RP:Prequel, in the Shadow Realm
Part of the Venturil's Bane Arc
The latest Stack-War had dragged on for decades now, decimating Shadowside’s native population. Unfortunate, considering how vulnerable this made the land itself in the face of Barbarian encroachments, but such wars were both necessary and natural to the denizens of this world’s dark hemisphere. Without civil war, Shadowside would fall into chaos. The Stacks would become overpopulated, competition between the Nobles would inspire new, more outrageously deadly vat-spawn to be created in numbers unchecked, and the resulting hordes would inevitably strip the hemisphere bare of every organic scrap until they’d eaten themselves into extinction or in sheer desperation crawled over the border into Lumen to perish under the Eternal Sun’s corrosive light.
But the war was ending. The King of Shadow’s new wife, alien to these lands, had brought with her from her own realm innovations, amongst them concepts of rule that offered new and less wasteful ways to manage the population’s constant increase.
Yes, the War was ending, but still it remained that battles must be allowed to play out, Stack against Stack, Lord against Lord. Among those who lost, whose properties and vassals were now being claimed by the Shadow-King’s men, were Hakhal the Weaver and his spider-thralls, Lady Lillian Stonegaze of the infamous Gorgonspire… But as many were dead, many survived, too, and soon would kneel at the feet of the Shadow-King - whether by consent or force..
Amid the strewn wreckage of the latest skirmish, Tenebrae and her entourage strode the battlefield from carcass to carcass, marking those which showed promise as potential raw materials or simply food for the hideous creations fulminating in her vats back at Shadowstack.
With her, as ever, was the being whose very existence bridged two worlds, and whose odd amalgam of flesh had provided its mistress with a path to this dimension. Maladroit, the winged and faceless thing Tenebrae called her ‘familiar’, loped by her side on the knuckles of all four limbs.
Its design was not exactly shocking to the natives of Shadowside, but showed enough innovation that it had inspired a flurry of mimicry in the vats of Lords like Grisal of Plaguemanse, and Djordje Skinthief, though none had managed to replicate its oddities precisely.
Of more wonder to them was how the Queen of Shadow had made it, in the first place. Secretive as she was about it all, rumour was rife in Shadowside: she’d somehow summonsed a larval wingbeast into her own primitive world, and employed its malleable meat in the construction of the Gaunt, as she called it. It was the other, alien, elements of its flesh and the strange awareness that it was imbued with that defied their efforts, much to their chagrin and the King’s continuing delight.
Maladroit itself cared not that it was such a wonder. Bound as it had long been to the Necromancer, it merely followed her and did her bidding, ever pining for the wide Cenril sea and its schools of luminescent squid. There were no such fascinating cephalopods in the abyssal, black waters of Shadowside’s oceans which were nearly as barren as its soil, not to mention infinitely more dangerous even for a being with metamorphic flesh.
Starwalker, they called it, for its ability to weave bridges between worlds, and withstand the airless, pressurised reaches of the dark hemisphere’s endless night.
Sunseer, they called its Mistress, for only she among the Nobility, being born of two worlds, could tread the Twilight Belt that lay between the dark and light hemispheres without being burned to ash – an ability that helped her amass wealth and power beyond reckoning for herself and the King, and set in motion his plan for the unification of Shadowside.
The King had found her, crushed by a fall and close to true death at the bottom of a canyon near the Twilight Belt, where he had been hunting among the Barbarian territories for new flesh with which to stock his vats. Stricken by her beauty, and unaware of her origins, he assumed her merely human and had charged his most skilful alchemists and bonewrights with the task of not merely restoring her, but transmuting her into a suitable concubine.
They soon enough discovered that she suffered a strange malaise of the flesh, an alien disease that caused her to take the likeness of some kind of canid at times. Thankfully, she did not regain consciousness until they had distilled her properly and purged the majority of the sickness from her tissues, though – as would become apparent in time to come – they had not freed her from the entirety of that bestial taint.
The rest is a long story. But the woman who was once Joliette Thorne, in Lithrydel known as Tenebrae, was created anew and in the image of Shadowside’s fell Nobility. She, like her husband (for she flatly refused to be his concubine, and her subsequent slaughter of his harem and all its guards only endeared her to him more), like all the Lords and Ladies of the Stacks, had become a blood-feeder with the same metamorphic flesh that every Noble possessed.
But unlike the natives, she could stand in the sunlight and survive. Unlike them, she bore the wolven taint that made her more frightful than even the legendary brood-matron Toltessa Direwing, the Harpy of the North, whose ancestral blood-mother was rumoured to have mated with a monstrous bat.
Together, Tenebrae Sunseer and her minion were prizes beyond esteem, and the King of Shadow treasured them accordingly. He would have, if he could have, keep both securely under lock and key. Failing that, he had to be content with simply keeping a close eye on them, which was the subject of the spats occasionally overheard by royal thralls in Shadowstack’s upper reaches. But that is another tale, belonging to another world.
More relevant to Lithrydel – or Hollow, as it is colloquially, and perhaps more aptly, known – are the rifts that on rare occasions link it to Shadowside.
Tenebrae’s tinkering with the unworldly matter from which the gaunt was partially constructed, along with various magical disasters wrought by others upon the dimensional barriers surrounding Vailkrin, had created several holes in the fabric of Time and Space.
Through one such hole, a tentacled monstrosity from Shadowside’s darkest equatorial nadir had fallen into Hollow’s Dark Lands. Its destruction created a vacuum that had to be filled and.. well…
That, too, is another story.