Late entry!
Name: Embodiment of Despair, Vernach
Age: ~2000 years old (counting from the moment he manifested)
Gender: Male. Though anatomically genderless unless he so chooses.
Species: Demon
Class: Shapeshifter Wizard
Color(s): Blue, Black, Red
Appearance: Being a born shapeshifter, he’s taken a number of different forms over the millenniums, but there are three particular forms he’s rather fond of using: a Human form, a purely Demonic form and one somewhat in between (the one he has taken to calling as his “normal” form.) As a human, Vernach resembles the planeswalker whose spark he’d usurped so long ago (it takes from Vernach’s sense of irony
a man in his mid-twenties, well-built and handsome (most likely “slightly” more than the original) with sharp, defying eyes, but an overall casual, ordinary face, and silky raven colored hair. He usually takes this shape to play the role of underdog or innocent caught up in whatever events he’s trying to get involved with, changing the clothes he wears according to the situation.
His “normal” form is by far his most common and the one he is most comfortable with. He chooses to appear like this to those who he is about to make a pact with, or to the very few who know him personally (and by him, he does not mean one of his personas.) The overall look of it is humanoid, to be sure, having the same number of appendages, external organs and all that jazz, but the similarities mostly end there. In this form, his skin has a hard, rocky texture and is crimson shaded, almost like it is perpetually coated in blood, with large, deep blue stains running through the surface. His shoulders are wide, and his arms, always exposed, are toned and muscled (redundancy hurray). His head seems to be caught midway through the transformation between human and demon: it bears the same rough skin texture as the rest of his body, yet is but the size of a normal human’s head. He often bears the same medium raven black hair his human form had, though he likes to switch between this and a random set of horns. Or both.
The clothes Vernach wears in this form are a buckled suit entirely made of leather, dyed as dark as his own body but bearing a blood red shade, though he’s taking to adding a bit of blue to it for contrast. It is completely sleeveless, the top part being nothing more than a tight vest which reveals his shoulders and arms, and is stylized by… belts and buckles. A lot of them. The trousers are kept tight to the legs by a descending circle of belts with outer buckles, same as his vest .The whole look is completed by classical boots. Vernach believes it gives him a bit of class and does well to settle the whole “demon” thing he has going on, making him look more approachable and business like (while the naked arms and protruding horns serve as a reminder of who they are addressing.)
His purely demonic form, though, loses all of the casualness and weak façades, trading those for a substantial amount of raw power. In this form, he becomes a titanic demon with leathery wings (each as wide as an Armodon,) ashen skin and massive horns. Thick, rock like plaques grow on his fists, feet and waist, made from alchemical adamantium (recipe stolen by the Dimir from the Izzet.) Not only does this make them impossible to penetrate, they also ensure nothing crushed beneath Vernach’s demonic fist will live to tell the tale. He wears little to nothing on this form, because, really… would you?
Personality: A demon with an endless life is, above all, patient. The amount of raw power he’s accumulated through his long, long life also gave him a sense of god-like superiority; playing with “mortals” is a sport like any other, and one that even after all this time still amuses him. He is a trickster and a liar, to the point he could tell you the truth you want to know and still believe it’s a lie.
Vernach seems to be permanently grinning. He is completely satisfied with his life, with his status and his power, and the complete ability to use and abuse his gifts, which he often does. Even though he draws sustenance from a person’s feelings and emotions, particularly despair and fear, he is perfectly capable of pleasing his huge ego simply by pummeling down a being several times taller than him. Taking down dragons and titanic monstrosities with nothing but his bare fists, for example, is a favorite of his. Even though he is a wizard at heart, he loves showing off his brutal demonic strength. If he is close to god-like perfection, he needs to be as physically strong as he is mystically powerful, after all. Or else it just wouldn’t do.
Vernach loves planeswalking and exploring new places. An eternity of living naturally needs to constantly meet and see new things, particularly in the case of a power hungry demon. He overreaches the influence of his own personal empire to several planes, leaving behind the roots for great schemes that are often left cooking for centuries before he picks them up again.
Socially, Vernach is more than inadequate. He outright mocks people and their attempts at futility. He simply enjoys being a sarcastic deadpanner, never letting go of his characteristic grin when he verbally crushes the feeble intelligence of those beneath him. It is another thing that gives him pleasure. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that if anything, anything at all, has a chance of amusing Vernach even slightly, he’ll do it. Unless his calculative mind tells him he benefits more from standing back and doing nothing, which he honestly rarely does. But initiating the spark of conflict then standing back and watching it escalate into all out war is definitely amusing. There is something poetic about the ever constant presence of chaos in the hearts of all.
History: Warning: reading the Plane section first will make this section much less confusing. I advise you go read that part first, then come here.
Vernach started as an accumulation of negative feelings: longing, weakness, paralyzing sadness and, most importantly, that which bound them all: despair. He had no form, no sentience, and most would say this was before he even achieved existence. In this fetus stage, he grew by absorbing negative feelings that coincided with those he was already made of and tempered this cluster of emotion by living independent memories of tragedies, be them romances, epic battles lost or the story of sad, unlucky man who’d lost all he ever loved. Over centuries he evolved, eventually gaining awareness, then sentience, then… a sense of self. A Demon was born. In the centuries between his “birth” and his manifestation on the physical world, he ventured the Sea of Memories for knowledge and experience. In the memories of the dead he learned of the living world, of magic, of politics and religion… By the time he was approached by a cult of Dreamers, he was already well-versed in all matters human and more than able to provide the knowledge and power the cultists sought.
They approached him seeking all manner of things: knowledge, power… omniscience. They had fooled themselves into thinking a demon could grant them all of it by virtue of its nature as living magic alone. So, he fed of them. He fed as he nurtured those delusions; first simply nibbling their desires and hidden emotions, then delving into distant memories and absorbing their emotional value. His parasitism only ended when he physically devoured the flesh of his followers, which ended up fully cementing his physical form and ending all existential instabilities he’d been suffering. Finally able to venture out of the cave his follower’s had built him, he extended his influence over all of Aria. Two decades after he’d already travelled and feasted on all the corners of Aria, his powers greater than they ever were. Yet, he grew bored. He felt he was beginning to run out of new things and experiences to do after but twenty years of living – a thought that would terrify anyone with the potential for immortality. This world had already given him nearly everything… but he craved more. He knew his current self was but a fraction of what he could be, and he craved more.
It was then that he met a traveler: a young mage with a distinct smell. Everything about him was mysterious: his very essence was foreign, his accent, his mannerisms were unlike those of the people he’d met until then, he weaved unknown magics and he spoke of things Vernach could only dream of. It was like Vernach became infatuated with this human, or rather, by what the human represented. Something new. Something different. He wanted it. His life experience, his new magics, his knowledge… He wanted it all!
So they fought in a bloody battle that pushed Vernach farther than he’d ever been pushed. He used every single trick in his arsenal, and not even his blue counter magic, his black death magic and his demonic strength were enough. Finally, after both knew they had exhausted the other, Vernach felt a pull in the world’s very fabric. The other mage was a Planeswalker, and though pride had ordered him to stay, the danger his life was in finally urged him to escape. To ‘walk – to JUMP – somewhere far far away and rest. Vernach knew not what planeswalking was, but he could tell the man was running, and he couldn’t condone that. He summoned all of his remaining magic, he pulled all the mana from the forest, the swampy lake and the very air and shot himself at the mage. Not a second after and Vernach was on top of him, pinning the human down on the ground. And he feasted again. He feasted on his flesh. He feasted on his memories. He feasted on his power. With his mouth he absorbed the physical aspect of the man, and with a swirling black energy he consumed the magic, the spiritual, and the mental. He’d never dined on someone to this extent. Every fiber of his being – everything that man had been and could ever be – was transferred to Vernach. Even the spark.
Bearing the memories of the ‘walker, he knew exactly what he now was, and what was just opened to him. Infinity. He immediately jumped to a new plane and began his millennia long quest for exploration and power.
A few centuries passed before he arrived on Ravnica, where he quickly became affiliated with the Dimir, where his powers as a shapeshifter, mind-manipulating teleporting Planeswalker shone. As the years passed, Vernach went from being just another agent, to being the head of the Moroi squad and eventually to a being of such power in the guild he rivaled the necromages. It was this guild that honed his abilities as a long term planer and manipulator capable of orchestrating thousands of people to believe – and create – a whole new reality, sometimes without even the need for memory manipulation or illusions (something he became an expert at.)
However, the tightly controlled structure of the entire guild, its secrecy and its code of conduct meant Vernach rarely had a chance to unleash his full power in an all out bloodbath/massacre of many. That pleasure, that feeling of almost sexual release (perhaps the closest thing a demon could feel to it) was only ever found amidst the Rakdos. Vernach never really became a part of this guild, but, being a demon, he was more than welcomed at their sacramental bloodbaths. He made sure to constantly shapeshift and to always create a new alias when dealing with the Rakdos, but the sort of carnage he witnessed – as well as the carnage he unleashed – taught him a type of direct confrontational magic he would never learn from the Dimir. His Black and Red magic grew the most here, and this was where he learnt that raw power was as much of a threat as centuries worth of manipulation.
Vernach was living his dream. His power and influence extended far beyond a single world, and his knowledge exceeded that of entire planes put together. He truly felt like one of the most powerful creatures in the multiverse, and for the first time in his long life he achieved satisfaction.
All of it was destroyed by the Mending. The phenomenom that changed the very face of the multiverse and altered the laws for planeswalkers affected him far more than it did any other Planeswalker. When his spark changed its very properties, it was temporarily disconnected from Vernach’s very being. The wave of power Vernach unleashed during this experience – the excess power that his spark would no longer hold – ripped him apart. It reverberated right back across time and space and found the one truth: Vernach was a being of memories and intangibility. A simple error in the universe’s logic born from the chaos of an infinity of rebirth’s and the haste needed to fix the bugs in reality caused Vernach to remember his status as a being made from coalesced memories, only capable of attaining physical form by stealing the very flesh of others. Vernach saw all of the power and knowledge he had physically escape his body, and in no time felt his own body cease to exist. His essence, now an innumerable amount of shards of his former existence, was split apart infinitely. The shift in reality itself made one tuing clear: he was not real, and that reminder nearly ended up erasing him. For a moment, Vernach was unsure if he even existed.
It took all his might to reassemble himself. This time, he didn’t use the Planeswalker spark as the glue that held all of his pieces together. He became one with it. He returned to life weaker than he’d felt in centuries, a shadow of his former self. If he ever appeared like this in front of the Dimir, he’d be killed for his weakness; a loose end no longer capable of keeping the secrets that were the very core of the guild. So he ran, once again embarking on a journey to grow stronger. He visited many places, from Mirrodin to Shadowmoor, and learned many new magics as well as recuperated most of his old powers. His position in the Dimir was secure even when he spent decades missing: his subordinates were orderly little sheep and his duties were being carried out diligently. After all, it was not unusual for a Dimir head to spend decades – even centuries – without giving so much as a sign of being alive yet still getting his work done. Heck, such a thing was expected of them. Vernach had already learned how to do that from a distance; he’d never stopped planeswalking even when he set up semi-permanent stay in Ravnica.
Now, Vernach once again seeks to grow powerful, his thirst only growing bigger after he was stripped of everything he’d earned. With a cunning mind and the knowledge of 2000 years travelling the Blind Eternities, there is little this Archdemon can’t achieve.
Abilities: Vernach’s powers fall to rather large categories: his blue spells (for deceit, trickery and mind manipulation,) his black spells (used in combat and more… particular occasions), his red spells (for pure chaos and destruction whenever it was needed) and his multicolor spells (used to affect space, the aether, to rot minds and counter magic, in the case of black and blue, for example.)
From blue mana he extracts the ability to shapeshift, to intrude another’s mind (and manipulate it) and the ability to hide his presence; most of these skills, if not all of them, were gained under the watchful care of the Dimir. This explains why, aside from the ability to shapeshift his body into weapons, forming a blade on his arm or adding the occasional extra limb, these techniques rarely influence the flow of battle. No, for when the need to show his true power arises, he prefers to fall back to the energy-stealing, power-granting, life-taking, debilitating, gore-loving wonder of black mana.
Vernach uses black mana to wither away his opponents strength and feed his own. While he is more than capable of rending you inside out with a surge of black energy, or to simply destroy you with a single spell, he much prefers to see you struggle and slowly let your despair grow. He gorges on this feeling, and is overjoyed by the broken will of the foolish hero who collapses after every single spell he knew left but a scratch on him. He loves toying with his enemies from the start.
But Vernach can do yet more: he can fuse these two schools to weaken enemy spells with deadly efficiency, or he can instead manipulate the very fabric of space using blue mana, and weaken its very structure with black mana, granting him the capacity to “teleport” between the special soft spots he created. And, last but not least, should he ever find himself in some bizarre event where he is so outnumbered his powers alone cannot ensure victory, his will to succeed will coalesce into a devil: a manifestation of a demon’s emotions, and empower him with the strength and numbers he needs.
He truthfully can’t very well fuse the blue and red spells, since he does not have that close acquantaince with madness and genious that the Izzet have. He can combine red and black magic for a single spell combining the destructive aspecst the black and red schools have individually, but the effects aren’t as diverse or unique as the combination of black and blue.
Equipment: Presently, none of relevance.
Plane From (w/description): Arkhos, the Twilight Plane.
Arkhos is a plane perpetually covered in the time between dawn and dusk, where the sun is still setting but night has already come. It does have mornings and proper nights, but due to its very nature, these are either illusions or just a few hours long. However dark this may seem, this does make the plane as a whole eerily beautiful, especially when coupled with the reflective lakes and rivers that run through the continent of Aria. Lingering mist hovering over the surface of the water is a common sight, as are lake side villages, umbral forests and ominous, ever distant mountains. This plane is a romantic’s paradise, but not just due to the scenic beauty.
In Arkhos, the division between dream and reality is thin at best. The plane’s residents live in perpetual doubt of just who they are and what is real, and many find themselves living double lives without knowing when exactly are they awake. Many are knowingly insane, others use the dreams to further their own desires, while some are barely affected. Memories become fickle things and become nearly impossible to hold on to on a world where continuity and perception are luxuries. Many memories are lost to the tides of time, the strongest ones lingering and affecting the real world, trapping those it catches to re-live them, or manifesting as dangerous spirits of mourning, perpetually trapped in the emotion of the memory they were born from. A cautionary tale, if there ever was one.
The abundance of mana, particularly blue and black mana, in conjunction with the tangible property of the mind, dreams and memory have caused many a wild creature to prefer feasting on esoteric matter. Midnight hauntings in Arkhos don’t involve demonic possession or death, but the intrusion of the mind. Spirits and creatures feed off dreams and nightmares, and dine on your finest memories. The more meaningful and emotional it is, the tastier. Particularly intelligent creatures, namely demons and somnomancers (sleep wizards), are not content with this, and manipulate the dreams of their prey in a manner as to engineer a memory of their preference by having them live through a false life the sleeper’s manipulator created.
In Arkhos, where life is a journey filled with deceit and uncertainty, death is something all too often welcomed. Generally referred to as the “enlightenment,” it is compared to the opening of one’s eyes, and other senses, to finally see the truth the mists had kept hidden from them. However, truth is meaningless if it uncovers no lies. This, to most Arkhonites, means that, though welcomed, death is nothing sought too soon and should come only after a long, passionate life. This is the creed that most churches follow. It translates to everyday life as the arkhonites’ love for eventful lives, for mystery and for tragic romances. Arkhon’s art is filled with bittersweet literature, dark paintings and tragic epics, and the architecture is heavily sober and imposing; a traditional gothic.
Aria’s lands are divided in independent territories functioning as city states. The majority of the population sees itself as one nation, but political conflict is a given occurrence. There are rarely any wars, though, so conflict is usually nothing more than a purposely engineered chance for a strong political debate devoid of any real threats. Due to this, most states’ armies are kept as border guards, patrolmen, forest rangers or exorcists. Their hands are usually full even with no wars, though.
Army man and soldiers are, unlike most other plans, rarely masters of the sword or of combat, but usually skilled mages able to perceive the veil between reality and the dream world and strengthen the wall that keeps them separate. Their combat training comes out of a demand to slaughter wild beasts, but given the fact that even these have evolved and adapted the ability to commute with the dream world, no scouting party feels safe without a handful of somnomancers backing them.
But what, exactly, is the dream world?
You will never have an answer for this question. The dream world is form-less and intangible by its very nature. What it is and isn’t depends upon the perception of the one who experiences it. Even its purpose and existence is unanswered, though there are many a legend. The only thing known of it is that it seems to be affected by the beings dragged into it, as well as the time that they spend there. It is speculated (and all but confirmed) that this is where Angels and Demons are born, when a cluster of positive/negative emotions congregates, coalesces and is given form by a third party’s perception. The energies the very existence of this realm generates often seep into the real world, mixing reality with dreams, causing wild mutations and eldritch abominations. Often, the changes created by the merging of both realms in a particular area are only temporary, but, sometimes, there comes a time when a being half real half dream gets caught in the real world and is trapped in a horrific form alien to nature; they call these creatures Nightmares (for the record, they are all horror type, multicolored creatures, either white (dreams) or black (proper nightmares)). These are the single most dangerous reason for the need of Somnomancers in all armies and patrols, and why the academies in Aria specialize in sleep magic (which, just like Spirit Magic is unique in kamigawa, sleep magic is unique in Arkhos, differeing much from the somnomancy of, say, the kithkin.) This is also why the alchemy of Arkhos does not specialize in healing, the making of poisons or compulsive magic research (or, Gods forbid, whatever cruel word describes the horrors of Innistrad’s alchemy,) but for the making and selling of exorcising dusts, sleep regulating potions and reality stabilizing charms (or, for those looking to reach the dream world, the means to more easily traverse the bindery - drugs.)
But, just as most villagers have learned of the existence of two worlds and come to embrace the physical world as the real world, there are those that prefer the metaphysical world of dreams. The reasons for this are many: some are simply insane fools infatuated with the idea of an unstable, ever changing place that accommodates to the visitor’s wishes, other’s wish to brave the Sea of Memories in search of lost lore and magic; a good deal simply wish to understand the place in order to harness its reality bending powers, and form cults dedicated to its study. Though each cult has their name and identity, their cultists are generally referred to as “Dreamers;” the connotation being negative or positive varies from area to area depending on the characteristics of that area’s main cults. These cults are not necessarily evil or benevolent; most are neutral, simply wishing knowledge/power due to greed or unquenchable curiosity and spend their whole lives in a futile search of it, while other cults have developed morals and goals according to their research on the dream world. In their delving of the surreal, many cults come across angels and demons and are forever changed by the event. The encounter with an angel, for example, often comes before the rising of a mad men turned prophet preaching a new religion, or a new facet thereof. Coincidentally, the meeting with a demon sometimes generates the same, but much more often end up with the cult accidentally (or not) bringing the demon into the real world permanently, at which point it becomes their figure head. Unknown to the cult, the demon will simply manipulate its followers with promises of power, eternal life and knowledge (or what have you), feeding off them until it’s strong enough to kill them and walk unbound through the four corners of Arkhos.
The “total” presence of an angel in the physical world is rare –the very nobility that births an angel makes them against embracing false mortality by simplifying their existence to a physical realm- but occasional sightings or appearances do occur. Most of the time, an angel born of a noble soldier’s will to defend will surge from dreams to strike down a Nightmare attacking an innocent woman, only to dive back into dreams again. The few angels that do cross over and become trapped in the physical world either die (the church and some academies state this is due to the original dream/will that formed it being too weak to survive real world issues; ie, empty idealism,) become absent heroes/vigilantes, or prominent political/religious figureheads.
The mediator of city states is one such angel. Dubbed an “Archangel,” the prefix given to other worldly creatures that manage to survive in the physical world for more than 1000 years (yes, this makes Vernach and Archdemon in Arkhon,) the angel Lythia presides over more stressful or sensitive gatherings of the state leaders, and serves as a tiebreaker and continent wide political advisor. When the whole continent looks to a definite political leader, they look to Lythia.
Her counterpart is the Archangel Luminia, the religious leader. This is the only archangel in known history that remains freed of boundaries, and can reside in either realm for as long as she chooses. Unlike Lythia, who does not have any qualms on speaking her mind, Luminia has remained silent throughout most of her existence, and what little words she speaks are considered once-in-a-lifetime blessings to those who hear them. Lythia does not have a set place to stay, and her location is generally unknown, though the church affirms she can be reached through pure prayer, if one is worthy. True or not, most archbishops can call her out (most chose not to disturb the closest thing they have to a God, though,) but a good deal of souls are visited by lesser angels after prayer (referred to as Luminia’s Angels, or Listeners.) Lumina’s religion has an interesting twist to it: the truths must be sought by the followers. Luminia has never preached nor written a book of laws. Instead, she is approached with a book of a self-entitled prophet, which she then approves or denies. This means that the church of Luminia is interestingly devoid of Holy Books, and as such do not offer much in the way of morals. Instead, this church is seen as a means of holy protection from Nightmares, a place of study for holy magic and wards, and a sanctuary to maintain the boundaries between real and unreal steady.
It is said Luminia and Lythia are the reincarnations of an old King, the one who united Aria and spread cultural understanding throughout the land, making it not only one country, but one single “Nation” as well, other’s settle with calling them simple beings born from his influence.
