Background
A man comes home and finds his favorite jewelry missing. A sultan’s vault is emptied in a night. A child is born without a voice. A circle of the Chosen come to a manse famed for its treasures and discovers it to be empty. A First Age war machine disappears from its silo. Eight Eyes Ending has been here.
Beyond the veil of years, the dead primordals dream and wait for Creation to fall into agony and empty disrepair. When that happens they will finally devour it and retreat to the nothingness of oblivion, and their wretched existence will end. Some of their servants, however, are not content with mere waiting. Eight Eyes Ending takes. She reaches into Creation with her Chosen and her schemes, finds the things that mortals value the most, and drags them through the shadows into her patchwork citadel in the underworld. Her least supplicants might be called thieves; Eight Eyes Ending herself is a plunderer who seeks out the most treasured stocks of valuables and artifacts ever known.
Eyes’ citadel is an artfully arranged collection of the many things she has taken from Creation. A tower from an ancient castle. A gate from the edges of the world. A wall made of silver bullion. A room with a thousand orbs that sing with a thousand stolen voices. A garden of beautiful bonsai, none of which will grow again. And deep beneath, a dragon-shaped war machine that forms a hole where a manse used to be. Eight Eyes Ending loves to behold that which was once someone else’s. She has recruited a handful of deathknights who strike her as good agents and sent them far and wide to bring her more treasures.
Yet, even the things that one loves can become tiresome, and even a deathlord can find a lack of opposition boring. Eight Eyes Ending has hatched a plot that may bring her not only a new deathknight, but many powerful ghosts and great material reward. There is risk, yes – but the potential gain is tremendous. Let the games begin.
Appearance
Eight Eyes Ending appears as a light-skinned, well-tanned woman with red lips and dark eyes. Her long black hair is in dreadlocks down her back. She wears a brown spider mask on her head, which she pulls down over her face when entering battle or beginning serious works. Her voice is beautiful, taken from a singer hundreds of years ago.
Demeanor
Smiling, enigmatic, languid, and predatory. Eight Eyes Ending enjoys what she does and who she is. Sometimes she’s bored, sometimes she’s intrigued, and she doesn’t take much effort to hide her emotions. When her attention is focused, her eyes never leave her target. She enjoys showmanship when she’s the one putting on the show, and is generally bored by it otherwise.
Eight Eyes Ending knows that there is a great risk inherent in bringing together this many Chosen. In fact, she thrills at it. The possibility that she might actually get to stretch her power is one of the few things that has excited her in the last fifty years.
Intimacies: “All of Creation will be mine before the end” (Defining), “People are just things” (Major), “I need warriors in my battle for dominance” (Major), “My fellow deathlords” (Negative), “Anything interesting” (Positive)
Capabilities
As a deathlord, Eight Eyes Ending is one of the most powerful beings in the underworld. Her authority is recognized by all creatures of death, and while some may deny her, none dare insult her. She has a confidence and a presence born of fifteen hundred years of experience. Her mind is quick and clever. When there are places where her intelligence balks, she is not too proud to command ghostly experts to inform her. Her eight eyes are more than just a figure of speech, as she seems to take in every detail from her surroundings.
Eight Eyes Ending controls a nameless criminal organization that spans the underworld, Creation, and more. She allows her Chosen and the nephwracks who are her tributaries to run the operation. The deathlord herself skims the things that money cannot buy. Mere wealth is plowed back into the organization, or used to upset economies in subtle ways. Investments are made, and then suddenly withdrawn without explanation – ventures fail. Mercenaries are paid, and then the pay is withheld – the mercenaries become bandits. Her nephwracks profit on the chaos.
As with most deathlords, she is a necromancer, and the essence of death serves her in a myriad of ways. Her every breath pulls essence from the living, who find themselves weak in her presence. She can pass through walls, reach into locked containers, take a stone from beneath a house of cards without disturbing it. She can take even things that are ephemeral, for a time: strength, grace, wisdom, sense of self, voices, and more. The stronger someone is in such a thing, the better they are able to resist her. Those trying to steal from her find themselves losing their own belongings quickly, cursed to wander naked with their one stolen treasure.
In battle Eight Eyes Ending is not the most fearsome of the deathlords, yet she is not to be underestimated. She carries a brace of artifact knives, each one different and unique, and they seek the heart unerringly. She can throw them nearly a kilometer. They return in a flash of darkness. The gossamer clothing she wears absorbs blows like the heaviest armor, and her helm makes her proof against magic that might control her mind. On her death, every object she holds will vanish to elsewhere, awaiting her next incarnation.
Eight Eyes Ending brought two creatures from the Labyrinth with her to seal her competitors into their arena. The first is the creature called Unwanted, which watches the combatants and tries to lure them into ambushes together. The second is a stranger thing, a vortex of stale fate and dead stars, which covers the entire island and the nearby sea. It is this spirit that shifts the winds, pulls in the Chosen, and directs their ships onto the jagged reefs.
Supporting Characters
- Unearned Deception, the deathknight who advised Eight Eyes Ending not to do this. Wary, stealthy, loyal.
- Jhelam Vir’dan, Eight Eyes Ending’s witless servant at this event. Slow, obedient, strong.
- Iceheart, one of the nephwracks who runs Eye’s criminal cartel. Subtle, plotting, joyless.
Questions
- Who does Eight Eyes Ending want to win?
- Why did she bring Pain here?
- Is she trespassing on another Deathlord’s territory here, or does she claim this archipelago for her own?
- How long will it be before Yu-Shan brings greater force against her than just Keymaker?
- What will she do if the remaining contestants stall or unify rather than killing one another?
Stranger Creations 