seized in battle and therefore theirs to do with as they pleased. The Bright King mulled over this response and pronounced his judgement—the Fae had saved Kishlaith and acted in the interests of the people and creation itself. However, their selfishness and untrustworthy nature had shown itself the instant the threat had passed, and he could not let that betryal go unpunished. He did not destroy them or strip them of their minds as he had threatened to after the inception of elves, but he silenced their voices. Not only were they forbidden to create avatars, but they were also forbidden to speak to mortals or influence anything created by the Bright King in any way. Their own creations were fair game, but they were to be apart from anything else for all of time.

  • The wyrms who would have been new elves were freed of the Fae's influence as the Bright King swept it aside. His reasons were unknown, but he allowed these strange wyrm-elf hybrids the same purchase on the world as the mortals he had made himself. They proceeded to roam in confused packs as they sought out others of their own kind for some meager comfort. Without the First to control them their thoughts were their own, but they were little more than highly intelligent animals at the moment, although this began to change rapidly throughout the generations. In time the slowly rebuilding people of Kishlaith would give these creatures a new name that would be theirs from that moment onwards—the Thasmians.

• Relevant Tropes:

• A God Am I: An interesting example. The First of Wyrms is a god, so his perception of his immortal nature and vast power are not exaggerated. Where the trope comes into play is his ambition to obtain and usurp the unique ability to create, which is the sole property of the Bright King and mortals. Upon devouring millions of souls and forcibly remodeling them into miniature copies of himself, he boasted that he had mastered at least some fraction of creation.

• Alien Sky: A fairly mundane example for the setting, although it only added to the terror of his rampage. During the Age of Dawn, there was no night or day, only an eternally ruby-pink sky lit by a faint reddish glow that lingered upon the horizon. When the First of Wyrms began to attack Kishlaith, the smoke and ash from the people and things he burned was whipped into the air and it turned the sky a dirty orange color as the light was forced to filter through these foul clouds.

• And I Must Scream:
  • With the connection to his offspring cut, the resulting sensory deprivation made the First of Wyrms feel trapped and constrained within his own body. Every one of his senses seemed like nothing more than a dull mockery of its former glory and he was left with only faint echoes of the free-flowing memories he had instant access to only seconds prior. He was nearly insane from this torment by the time the Bright King finally decided to intervene, and his imprisonment at the hands of his master only made this suffocating feeling of confinement an eternal reality.

  • He also inflicted this upon the souls he devoured and twisted into his obedient replicas. When Jularius, the only original wyrm left on Kishlaith tells the gathered members of the GOT about his origins, he mentions that being under the First's control was pure mental torture. The victims transformed into wyrms were barely cognizant of who or even what they once were but were acutely aware that they were trapped within a physical form that was wrong on every level. Worse than that, they had no control over these new bodies and were entirely puppets of the First's whims. Even their thoughts were not fully their own—-the First of Wyrms would continually overwhelm what was left of their minds with his thoughts and emotions, which meant that they were forced to feel his cruel glee at the destruction he was inflicting even if their own wills tried to feel remorse or horror.

• Ambiguous Situation: Just what Dr. Xever is, and the true nature his of relationship with the First of Wyrms is never truly understood by anyone, perhaps not even the man himself. At first it seems fairly straightforward—-he is a mortal recruited by a member of the Exalted House to serve as the primary instrument of his will on the mortal plane like many others throughout Kishlaith's history. However, there are complications that muddy the waters. It is clear that Xever is suffering from the Wyrm-Touch and has lost much of his memories and original personality from both the ravages of the plague and the psychological stress of the torture that broke him. A skeptic would suggest that he is just an infected madman acting on his delusions. However...there is no denying that his Wyrm-Touch mutations are actually beneficial, he has knowledge of things he simply should not, and that he had a number of uncanny abilities even before Serumia Cavar taught him the Hemocraft magic as part of his inclusion in Project Savior. Further complicating the situation is the fact that the Twin Dales' Fae, Gráinne the New Beholder, explicitly refers to Dr. Xever as the First of Wyrms himself, instead of addressing him as a mere servant of the Fae's hated foe. Although the New Beholder was not in the best mental state at the time and could have been mistaken, it raises a third possibility: that the First of Wyrms has remotely taken over the body of a Thasmian on the brink of mental and physical collapse and has deluded himself into thinking he is his own Champion.

• Archenemy: To the Fae and the feeling is mutual. The First was initially indifferent to the Fae and even appreciated their work in keeping Kishlaith stable. But when they interfered with his destruction of mortal life and then severed his connection to his children, he began to hate them almost as much as the Bright King. For their part, the Fae utterly despise the First and view him as a dangerous and grotesque monster who committed unforgiveable actions against Kishalith and personally hate him for inflicting wounds on their comrades that took thousands of years to heal.

• Attack Its Weak Point: Due to his divine nature and his purpose as a living weapon against the Nameless Gods, the First of Wyrms was a nearly invincible powerhouse that could not be harmed by mortal weapons and was only temporarily inconvenienced by attacks from beings on his level of the cosmic hierarchy. His only true weakness lay in the millions of physical bonds he had established with his "children", the wyrms made from devoured souls, since cutting them destroyed his ability to use them as his extra bodies and senses, something he had grown far too accustomed to.

• Awful Truth: His true nature as a force of death and fiery destruction that nearly exterminated all life on Kishlaith is one for any Thasmian who hears it from a reliable source. To the Thasmians, both those raised within the Dominion and many of those who live in the outside nations of "the smallfolk", the First of Wyrms is their god-king. They see him as a magnificent and wise figure who created their original bodies in his image and led them to heights of glory before being backstabbed by the jealous Fae who wished for their elven children to seize lordship of Kishlaith.

• Became Their Own Antithesis: The First of Wyrms was brought into being for the sole purpose of preventing the Nameless Gods from consuming mortal souls to assuage their hatred and ceaseless quest for perfection. He performed this job flawlessly until his increasing discontent and bitterness led him to devour the souls of millions of mortals, steal their memories for himself, and enlist the monsters made from the remains to rampage across Kishlaith. In many ways the First became worse than the Nameless Gods he was made to combat; none of them have ever consumed so many mortal souls in such a short time span, and certainly none of them have come even close to the threat-level he did, even in the rare circumstances when they have been able to enter Kishlaith proper.

• Body Horror:
  • The Wyrm-Touch plague that afflicts Thasmians supplies all too much of this in its late stages. The already irrational and sometimes violent victim begins to spontaneously sprout an assortment of random appendages, digits, and even limbs and organs. Extra eyes, extra ears, extra horns, extra arms and legs or even features Thasmians do not have such as large leathery wings—-all of them growing in a haphazard and rapid fashion that causes immense pain to the victim. Amputation does not work, since a Healing Factor keeps these horrific and chaotic growths coming right back, in greater numbers than before. Mercifully this is the final stage of the Wyrm-Touch, and the victim dies within a few days as their bodily functions fail. Their corpses are an unrecognizable tangle of distorted flesh, cremated both due to the shame of falling to the Wyrm-Touch and the desire to spare the public from the sight.

  • The First of Wyrms himself was an unsettling example, although it was only apparent to divine eyes. The surface of his scaly body writhed with thin strings of flesh that connected to every wyrm that made up the invasion force ravaging Kishlaith. These were real physical constructs akin to nerve tissue that radiated outward from his body and wrapped all around the world, each of them ending in the body of one of his creations. Upon seeing them, the Fae Seanlaoch the Oath of Burdens was disgusted, something that is hard to inspire in a Fae.

• Creative Sterility: The First of Wyrms was unable to create anything despite his increasingly painful desire to do so. Not only could he not physically make anything, but he lacked even the ability to mentally conceive of how to do so, despite the urge being there. He naturally blamed the Bright King for this when he was reprimanded for expressing any desire outside of his job. However, this was not the Bright King's fault at all; the only beings capable of creation are the Old Father, the Bright King, and mortals themselves, due to all of them being The Chosen Many of the Great Potential as a means to carry out its wish for endless change and evolution. Nothing apart from those chosen ones can truly create, change to existing matter is all they can bring about.

• David Versus Goliath: Seanlaoch the Oath of Burdens vs the First of Wyrms was very much this trope. While both were powerful and immortal beings, Seanlaoch was vastly weaker and more vulnerable than the First who was not only a god but had been specifically crafted for battle. In fact, the Oath of Burdens knew it had no chance of even hurting the First of Wyrms, much less killing him. Instead, it staked everything on cutting its enemy's connection to his minions, having observed how much he had grown to rely on using them as extra bodies for his will.

• Despair Event Horizon: While all Thasmians are vulnerable to the Wyrm-Touch plague, it seems to be more common in those who lose any hope for themselves and cannot even begin to think of how to move forward. Many Dominion military officers who have made mistakes which resulted in severe and avoidable casualties inflicted upon the soldiers under their command have wound up infected as their guilt eats them from the inside. The brutal attacks against Thasmians living outside the Dominion that were carried out by Elizabeth Mourner’s Big Bad Duumvirate partner, The Hunter and his group the Destroyers had the nasty secondary effect of rampantly spreading the Wyrm-Touch amongst the victims. They were already in danger of contracting it due to the stress and negative emotions from being in a foreign environment and weathering discrimination and distrust. Watching their friends and even families being slaughtered with little interest from the authorities in many nations pushed things over the edge for many. Finally, the man who would become Dr. Xever is another example—-his mind utterly fractured after being tried, publicly condemned and humiliated, stripped of his rank and title, and then tortured by the Dominion authorities as punishment for resorting to magic in desperation to heal the soldiers he had been assigned to protect. According to him, it was at this point that the First of Wyrms came to him, his voice clear and unmistakable, and guided him to his new purpose.

• Dragons Are Demonic: The First is a rebellious protector deity turned bringer of death to the world. The wyrms who followed him were the souls of countless humans and dwarves eaten and subjected to torment and mutilation until they assumed his image and were branded with an inescapable link to his will.

• Evil Counterpart: He manages to be one of these to both the Bright King and the Father of the Void in terms of his relationship with Kishlaith and its mortal inhabitants.
  • The Bright King's desire to create is a fundamental part of his nature and he does it simply because that is what he is. His attitude towards his creations is of awe and wonder, and a constant curiosity and anticipation of what they will do next, which is why he largely gives them freedom to do as they will apart from a few firm nudges. The First's desire to create was born from a pure desire, but it rapidly turned into jealousy of both the Bright King and mortals alike, rapidly turning from wanting to create for its own sake to wanting to have what they did. When he made his wyrms he exerted complete domination over their minds and bodies, not allowing them the smallest bit of freedom. He believed that this was far superior to the Bright King's method managing his creations and saw no value in creating things that did were not bound and beholden to him in every way.

  • While the Father of the Void and the First of Wyrms both harbor desires to destroy Kishlaith and its populace, their incentives, methods, and feelings towards the people of the world are far different. The Father of the Void does not hate Kishlaith or its people; he sees the world and its life as his twin brother's delusion, one that has caused him immense suffering. He wishes to free his twin from his self-inflicted torment by destroying the delusion and "reminding" him that nothing else exists but the two of them. The First of Wyrms' desire to destroy Kishlaith's people was just another expression of his hatred and jealousy. On one hand he wished to take revenge for his "slavery" to the Bright King by subjecting his master to the sight of seeing his precious creation ravaged. On the other hand, he was furious at the sight of the beautiful world he knew he could neither participate in or truly enjoy and wanted to destroy the sight entirely. Finally, he wanted to clear the place for him and his wyrms and claim as their own. In terms of their feelings towards the people, the Father of the Void does not see Kishlaith's mortals as thinking entities, therefore he cannot hate them...he just sees them as problems to be solved. The First did indeed acknowledge the people as their own beings, which is part of why he took such great pleasure in subjecting them to the pain and horror of his powers.

• Evil Is Burning Hot: The First of Wyrms' primary mode of dealing death and suffering revolves around heat; his fire breath can destroy quite literally anything as long as is not a divine entity on a higher level than him. It could spread so rapidly that miles of countryside would be reduced to ash with just a single breath, and vast storms of fire would move across the world when combined with the wind from his wings. If that wasn't bad enough, his high body temperature immolated everything in his path, causing stone and steel to melt and flesh to burn just by being in close proximity to him.

• God-Emperor: Explicitly one to the Thasmian Dominion, to the point that its government is structured around this concept. Unlike most nations on Kishlaith the Dominion has no royal family, council of powerful rulers who ascend through birth, or even an attempt at democracy. Instead, they are a unique military dictatorship with the Warlord, the commander of the military's forces, considered the head of state. The reason for this is because the Dominion is waiting for the day the First of Wyrms leaves his prison, restored to his former glory and rules them as a tangible sovereign. While the Warlord is the head of the nation, it is considered a matter of temporary powers the way any other nation would conduct itself when its ruler is incapacitated. The massive stone throne in the Dominion's capital, constructed with the blood, sweat and tears of Thasmians rather than their human slaves is both a symbolic monument to this long-awaited period and an actual intended seat for the First to take when he arrives.

• God of Evil: Well, he is considered to be the god of chaos in a decidedly Chaos Is Evil sort of way. This is extremely downplayed and most of Kishlaith's populace see the First of Wyrms as a mischievous and ill-intentioned being similar to an obnoxious and unruly town drunk who must be continuously disciplined for his crimes. There are hundreds of children's fables and more humorous official legends featuring the First of Wyrms that boil down to him causing large swaths of inconvenient and irritating damage around the world before being confronted and locked up by the Bright King. These are all highly watered-down versions of the absolute horror he wrought at the end of the Age of Dawn.

• Godhood Seeker: A rather petty version considering he already was a god in the first place. However, the First sought to be like the Bright King in terms of lordship over a world of his own and upon understanding that he could never craft and shape a domain like his master, he decided to invade Kishlaith and repopulate it with his own attempts at making life.

• Greater-Scope Villain: Of both the Twin Dales arc and even more so in the long-feared Great War between the Solinri Empire and the Thasmian Dominion. In both instances the First of Wyrms used his Champion Dr. Xever to manipulate events in wider Kishlaith to his advantage. During the events of the GOT's Twin Dales mission this was "merely" putting Xever in a position to gain immense magical knowledge and power, but the Great War saw Xever use this power to bedazzle the Thasmian Dominon's government and trick them into allowing the First to have a true chance at bringing all of his children beneath his control at long last. See Unwitting Pawn.

• Hearing Voices: All Thasmians can faintly hear the call of the First of Wyrms as he still attempts to bring his children back under his influence eons later. This takes the form of a faint but exquisitely beautiful "song without music" that plays constantly in the back of their mind, akin to mental tinnitus. Due to living with this sound since birth it does not bother them in the slightest and is just part of their sensory experience of the world. However, one of the first signs of the dreaded Wyrm-Touch plague is an increase in this sound to the point that it blots out other thoughts or in the later stages, it becomes a distinct voice, although it remains completely incomprehensible, which helps to drive its victims to insanity along with the physical pain and horror of the other symptoms.

• Healing Factor: The First of Wyrms could rapidly heal from wounds inflicted by the Nameless Gods. This was a vital part of his design, allowing him to return to fighting his endless battles as quickly as possible. Although his wyrms did not have this same miraculous regenerative power, the First was able to share it with them, when necessary, through his connections to their bodies. This made the few injuries desperate mortals managed to inflict on them pointlessly cruel Hope Spots.

• Hive Mind: Kind of, with a good dose of Mind Hive thrown in for good measure. The First of Wyrms had such complete control over the wyrms he created that he could see through their eyes and use their senses. They responded to his very thoughts and their attack patterns and movement corresponded to his direct will. That said, they did have their own individual consciousnesses, they were just unbelievably weak and broken from their ordeal and helpless to resist their master's commands. The First was also able to access the memories of every single person he had converted into a wyrm, from infanthood to their original deaths, to their tortured existence as his "children". He used these memories to learn more about Kishlaith and seek out places mortals would hide or to bypass methods of defeating his horde. Which is ironically what the Nameless Gods do with the souls they consume, brutally strip-mining their memories and experiences for eternity.

• Immortal Breaker: A downplayed example but still potent. The Nameless Gods and Fae are undying entities on a higher level than mortals and thus cannot be slain by them and in most cases cannot even be damaged or injured by mortal means at all. However, the First of Wyrms was made precisely to deal with such creatures and he rampaged against the Nameless Gods without mercy. He would later extend this ferocity to the Fae when they tried to stand in the way of his extermination of all life on Kishlaith. In both cases he inflicted horrific injuries against them, and the only reason they did not die was due to the fact that they are unable to.

• It Can Think: Two examples, each of them perhaps equally disturbing. The First of Wyrms is thought to be a largely mindless monster, lashing out in eternal rage and frustration as he vainly tries to escape his prison. However, his recruitment of a Champion and ability to direct that chosen one to perform complex plans on his behalf signifies a calculating intelligence that has either emerged for the first time in untold millennia or was always there, just temporarily clouded. Secondly, the First is the only one of the gods to ever really question his role or express ambitions or desires for something other than his task. This is something that not even the Bright King or Father of the Void can really boast and shows that his mind was different from the beginning. In many ways he is closer to a mortal than a god, in the same manner as the Fae.

• Irony: The First of Wyrms actually achieved the original uncorrupted form of his desire, even if it happened in the worst way imaginable. His children, the Thasmians, venerate him as their wise and benevolent creator, worshipping him well above the other gods of the Exalted House. They are a thriving military superpower that has conquered and enslaved an entire continent and have their designs set upon the rest of the world in due time. Furthermore, although he himself could not grasp the true essence of creation, the Thasmians are like any other mortals of Kishlaith—-they have their own civilization, innovations, culture and customs with all that entails. He made his mark upon the world and brought forth a group of mortals dedicated to him in a way that even the Fae did not attain when siring the elves. But if Dr. Xever's actions truly do reflect the First of Wyrms' will, then the situation is highly tragic. Despite establishing such a unique culture beholden to him, he cares nothing for it at all, with his only goal being to dominate the minds and bodies of his children so he can once again turn them into his personal extensions and rampage across Kishlaith to finish what he started. Even though he got what he wanted, his hatred and bitterness towards the Bright King and Kishlaith either blind him to it, or he sees no value in the simple joy of watching one's creations make their own way in the world.

• Kaiju: An absolutely massive reptilian monster. In the modern era, attempts at sonar imaging of the First of Wyrms' prison via aircraft have shown his body to be at least the length of two cities, while his height is similar to a medium-sized mountain. That Seanlaoch was able to climb and traverse his body to cut away his connections to the wryms is a testament to both the Fae's powers and its single-minded determination to win.

• Leaking Can of Evil: He is imprisoned within the center of a massive, swirling storm that endlessly rages around the barren and dead fifth Sister Continent of Thasmia. But his influence upon the descendants of those he converted into wyrms is still very much there, in the form of an enticing "song" in the back of their minds and a disease that twists and then destroys the body and mind of its victim. A disease that is explicitly revealed to be him reaching out from his prison and failing to completely seize control of a victim.

• Light Is Not Good: He is a brilliant white and gold, the colors associated with the Bright King. This is not accidental; the Bright King painted the First in his colors, as an extra message to the Nameless Gods who were menacing Kishlaith at the time. In addition to his flames obviously being bright, a deep red glow burned beneath his scales as he constantly sprayed fire. Combined with his size this made him a massive and horrifying object in the skies of Kishlaith, like a malevolent sun raining down death from above.

• Mad God: It is agreed by most on Kishlaith that the First of Wyrms has completely taken leave of his senses (some theological scholars argue he always was this way, which gives debates as to why the Bright King would allow such a being to come into existence, let alone let it stay). Certainly, losing his wyrms sent the First into a frenzy that grew worse until his mind sundered from the isolation and sense of being constrained in his own body. With that said...it is possible he was already insane by the time he invaded Kishlaith, his mind deeply scarred by the isolation of his predicament and the reality that he would spend an infinite existence fighting the Nameless Gods while viewing a world he couldn't even enter or participate in.

• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Played with. The Bright King's dismissive attitude towards the First of Wyrms' growing discontent with his role was indeed lacking in empathy and seemed to showcase a haughty entitlement to eternal servitude. However, this was not due to malice on the King's behalf but simple inability to understand what the First of Wyrms was even trying to say or the feelings he was describing. The gods of the Exalted House are bound by their nature and unchanging in behavior unless a calamitous alteration shakes them to their core. The Bright King creates and observes, the Corpse Hound guides the souls of the dead, the Gray Maiden inflicts pain and torture upon the wicked, etc. They are their roles and cannot even understand wanting to change. The First is unique among the gods for the fact that he could even feel discontent or desire for something more. Either way, this misunderstanding led to unspeakable tragedy.

• Mystical Plague: The Wyrm-Touch is a dreaded disease that only afflicts the Thasmian race and all of them are at risk of developing it. The first symptom of the Wyrm-Touch taking hold is a slow but steady increase in the intensity of the "song" all Thasmians can hear in the back of their mind; the sound begins to interfere with their thoughts or comprehension of what others are saying. From there, they become obsessed with figuring out what the voice is trying to say and will go to extremes and even hurt themselves or others, if they think it will bring them one step closer to discerning its meaning and purpose. Finally, the physical changes begin; the victim's body temperature grows dangerously hot, spiraling beyond fever into something that inflicts burns upon them and anyone unlucky enough to touch them without protection. Extra limbs, digits and even organs begin to grow from the body, and they gain an unnatural healing ability that keeps them alive far longer than they should be in such circumstances. Ultimately, they die, leaving behind a truly disturbing mess. This horror show is caused by the First of Wyrms forcibly attempting to assert his control over the Thasmian in question and brute-forcing his way through the changes inflicted on them by the Fae. However, his connection is far too weak and all it creates is death and chaos. During the events of the Great War, Dr. Xever is able to use his mastery of the Hemocraft school of magic to take this Up To Eleven via creating an actual physical means of spreading the Wyrm-Touch to Thasmians and strengthening its ability to let the First take full control over them.

• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Had the Bright King not been so outraged by the Fae's attempts to turn the wyrms into elves—-and thus dabbling in creation—-it is possible that complete transformation would have fully destroyed the remains of the First of Wyrms' connection to the souls he had claimed. Not only did the Bright King stop this changeover, but he left the Fae's "project" in a state of half-wyrm and half-elf rather than making any changes of his own. This allowed the First's connections to slowly grow back over the eons of his captivity, even if they are still nothing like their former potency.

• Not Using the "Z" Word: Never once are the First or his brood referred to as "dragons". In fact, the word wouldn't even make sense to anyone on Kishlaith. Those who even know about the existence of the First's children call them "wyrms".

• Omnicidal Maniac: Driven by jealousy of the Bright King and mortals and the desire to seize Kishlaith as his own domain, the First of Wyrms rapidly set to work burning away all that lived upon the world’s surface. This was not just an extermination campaign directed against the sapient lifeforms brought into being by the Bright King and the Fae; the First was all too willing to put everything to the torch—animals and plants included.

• Only Friend: The Corpse Hound was the First of Wyrms' only companion during his time of service to the Bright King, although this was incidental, since the Corpse Hound was escorting the souls the First was charged with protecting. Their tasks and proximity to one another made the First mistakenly believe he could establish a friendship with his fellow deity, but the Corpse Hound was hardly receptive to his attempts at camaraderie. This did not really deter the First of Wyrms and he considered the Corpse Hound his friend, nonetheless. Despite slaughtering incalculable amounts of people during his rampage against Kishlaith, the First of Wyrms never once took the opportunity to consume their souls at the moment of their deaths to create more wyrms. It is unknown why, but it is possible that he averted doing this since such an action would have placed him in direct conflict with the Corpse Hound.

• Outside-Context Problem: No one on Kishlaith was prepared for the First of Wyrms’ arrival and his subsequent assault on the world. Despite his eternal war waged on their behalf, his existence was entirely unknown to the populace. Therefore, when he first appeared in the skies, countless people gathered to observe this alien being, filled with a mixture of awe at its fearsome beauty and wariness at its unknown origin, nature and motivations...fear that was too quickly proven to be correct, if futile. On the Bright King’s part, the First of Wyrms’ rebellion and devastation of Kishlaith was a terrible event he had not even thought possible. While the Fae and mortals had disobeyed his rule before and disappointed him, never once had one of his creations so openly lashed out against him in pure spite and never had his world been threatened with absolute destruction before. Both of these things happening simultaneously completely stunned him and all he could do was uselessly demand for the First of Wyrms to stop his rampage. When the Fae finally stepped in to stop him of their own initiative and then began to realize their own ambitions, it hit home just how badly things had deteriorated and pushed him into intervention at last.

• Physical God: The First of Wyrms is very much a tangible being of flesh and blood who exists in the mortal world. This makes him very different from the other seven members of the Exalted House. While the gods can manifest a physical form on Kishlaith, this is merely a fraction of their power and consciousness inserted into the world and “dressed” in flesh and blood while they simultaneously exist elsewhere. The First is the only one who is a physical body and nothing more.

• Sadist: Slowly devolved into one after his rebellion against the Bright King and his subsequent rampage across Kishlaith. He took deep, abiding pleasure in his former master's grief as he corrupted millions of deceased mortals and then turned the newborn world into a lifeless black wasteland. His enjoyment of suffering extended to the people of Kishlaith too; originally, they were just victims of his Revenge by Proxy against the Bright King, but his jealousy of their own creative prowess caused him to enjoy inflicting terror and pain on them en-masse and watching them slowly give into despair as they realized the futility of fighting him.
  • Softspoken Sadist: The Wyrm-Touch's song is described by all Thasmians as a beautiful and melodic sound that belies the horror of what it can lead to. Considering that they believe this to be his "voice" calling out to his lost children, this trope could somewhat apply there. A more literal example is Dr. Xever himself—-he claims that the First of Wyrms replaced his original voice with his own when he healed the Tongue Trauma that was part of his torture. Whether this is true or not, Xever does have a deep, smooth, and almost soothing voice that is confirmed to not be his original.

• Satanic Archetype: The First of Wyrms was a powerful and brilliant entity made by a benevolent creator god to protect the world from an evil force that sought to destroy it. However, his jealousy caused him to bitterly rebel against his creator and corrupt many innocent souls, bringing them under his absolute control. He would then dedicate himself to the destruction of the world and people he was assigned to protect. Even after imprisonment by his master he reaches out to corrupt the descendants of his original victims, forcing them to be constantly vigilant against his deceptively beautiful voice. Oh, and he's a dragon, so there's that.

• Small Role, Big Impact: The First of Wyrms had a—-relatively—-small role in the setting's history and never directly appears, but it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that he quite literally shaped the course of history on Kishlaith. Prior to his devastating invasion, Kishlaith existed in the Age of Dawn. While the world was still under construction and somewhat unstable, the people enjoyed an era of peace and plenty. Conflicts were present, but they were short-lived and rare, and many fledgling civilizations coexisted in relative peace. The First of Wyrms brought this age to an abrupt end through nearly destroying all life on Kishlaith and condemning the survivors to centuries, if not millennia of slowly and painfully rebuilding what had once been. The groups of humans who had survived the fiery apocalypse began to viciously fight over the scarce resources that remained in the world, while the dwarves retreated deep under their mountains in fear of the sky and the death that had come from it, a tradition that would stay with them forever. With the Fae no longer allowed to commune with or guide the people as punishment for their actions, the humans and dwarves struggled on their own. The Fae could only speak with the elves, which allowed the formerly timid and scarce race to thrive by following the wisdom and advice given to them. They became the mighty Ilesti Empire which would bring most of humanity under its control as a servant race for thousands of years. The Thasmians, left to their own devices, would wander as primitive tribes of raiders, until they united under a single warlord to invade and destroy the now decadent and unprepared Ilesti Empire, ripping it apart and leaving humans to fend for themselves. That spurred centuries of bloodshed and fighting as human factions tried to fill Ancient Ilesti's shoes or fought for their right to live as they wanted. Although this ceaseless conflict spawned unspeakable horrors like the Red King and the vampire types, it also resulted in immense wonders like the golden age of human magic. It all led to the current world of today, with Ancient Ilesti sundered into the nations of North and South, elves vastly diminished as a power in Kishlaith, and the human Solinri Empire having patchy control of two continents with the Thasmian Dominion controlling another in its entirety and with its sights set on the rest of the world. All while other nations of diverse populations try to advocate for their own interests while retaining their hard-won independence.
  • The First's actions did not just affect the mortal sphere; it also drastically changed the course of how the gods themselves operated. The Bright King was traumatized by the loss of so much life and the long-lasting disfigurement of his world by an outside party. He became far more paranoid and protective of Kishlaith than ever before and when he created the other three members of the Exalted House, he purposely ensured that they would have no desire or ability to rebel, in the way the First of Wyrms accused him of doing. When the Gray Maiden, a being he had no control over and who vastly outclassed him in power, hinted that she would invade Kishlaith if she was not given what she wanted, the Bright King immediately capitulated to her demand to be given certain souls to torment for all eternity. Finally, the suffering this event caused the Bright King motivated the Father of the Void to act upon his belief that all life and form outside of the two of them was a delusional mistake of his brother. He was moved to rectify this due to the fact that it was clearly causing him pain, and has stuck to that determination for eons, cementing the regularity with which he would invade Kishlaith and attempt to destroy it.

• Unwitting Pawn: Both Erwist and Serumia Cavar and the Thasmian Dominion's government became these to the First of Wyrms, though with varying degrees of severity.
  • One of the core facets of the Cavars' "Project Savior" involved torturing children gathered from all corners of Kishlaith and force-feeding their pain, fear and despair to Twin Dales' Fae in order to break its mind and thus leave its golden blood vulnerable for them to feed on, letting them ascend into something beyond their already fearsome status as Type 3 vampires. This mental torture could only be inflicted upon the Fae using a specific type of magic, the Hemocraft All-Arcanum. Due to its dangerous nature, the incredible difficulty of mastering it, and the threat it poses to Type 3 vampires, Erwist and Serumia were hard-pressed to find a suitable mage to entrust with this lost school of magic. The First of Wyrms ensured that Dr. Xever was in the perfect place and position to be recruited by the couple and made into one of the key players in their plans against the Red King.

  • Once Dr. Xever obtained the knowledge and use of Hemocraft, the First of Wyrms used his champion to entice the Thasmian Dominon's government with the lost magic's power and war potential, as well as its possibility of "restoring" the First of Wyrms' legendary blessings to his chosen people at last. Xever was able to then use Hemocraft to rapidly spread a more refined but still devastating version of the Wyrm-Touch to many Thasmians under the guise of imbuing them with their physical birthright and the power to take the world at last, placing them directly under his master's control.

• Villain with Good Publicity: To the Thasmian Dominion. The Thasmians see the First of Wyrms as their holy progenitor and a god-king with their best interests at heart. In their mythology, the First was created by the Bright King to protect the world from the Nameless Gods, and after ages of faithful service, was rewarded by the King by being allowed to create his own beings and add them to Kishlaith's mortal populace. He created the Thasmians in his image, making them strong, wise, and nearly invincible and maintained a just and dignified rule over them. The jealous and scheming Fae were afraid that these new creations would upstage their elven children and therefore they cut the wyrms' connection to their master, and then tried to force them into becoming elves. The Bright King saved them from the Fae, but the First was driven insane by the ordeal and was thus sealed away by the King for everyone's protection. This misunderstanding is behind the Thasmians' hatred for the elves and their goal of conquering all of Kishlaith, though their quest for domination is more complicated than solely religious goals. With that said, the Dominion also recognizes that the First is the source of the Wyrm-Touch corruption and that nothing good would come from their progenitor interacting with them in his current state. Thus, their prayers to him are a mixture of praises for his (supposed) past actions and pleas to stay away from them until they can bring about circumstances that will lead to the restoration of his former righteous glory.

• Wrong Genre Savvy: The Thasmians believe that their ancestors were once the stereotypical fantasy dragons—-powerful beyond measure, gifted with immortality and keen intellect, and an exalted place among creation due to their lord's service to the Bright King. Very little of this is true, apart from the physical powers and immortality aspect. They were nothing but Slave Mooks to an omnicidal monster who cares nothing for their advances and progress over the ages and would return them all to that state in an instant, just to start up his rampage again with just as much fury as before. This deep misunderstanding of their history led them right into the First's claws during the Great War as the option of obtaining this legendary status had many of them unwittingly infecting themselves with a virulent and potent form of the Wyrm-Touch.

Edited by Swordofknowledge on May 4th 2023 at 11:18:30 AM

This guy is a living extinction event. That was my first thought after reading that. Like an intelligent asteroid hell bent on wiping out all life because that is its purpose and he pursues that purpose with abandon. He's both a force of nature and a character. I always find these characters refreshing in their simplicity. They're so powerful they don't really need a lot of subtleness in their characterization or interactions to need reasons for what they do. What you see is what you get.

Second thought was that this is an archetypical fall from grace story. The archangel becoming the devil. The bright morningstar becomes the prince of darkness. Pretty appropriate for a creature from very early in the creation of the world. Though there's something very ironic in his early satanic role in world history being lost in time and replaced with the more general douchiness of his current portrayal among the people.

There's also a sense of childishness about him. Which is strange, considering the First of Wyrms is an ancient deity with thousands of "children" of his own. But when you look at the story in this light, this is a tale of a child throwing a tantrum because daddy wouldn't give him what he wanted. Yeah, you can't create anything. Well, I can't fly or breathe fire or turn souls into an army of world destroying puppets. Life's not fair sometimes. I half expect the Bright King to tell him to take off the black nail polish and for the First to respond, "It's not a phase, dad!"

Speaking of world destroying puppet armies I don't have, I do appreciate the fact that his greatest weapon against the mortal realm also proved his initial undoing when his connection to them became undone and it drove him crazy. It's very Sauron and the One Ring.

I don't have a character to share, so anyone who wants to post go right ahead.

This will differ little from the usual format due to it being about two characters who fill the role of Big Bad together. I plan to make profiles for them individually, so this is more of an overview than anything solid. Thus, there won't be any "Abilities/Weaknesses" and other aspects that are unique to them as characters.

• Name: Erwist and Serumia Cavar

• Age: As humans, their ages differed greatly. Erwist was 53 years old and Serumia was 25. However, due to joining the Red King's ranks at the same time, they have both been Type 3 vampires just over eight hundred years, making them technically the eldest among the founding vampire's servants.

• Appearance:
  • When wearing his former human appearance, Erwist appears to be a tall and muscular middle-aged man of heartland Solinrian ethnicity, standing at an imposing 5'11. His well-groomed hair and goatee are chestnut brown and heavily streaked with threads of gray, a herald of his advancing age. In opposition, his chiseled and handsome face is almost free of age-related lines, apart from a few deep crow's feet around his gray eyes. Erwist's clothes have changed with the passing of time, but regardless of the era, he ensures that he is clad in the finest and most fashionable of garments. In the modern days he favors expertly tailored suits and formal shoes, the only throwback to his ancient origins being his insistence on dark red ascots and wearing the heavy jeweled rings that marked his membership to House Cavar, one of the Solinri Empire's Nine Noble Families. When he forcibly appointed himself Lord Protector of the kingdom of Twin Dales, he added a steel medallion that denotes the solemn office. In his true form as a Type 3 vampire, Erwist is a massive batlike monster with humanoid overtones, standing fourteen feet tall. The creature lacks skin, leaving its muscle and connective tissue exposed as if his body has been flayed, and his mouth is full of razor-sharp fangs. He has pointed ears and eyes set in deep sockets that glow with pale grayish light. His hair and beard are far longer in this form, almost reaching his chest and back, and the gray is far more prominent. His physique is almost grotesquely muscular and large leathery wings protrude from his back. In his human form his voice is deep and strong, but in his Type 3 vampire body it takes on a loud and grating edge that chills the blood.

  • When wearing the guise of humanity Serumia is a petite and slim woman of Nuranese ethnicity standing 5'4 in height. She has long straight black hair that reaches her mid-back, usually pulled into a side-plait thrown over one shoulder and decorated with a number of small subtle ornaments, or other times simply allowed to flow loosely around her heart-shaped face. A thin and disturbingly neat scar rests beneath one of her brown eyes, the faded white mark standing out against her dark complexion. Like her husband, Serumia's outfits have changed with the tide of eras. Currently her main attire consists of white button-up shirts and blue blazers along with formal capri pants and high heeled shoes. She wears a necklace that takes the form of multiple gold bands interlinked with engraved beads of amber wrapped around her neck. In her true form as a Type 3 vampire Serumia is a humanoid bat monster that stands around twelve feet tall, lacking skin and showcasing her muscle and sinew for all to see. Her black hair is long and hangs nearly to her knees and deep-set eyes give off a sinister amber light from their sockets. Her ears are pointed, and her mouth is filled with razor sharp teeth. While greatly taller in this form, she is just as slender as her human body, and her wingspan is shorter than her husband's. However, due to exploring the absolute limits of her shapeshifting abilities, Serumia has not taken this appearance since the Cavars invaded and took over Twin Dales. Instead, her true body bears a far more grotesque and esoteric form, uniquely suited to the couple's purpose in the region. Whatever form she takes, Serumia's voice remains the same—extremely high-pitched, almost squeaky, something that tends to disarm most people who initially speak to her.

• Personality:

In many ways the Cavars have a near-perfect relationship. They have always been intensely devoted to each other, and centuries at one another's side have only deepened this bond into something unbreakable.

To Erwist, Serumia is one of the few people he not only respects as a person, but actually defers to. Her wellspring of arcane knowledge has always held a great allure to him and its usefulness to him in his mortal life was what kindled the spark of his genuine love for her. He understands just how devastating the loss of her magical abilities was for her and has constantly found ways to allow her to employ her grasp and knowledge of the art, even if their state of undeath means she can no longer use it herself.

In both their human and vampire lives Serumia has been the one exception to Erwist's aloof, callous and often cruel treatment of others. Despite not having a drop of noble blood in her veins, he has always done his level best to respect her and spare her from hardship. He will not allow anyone to insult her, and grave suffering awaits any he feels has done so—-intentionally or not.

Despite his own rigid belief in a natural hierarchy and the inalienable right of a lord to exert absolute control over the lives of his subjects, he allowed Serumia to convince him to devote all his resources and centuries of skill towards a "revolution" against the Red King. The idea of turning against their master gravely unsettles him, but Erwist is willing to put that aside for a future where the two of them can live eternally without his shadow tainting their peace.

Serumia deeply loves her husband and admires his ruthlessness, skill in politics and manipulation, his relentless brutality, and—although she may sometimes express exasperation over it—his rigid adherence to codes and beliefs that were ancient when they were turned into vampires.

The contrast between the way he treats her compared to others will always bring a faint smile to her face, and so will the knowledge that he is willing to move mountains if it will bring her the slightest hint of joy. Although the loss of her magic to vampirism is a shattering blow that she knows she will never recover from, Serumia is always pleasantly astounded that Erwist has made it his eternal mission to provide her with opportunities to impart her wisdom to others, provided they prove worthy.

She despises the Red King for many reasons, ranging from his betrayal of the pact he made with them to his cowardly true nature, which she finds contemptable on multiple levels. But what she truly cannot abide is the sight of her regal and powerful husband bowing before a creature she sees as absolutely undeserving of fealty.

Watching Erwist humiliated by the Red King multiple times through their centuries of service enrages her to no end, especially as she sees him compelled to silently endure it via his code of honor and bond to their master. Serumia’s hatred and resentment for the founding vampire has resulted in her putting her arcane knowledge towards a plan to not only break the Red King's hold over them, but to elevate themselves into godlike beings, worthy of worship in their own right. The name she has given to their plan, Project Savior springs from her grandiose belief that they are rightfully freeing themselves from unfair and intolerable bondage.

While their genuine love for each other makes the Cavars unique among the ranks of Type 3 vampires, their attitude towards others is all too common for their brand of undead. Erwist and Serumia see people, whether they are living mortals or even other vampires, in rigid categories—-useful tools for their endeavors or to indulge their whims, faceless cattle to be ignored until they become the former category, or mere food and tribute to the Red King. They are wholly without empathy or compassion for anyone apart from each other and perfectly capable of committing horrific atrocities without feeling a hint of remorse.

Although they can mimic kindness, altruism, sympathy, and other tender emotions when interacting with others, this is simply well-practiced facade cultivated to ensure obedience in people who are useful to their plans when threats, force or mind-control will not attain the desired results.

In addition to attracting a host of willing followers with the lure of arcane knowledge and hidden wealth, the Cavars have extended the hopeful premise of Project Savior to the wretched and desperate of Kishlaith, promising to free them of their curses and afflictions when they ascend into divinity. This has given them access to the service of a number of people at the end of their rope and willing to assist in unspeakable actions for a sliver of hope. However, any subordinates who fail to live up to their expectations or anger them in any way will immediately find themselves subject to the full force of Erwist and Serumia’s wrath, with their previous positive interactions having little to no impact.

Having possessed the overwhelming physical and supernatural powers of Type 3 vampirism for over eight centuries, and with the legendary St. Byzas dead by their treacherous hands, neither of the Cavars have any real fear of anyone apart from the Red King. Time and time again they have utterly destroyed anyone who would oppose them, reaching the point where they no longer view enemies as threats to their physical wellbeing. Instead, they use the potential logistical damage an enemy can do to their plans as a way to gauge the severity of the threat and formulate a response based upon that alone.

Because of this outlook, they view The Muffled, a group of Twin Dalesian citizens fighting an increasingly desperate battle to oust their “Lord and Lady Protectors”, to be a source of amusement and diversion from their work rather than any real hazard. As such, Erwist and Serumia have inflicted multiple Hope Spots on the rebellion before mercilessly slaughtering their prey and starting the cycle again.

• Goals: The Cavars' plan revolves around Gráinne the New Beholder, the Fae who serves as the anchor for Kishlaith's reality in the kingdom of Twin Dales and the surrounding regions. Erwist and Serumia intend to consume every last drop of Gráinne's golden blood, allowing them to replace the Red King’s blood that houses their souls with Fae essence. Once they have turned themselves into creatures composed of Fae blood, they intend to use the resulting power to sever Twin Dales and the surrounding land from Kishlaith. This will create an entirely new plane of existence where reality is subject to their every whim, and the populace entrapped in this place will bow to them as gods. Due to the impossibility of injuring a Fae by any mortal means, they have resorted to exploiting the fact that Gráinne embodies the joy of ushering new mortal life into the world and protecting and overseeing its development. Through torturing and eventually killing vast amounts of the young mortals the Fae so dearly loves, and magically funneling the painful experiences of those children into the Gráinne's mind, they hope to drive the Fae to abandon its physical body to flee into the wider network of the World-Spine to escape its anguish over the situation. When this happens, there will be an instant in which its divine fortitude fades, and its blood will be available for them to absorb...an instant they intend to take full advantage of.

• Motivation: Although they do not entirely see eye to eye on the matter, Erwist and Serumia wish to free themselves from the control of the Red King due to centuries of servitude after he reneged on his agreement to give them power and eternal life in exchange for the lives of their subjects and the assassination of St. Byzas, the Corpse Hound's only Champion, and one person capable of destroying the founding vampire. They are not content to live a simple life after attaining freedom but want an exalted existence for eternity, bolstered with control over the very fabric of reality in their own "fiefdom". Serumia sees this outcome as their justified reward for putting up with the Red King for so long and Erwist sees it as his rightful place as a member of a noble house who has ascended into something greater.

• Role In the Story:
  • Erwist and Serumia are the primary antagonists of the Guild of The Triumvirate's investigation into the Undeclared Territory of Twin Dales as they attempt to figure out the country's connection to the Bloody Wheels gang, a vicious terrorist group that has perpetrated a series of bombings and kidnappings of children across two of the world's Sister Continents. Vestryn Satoril a former South Ilestian Ranger and leader of the Bloody Wheels considers vengeance against the Cavars to be his sole reason for living after losing his daughter to the early actions of Project Savior, and his ruthless actions for the sake of his revenge against the couple are what draw the GOT into the fight.

  • To the people of Twin Dales, the Cavars and their followers are a force of unknown evil that seized control of their country literally overnight, cutting it off from the world, and turning it into a hellish staging ground for their unfathomable whims. Of the evildoers the GOT has slain over the years, Erwist and Serumia are among the strongest in both their social status and sheer raw power. In the end, destroying them is a bitter Pyrrhic Victory that leaves the GOT in a vulnerable position—-the target of both political pressure from the Undeclared Territories and possible retaliation from the Red King, as well as having dark and long-reaching personal consequences for the members who participated in the mission itself.

  • Reaching back into antiquity, Erwist and Serumia are the reason behind the destruction of the infamous ancient Solinrian Ghost City of Wylgrad. Erwist was its lord and Serumia was his Court Mage-turned-mistress. The two of them fed the city's entire population to the Red King after poisoning and killing the frail and elderly Saint Byzas, in exchange for eternal life and power from the founding vampire, a deal they would find came with hidden costs.

• Backstory:
  • In 1998 the nations of the Undeclared Territories located on Kishlaith's continent of Arius were delivered a shattering blow when the Thasmian Dominion invaded Dwenzen, a powerful and bustling hub of trade. Despite the mutual benefit of ensuring that Dwenzen was spared from the Dominion's influence, the event preyed on the worst weaknesses of the Undeclared Territories as the nations began to squabble over how the war effort and aid would be handled. Each member of the UT sought to give the least while gaining the most, and as in times past, many only obeyed the sheer letter of the law in terms of their ancient treaties to aid each other in times of need.

  • All of this allowed the Dominion to overwhelm Dwenzen's defenses and annex the nation, adding it to the Thasmian Dominion's lands and gaining a strong foothold on Arius. As the citizens of Dwenzen were subjected to the horrors of the Thasmians' infamous cruelty to the conquered, the resulting refugee crisis saturated the Undeclared Territories. As before, the nations struggled to cope while maintaining their rigid independence from each other and avoiding dreaded offers of "help" from the Solinri Empire.

  • The kingdom of Twin Dales was one of the few that handled the crisis with some degree of competency. Concerned about the sinister implications of the Thasmian Dominion having conquered such an important nation and entrenched itself on the continent, King Otto of Twin Dales began to take measures to ensure his country was protected in every way possible. He allowed large numbers of Dwenzenian refugees into Twin Dales, with the price being conscription into the military, bolstering its ranks with new recruits.

  • Otto then reached out to across the sea to the Speaker's Council of South Ilesti, with the goal being a treaty with the elven nation that would ensure cooperation against their mutual enemy. South Ilesti accepted and quickly supplied Twin Dales with a host of resources against the Dominion, ranging from funding to deploying a number of their Rangers to train the Twin Dales military in resisting the Dominion's tactics.

  • At first all went well; the people of Twin Dales were able to breathe a sigh of relief with the knowledge that their country's defenses against the Dominion had been greatly bolstered with South Ilestian resources and the bodies of Dwenzenian refugees. Public support for King Otto and the wisdom of the Royal Pillars, his council of advisors, skyrocketed.

  • However, the Solinri Empire soon received word of South Ilesti's deal with Twin Dales and was unhappy. The alliance between the remnant of Ancient Ilesti and Kishlaith's "human empire" had always been strong, but seeing the elves give aid to a nation that refused to submit to Solinrian rule rankled many in the Imperial Court. As a result, the Solinri Empire began to lean heavily upon South Ilesti, pressuring them in various ways when it came to the issue of Twin Dales.

  • As a result of this, South Ilesti began to demand more and more in return for its aid against potential Thasmian Dominion attacks, and this translated into greater hardships for the citizens. At this point over a decade had passed without the Dominion moving outward from the conquered territory of Dwenzen, and the people began to doubt the Thasmians would make any major moves in their lifetimes and unrest and resentment began to build.

  • Not wishing to alienate South Ilesti but also wishing to keep their options open as to ways to protect Twin Dales, King Otto and the Royal Pillars reached out to various sources to keep the nation's defenses intact. During this time, a mercenary company calling itself the Dauntless Corps answered King Otto's summons. The Dauntless possessed a vast army of its own, enough to compete with a small nation and its leaders, a married couple named Erwist and Serumia Cavar, were highly amenable to most of the terms given by the King and Royal Pillars.

  • Things went well and soon Twin Dales invited the Dauntless Corps to slowly but steadily replace the South Ilestian forces that had been stationed in the country for over ten years at that point, as a way to gently push South Ilesti and its vast demands away from their nation. As a way to commemorate the start of this process, King Otto and the Royal Family invited the leaders of the Dauntless Corps to the capital city of Leynore to dine with them at a state dinner held in the royal palace. Erwist and Serumia graciously accepted and on a festive and sunlit afternoon in 2006 the Cavars entered Leynore and the royal palace to the applause and adoring eyes of many royal courtiers and onlookers.

  • The precise detail of happened next is unknown to anyone except for those who were there at the time. The dinner that night was a lively one, with King Otto and his many children asking questions of the couple, some of them pertinent to the oncoming change and others genuinely curious as to their origins and their previous adventures with the mercenary company they led.

  • Of those who were there, even they do not know what triggered the slaughter. Perhaps it was some hidden signal between the two or perhaps a random decision about when to begin and the Cavars were so finely tuned to each other that they knew to simply match each other's pace. Either way, a simple gesture from Erwist turned into a clawed hand reaching across the table and tearing off the head of King Otto's youngest son. Serumia's polite laugh turned into an array of crimson tendrils sent into the hearts of a dozen Royal Pillars as swiftly as any assassin's bullet.

  • From that moment there was no fighting back, only prolonging the inevitable. The monsters the king had invited into the palace, into the country ravaged all who were present. Some ran, only to be cut down by the wide-sweeping range of their attacks and others fought to the last, screaming in desperation as they pulled the triggers of their guns and drew their blades in a final stand that proved useless. The Crowned Blades, the Royal Family's final shield took them on all at once, but they were cut down from both the Cavars' attacks and from within. The monstrous Type 3 vampires ensured the blood from their opponents did not go to waste, drinking every drop of it from the walls and floors of the palace until it stood clean and pristine, as if the slaughter had never occurred.

  • At the end of the massacre, few of Twin Dales' ruling structure remained alive and of those who remained, all of them were in the Cavars' pockets. Erwist had been busy long before the couple had even approached King Otto with their false promise of helping the struggling country. He had made allies among the royal government through terror of the Cavars' overwhelming power, the lure of what potential followers had to gain from an alliance, or through exploiting grudges and resentment towards the Royal Family itself.

  • It was not long before the changes desired by the Cavars spread throughout Twin Dales at the hands of their pets within the surviving government. South Ilesti's forces and indeed any elf, including citizens of Twin Dales, were rapidly deported with little to no explanation. The Dauntless Corps and its vast army moved into Twin Dales and replaced the military and police forces. The organization that had first presented itself as a bulwark against the Thasmian Dominion now showed its true face as a merciless enforcer of their new rulers' will. An indefinite martial law came down like a lead curtain, cutting Twin Dales off from the rest of Kishlaith and any unauthorized communication to the outside world was severely punished. The only ones allowed passage in and out of Twin Dales were the servants of the Cavars', beckoned from all over Kishlaith by the lure of alleviation of their curses at long last.

  • On the surface King Otto still seemed to reign over the country from Leynore, but it was a far cry from before. His televised speeches were lacking in the vigor and passion that had once fueled the man, and the unexplained absence of the rest of the Royal Family was a harsh indicator of the ruin that had descended upon the country.

  • Yet even this wasn't the end of the tribulations that would come to affect Twin Dales. As the Cavars' rule cemented itself a gruesome new change would sweep the country. Erwist and Serumia now began to enact the first stages of Project Savior, demanding a large number of children from across their newly conquered territory to be delivered to Leynore. They spared no one, not even the few offspring of the Rangers that had been left behind in the hasty exit from the country—-a mistake that would prove to be the thread that unraveled their entire operation, though it would take years to become apparent.

• Relevant Tropes:

• Admiring the Abomination: The Cavars are not universally reviled; quite the opposite in fact. The Empty Hands, an organization that is composed mostly of Type 1 vampires and exists to help prolong their lives and hide them from the Order of St. Byzas, sees Erwist and Serumia as nearly godlike beings due to them being Type 3 vampires and out of the belief that the two of them truly wish to cure the Type 1s of their debilitating and endless craving for the aura energy of others. The group's leader Marie Kristiansen has pledged her support to their cause and has used many of the Empty Hands' vast underground connections as the primary channel through which Project Savior acquires children. Many of the Twin Dales' government that survived the Cavars' massacre became Les Collaborateurs out of fear or a selfish desire for power, but there are a few who truly see the couple as a blessing. This minority believe that the Cavars will lead the nation to a true golden age, with the current dark times as a necessary price for that wondrous future.

• Archenemy: Two examples.
  • Vesryn Satoril, a former South Ilestian Ranger, has made destroying the Cavars his sole reason for living. He is willing to do anything to move one step closer to this goal, with his most extreme act being the creation of a group that abducted children to hand over to Project Savior in a bid to clandestinely grow close to the couple so he could figure out their true nature and a method of killing them. Although Vesryn's hatred was strong enough for him to commit unspeakable actions to sate it, neither Erwist nor Serumia really think much of him, apart from Erwist remembering a random South Ilestian soldier he forced into a Sadistic Choice of his life over his daughter's during the early days of their reign. Both of the Cavars have completely moved on from the incident and Erwist is rather amused when Vesryn appears at the side of the upstart adventurers of the GOT who dare to challenge them.

  • Gráinne the New Beholder despises the couple with a fierce passion for subjecting countless children to horrible suffering within its domain and forcing it to experience their anguish, adding salt to the wound. This is made all the worse since the Bright King's ancient command of non-interference holds Gráinne back from saving these innocents and unleashing its wrath against the comparatively puny Type 3 vampires. Compounding the matter, the Cavars are also unknowingly collaborating with the First of Wyrms, the ancient enemy of the Fae. The instant the New Beholder has the ability to sidestep this command, it inflicts a brutal and humiliating beating against Serumia before condemning her to a Fate Worse than Death, and it expresses mild frustration that it could not do the same to Erwist due to Simon completely destroying his soul earlier.

• Aristocrats Are Evil:
  • Erwist was born into House Cavar, one of the Solinri Empire's Nine Noble Families during an unfortunate time in the empire's history. As Solinri rapidly grew from an ambitious human kingdom into an empire, the Nine were becoming drunk with their growing power and losing sight of their obligations to the people—a moral decay that would only worsen over the centuries, as Elizabeth Mourner saw in her own human lifetime. Erwist is very much a product of this time period; he sees a ruler's subjects as property that can be used according to their sovereign's needs and wishes with no regard for their wellbeing. During his human lifetime as lord of the city of Wylgard he ruled with an iron fist and handed down horrific punishments for any rebellion, not merely out of a desire to keep the people in line, but because of his genuine belief that any insurrection against one's ruler is an act of spiteful evil. He would ultimately make the final decision to hand over the lives of his subjects to the Red King, using them as currency in a deal to gain endless life and power, something he feels was his absolute right to do.

  • Both Serumia and Erwist would come to replicate Erwist's rule over Wylgard in Twin Dales once they had taken over the nation. The Cavars see the citizens of the country as tools to keep it functioning well enough to dissuade outside intervention from other powers, food, or as nourishment for their egos as they enjoy ruling over a vast population of mortal beings. Regardless, none of these views are particularly benevolent and none of them include care for the citizenry for their own sake.

• Asshole Victim: The remaining terrorist—-ahem, Free Mages who staged a full-on rebellion against the Mages Guild nearly a decade previous resurface as members of the magic-users who have come to Serumia Cavar's side to learn her arcane secrets. And, like anyone else in those ranks, they are subjected to her brutality when they falter or fail to grasp a lesson she thinks they should. Lest one feel sorry for these mages, it should be remembered that they committed a number of heinous crimes against the populace using magic, killed many innocent mages for the sole crime of continuing to obey Guild rules, and murdered Mia Aimms' parents and students, sending her into a spiral of hatred and revenge. The Free Mages aside, this trope could apply to most of Serumia's "apprentices"—-they are fully aware of that the Cavars are torturing and killing masses of children from around Kishliath but disregard it because they deeply desire access to lost magical arts.

• Badass: Whatever else they may be, there is no doubt that Erwist and Serumia are powerful and imposing individuals. They were chosen to serve the founding vampire directly and thus belong to the highest category of undead on Kishlaith, they are incredibly ancient and have lived through at least two of the world's ages, and they were able to conquer an entire nation in a single night—-although a great deal of manipulation and backroom dealing proceeded the actual coup. All of this makes them a nearly unstoppable force to be reckoned with.

• Bad Boss: Neither of them has any issue brutalizing their followers for failure or simply angering them. Erwist will outright kill members of the Dauntless Corps the instant he feels they have disrespected him, at times taking their lives in extremely painful ways. Serumia takes this into "Bad Teacher" territory through the way she treats the mages who come to her for access to a host of ancient and forbidden spells barred and hidden from the public by the Mages Guild. If she feels they are not trying hard enough, that they are slacking off in their studies, or if they are questioning her expertise, she will instantly remove limbs or more often eyes with surgical precision as a manner of correcting them. The couple gives leniency to their direct subordinates, known as the Project Leads, but that is more to do with their unique skillsets and connections that make them harder to replace than any special affection they hold for them.

• Bat People: Like all Type 3 vampires their Shape Shifter Default Form is that of humanoid, batlike monsters lacking skin with Glowing Eyes of Doom. It is unknown precisely why the Red King forces his followers into this default form unless they are specifically concentrating upon their former mortal appearance, but during his lifetime as a human warlord fighting in the ruins of a post-Ancient Ilesti world, his armor and helmet bore a heavy bat imagery, perhaps indicating that in his vanity he is shaping their bodies into replicas of himself when in his mortal prime.

• Be Careful What You Wish For: Erwist and Serumia's end goal is to break free from their connection to the Red King, attaining true freedom at long last. They do end up disconnected from him in a manner of speaking—-Simon destroys Erwist's soul, erasing it from existence and obviously placing it beyond the control of the Red King. Gráinne drags Serumia deep into the World-Spine and binds her to the Fae's world-spanning neural network. It then forces her to experience all the torturous memories of Project Savior’s victims, again and again for eternity. Similarly, due to the vast power over reality held by a Fae, there is nothing the Red King can do to free her even if he wanted to.

• The Beautiful Elite: The Cavars have more than just wealth, expertly tailored clothes, and power. Erwist and Serumia are incredibly physically attractive in their human forms, possessing all the perfection and glamor of airbrushed models. This is actually not what they looked like when they were truly alive; although they weren't ugly by any stretch of the imagination, they were far plainer than they appear now. As the centuries passed, they have become so adept at their shapeshifting powers that they can subtly alter their features to take on ever more enticing aspects to further charm others and one another.

• Berserk Button: They have at least three between the two of them. Both Erwist and Serumia have a deep intolerance for anyone insulting the other, even if it is unwitting or unintentional. Erwist cannot abide disrespect or rebellion against his rightful authority as a ruler. He will kill anyone he even suspects of such a thing, with their pleas and declarations of innocence or remorse meaning nothing. For her part, Serumia despises any mage she feels is not applying themselves properly under her teaching, is slacking off, or otherwise wasting their ability to still use magic. Similar to Erwist, pleas for mercy or trying to convince her she is wrong will only fuel the fire, and result in an even harsher punishment.

• Big Bad Duumvirate: The Cavars and their devoted enemy Vesryn Satoril both occupy the spot of main villains of the Twin Dales arc. While Erwist and Serumia's position is obvious, Vesryn is the reason the GOT even got involved in the first place. The entire ordeal started with the Guild trying to hunt down a group responsible for hundreds of deaths and an untold number of missing children—-a group Vesryn secretly leads as part of his revenge scheme. He would then befriend the GOT and "guide" them to Twin Dales as another part of his plan, thus having one of the arc's primary villains under their nose the entire time.

• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: The Cavars are perfectly capable of being polite and cordial when interacting with other people, especially those they deem useful to advancing their plans. However, they are quick to reveal their monstrous nature in both the figurative and literal sense. This can best be exemplified during the beginning of their interactions with Twin Dales. Erwist and Serumia charmed the royal family and its advisors by presenting themselves as a couple of semi-retired adventurers who had started their own mercenary company, a swashbuckling yet refined pair who would make great allies of the country. Yet the very day they were invited as guests to a feast that celebrated their alliance, they killed nearly the entire royal family and their courtiers, sparing only those who had already been converted to their side.

• Bloody Murder: As Type 3 vampires Erwist and Serumia's powers revolve almost entirely around the control and use of blood. Even their very bodies are an example of this; at their core they are nothing but disembodied human souls housed within an "allotment" of the Red King's blood, that they can mold and control to their heart's content, albeit with the King's eternal oversight. Whether it is shapeshifting, regeneration, creating weaponized constructs or armor, all of these powers are achieved through manipulation of this potent blood. Replacing the Red King's blood with the golden ichor of a Fae is not only their path to freedom from the founding vampire, but to the level of the divine. Ironically...

• Blood Magic: Project Savior's most important tool is the Hemocraft school of magic. It is the art of controlling your own blood, and that of others, by using it as a perfect conduit for the caster's aura energy. It is the most primal and powerful school of magic, infinitely versatile and capable of even mimicking the powers of other magical disciplines. However, it is incredibly dangerous to study and most who try to delve into it wind up dying one way or another. Furthermore, the Mages' Guild destroyed any known descriptions or instructions on it during their great purge of the varied magic schools as they took over the teaching of magic on Kishlaith. Serumia has full knowledge of how it works, although she is of course unable to use it herself. To that end she taught it to a Thasmian mage named Dr. Xever, so that he can use the blood of Project Savior’s young victims as a means to force their anguished memories into Gráinne's mind.

• Body Horror: Their batlike true forms lack any visible skin, thus exposing their muscle and connective tissue in a gruesome and glistening display. In the Final Battle against Erwist, Simon's wife Lizai finds herself morbidly fascinated by the way she can see the muscle fibers flex and stretch across his body, and the way his anatomy loses and regains cohesion in the blink of an eye as he alters his physical form from second-to-second.

• Boom, Headshot!: During his battle with the Cavars to save his daughter, Vesryn shot both of them in the head, which he assumed would inflict fatal damage. He was utterly shocked and horrified when the two of them instantly recover from the supposedly deadly attacks, heralding how badly things go from then on. Erwist and Serumia have weathered headshots from a number of snipers over the years they have reigned over Twin Dales, although as word of their seeming invincibility has spread through the land, the number of people willing to risk everything to take aim at their tyrannical rulers has dwindled.

• Brains and Brawn: Played with. Erwist is not stupid by any stretch of the imagination; he was trained in politics from an early age due to being born into nobility and centuries have made him a skilled manipulator of people and organizations. However, he has little to no understanding of the magical arts and deeply struggles to grasp more than the basics, especially without the ability to actually use magic. Serumia on the other hand is a former member of the Amber Sages, an ancient nomadic group of highly talented magic-users. She has an immediate grasp of the structure of most spells and has created several new ones of her own, as well as having deep knowledge of multiple schools of magic that have risen and fallen into obscurity over the ages. Thus, she serves as the arcane architect behind Project Savior while Erwist's place is subjugating Twin Dales and keeping the citizens and country itself in line so that it can serve as the staging ground for their operation. On the other hand, both of them are incredibly powerful due to being Type 3 vampires, meaning neither of them are lacking in brawn.

• Brainwashed and Crazy: Apart from their inordinate physical might and weaponized transformative powers, Erwist and Serumia's most fearsome attack is a hellish scream that will place anyone who hears it under their absolute control. The form this takes can vary but any victim will now find their will subject to the Cavars' control with no hope of resistance. Most victims of the Cavars' screams are allowed to keep their memories and sense of self, but must live with the gnawing dread that they are now a ticking time bomb—the instant Erwist and Serumia give a command, they will carry it out immediately and without question, no matter how horrific it is. Serumia used this upon King Otto in exchange for sparing his life as he wept at the end of her claws, and he lived to regret it. She used this mental leash to punish him for his acts of insubordination and funneling information to the Muffled rebellion by forcing him to participate in their operation’s most gruesome aspects while leaving his mind completely intact. Eventually Otto took things into his own hands by cutting off his leg to limit what she could force him to do.

• Catharsis Factor: After spending most of the arc either arrogantly luxuriating in their control over Twin Dales, smugly assured that everything is going their way, or actively hunting the GOT team like animals it is extremely satisfying to see them become completely unglued as they realize that not only are they up against opponents who can actually match them blow-for-blow, but are more powerful than they are. The resulting begging and eventual defeat is just the cherry on top.

• Co-Dragons: Erwist and Serumia are these to the Red King, since they are his oldest and most trusted servants. As living humans, they killed St. Byzas, who was the greatest threat to his existence, and sacrificed an entire city's worth of people to revitalize him and heal the grievous wounds St. Byzas had inflicted upon him decades earlier. As Type 3 vampires they have been at his side for centuries and carried out a number of tasks and missions on his behalf. He has even allowed them to remain outside the cycle of wakefulness and hibernation that binds all other Type 3 vampires and limits the time they can be active in Kishlaith, so that they can be at his beck and call at all times. When the Cavars instituted Project Savior, they recruited a number of individuals to act as "Project Leads" based upon their skillsets and connections that made them particularly useful. These individuals serve as their direct subordinates and are as follows:
  • Erik Sedgerson is a heroic and respected figure in the dwarven kingdom of Orvudin who waged a decades-long civil war to attain equal rights for the kingdom's Mining Caste. Now an old man ravaged by disease and bitter at the prospect of never being able to enjoy the future he fought so hard to achieve, he joined the Cavars out of desperation. He leads the Dauntless Corps and serves under Erwist as the bulwark against any rebellion to ensure the country remains in the best state to host Project Savior.

  • Marie Kristiansen the current Queen of Empty Hands is the leader of an organization that exists to help Type 1 vampires make their way in life and survive their affliction as long as possible. She is captivated by the Cavars, especially Erwist, and sees them as perfect beings due to their status as apex vampires. Their promise to cure the Type 1s when they have ascended into gods sealed the deal, and she has put her organization and most of its resources at their disposal. Of the three Project Leads, she is the only true loyalist to the cause.

  • Dr. Xever, a mysterious Thasmian mage, a near-oxymoron considering the race's feelings towards magic. Little is known about him apart from the fact that he was the only one to survive the rigors of learning the Hemocraft school of magic from Serumia. He expresses unswerving loyalty to the Cavars' cause, quietly fulfilling his duties without complaint. He is afflicted with the Wyrm-touch, a fatal Mystical Plague that hounds the Thasmian race, leading to rumors that he is just one more person participating in the operation to cure his illness. Unbeknownst to the Cavars, he is the Champion and indeed host to the First of Wyrms, a destructive deity from Kishlaith's earliest history.

• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Although "sequel" doesn't quite apply here (there being half a decade and many other adventures between the incidents) Erwist and Serumia are the next major vampire villains the Guild of the Triumvirate face after the calculating Elizabeth Mourner, and they could not be more different. Although she was an illegitimate offspring of the Solinrian House Darus, she lived the humble life of a commoner, wheras both Erwist and Serumia were born into a high position in their respective groups and lived lives of privilege and responsibility. Elizabeth was a kind and honorable knight before the horrors of war, betrayal by her own troops, and meeting with a dark and manipulative figure turned her into a monster. Erwist and Serumia were ruthless people even when they were alive, although Serumia had her kinder and more vulnerable moments. Even as a vampire crime lord Elizabeth kept traces of the person she once was, and she had certain rules she held herself to. Put bluntly, Erwist and Serumia only care about gaining power and enriching their own lives regardless of what they have to do. They have no rules, no boundaries, and see morality as beneath them. Finally, Elizabeth was a Type 2 vampire riddled with weaknesses and limitations, while Erwist and Serumia are Type 3s—nearly unstoppable fiends possessing supernatural power and violence that make it impossible for even the best hunters to take them down.

• Curbstomp Battle: Due to their powers, the outcome of any fight against them is already decided before it has even begun. Erwist and Serumia can weather immense amounts of damage and even if they are injured their regenerative abilities mean that their enemies never truly had a chance of defeating them in the first place. Every conflict between them and an opposing force has resulted in their victory, with the enemy exhausting themselves and succumbing to despair even before the Cavars deliver the final blow.

• Fantastic Racism: Averted, although it seems to be a factor in their actions at first. One of the first things Erwist and Serumia did when they usurped control of Twin Dales was to banish all elves from the nation's borders without warning and without reason. This was not just limited to the South Ilestian soldiers who were stationed there, citizens with lifelong history were suddenly and violently evicted from their homes. At first this seems motivated by some distaste towards the elven race, but it is later shown to be highly pragmatic. Elves are a hybrid race of human and Fae and are thus uniquely compatible with their progenitors. Any elf would be able to at least faintly sense the anguish of Twin Dales' Fae filling the land and at worst would be a candidate for Gráinne to attain physical means of stopping Project Savior. Eliminating even that small possibility was a top priority.

• Hero Killer: St. Byzas was the Corpse Hound's first and only Champion, the most effective vampire hunter to ever live, and a man who struck terror into the hearts of the undead. He wielded a sword forged from a fang of the Corpse Hound and his swordsmanship was second to none. Both of these aspects allowed him to fight and defeat the Red King by effortlessly cutting through the vast shield of stolen mortal blood that protects his cowering soul. Erwist and Serumia would eventually poison the now frail and elderly warrior when he tracked the weakened Red King to the city of Wylgard, as part of their deal with the founding vampire. This not only ended the life of the Red King's worst enemy but halted any chance of stopping Kishlaith's vampire scourge.

• Mortals Are Insects: The Cavars see living mortals and even the lesser vampire Types as cattle who exist to serve their wants and needs. If they are not food, tools, or objects of amusement then they will be ignored until they are seen as one of the former categories. Befitting this view, they care nothing about the personhood of those they use; once they have determined you are fit to serve a purpose for them, you will do it or be broken and beaten into submission. And should you be too much of a hassle, you can just be killed and be replaced with a more pliable pawn. Their views once led to an Evil Cannot Comprehend Good situation when the Cavars visited the defensive enclave Isaac Marsden created for the Becker family in the Sulvey Swamps. At first Erwist and Serumia were intrigued, believing their fellow Type 3 had cultivated his own colony of mortal pets to worship him. They were abruptly bemused and then contemptuous of the way he served them as a protector and helper with their chores and procurement of food via his powers.

• Invincible Villain: As Type 3 vampires Erwist and Serumia can shrug off many powerful attacks from their enemies without even flinching. Even when they are damaged, their regeneration allows them to rapidly recover, to the point of constructing entirely new and functional bodies in less than five minutes. Making things worse, their overwhelming power lets them shred through hordes of opponents, to the point that just one of them can destroy a large battalion of heavily armed troops, the time it takes to do so depending on how many stand their ground and how many choose to flee. Even the GOT's powerful adventurers are completely unable to do any lasting damage to the Cavars. It takes Simon sinking deep into the darker aspects of his mantle of the Father of the Void's Champion and Dr. Yelaros choosing to give himself as a "spouse" to Gráinne the New Beholder for the heroes to triumph against the malevolent couple.

• La Résistance:
  • The Cavars have the audacity to think of Project Savior as a variation of this trope due to their ambition of finally freeing themselves from the founding vampire. While they definitely agree with this view of their movement, they have radically differing perspectives on it—-Erwist is uneasy and wars with his sense of duty to what he considers is his liege-lord. It undermines his self-image and makes him uncomfortably consider whether or not he is the same as the rebellious vermin he dealt with in his days as the lord of Wylgard. Serumia sees the rebellion as a rightful reaction to the Red King's treatment and far too long in coming. She is cautious of his potential to find out what they are doing but is exhilarated at the thought of a life without his oversight.

  • On a far less delusional level, a group known as the Muffled began to quickly rise after the Cavars took over Twin Dales. At first it consisted of soldiers who refused to bend the knee to the new regime and its edicts and changes, but as the Cavars gruesomely tightened their iron fist and showed just what they were capable of doing, the rebellion began to accept anyone who could use a weapon or utter a spell—-and who was reasonably sure they were in full possession of their own will. Their name stems not only from their stealthy tactics but because of their need to use a magical means of deafening themselves to avoid possible exposure to the Cavars' mind-control screams.

• Mask of Sanity: Not Erwist and Serumia themselves per se, but Twin Dales itself fits this trope under their rule. From the perspective of outsiders, even the country's fellow Undeclared Territories, Twin Dales has adopted a radical policy of martial law, turning into a heavily fortified and armed hermit kingdom in fear of a potential Thasmian Dominion invasion. A strange policy but not something that would truly raise eyebrows. The country still fulfills most of its obligations and agreements with its allies in the Undeclared Territories and has negotiated its way out of those that are no longer possible. It is only when one enters the nation's borders and spends a significant amount of time there that the horror of what is happening becomes starkly clear.

• Nothing Is Scarier: To the citizens of Twin Dales, one of the most horrifying things about the Cavars is that no one knows what the hell they are. They know that their new "rulers" are not normal humans by any stretch of the imagination and that they have an array of fearsome and deadly powers, but no one can come to an agreement as to where those powers come from, or more importantly, how to defeat them. Some believe the Cavars are rogue mages practicing some form of evil sorcery from Kishlaith's murky past, others see them as a pair of Nameless Gods who have decided to torment the people, and others don't even want to speculate. Even the GOT's members can't really identify them from Vesryn's account of his battle against them; it's only Simon's knowledge of Type 3 vampires from his time in the Order of St. Byzas, combined with the GOT's overall interactions with Isaac that allows them to give a name to their enemy.

• Personality Powers: Erwist and Serumia technically have the same powers, but they have taken their abilities in very different directions. Erwist has turned his body into an offensive weapon dedicated to rampant physical assault. He can harden his flesh into unyielding armor to repel blades and bullets, unleash flurries of hardened blood shards, lengthen his claws into massive blades strong enough to cut through stone and steel, and exude hemorrhagic gas. Serumia has delved into the more esoteric and abstract side of their powers. She can transform herself well beyond the batlike body of a Type 3, merge herself with structures, generate blood-constructs that can function remotely, and even create multiple clones with their own formidable abilities.

• Pragmatic Villainy: Despite sacrificing many kids from all over Twin Dales in the first year of their reign, the Cavars never again demanded that the citizens of the land give up their young to Project Savior. Futhermore, they ensure that no victims are taken from any of the surrounding countries either, instead ranging farther across Kishlaith for their "resources". The reasons for this are as follows—gutting Twin Dales' population by sacrificing its children is self-defeating in the end since it impairs the nation's ability to function and it would just inflame support for rebellious elements. Doing this to nearby countries would raise suspicion and invite investigations that, in the worst-case scenario, could lead to a war Twin Dales really doesn't need.

• Pyrrhic Victory: Although the GOT team sent to Twin Dales does manage to defeat them, victory over the Cavars comes at an extremely steep cost for both the Guild and the individual team members as a whole.
  • Simon was forced to personally call upon the Father of the Void for aid to defeat Erwist. This deepened the hold his patron has on his body and soul and drastically shortened the time he has left before he is converted into the Father of the Void's avatar on Kishlaith. Dr. Yealaros merged his body with the will and consciousness of Gráinne the New Beholder in a desperate attempt to stop Serumia, permanently binding him to the Fae as its "spouse". This prevents him from really being able to leave Twin Dales, resulting in his departure from the organization. Saras and Lizai, the Thasmians in the group, have their own issues—-Saras' faith in the First of Wyrms is deeply shaken by the truth of his god's nature from a very reliable source and Lizai winds up corrupted by Dr. Xever, through being secretly swayed to his ideology. She becomes first person he infects with his version of the Wyrm-Touch plague with her transformation into a wyrm slowly taking hold as time passes. Finally, Mia is deeply shaken by the things she has witnessed in Twin Dales and her eventual encounters with the Free Mages aligned with the Cavars digs up a great deal of trauma and wrath she thought long-buried.

  • For the Guild as a whole, the situation is almost as dire. The heads of state of the Undeclared Territories are thrown into a frenzy at seeing two of their peers deposed from their rule by a group of organized adventurers that can send powerful fighters into remote areas at any time. Even after they become aware of just what Erwist and Serumia were, they dislike the precedent it sets for the GOT to be able to take down a country's leader by its own volition. They begin putting enormous pressure upon the GOT to disband or to ally with the Undeclared Territories or admit to being agents of the Solinri Empire, or even the Thasmian Dominion. Worse, the Red King is now aware that mortals have actually been able to kill his servants for the first time in centuries, and the way the GOT ended the Cavars leaves him unable to create new Type 3s to replace them. That leaves the possibility he will personally target them in retaliation for this permanent damage, an action that would easily destroy the entire group.

• Smug Super: Centuries of predatory life has worsened their already dark personalities and made them extremely arrogant, egotistical creatures. Conquering Twin Dales in a single night and reigning unopposed for nearly two decades has made them very self-assured that their ultimate victory is in sight, and it never once occurs to either of them that there is even a possibility that anyone apart from the Red King himself can stand up to them, let alone stop them.

• Super-Empowering: Just like how the Red King extended power to them centuries ago in exchange for their allegiance, the Cavars have gifted powers to their direct subordinates in the form of a number of powerful artifacts and knowledge they have attained over the years. Erik Sedgerson was given the Dauntless Seed armor, an enchanted suit of armor that can fuse with the wearer's body and halt their illnesses along with granting a number of other arcane powers. Marie Kristiansen was presented with Satiation, a sword that can fatally drain the aura energy from those it pierces, making it the perfect weapon for a Type 1 vampire. Finally, Dr. Xever was given full knowledge of the Hemocraft school magic. While this was in accordance with his job in Project Savior, the knowledge itself is his to do with as he pleases, making him the only mage currently living to know how to use it to its full potential.

• Unholy Matrimony: Their glaring misdeeds and atrocities aside, the Cavars are a couple genuinely in love with each other. They openly display affection, praise the contributions each of them has made to the plan, and each of them admires the direction the other has taken their powers. They have been together for centuries and, when boiled down, their scheme is all about ensuring they will never be separated from each other and will be able to live in utter comfort for all eternity. When Erwist is destroyed by Simon, Serumia undergoes a massive Villainous Breakdown as her mind is consumed with the despair of never seeing her beloved husband again. As a result, she quickly changes Project Savior's goal of attaining godhood to a much more disturbing and simple goal—-gaining enough power to tear a hole in reality and inviting ravenous hordes of Nameless Gods into Kishlaith. All so that they can destroy a world she sees as unfit to exist without Erwist in it.

• Unwitting Pawn: They are unknowingly doing the heavy lifting for not one but two malevolent powers, one of which is the very master they are trying to escape. Due to their souls being embedded in his blood, the Red King has absolute control over the Cavars and all other Type 3 vampires. This includes being able to read their minds at all times, down to their most hidden and secretive thoughts. He knew the instant the idea of rebellion occurred and then solidified into action. He allowed the two of them to carry out Project Savior partially out of amusement and partially due to an ambition of using his link to the Cavars to siphon Gráinne's blood into himself the moment they achieved their chance to drink it. Secondly, Dr. Xever the Thasmian mage is the Champion of the First of Wyrms, and Serumia instructing him in Hemocraft provided the First with the means to spread his influence over his Thasmian "children" in a far more effective and devastating way than ever before.

• Villains Want Mercy: When finally backed into a corner and faced with enemies they cannot defeat, both Erwist and Serumia completely lose their composure and grovel for their lives.
  • Erwist tries to reason with "Tall Dark and Angry Simon" once he realizes that his strongest attacks cannot even scratch the Father of the Void's avatar, and as he feels his soul being snuffed out, he alternates between tearful pleading and hysterically commanding Simon to spare him.

  • As Serumia kneels defeated before Gráinne the New Beholder and realizes what it has in store for her, she desperately tries to plead her case and even alters herself into a grotesquely childlike appearance as a way to play upon the Fae's status as a guardian of the young.

  • In both cases no mercy is forthcoming, and the Cavars reach the end of their centuries-long journey at last.

Edited by Swordofknowledge on Jul 4th 2023 at 6:33:30 AM

"Love each other, be mindful of the Red King, and scorn all other men." - Vow of the Cavars

Well they're a couple of right bastards aren't they? A pair of immortal, nigh unstoppable monsters wrecking havoc wherever they go. If the Worm was a living extinction event then these two are walking natural disasters. Everywhere they go death and chaos comes with them, and when the dust settles, there's misery and despair following. Monstrous partners in crime whose twisted love for each other is matched, indeed intertwined with, their their darker obsessions and impulses.

Let's get their 'positive' trait addressed. Their years of marital bliss have proven that they're devoted to each other at the very least. I can't imagine what kind of couple's therapy they have to go through to stay married after almost a millennia. Erwist has a demonic sense of chivalry about him, demanding respect for his fair lady above all else. Serumia acknowledges this and indeed finds it one of his nobler traits. And while she's less physical about it, it's clear she is protective of his pride, maybe even his sense of masculinity and her beef with the Red King is as motivated on his behalf as much as her own. Considering the company they keep though, either short lived mortals or immortal psychopaths, then perhaps their own company, evil as it is, is the closest thing they have to genuine human relationships.

Speaking of immortal psychopaths, ohai Red King! Didn't see you there. I'm amused you listed them as Co-Dragons, but didn't include The Starscream, considering how little mentioned there was of what they do for the Red King, but so much about how much they hate him and want to stab him in the back. The only being in their lives who reminds them that they are not the all powerful gods they clearly think of themselves has. In fact, considering they view every living being in existence as tools, mindless cattle, or food, that dynamic gets flipped on its head when the Red King is involved. He's in their position in that relationship, so what does that make them? Tools? Mindless cattle? Food? Despite not really affecting their lives on a regular basis as far as I can tell, their life goals revolve around him. Hate, fear, those emotions one tries to avoid, he's the only one who makes them feel small because he invokes those.

But when they're not being tools, mindless cattle, or food for the Red King, they're treating everyone else that way. With how Darth Vader they tend to go on anyone who mildly displeases them, I have to wonder if their secret project would have been done like 700 years ago if they hadn't kept murdering their own followers and partners. Frankly I'm surprised they maintain any sort of following. Must be some very, very desperate people. I'm sure that must be a gut punch when people realize the Muffled exist not because of the efforts of the freedom fighters, but because they're the mouse the cats are playing with before biting on the neck. Their single minded belief that they are absolutely entitled to the hearts, minds, and souls of their subjects certainly makes them out of step with the other villains from this setting, who generally acknowledge that they're forcing others to do things against their will, which does emphasis both their twistedness and how out of step they are with the modern times. And it's not like they can't communicate on a normal level, they showed that when they subtly took over Twin Dales before openly massacring the royal family. They just consider it soooo beneath them. I'd respect the commitment to principles if, you know, it wasn't so evil.

There's some aspects that feel undercooked though. The relationship with the Red King is rather lacking. I get they hate him basically for existing, but is that all there is to it? Does he do or say, or make them say or do something, that they find particularly obnoxious? It doesn't even seem like they were aware he was spying on them the entire time. And I'll admit there was only so many times I could read about what mass murderers they are before it started blurring together. I get that the Type 3 vampires are ancient beings of Kishlaith's days of myth and yore and are thusly nigh unstoppable demigods, but from what I read, Simon and Yealaros get power-ups and then deal with the vampiric duo in the blink of an eye. Feels like they were overpowered and got anticlimactically curbstomped at the same time.

They do sound like the usual "mountain standing in the way" of the protagonists and exists to "be conquered" after a long and perilous climb towards the conclusion. Nothing wrong with that, as having a difficult opponent leads to a chance for growth for the ones fighting them.

...

Name: "Bunny Burnbridge"

Age: Forever 33 years old.

Personality: Tired, honest, determined, trembles anxiously when facing women, loves to make small children laugh and stop crying, can't have enough of petting stray cats he meets on the streets. Values the one friendship he still have and willing to go the extra mile just to make sure he won't lose it. An innocent admiration of genuine actual heroes in society.

Abilities: Designated the duty of his boss/roommate as a "Story Destroyer" of the Infi-verse, he destroys realities that reached their "dead ends", regardless if they ended happily or badly, with his creativity serving as their limiter. Can travel between realities and timelines freely even if it is more akin of being pushed and dropped from a plane with a parachute than anything else. Can bring in the means to destroy the timelines and knows the locations of the linchpins that holds the doomed worlds together, which he destroys to make them collapse and send him off into the next one in line. Limited ability to predict the future (one week ahead only) through math. Capable of creating basic and extremely crude-designed super-empowered artifacts known as "The Tags".

Weaknesses: Can only travel to doomed realities/timelines. Personally only as strong as a normal human being of his age. Feels pain like anyone else. Can get hurt but not wounded and never gets used to the pain. Still have his humanity and morality intact, causing him no end of grief. Sometimes does good things on a whim, which ends up hurting him in the long run later. A stretched muscle in the left side of his back which might put him to pause when locking up from time to time.

Goals: He wants the job DONE.

Motivation: Reached the point where he just wants to end all of the infi-verse completely, leaving only a single void where nothing new will ever come into existence, just so he can go to sleep and finally be free of this task forced upon him by his boss/roommate "Sherry Sharkbite".

Role in the story: Co-antagonist and serving as the Main Antagonist's agent of the apocalypses. Also supporting whatever protagonists he come across the doomed timelines with a legit fighting-chance to postpone the destruction of their timelines a little longer, even if the outcome is nowhere near certain. And eventually give them a chance to stop him all together regardless of how small that chance might be down the line.

Backstory: He started off as a cashier clerk in a small store in the small village he lived in. That was a long time ago.

Relevant Tropes:

• Arch-Enemy: Of those who uses "The Tags" for good/selfish reasons and began pursuing him through multiple timelines and realities just to stop him from destroying them and eventually, hope to end "Bunny Burnbridge" himself to save all the worlds from their shredding. The man himself welcomes the notion with open arms.
• Anonymous Benefactor: He is the reason the protagonists (main and temporary) can even stand a chance of protecting their worlds from "Sherry Sharkbite" as he is the one who discretely hands out the mysterious artifacts only known as "The Tags", which grants anyone who wears them a oddly specific and utterly worthless superpower at complete random to fight him with.
• Atrocious Alias: "Bunny Burnbridge" was chosen by his boss/roommate as his new name and stuck around as she didn't bother calling him anything else.
• Berserk Button: For the love of whatever god you believe in, never ever hurt any of his kids in any timeline where he has them. It does not matter if they are "beasts of the apocalypse", dormant or active, he still loves them more than enough to get up close and personal with anyone who brings harm upon them.
• But Thou Must!: Has no choice or say in the matter of wanting to do his job or not. It must be done.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Despite serving as "Sherry Sharkbite's" substitute and everything he has seen while doing her job, he still does nice things for her even when not asked too, such as hanging out in her room whenever she's more bored than usual or taking scenery-pictures of doomed yet pleasant timelines before shredding them into oblivion. Sometimes he even hangs out with temporary-protagonists who are at their wits end and hears them out when they've hit the rock-bottom, just to let them get it off their chests and have another chance to find their resolve and keep fighting him later down the line afterwards.
• Evil Virtues: Creativity, Determination, Diligence, Flexibility, Generosity, Honesty and Love. For everything he has done "Bunny Burnbridge" is still a human being and with his soul still intact alongside a moral judgment. If you use one of "The Tags" for selfish evil, he will still end the timeline/reality you're in but he will end you FIRST and offer a moment of pity for your parting soul afterwards. Use "The Tag" for good, and he will spare you for as long as possible, give you every chance you could possibly have to postpone his task, and offer a you a courtesy prayer before sending you off into oblivion if you still fail to stop him despite all of those chances.
• Fatal Flaw: Empathy. Despite having done the job forced upon him for countless times and millennia, he still can't bring himself to think badly about "Sherry Sharkbite" and does whatever he can to make sure that her rare genuine smile never fades away. Even if it means him keep doing a job he loathes with all of his being in the process.
• The Faceless: Never seen without a one-way sun-visor covering his entire face when out on the job. Only takes it off in "Sherry Sharkbite's"(His "roommate/boss") room and even then his face never gets shown or described in any way or form.
• Formulaic Magic: "Bunny Burnbridge"'s knowledge in mathematics from his previous life and empowered by his employment to "Sharkbite", now allows him to calculate the future with frightening accuracy, even if it is only for a week ahead, not flawless, and open for errors he could not have possibly expected when doing the first calculations.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Started off as a random cashier clerk in the middle of nowhere and became an agent of all apocalypses due to his boss wanting to slack off and dump her job on someone else for an indefinite coffee break instead.
• Good with Numbers: Had a knack for math in his life before the abduction and thanks to "Sharkbite" empowering him, it transcended into Formulaic Magic as a result.
• Has a Type: A remnant from his life as a normal ordinary person, "Bunny Burnbridge" do have a preference when it comes to women for a stress-relieving romance. Such as "women who are true to who they are". Anything else won't even get a glance from him.
• Hobo Gloves: Usually seen with a pair of red gloves missing the tips of two-three fingers on each hand. As long they serve their purpose, he won't trade them out until they've ceased to exist all together.
• Kidnapped by the Call: He was perfectly fine with his "boring ordinary life" as a cashier clerk before his boss, "Sherry Sharkbite", found him and put him to work in a new line of "employment" instead.
• Messy Hair: Never once bothered to rein in his naturally curly black-brown hair clawing around his mask and the air around it. As it is as indestructible as he is and ceased growing all together, he never bothers with cutting it either.
• Morality Pet: Whenever he manages to have a kid that doesn't immediately turn into a "Beast of the Apocalypse" upon birth and ends the timeline then and there, he's allowed to turn into a loving and doting father for that child, resulting in those particular timelines to postpone their ends by one-two decades. Unfortunately, those children tend to destroy these timelines instead upon coming of age. Alongside with themselves.
• Mysterious Stranger: Due to having been erased from everywhere all at once upon being "hired" by "Sharkbite", this is how he appears to anyone who isn't the Protagonists in any world he visits and interacts with.
• Nature Lover: Whenever he ends up in a world/timeline almost void of human life but with a flourishing world of nature and wildlife instead, he always takes his time enjoying those paradises and making sure that they get the most peaceful ends imaginable just to spare them from the worst aspects of his job.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: "Bunny Burnbridge", due to his circumstances, is beyond getting hurt anymore to the point where if a nuke would drop right on top of him, he would still be fully intact in the middle of the crater it creates. But the pain he would be in could only be called hellish though and leave him in agony for a few months afterwards.
• Not-So-Badass Longcoat: Usually walks around covering his thin body with a temporary longcoat that's three sizes too big, reaching down to his ankles. Gone pale as a sheet from repeated exposure to strong lights, reeks of dried-in rainwater, half of its pockets missing/torn off, and mud-stains at its bottom hem. As far he sees it, if it serves its purpose to cover his body then what it looks like becomes irrelevant.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Have the disturbing habit/ability to appear right behind people who ends up frightened out of their minds if they actually turn around and finally notice him standing there. This isn't a power granted him by "Sharkbite" either, but an actual skill he learned while he was still a normal human being.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Whenever he makes use of his powers to throw something at the protagonists, it assumes the base-shape of a random bizarre dragon-like creature 66.6% of the times. All he does is just look and point at the desired target though, as "Sharkbite" is the one doing the process of creating the random creature out of pure chaos and random chance first.
• Platonic Life-Partners: With "Sherry Sharkbite" as he is basically the only real friend this world-ending, timeless, reality-warping Eldritch Abomination have ever had in all of its existence.
• Really Gets Around: As an agent of the apocalypse, he has some freedom to work with within the doomed worlds and sometimes, sought out some "stress-relief" from the locals with mutual consent only as lone condition for it to happen whenever the burdens of his "job" really comes down on his mind. It never ends well in the long run.
• Uncanny Valley He's disturbingly thin and skinny for a human if one looks long enough at him head on. A lingering side-effect from the first and only time he ended a timeline through creating a huge artificial black hole and standing way too close to it.
• Unperson: The moment his boss abducted him, she also erased him completely from every single possible reality within the whole infi-verse to ensure he wouldn't be missed. As a result, not a single person know who he is anymore, except for "Bunny Burnbridge" himself.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Is a big fan of highly unusual and unorthodox random superpowers being used. To the point that he created "The Tags" for the main purpose to see what people would do with such powers when used against him.
• You Can't Go Home Again: "Bunny Burnbridge" have been in "Sherry Sharkbite's" employment for so long, he no longer know if his original world even exists anymore.

Edited by Trainbarrel on Aug 28th 2023 at 5:59:06 PM

...Such a tragic character, really. Honestly, his name struck me as slightly funny at first, but the more I read into the profile the sadder and more depressing it became. Bunny Burnbridge really is a Tragic Villain and through no fault of his own.

I think what hits me the hardest about his situation (apart from being pulled into this endless nightmare against his will) is the fact that he must forever exist among people he is obligated to exterminate. Everyone he sees is a "walking corpse" and he is their destroyer, indirectly or otherwise, no matter where he goes. Having written about the psychological toll that takes short-term, I can't imagine a character who has gone through that for endless ages.

And what makes it worse is that it hasn't jaded him so much that he's lost his humanity. Worse, he clings to it and thus despairs over his fate while relentlessly performing his task. That part about just "wanting to sleep so it will be over" was...oof .

Apart from that, the whole thing about doomed alternate universes reminds me of DC Comics' Dark Multiverse and the overall depressing nature of that entire concept and setting.

All in all a very good way to showcase a victim turned into an unwilling destroyer of universes who manages to be terrifying because of what he is and because of his essential humanity.

Here’s the Big Bad for the first entry of a series I have. Name: Epiales, the Spirit of Nightmares.

Age : Ageless

Personality: Epiales is a refined, serious being who is rather polite to the main characters despite his hatred of them. He is deeply and genuinely caring for his fellow nightmares and his goal is to create a utopia for them at the severe expense of humanity who he plans to subject to And I Must Scream (unable to die and subject to as much pain and fear as can possibly be inflicted on them). He holds no ill-will towards humanity yet simultaneously holds no remorse or hesitation in what he has planned for them. He also sees humanity as beneath him and generally has a high opinion of himself. Beneath this refined appearance he is capable of extreme acts of malice and cruelty to his victims when they especially draw his ire.

Abilities : As the current leader of the nightmares, he has access to a vast army of them and is capable of creating new and stronger types. By concentrating a specific fear of man, he can create a totem, which are spawns for more nightmares and create elaborate labyrinths around themselves to protect them (though he cannot get around the fact that said labyrinths have to be solvable). He is capable of shapeshifting alongside other various powers in combat, including a One-Winged Angel form he assumes at the height of his power.

Weaknesses: Like his fellow nightmares, he is weak to the weaponry of the Hunters of Nightmares as they are imbued with the Flames of Man, the mortal weakness of his kind that are created from mankind’s positive qualities. His greatest fear is the Sunrise, an extremely powerful BFG that can create a concentrated blast strong enough to kill him when weakened sufficiently.

Goals : To eliminate the Hunters of Nightmares (humans who enter the Mental World to fight the threats that emerge there) and to create a utopia for his men through horrific suffering on a global scale.

Motivation: To finish his revenge on the Hunters for killing his people and to ensure his people thrive.

Role in the Story: He’s the Big Bad and the main characters are motivated by undoing his victory and avenging the people he has killed or subject to torture and experimentation.

Backstory: He was once a high ranking nightmare in service to his master, Phobetor, the God of Fear. After his death and his master’s sealing, he was revived by a traitorous high ranking Hunter seeking to steal his Godlike power. He proceeded to use his revival to create a huge army of nightmares in the Hunter’s HQ, resulting in a massacre very few hunters escaped. The rest were killed or captured and subject to torturous experimentation.

Will add tropes later.

I like that type of villains, who are nice and normal to their in-group (but only their in-group). The totem thing sounds a bit confusing, also why do the labyrinths need to be solvable?

Real Name: (manufacturer's name) (number) Habitch

Code Name: Projekt Habrok / Living Inferno

Also Known As: Matchstick, War-hawk of the Future

Age: Born in 1938 (2-7 through the story)

Nationality: German (no citizenship)

Occupation: Nazi supervillain, technically a Luftwaffe airman (no rank)

Appearance: Living Inferno is about 6" tall, human-sized robot with four-toed feet capable of grasping objects, and a tail and large fixed wings visually similiar to Göbbingen Gö 3 Minomoa's◊ and equipped with formation and navigation lights. His two-eyed beaked and expressionless head makes the whole invoke a sleek, angular predatory bird. The tail and wings can fold up for space, and he can fold out two primitive arms for manipulating objects.

Standing with his arms out he looks sort of humanoid despite his stance being slightly off. He spends most of his time in this more humanoid shape with his wings and tail folded and his arms extended.

(I imagine his head to look something like this guy's in shape)

Personality: New to the world and curious, on the surface Living Inferno comes off as nice and chill, quiet guy, but that's only because he's often next to fellow Der Einherjar Romano Marchegiano who anyone would look calm next to. He doesn't seem like he has much else going on, but he's deeper than that. Inferno is often lost in his own thoughts about the world, his place in it, what it means to be human, whether he's a person. He's looking for his soul and wants to be human, and identifies with Pinocchio and The Creature.

The questions are always in the back of Inferno's head, and he uses cheekiness to cover up his insecurity and existential dread. Secretly, he's desperate to be viewed as his own being, which the iron cross he seeks to earn comes to symbolize to him. While he doesn't say it, he clearly devalues himself in comparison to humans, like his life is less important. Marchegiano says Inferno brings out the best in him, but the opposite is also true — Marchegiano brings out the asshole side of Inferno, particularly when they're at odds. Inferno also doesn't hesitate to burn people alive and raze towns, or make horrific threats at people he thinks deserving.

Abilities: He's a pyrokinetic whose fire can burn as hot as about 1540 °C^note  (the melting point of carbon steel, which seems to have the highest steel melting point. Easily surpasses the melting points of lead and copper which is what bullets are made out of), and can use the fire to propel himself in the air. His halogium body is extremely tough, withstanding bullets, explosions, and only melts after 2000 °C. The claws on his feet are from the same metal, sharp and destructive. He can't feel pain, and is also stronger than a human and unable to tire physically. He knows morse code and taps or flashes it to communicate, and has private sign language Marchegiano. 

Weaknesses: While he's fuel-efficient, he can and will run out of juices eventually. Can't carry anything with him, and needs to cool down after using his powers before he can safely touch anybody or anything. His inability to feel pain may prevent him from noticing or realizing the severity of his injuries. He'll also sink in water, and his inability to speak makes communication and passing on information harder.

Goals: Helping Germany win the war, and earning a "person card" in others' eyes. He's also dreaming of an iron cross, which connects to the latter.

Motivation: Belief in the nazi propaganda, desire for approval and being recognized and treated as a person

Role In The Story: One of the 6 main villains, after he dies his remains become a MacGuffin

Edited by Nukeli on Apr 5th 2024 at 4:11:00 PM

To answer your question, it’s stated in universe that the dungeons have to be solvable and any attempt to make the Totem unreachable fail though nobody is sure why. It’s later revealed it’s due to the machinations of the Greater-Scope Villain who is treating the entire thing like an experiment. The Totems are essentially the embodiment of a particular fear or source of misery (such as workplace abuse and exploitation) that spawn a large volume of Nightmares and empower Epailes.

I like the concept of your villain as a Tragic Villain who just wants to be accepted as human yet internalizes the discrimination he receives and believes he is inferior to humans. Does the story point out the Irony of a non-human seeking acceptance from the Nazis?

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Aug 5th 2023 at 12:23:12 PM

It does. There's an entire point that licking the boot that would kick you won't make the boot like you (and is a terrible idea that'll end badly for you one way or another). The mentioned Marchegiano really knew this already, but Inferno's death forces him to acknowledge and confront it.

• Name: Scythirax the Manifold / Scythirax the Returned

• Age: Roughly around since the 8th or 7th Century BCE.

• Personality: Scythirax is at first something of a fish out of temporal water, curious and eager to explore the state of the world...but it quickly becomes clear that even in a brutal early age he stood out. He is quick to take money or favors in exchange for deploying his murderous gifts, even though he would likely have done it for free anyway. He maintains a jovial and polite front, even seeming playful, and is in favor of "giving the prey some leverage". As he tells it, it's just no fun for him if someone's completely tied up with no avenue for escape. If someone completes a shift to Action Survivor it just makes the ensuing chase more thrilling for him. "If they think they can survive, fight through the agency, it makes the crushing of their hopes all the sweeter." Thus, he tends to view "outside help" underlings who stand to get caught up in this indulgence as expendable. Scythirax treats his sons somewhat better, but it's clear he's a spare the rod spoil the child kind of father while they're little: his objective being to beat the instinct to cry out of his kids. When it comes to actual Umbrals under his command, he both readily brings "young talent" on and gives chances they wouldn't otherwise get...but also manipulates that talent to help him in his ends. The best thing that can be said about him is that he's a good sport: when Conner beats him at the top of the dam and knocks him off, his only words are "...Admirably done."

• Abilities: Scythirax maintains an old but powerful set of Magitek Powered Armor, equipped with a cloak that lets him turn invisible, a mana cannon built into a single Wolverine Claws style gauntlet called a "Nihil Claw", which when active rips through living things disturbingly easily. His moniker comes from a wide variety of weapons kept in a "bottomless bag" at his waist. He's known to pull out flame shaped blades, a cross bladed, serrated naginata, a hammer, a couple exploding throwing knives, and it just goes on...

• Weaknesses: While he's necessarily involved in the Magic Side, he isn't actually very good at much actual Magic. Relying more on his armor, weapons, personal body reinforcement via Mana, and melee skills.

• Goals: Rebuilding his reputation and station in the modern Umbral Horde, and enjoying his freedom as it were.

• Motivation: "I was left in stasis in that jar for so long, I had to make sure I wasn't too rustic." -when asked "why" he backed the Human Hunting Association.

• Role in the story: The Heavy. Technically, "Mr. Gustav" is the head of the HHA, and Nadalia is on the same rank as Scythirax, but he's blatantly the most threatening of them all. It's Personal with the Dragon also applies - with Conner in particular being out for blood.

• Backstory: Scythirax - real name unknown - derives his ID from his homeland, Scythia - an ancient empire of which relatively little is known. It's possible some of the wild stories Herodotus records hearing were based on him - as he and his cohort were consistently in black cloaks. He had twenty sons with a number of mothers, and raised them himself - with little involvement from said mothers. He very much enjoyed raiding as a lifestyle and method of obtaining resources, eventually taking a Comically Small Bribe during the Three Kingdoms Era of China from Wei to attack Shuhan, leading an army of Xianbei. However his army got cold feet when he was stalemated by the general Ma Chao, and their fears were validated when a man named Yu Zhen sealed Scythirax inside a jar at the cost of his own life. Scythirax's oldest son took over his army - though the others disputed this. The result being Scythirax's warband disintegrating. Eventually however he was freed of his confinement due to communist Chinese officials carelessly disposing of the jar. The newly freed Scythirax quickly relocated, and took up some new activities to both pay for his needs, and rebuild his "status".

• Tropes:

• Abusive Parents: He is not a very kind father. Specifically, he made every effort to ensure his sons could not cry, and wanted them to be representatives for him wherever they went. Tellingly, as soon as he was gone, a couple of them ran off to get as far away as possible.
• Ancient Evil: He's a Scythian. He was already about 900 years old when he got sealed away.
• Asshole Victim: He shows up while the tourists - Conner and his friends, and a pair of Jerkass Rich Bitch brothers - are settling in after enjoying a sauna, and starts explaining what's going to happen down to the fact they've been drugged "to varying degrees". The two brothers, referred to as Andrew and Tristan, get particularly belligerent with Scythirax, who is sincere in saying they won't be harmed or injured just yet. However they irritate him so thoroughly, including tossing a drink in his face, that Scythirax calmly crushes "Andrew's" throat in his Nihil Claw. He then blasts "Tristan" into a pile of ash on the floor when he tries to flee. Considering who these two transparently are, it's arguable Scythirax has somehow lucked into doing a good thing.
• Bad Boss: On top of everything else, he isn't exactly a joy to work for. He has a marked Svengali tendency for his young students, and utilizes their ascent for his own benefit.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Maintains a nest in the compound letting him watch what goes on and comment through speakers.
• Cloak Of Invisibility: Utilizes an enchanted cloak that lets him turn invisible.
• Does Not Like Guns: Out of all his weapons, not one is a gun. His reason changes, including jokingly stating he thinks guns are too American.
• Facepalm of Doom: Via the Nihil Claw on a lot of people.
• False Reassurance: He delivers plenty of it, but the crowning example is his horrid taunting of Ethan, a friend of Conner's. "You are free to leave if you wish, should you break the restraints." Ethan does - and Scythirax tosses a hatchet into his head as he makes it to the door. "I never said you'd succeed."
  • In Sandfield, he seized an artifact from a curio dealer who he'd agreed to serve as the bodyguard for during the siege of Sandfield. "Of course! I come to you with the right hand of friendship..." Followed by skewering the man on his Nihil Claw, "...unfortunately, I also come bearing the left hand of deceit."
• Faux Affably Evil: He's a deeply cruel person who commits horrible acts of torture and murder while seeming to regard it with bemusement and polite engagement.
• Fingore: "Now clench your teeth a bit. This may hurt." Followed by powering on his Nihil Claw and driving the "nails" through the flesh of Conner's left hand up toward his ring finger. All while the poor guy is screaming his lungs out. And then when Conner's hoarse, Scythirax has the temerity to go "Tut tut tut, I said to clench your teeth." However it's this mannerism during it that causes Conner to put two and two together, and realize who he is. Down a finger and with one severely burnt, Conner nevertheless swears he'll kill Scythirax.
• The Heavy: Out of the HHA, it's clear Scythirax is the only one with more than a passing understanding of Mana, and the most dangerous out of them all.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: He prefers his game a bit seasoned, usually letting other "hunters" work "the target" / "the prey" up a bit. Once he's sure he has something worth his time he calmly strolls out. He rather dislikes it when his associates do things like cut the hamstrings - simply because it eliminates the thrill of the chase.
• In Love with Your Carnage: Seeing Conner fighting through the hell he created, Scythirax seems to enjoy it, as it fulfills his desire. Nadalia accuses him of wanting Conner to escape.
• It's Personal with the Dragon: He butchered Conner's brother, including tearing off his arm, then his head. Conner was all of 12 at the time, and saw him do it while hidden in a closet. When Scythirax realizes why the "boy with the magic knife" is out for his blood, he laughs his ass off. "...Figueredo's...baby...brother!!" He also admits he knew Conner was in there, and "I'm glad I didn't boil you alive."
• Made of Iron: More like made of titanium given the caliber of things Scythirax survives:
  • Kicked off a train by Conner into the tracks and electrified by the rail. Gets up without any issue.
  • Blasted off a helicopter in the middle of a getaway, landing in a forest. Complains that his attempted assailant half-assed it.
  • Casually commits to bringing down a whole mall on the logic that he can survive the roof coming down on him, the people he's hunting can't.
• Multi-Melee Master: He makes use of a variety of weapons, switching between them seamlessly if any of his collection is damaged or knocked out of his hand.
• No Sense of Personal Space: He tends to get really up close and personal with people, waving and gesticulating right in front of their face.
• One-Man Army: To compensate for his lack of magical talents, he both has enchanted weapons and incredibly physical capabilities. He isn't bluffing when, confronted by 25 armored cars and a small army of Slovak police, he just says "...Fine. I'll kill you all." When the story cuts back to him, that locale is now full of Scenery Gorn, and littered with dead bodies.
• Reality Ensues: Considering the damage "that movie" did, as soon as the authorities cotton on to the game Scythirax is responsible for, the crackdown is swift. While Scythirax is too powerful for direct legal consequences, his underlings aren't. Though it could be argued in turn that he didn't really care that much, having already demonstrated "proof of concept". Tellingly, Scythirax and Gustav also had to build the compound deep underground.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Suffice to say he got the King Piccolo treatment. He's markedly wary of anyone able to use Yu Zhen's technique.
• The Svengali: Sure, he'll help get someone else ahead - but only because doing so lets him get something out of it.
• The Unfettered: When it comes to getting what he wants, Scythirax doesn't seem to let anything get in his way.
• Values Dissonance: defied - Antonius starts to say that Scythirax was "a product of his time", but halts and says "...No, no, that's bullshit. He was a nasty one even by the standards of his time."
• Villain Team-Up: A member of The Pentagram, a group of Umbral Horde members dissatisfied with the Grandmaster and aiming for a replacement.
• We Can Rule Together: Showing his Evil Cannot Comprehend Good tendencies, he seems a little confused why Conner furiously tore up the card Scythirax gave him as an offer to "join the club".
• Wolverine Claws: One claw gauntlet called a Nihil Claw, outfitted with a cannon in the palm. It's a remarkably powerful weapon, and only certain Umbral Warlords and Champions get one.
• Would Hurt a Child: Conner, at his darkest moment, takes Gustav's daughter hostage. Scythirax promptly starts charging up his arm mounted cannon, admitting he doesn't care in the slightest. Gustav briefly distracts him but he's quickly slain, though the daughter and Conner escape in the commotion.

Edited by NickTheSwing on Aug 18th 2023 at 8:28:23 AM

Scythirax seems interesting, if a bit cliche. If he really hams it up he could have some presence, but as is he seems a little... flat. Just, like, the main stuff here is about how evil he is. Why? What's his real goal here? Is he just a For the Evulz style villain? Because that really takes charisma, especially for the badass mercenary archetype. I might humanize him a bit, probably through his children, or just make him Laughably Evil.

Essentially, he's supposed to show both the kind of brutality and behavior that showed up in history - but also just as much that "he was a product of his time" as used for a number of other characters is not really an excuse that should work. Antonius works for a different branch of the same religion, is roughly in the same ballpark of age as Scythirax, and he's a dark if humanized villain.

Some of the Umbral Horde leaders get involved in a warband to protect the less combat ready members of their religion - because its an Illegal Religion. Some of them are Blood Knights with a code of honor.

Then there's guys like Scythirax.

I meant to add an example of him being Right For the Wrong Reasons: he absolutely has a point as a member of The Pentagram that Caine is insane and leading the Horde astray. It's just that what he'd prefer the Grandmaster to be like is...a lot worse.

He's not opposed to Caine for his rampant inhumanity. He's opposed because he isn't smart about it.

Working on a villain for a book I'm working on:

• Name: Reinhardt Von Speer, the Black Knight

• Age: Late-20's/Early-30's, haven't settled on what specifically.

• Personality: Reinhardt is a man utterly convinced of his superiority over others, both in his station and in his skills as a Mail Knight, all of which has led to his personal philosophy be dictated by one driving maxim: "might makes right". Despite this, he chafes under the knowledge he will never be offered his father's duchy, and resents his father and brother for this fact. He craves for a great opponent to fight to test his skills, though would almost certainly hate it if he actually found such a test.

• Abilities: Reinhardt is one of the empire's most effective and decorated Mail Knights for his services in protecting its northern borders. He pilots his family's ancestral Mail: the Schwarzwolfin: a jet-black Lancier-Class Mail in the visage of a wolf that wields a mighty lance. He is also a tactical prodigy, able to command his troops effectively on the fly and create pincer formations to move in for the kill through the sheer weight his name and title alone carry.

• Weaknesses: Reinhardt's arrogance is his downfall. He refuses to place his trust into "lesser" people (anyone but himself) and to believe anyone could come anywhere close to his level of skill, and has been lucky enough to have this belief of his reinforced over and over again. If he is to be defeated, his self-image will crumble and he becomes prone to rash decision-making to get back at whoever humiliated him just to prove himself still worthy of his title.

• Goals: Put an end to the Republic of Garland, rise through the ranks of nobility and find a worthy opponent to fight.

• Motivation: Carve out a legacy and have his name be remembered in the annals of history as a mighty warrior.

• Role in the story: Primary Antagonist, Rival

• Backstory: Born the second of three children to Duke Erwin Von Speer of the Duchy of Lumeria in the west of the Asterian Empire, Reinhardt Von Speer grew up in the shadow of his brother Wilhelm: a skilled statesman favoured by their father, and sought to make a name for himself. Knowing that his brother held no interest in becoming a Mail Knight, Reinhardt trained for years to become good enough of a Knight to pilot the Schwarzwolfin, before finally gaining control of the Mail. He would be assigned to the northern border of the empire with the Kingdom of Efrigard: a frigid nation infamous for sending raiding parties down south towards the empire. It is said that Reinhardt managed to defeat all their Mail single-handedly in the Schwarzwolfin and slaughter the raiding party to the last, earning the title of "The Black Knight" for his deeds. This would not be enough for him, however. As he desired more and more power and influence within the empire. Even a personal recommendation from Emperor Lucius III wasn't enough to quell his desire for more. He would not be satisfied until his father and brother, perhaps even the Emperor himself were dead and out of the way permanently. To this end, he allied himself with Lucius's young son Crown Prince Arion IX to serve as a Puppet King and plotted for years to kill his father and brother, succeeding on the former and is currently still plotting the latter. It would be about a decade later when another of the empire's duchies, the Duchy of Garland was overthrown in a revolution of the merchant and peasant classes against the duke and other nobility, establishing The Republic of Garland. Reinhardt found the very ideals of such a state like democracy, representation and self-governance disgusting, seeing it as the lowest dregs of society getting ideas above their station and challenging their rightful betters, and personally volunteered to lead the vanguard of the attack against the republic. In a skirmish along the Garl/Lumerian border however, he would encounter the republic's new secret weapon: a recently-unearthed ancient Mail of unknown origin and great power known as the Red Lion, piloted by a half-Efrigardian former slave gladiator named Roland. As time would later tell, their destinies were intertwined, and how Reinhardt would receive the challenging battle he asked for...

Relevant Tropes:

• Ace Pilot: One of the empire's best Mail Knights by far.
• Always Someone Better: His brother Wilhelm and his father Erwin.
• Ambition Is Evil: His path to the heights of Asterian nobility is paved in the blood of everyone in his way, including members of his family and even the Emperor himself.
• Animal Motifs: Wolves. It is the symbol of his noble crest and the motif of the Schwarzwoflin. He even refers to his squadron of Mail Knights as his "pack".
• Aristocrats Are Evil: And how. He's a smug, elitist prick who insists he's better than everyone else trying to quash a democratic revolution purely on the basis of how peasants and their ideals disgust him.
• Black Knight: His title, gained from the all-black Mail he pilots: the Schwarzwoflin.
• Blood Knight: Part of Reinhardt's goal is to best a powerful opponent so his name will go down in legend.
• Blue Blood: The second son of the duke of Lumeria.
• Cain and Abel: The Cain to Wilhelm's Abel (and Hilda's Seth).
• Curtains Match the Windows: Both his eyes and hair are both a very dark, almost blackish-brown.
• Egomaniac Hunter: Reinhardt sees himself as a hunter and his victims on the battlefield as his prey.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Despite his hatred of his brother and father, he still treats his sister Hilda with respect, probably because she's a Mail Knight in her own right and isn't in his way.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: He legitimately cannot understand why values such as liberty, cooperation, and equality would appeal to people. As far as he understands, everyone shares his misanthropic and hierarchical views whether they know it or not, and just wants to be at the top.
• The Evil Prince: He's the son of a duke, not a prince. But the sentiment is the same.
• Fantastic Racism: Is openly dismissive at best towards anyone who isn't Asterian, especially Efrigardians.
• Faux Affably Evil: Despite being raised to be as courteous as a noble should, Reinhardt is smug and dismissive at best towards anyone he sees as beneath him (that is to say everyone).
• Freudian Excuse: His inferiority complex and hatred of those of a lower class than him stem from parental neglect and a desire to be seen as meaningful to the world.
  • Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: ...However, he was still raised in the lap of luxury while peasants tolled just outside in his fields. He still got a vastly better deal than most people do, and he has no sympathy for them, purely because they aren't him.
• Glory Seeker: One of Reinhardt's primary goals is to see himself remembered as a great warrior and hero.
• Humongous Mecha: The Schwarzwolfin, a Lancier-Class Mail that wields a lance.
• Hypocrite:
  • Reinhardt fundamentally sees the world through a social-darwinist lens where those with the power to take charge should, and yet when the Republic of Garland forms from people who did just that against the corrupt nobility, he is repulsed by the very idea of it.
  • Despite calling Efrigardians "mindless barbarians who know naught but fighting", Reinhardt is guilty of almost everything he accuses them of being.
• I Just Want to Be Special: Reinhardt trained all his life to be a man the history books would remember as a mighty warrior just so he wouldn't be seen as merely the second son of a noble.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: His entire ideal of himself is as the invincible Black Knight was crafted purely out of a desire to not fall into mediocrity and irrelevance.
• It's All About Me: The true reason behind his supremacist beliefs is simple narcissism. If he isn't the strongest, then he truly has nothing to live for.
• Jousting Lance: The primary weapon of the Schwarzwolfin.
• Legacy Seeker: His ultimate goal. Reinhardt wishes to be remembered for all time as the greatest warrior to have ever lived.
• Mix-and-Match Weapon: He is proficient in the sabre: a sword with a gun barrel in the middle that serves as the main sidearm for all Mail Knights.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Reinhardt is racist towards non-Asterians, primarily Efrigardians, and also holds regressive views towards women (at least those who aren't fighters), the disabled and anyone that isn't a lord.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Out of the duchies, Lumeria; a Fantasy Counterpart Culture to Germany, Poland and Czechia is mostly well-known for its martial culture and large standing army. Reinhardt is considered by his people to be the shining example of that culture.
• Red Baron: "The Black Knight".
• The Rival: Serves as this to the main character Roland: Knight of the Red Lion for the Republic of Garland.
• The Un-Favorite: Compared to his elder brother Wilhelm and his younger sister Hilda, Reinhardt got the short end of the stick in the sibling hierarchy, relatively speaking.
• Savage Wolf: While he styles it as more of a Noble Wolf, the Schwarzwolfin comes across more as this, as Reinhardt is only "noble" in a social sense.
• Self-Made Orphan: He committed patricide in order to move up the line of succession.
• Social Darwinist: To Reinhardt, if you aren't a noble (or even a noble who doesn't fight), you are the scum of Terra who exists only to serve your betters.
• Villainous Breakdown: When he starts losing to the Garl Revolutionary Army, he does not take it well.
• The Von Trope Family: His surname has "Von" in it.

Edited by Hawkatana on Sep 27th 2023 at 3:54:25 AM

Probably thread necromancy, but this is a good thread and I'd hate to see it go.

As for Von Speer, if you were going for the classic image of a sneering Prussian Aristocrat, you got it in one. The sheer arrogance of his existence seems to radiate from the description you've provided, and about the only criticism I can think of is there isn't a whole lot of description of what happens when things don't go his way. Granted, that's probably because that's something revealed within the context of the story itself, so it's not a major deal breaker concerning Reinhardt

Working on a villain for a post-apocalyptic story.

Name: Kas

Age: Around a bit over a century. He's not entirely sure himself. Kas has extended his life throughout a massive apocalypse using nanites and beauty treatments, and is the oldest being in the setting.

Personality: Kas is a psychotic serial killer who considers himself superior to all other beings, and this gives him the right to kill them. Kas murders pretty much anyone who enters his valley, and keeps trophies from all of them. Kas is quite obviously deranged, often repeating and/or agreeing with himself, talking to people who aren't there, and compulsively killing people not out of malice but boredom. Kas often makes horrific jokes about murder, which serve not for comedy but to emphasize his insanity. He's a suprisingly competent planner for someone so crazy, though, able to plot out schemes to spread his ideology and gain power. Overall, he acts somewhat reminiscent of a slasher movie villain.

Abilities: Kas has control over a colony of nanites that serve as extremely strong and malleable Combat Tentacles, deadly blades, or thick shields. He can beat pretty much anybody in melee combat, and is a very dangerous fighter. Kas also has a very strong AI code and is capable of surviving the destruction of his body and hacking into security. Any other A.I.s (ubiquitous in this setting) that try to hack into him will have their code lethally shredded.

Weaknesses: While a formidable fighter, anyone going up against Kas in sufficient numbers should be capable of taking him out. Also, he's stuck in a wasteland with pretty much no resources beside his nanites, and while he's powerful, he's not nearly strong enough to go up against any major players without help, and has difficulty getting that help due to being so obviously unstable that nobody in their right mind would trust him. Kas works around this by ensuring that the people he seeks help from are not in their right minds, gaslighting them into insanity and/or appearing in moments of desperation.

Goals: Kas seeks nothing less than the complete destruction of the world as he believes that it is utterly meaningless. However, for the most part he was content to wait in his canyon and murder everyone he saw until he encountered Caleb. After Caleb managed to escape and destroy his trophy collection, Kas set out to act on this goal by gathering enough material to unleash a Grey Goo apocalypse. He occasionally talks about how this will create a "master race" that will survive the Earth's destruction and become powerful, but this is impossible for obvious reasons, and it is likely that he believes he is the only person who could become such.

Motivation: He's bugfuck crazy, nihilistic, and narcissistic. Kas genuinely believes the ideology he spouts about life's meaninglessness, but also simply enjoys killing and violence. Kas is an Evil Counterpart to the heroes. Some of the stories' main messages are Humans Are Special and how we should move forward from tragedy, and Kas proves to be the antithesis of this, spouting that Humans Are Bastards and there's nothing to do but lie down and die. Kas also has a fixation on Caleb for defying him.

Role in the story: Kas makes his first appearance as a minor one-shot villain, but proves one of the most competent yet, leaving the Experienced Protagonist completely on the backfoot for the first time. Kas is thought dead at the end, and leaves mental scars on said protagonist, which influences some of his choices. Kas is eventually revealed to be alive and attempts to kill Caleb once more, only failing due to a Heroic Sacrifice. He then manipulates a disenfranchised feudal lord into giving him more material to work with in order to become stronger, and eventually becomes the overall Big Bad.

Backstory: The specifics are never made clear, but Kas was among a group of elite people on top of society who attempted to isolate themselves in comfort and wait out the apocalypse. They locked themselves in a facility full of resources and advanced technology; everything that could give them comfort. They all used nanites to keep themselves young and beautiful forever, but started to Go Mad from the Isolation. Eventually, either they all died off except Kas, or Kas snapped and killed them all himself. Kas was then left alone and went even crazier, eventually descending into his current state.

Relevant Tropes:

• Admiring the Abomination: Shows a reverence of the Mechanical Abomination Humongous Mecha WAN while watching it destroying a mountain.
• Alone with the Psycho: This is pretty much the gist of Caleb's first encounter with Kas.
• Axe-Crazy: Oh dear god yes. He takes barely restrained joy in killing pretty much everyone.
• Berserk Button: Gets utterly enraged when Caleb destroys his collection of trophies. This, combined with the fact that Caleb then escaped him, means that Caleb's continued existence is this to Kas in general.
• Creepy High-Pitched Voice: His voice is childlike, but has a metallic reverb that adds some menace.
• Creepy Souvenir: Keeps a souvenir from everyone he's killed. A lock of hair, a scrap of clothing, a possession, a finger... they usually have some relation to how he killed them, but the correlation usually only makes sense to Kas.
• The Dreaded: Becomes this to the heroes after proving how dangerous he is.
• Facial Horror: His cheeks have fallen off, leaving him with a permanent Glasgow Grin.
• Grey Goo: What he eventually ascends to become.
• Hero Killer: Kills numerous major characters. This includes Sigma-9, who is one of the three main viewpoint characters and essentially the tritagonist of the story, and the Over-Monitor, a benevolent machine-god and the overall Big Good. None of them come back.
• It's All About Me: Believes himself to be the perfect being, and that this gives him the right to kill anyone else. The only time he shows the slightest admiration of other beings is with WAN, a Mechanical Abomination with godlike power.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: At a couple points, when people beg him for mercy, he appears to grant it, and starts talking about how they'll do great things together, only to suddenly kill them in the middle of his speech.
• Leitmotif: A staticky sound follows him around wherever he goes.
• Manipulative Bastard: Downplayed. He does successfully manipulate a few characters into helping him, but it's made clear that this is mainly because they're already unstable and Kas doesn't understand social cues enough to be a successful personal manipulator.
• Mummy: His appearance, with his body dead and his skin emiciated, brings this to mind. His nanites also form a headdress resembling the Crown of Ptolmey.
• Psychopathic Manchild
• Robotic Psychopath: A cyborg who is homicidally insane.
• Sadist: Takes a massive amount of joy in murder.
• Serial Killer: Take away the nanites and the ancient origins, and Kas is basically what happens if you give a real-life psychopath the power to apply their designs to the whole world.
• Smarter Than You Look: It's easy to dismiss him as an insane fool with more power than brains, but Kas is actually a surprisingly good planner and skilled at forming plans to advance his own agenda.
• Tear Off Your Face: Does this at one point to a tribal woman and proceeds to wear her face as a disguise. It's kept offscreen, thankfully.
• Trophy Room: Keeps a collection of Creepy Souvenirs from everyone he's killed.

Edited by GhidorahUltima on Mar 25th 2024 at 11:03:03 AM

My thoughts on Kas: First I am not sure what "Kas has extended his life throughout a massive apocalypse using nanites and beauty treatments" means. Does this mean he is the only one who survived the apocalypse? And he did so in part by using Botox?

He seems to be a mix of too many things. Being a nihilist, crazy, a serial murderer and a misanthropic racial supremacist.

I also don't understand how AI is supposed to work in the setting, is he AI, or has he uploaded his consciousness into a computer? How does his AI "shred" other AI? Why is he stuck in his valley?

I am kinda also wondering how he can manipulate people into helping him, if he needed it. He looks too much the part of the villain, proudly displays the evidence of his murders and lives too isolated. Gaslighting takes time, and one needs to be in a position of control to manipulate their environment. He could probably gaslight a guest, but not some one he barely knows that lives far away.

Edited by ry4n on Mar 18th 2024 at 7:12:48 AM

Are we allowed to repost a previously posted villain if things have changed significantly? I wanted to post a new entry for a villain I previously posted since a decent amount has changed.