[Patron] Ixris, the Red Prince

[The King Of The Moon 7016]

⛧

The Red Prince

Ixris being crowned amongst a Nether riot.

 

 

Origin

I: The Darkening of the Deep

In the eve of the fifteenth century, with his second campaign against descendant kind underway upon the continent of Athera, the Betrayer was forced for a time to direct his efforts below. 
 

Since the desolation of Aegis and Iblees’ subsequent imprisonment in the dwarven Seal, factionalism had begun to fester. The infection of dissidence had spread amongst the Undead, as heroes of the first land, spearheaded by the likes of Rott and Freyj, the oldest of the Undead had been granted some modicum of autonomy during the Archdaemon’s sealing, and with their free will came the power to question. For the better part of his time since his liberation, the Aegisian troops had noted a change in their master’s priorities: a peculiar relic they had recovered from the singed bones of a dwarf slain in Drauchreim had captivated the Betrayer’s attention, and several of the Undead claimed to have bore witness to their master whispering to the axe, speaking of grand schemes of creation and renewal. Acts which, as the lord of Ruin, the stronger willed of the Undead saw to be madness. 
 

These whispers of lost faith were loudest amongst those emboldened by the Abyss. In the years since Iblees’ imprisonment, the dormant forces of the Nether had taken note of cracks in their home; a steady stream of lifeforce had poured in from some unseen gap between their prison and the lands above that they had once known as Aegis. At first a secret kept by only the most radical and freewilled of the undying army, this stream had become rivers that soon spilled out as great banks that would consume the Nether in its entirety, shrouding the underworld in a black fog. Carried by this current were innumerable shambling, purposeless undead not of the Betrayer’s ranks: the flesh and bones of those left on Aegis, doomed to perpetually rise again from death as a consequence of the Abyss’ relentless abundance of lifeforce. These necrotic hordes intermingled with Iblees’ ranks, spreading their resentment and discontent among them, whilst those of Iblees’ own make that breathed these invigorating fumes found in themselves a growing autonomy, and the will to distance themselves from the Betrayer’s control, until soon enough vast swathes of the armies of Aegis had come to not only question Iblees’ rule, but to also work against it. 
 

With his attention upon his mysterious trinket and the ill planned campaign against the diaspora upon Athera, Iblees remained ignorant of these budding voices of revolt until it was too late. Whilst tending to affairs above, the Archdaemon had been made aware of these curiosities below without much care for their explanation nor concern for the perceived threat of a few shambling undead, which he had sent a small and ill equipped division of his legions to handle whilst the bulk of his forces remained in Athera. It was not until the climax of the civil war that he was forced to take the threat of revolution seriously: when the treacherous undead breached his Nexus, pulling a handful of souls from it to begin stripping away at his power.
 

A thorn in his side that would stand in the way of his grand schemes, the Archdaemon knew he had not the time to crush these dissenters himself, nor could he risk allowing his Nexus to remain compromised should the Nether not be swiftly reclaimed. As such, the Betrayer was forced to put his campaign on hold: embarking from the material plane in search of a substitute. 
 

II: The Birth of the Inferi

Still recovering from his clash with Aeriel, the Betrayer would not risk seeking the aid of a deity for this task, whilst his mortal assets remained occupied with the wars on the surface. It was for such reasons his attention instead fell upon his allies from the conflicts of yore: the shunned Spirits Ixli and Ikuras, the latter of which had once worked alongside the Betrayer during the Thirty Year War. 
 

Whilst the risks of venturing to their domain were apparent - as the anomalous domains of the spirits were alien to the majority of deities, and the potential harm of bridging such to the divine planes not fully understood - the Daemon of Ruin had by this point grown too reckless to care for them. Lost in his arrogant assumption of fealty from the spirits he meant to meet with, along with the power of such divines that paled in comparison to his own, Iblees would form a bridge from his realm to the Spirit Wastes - a corner of the labyrinth the spirits had shaped from Apohet’s former plane for the anathema spirits, and the souls of the damned judged unfit to enter Stargúsh’Stroh by Kor - in preparation to bring his intended prize captive into his own sphere of influence: the Ancestral Spirit of Krug, which had eluded the Betrayer’s vengeance for centuries. 

 

These wastes, desolate and cold, were perforated only by swarms of damned souls. Chiefly of orcish and dark elven descent, those doomed to wander the Wastes had earned the ire of the Spirits. ‘Clean’ by Aeriel’s standards and spared from the Ebrieatas, the sins of these fallen were only of relevance to Apohet’s brood: the dishonourable, forsakers of the Spirits and traitors of their kind, chief among them the Dark Shamans of yore; a mixture of cowering practitioners stripped of their will over the Spirits in death, lorded over by titanic Ish’urkal - the hybrid remnants of mortals that had consumed the essence of Spirits, twisting their souls into shapes monstrous and tormented. These lowly crowds clung to the outskirts of Ixli’s domain; the fortunate among them were given purpose as his slaves, to tend the endless shelves of the Spirit of Forbidden Knowledge’s library. The less lucky were left to Ikuras, the Spirit of Fear and Insanity, who relished in tormenting these accursed few for his own entertainment, bottling their essence as jinxes meant to plague the living. 
 

Such twisted beasts were the first ‘inferi’: maddened, voracious souls that before long would forget their descendant sensibilities, retaining only the capacity to think and speak a guttural form of the Old Blah, as well as the curse of bloodlust that they had once suffered in life - which now consumed their every action. An uncoordinated mob that, following the example of the spirit-eating Ish’Urkal - had begun to practice cannibalism when fighting against each other, with great titans mounting the food chain and styling themselves as warlords of the Spirit Wastes. 
 

A relative unknown to mortalkind, spoken of only as ‘demons’ to the unlucky Shamans that had encountered them, and the few living Ish’Urkal daring enough to conjure these beasts to the mortal plane using the Bastard of Smoke, the inferi were a new discovery to Iblees, and soon captivated his interest as a potential force for his purge in the Nether; whilst the hunt for Krug may have been to the Betrayer’s satisfaction, even he was able to see the impracticality of such a pursuit, given the immediacy of his needs and the availability of this new potential fighting force. 
 

III: The Key to an Army

Iblees spent some cursory weeks  attempting to bargain with the Inferi, before relenting. As the master of Ruin, he had expected the Inferi to rally behind him on instinct; their nature was, after all, an indirect consequence of his own curse for the descendants of Krug, though found them impossible to reason with. As hybrids of mortals and devoured Spirits, these monsters’ frayed souls existed apart from the Creator’s vision with which Iblees was familiar, strangely resistant to his taint or that of any other deity. A reality he would centuries later come to understand as one of the many anomalies spawned from this cycle’s Mathic collapse; yet another ripple in Creation unwittingly caused by the Outvoker’s meddling. As such, he could not tame them, whilst the only collateral they cared for was what they dubbed ‘maleus’: the essence of souls stripped down to its most raw and potent form. A currency the Betrayer would dare not part with, for his own risk of losing such in his Nexus was the very reason for this venture.
 

Instead, he sought the aid of those that understood the inferi best: Ikuras and Ixli, who had acted as keepers of the demons in the wastes. The former, the Spirit of Fear and Insanity, had actively worked to influence the Inferi against one another, gleeful at the possibilities this new ‘Infernal Climb’ might yield, and coming to understand the chaotic hierarchy they had evolved for themselves, whilst the latter, Spirit of Forbidden Knowledge, had learnt to exert a small level of control these creatures in a pact quite akin to that formed between Shaman and Spirit. 
 

Unbeknownst to Iblees, this power lay in a tome of Ixli’s own make: the Book of Names. Initially collection of the true names of countless Immortal, Elemental and Ancestral Spirits curated since the days of Apohet’s sealing and at one point a conduit drawn upon by the Dark Shamans following the anathema Spirit, Ixli through the centuries had also began recording the souls of men upon its ensnaring pages, as a means of binding his servants to him; marking them as unfit for Kor’s judgement and condemning them to be warped into inferi for his bidding. With this volume he was over time able to give name to the inferi themselves, and as such exert some rudimentary will over those close to him.
 

Ikuras, on the other hand, had witnessed first hand to the formation of the demonic ranks, and in part influenced their evolution; the Spirit found that inferi had devolved past the capacity to fear or truthfully care much of mortal or divine entities, regardless of their comparative strength. The order created amongst themselves was instead an inborn fear of one another that underpinned the entirety of their ‘society’. Their twisted nature permitted the demons to reform from the gravest of injuries in the Spirit Wastes, though through consumption they could be eliminated fully. A reality to which all inferi were painfully aware. Understanding maleus as a currency meant that each demon risked expendability and subsequent consumption, and as such would rove in packs of fiendish lessers or align themselves with the largest and strongest of these demons to cower in their shadow as cronies. 
 

In thanks to their past alliances, and gifts of power offered to Ikuras, he was quick to offer this information willingly to the Betrayer, making him fully aware of the reality he could never bind the inferi to himself; only another, greater inferi. Ixli, on the other hand, was far less willing to share his secrets with the Daemon. The Spirit of Forbidden Knowledge had come to note a change in the wastes since Iblees’ bridge to his own realm was formed, and an emboldening in the inferi; as swathes of power had begun to seep into the climb from the Betrayer’s presence. The demons had begun to grow reckless and hungrier than ever, whilst stronger still. Fearful of what could come of his home in the wastes and the wider Spirit Realms if Iblees were to continue his indirect empowerment or learn of the Book of Names to turn the inferi on the wider plane, Ixli refused the Archdaemon the secrets to his lesser control of the inferi, and in turn sealed his own fate. 

IV: The Calamity

Within a year of the Betrayer’s arrival, the inferi had grown restless. Already bestial at best, the new breeds which had drank from the well atop the bridge to Iblees’ realm soon earned even Ikuras’ concern: once hungry for maleus and eager to devour one another as part of their self-made cycle, this short span of time exposed to powers of Ruin had turned them ravenous; the Dark Shamans once loyal to Ixli had begun to challenge their master’s will, whilst greater infernals that were once Ish’Urkal had even made attempts at consuming the Spirits themselves. These beasts had lost all interest in the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, whilst Ikuras’ mind games and nightmarish tricks left this rapidly evolved generation of demons largely unphased. Worse still, there had been talk amongst the lesser spirits of inferi wandering to the edges of the wastes, drawn by the souls of Star’gush Stroh in search of a greater abundance of malleus before being thrown from its gates by Kor himself. It was clear to Ixli who convinced Ikuras in turn that something had to be done.
 

The pair - divine in their own right, and among the strongest of all Spirits - were not foolish enough to challenge the Archdaemon directly. Suspecting a fate worse than death should Iblees obtain command over the infernal climb and integrate not only themselves, but all spirits into it, the decision was made to cut out the infection before it spread. Unearthed from the bowels of Ixli’s near museums and libraries of trinkets, spellbooks and relics, the pair lay bait for the rampant inferi; coaxing them toward the bridge between the Wastes and Iblees’ realm. Then, with the intent of cutting away the link between planes, the pair unleashed their combined power in an attempt to tear apart a portion of the Spirit Wastes and banish the inferi to the Void. Outraged, Iblees intercepted the pair, though he was too late. The Spirits had underestimated the extent of the power the inferi had sapped from the realm of Ruin and, coupled with Iblees’ hasty lashing out, triggered a grand calamity that split through the Wastes in their entirety. 
 

The well before the Betrayer’s bridge imploded in on itself, and through it exploded countless shards of the desolated plane before breaching the Soul Stream itself, in a grand roar that rippled through the Veil. All of divinity bore witness to this catastrophic storm between the realm of Spirits and the home of the Archdaemon; an event that cemented the risks of tampering with Apohet’s overrun realm in the minds of all Aenguls and Daemons to date, closing the walls between the shamanic and holy pantheons permanently. 
 

In the aftermath, Ixli and Ikuras  awoke in a hellscape. A realm frayed and tattered, open to the cosmos and lit ablaze by the soul-flame of inferi: Moz Strimoza. Exhausted by the acts, and forever sealed from their home among countless demons, it was not long before Iblees tracked the pair cowering in his own shattered plane. Enraged by their defiance though yet to lose sight of his goals, Iblees captured the pair, many remnant Ish’Urkal and - unbeknownst to him - the Book of Names. Through tortuous ritual the Spirit of Forbidden Knowledge and the Spirit of Fear and Insanity were stitched together in an aberrant amalgam alongside the demonic spirit-shamans and even the book itself; reforged into a singular entity. Demonic in nature though godlike in potency and capable of commanding the Inferi as if one of their own. The resulting deity would be called Ixris, in allusion to its former selves, whilst the inferi themselves had come to recognise the creature as the penultimate being. 
 

He who would always sit atop the infernal climb; He whose shadow all demons were destined to lurk in; He who liberated the first from their prison among the Spirits; He who would guide them across the stars in satiation of their eternal hunger; 
 

V: The Red Prince

The Archdaemon was quick to put his new resource to the test. With his own realm shattered and ablaze and perforated by a now steady stream of souls that remained untouchable and useless to him, as Moz Strimoza’s condition would warp any mistakenly sent by Kor before Iblees’ taint could take hold, Iblees was hellbent on putting his new assets to use for all they had cost him. 
 

The newborn Red Prince was a creature of unfiltered wrath. His mind still fractured between the two forsaken spirits at its helm cared only for destruction; to project the Ruin he had suffered unto all put before him. And so, the Betrayer cast him down into the Nether with a ring of inferi to meet the overwhelming numbers of the ongoing civil war, his own attention finally returning to the conquest of Athera and his schemes for the Axe of Krug. 

 

Ixris sank through the loyalist legions of the Undead, indiscriminate between ‘friend’ and foe in the war he had been condemned to. The darkening of the Nether had no effect on him nor his demonic cohort who had by their strange nature no capacity for lifeforce, and an immunity to the Ibleesian taint, though the legions of Iblees and the rebelling undead of the Aegisian Abyss still bore maleus; fuel. The infernal tide swept with ease over the necrotic hordes, shattering the cycles of resurrection they had depended upon to replenish their ranks by desolating the fodder with malflame, and twisting the worthy into further inferi to bolster Ixris’ forces. 
 

The absorption of these damned souls into the inferi sowed the seeds for the evolution of their language. Whilst the Old Blah was most common among the demons in thanks to their spiritual origins, the language lacked its own written script and the complexities to hold power outside of shamanic rites. As such, the Red Prince actively encouraged its fusion with the Al'tahrn-Durngo of the undead; appropriating the Black Speech of Ebrietaes for his own nefarious uses. It is from such a lexical union that Ilzakarn, the Infernal Tongue, was woven. 
 

Soon after Drauchreim was recaptured Iblees returned to the Nether without the Axe of Krug. The object of his obsession had been shattered with his campaign’s conclusion and supplanted with the awakened Malchediael, the Aengul of Courage. Having witnessing the ongoing decimation of the rebellion firsthand, and Ixris’ apparent success in the conversion of treacherous undead to his own infernal swarm, the Archdaemon came to acknowledge the title afforded to Ixris among his ranks: ‘Za’Rokultherak’ - the Red Prince. This to Iblees was meant less as an appraisal and more to solidify the dubious loyalties of his own creation, whose rapid growth acceleration had in reality meant the lieutenant was now afforded a larger directly loyal force than the Betrayer’s own remaining Undead. Further, the styling of ‘Prince’ was an implicit confirmation to both Iblees and Ixris that he would never truly rule the Nether after his conquest, nor Moz Strimoza once returned there; that only Iblees himself could be ‘King’. A dynamic Ixris resented. 
 

Fearful that further Undead might be caught in the crossfire of the Red Prince’s campaign, as well as distrustful of the inferi coming close to his assets - his nexus and Malchediael - Iblees withdrew his remaining soldiers to Drauchreim, establishing an impenetrable garrison about its perimeter whilst the war continued to rage through the Nether. Ixris was quick to question this, expressing a growing concern for the Aengul and Archdaemon’s schemes behind closed doors whilst silently fearful Malchediael was meant to serve as a more permanent replacement. A challenge to Iblees’ strategy which was met with appropriate harshness; a legacy of violence which would come to underpin countless exchanges between Ixris and his creator going forth. 

 

As the civil war progressed to its conclusion and the rebel undead were scattered, the darkening of the Nether persisted regardless of Ixris’ successes. The army he had amassed through the forced conversion of these necrotic troops into his demonic horde grew restless in the damned space, though Iblees’ work with the Aengul was not concluded. As such, the Betrayer commanded the Red Prince to return to Moz Strimoza with his inferi with instruction to mend and secure the frayed perimeter of his realm. During the conquest of the deep Ixris had noticed the Book of Names - now bound to his form, its power a part of his demonic makeup - to have expanded of its own accord. Refashioned in the new tongue of Ilzakarn using the Al'tahrn-Durngo script, entire volumes of names had manifested themselves on its pages as new souls were twisted into the Infernal Climb, names beyond those of the undead he and his horde had turned themselves; upon his return to the shattered realm, the numbers of inferi he had left there had quadrupled. 
 

This steady flow of souls warped into the demonic hordes in Moz Strimoza would soon reproduce past the realm’s capacity if left unchecked and so unsipervised by the Betrayer, Ixris set about investigating the intricacies of his new race: penning the first rites of demonology into his Book of Names as its penultimate grimoire using the blood of his demons - the coagulated maleus known as ‘rakir’ - concocted innumerable new applications for his malflame, along with the means to shackle, summon, and convert demons and mortals alike. With the conclusion of his foundational studies, the Red Prince tasked his countless serfs with solving both the problem of their overcrowded hells and - in his own way - tackling Iblees’ task of securing the frayed realm’s perimeter. 

 

A burning crusade was launched across the heavens. The inferi, ever hungering and growing in number, were tasked with the conquest of a thousand worlds; to bind and stitch each conquered star to Moz Strimoza, permitting a steady expansion of the patchwork domain, and in turn the crumbling of Iblees’ dominion over all but the plane’s centre. 
 

With the gradual collapse of the Mathic Cycle this demonic plague upon the veil has been appropriated by fate; the development of cosmic correction drawing the hunger of the inferi to the misplaced works of planeswalkers, Voidal horrors and divine entities alike, their place cemented as both pest and population control across the heavens. Such quirks surrounding their nature - and that of Ixris - are in many ways beyond the vision of Creation, offering them a unique level of negotiation with the usual self-ordering of the universe; their crusade permitted to continue so long as its limits are not pushed too far past the point of the collective pantheon’s ire, such as extensive threats to the material plane in a similar fashion to Iblees’ past invasions provoking Aeriel and others into action.  

 

 

Personality

Born of the unnatural fusion of two Greater Spirits, Ixris’ mental state is irreparably damaged by the corrupting influence of Ixli and Ikuras’ colliding psyches that is stabilized only by the deity’s immense magical strength and fortitude and its insatiable desire to increase it further and further. A hurricane of ambition, driven to bolster his own power through the curation of forbidden knowledge, and the spread of fear and insanity through his infernal machinations, his behaviour seldom represents the interests of Iblees, or any other but the inferi at large. Forged from these Greater Immortals - divine beings in their own rights - that were dethroned from their mantles in the Spirit Wastes, and forcibly merged by the Betrayer’s hand, Ixris has no affection for Iblees. Rather, what portions of Ixris’ memories remain of Ixli and Ikuras serve as a constant reminder that with or without Iblees they were - and still are - a being beyond mortality; owing no debt to Iblees for their powers that existed prior, and have exponentially been expanded through the machinations of the Infernal Climb during innumerable campaigns across the Nether and the wider mortal planes of the Veil. 
 

Such disloyalties are not expressed openly, however: whilst the Red Prince may wield power surpassing that of Iblees’ other patrons, rivalling even that of some lesser Aenguls and Daemons, he is well aware it pales in comparison to but a fraction of the Archdaemon’s. This has been made apparent to Ixris through countless shows of force, where Iblees has time and again punished the Red Prince for his perfidy. It is only for the Red Prince’s usefulness to Iblees thus far, along with his dependency on Ixris to keep the Inferi under the bare minimum level of control (not wishing to suffer even greater losses than were risked in the Undead civil war in the Nether, with the demons upon Moz Strimoza) that Iblees consistently refrains from outright executing Ixris. A fact both parties are painfully aware of.
 

A heartless being, bound not even by his maker’s skewed morals, Ixris has little regard for the wellbeing of the Veil. A rogue manifestation of Ambition, torn from the unintended pantheon of Apohet’s realm and reshaped into a force of Ruin by Iblees, Ixris’ regard for the Descendants, the Spirits and the greater Divines is skewed by pragmatism, pity and - in the case of the latter - envy. His respect for the persistence and wellbeing of Creation begins and ends with the Infernal Climb, and his desire to enroll every mortal and immortal soul into the machinations of the inferi. A true force of chaotic evil in the cosmos, his value for life is measured entirely by the extent to which it may be broken down into malleus and made fuel for the Red Prince’s own terrible purposes. 

 

 

Goals

[Backfacing section removed.]

 

Abilities

[Backfacing section removed.]

 

Current Location

At present the Red Prince’s location is fluid. Whilst utilising Moz Strimoza as a ‘hub’ it’s management is largely left to the warring Zar’rokul and his time there is oft under a veil of secrecy so as to keep contact with Iblees at a minimum, lest he be interrogated about what his time has been occupied with. He frequents Val’garis to issue orders to his sieging zentherak lieutenants as well as answers the subtle summons of Cosmic Correction himself in the scattered lesser planes.

 

This nomadic existence however has been interrupted by a recent interest in the penultimate Mortal Plane, where the Red Prince speculates new sources of malleus might await him. However, being well aware of the divine eyes set on the realm, Ixris minds his movements since centuries ago he spilled the secrets of Naztherak among the first mortal witches and warlocks, fearful of what deific retribution might await him there. Instead, he keenly watches the world, awaiting the ritualistic beck and call of any descendants worthy of bargaining with; an assurance of service prepared for his arrival in an inhospitable land. 

 

 

Purpose

The Red Prince’s purpose is to create an essential ST asset going forth as a ‘primary’ antagonist for medium (and in special circumstance large) scale events going forth. Essentially serving to fill a similar niche expected of Iblees in the days of Aegis and Athera, albeit not always with map ending consequence, Ixris is to be styled as the next front facing ‘big bad’ of LoTC. 
 

A figure players will be able to both directly and indirectly interact with on a much more frequent basis than any Aengul or Daemon, in similar regularity to the current usage of Azdromoth and Aruzond. The key difference being whilst the latter examples are styled as morally grey if not outright ‘good’ in their day to day player perceptions, the Red Prince is to be broadly understood as a force for outright chaotic evil in the universe. Whilst he seeks to ultimately betray Iblees, he is not and never will be an ‘anti-hero’, and this angle could at best be exploited in tricking players to work for the greater of two evils in terms of the pair’s comparative goals.  
 

Following on from the precedents set by the Inferi invasion, and the occult tropes established in Zarsies’ original Gifts of the Red Prince lore with the Zar’rokul, events involving the Red Prince should always offer the opportunity for player-versus-player antagonism, favouring the manipulation of player characters and the steering of their actions over cutscene roleplay or an overreliance on staff played ‘soldiers’ and long winded CRP. 

 

In this regard, Ixris is also to serve as an important narrative device for the ST’s toolbelt. In cases of the aforementioned, and where management deems such necessary, the Red Prince can serve as a vehicle for the injection of thematically appropriate magics and CAs under the respective Shamanism and Naztherak umbrellas as and when staff intervention is necessitated in response to gross inactivity. 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography
Moz Strimoza and the Inferi
Cosmic Correction
Naztherak
Gifts of the Red Prince
Inferis, the Demons among Men
Ish’Urkal

 

A Mordu and Zarsies © production.