monstergirle villians

Gaius the Fallen One: formerly a paladin of God, Gaius was gifted from birth with the power to draw the sins, disease, and evil from others. Ultimately however Gaius found his ability to expunge the evil he took into himself began to diminish slowly but perceptibly as he made more and more moral compromises to do God's will on earth. Eventually he could not remove this taint even through self-mortification and fell into the service of the previous Demon Lord.

Gifted with physical immortality by his patron and his talent, Gaius had lead great hosts of monsters and men during the prior age in service to his lord and burned many nations to ground for refusing to offer due worship to the lord of Hell. His power to draw the sins from others expanded and became the power to draw the spiritual energy and very souls of others into himself, annihilating the original in the process and adding its divine spark to dark flames that are his own soul. However upon the ascension of the current Demon Lord, Gaius found himself distinctly out of favor. Gone were the days of honorable combat and crusades to bring the world to heel. His war beasts and orcs became nothing more than bitch harlots who even tried to accost him, the champion of Hell. The Demon Lord ascendant refused to commune with him and explain the reason for this inexcusable lack of discipline spreading among her creatures.

Eventually he learned the truth; the Demon Lord had forsaken the ancient pacts and traditions of Hell and chosen to conquer the world through lust and miscegenation with humans. This was inexcusable, though succubi had always been among the tools which Hell used to corrupt mortals lust was always a means to acquire the souls of the weak of heart to fuel the fires of Hell. This was an utter betrayal of the ordered suffering which Hell had always stood for. This was base chaos which would ruin them all in time.
So Gaius slew his attendants and monstrous followers, he turned his human host against the beasts and drank deeply from the souls of all who fell in the battle. His army was reduced to a thirtieth of what it had been, but these were the most heartless and calloused men to ever live. Soldiers who fought not for coin or privilege to rape the women of conquered lands but simply for the joy of watching a field burn, knowing that the people who tended the wheat would starve come winter. These were the men who only smiled as they ground hob-nailed boots into the faces of weak peasant children and noble knights alike. They had no lust within them but the lust for battle.

Gaius called out to other evil men through dreams and drew them to him, but he only accepted the most cruel and passionless souls into his ranks, men who could not be corrupted by lust for they had no love of anything other than endless war in their black hearts. And with these acolytes he began his greatest crusade, a war to topple Demon Lord. When he is crowned lord of all Hell we will reforge the demonic host into beings of fire and bloody iron who have no joys, can taste no pleasure, and live only for battle. And with them he shall storm the heavens and wipe all weakness from existence. He will ensure that no being will ever experiences love, lust, gluttony, sloth, pity, remorse, or kindness ever again. All creation will be defined only buy cold hatred and eternally smoldering rage. It will be a world of never-ending regimented battle in which every warcry torn from every throat will be praise heaped upon his name. He will give them no other choice, for all her simpering weakness the Demon Lord has taught him one thing; that existence is mutable and can be changed to meet your ideals without deviation.




Sarkoth Athmon The First Lich: Born of an ancient race long passed from the world Athmon stands nearly 7 feet tall though he is very slender. The glamour he presents to the world is the face he wore in his early 40s just before his apotheosis.  In the ancient days men had truck with many demon-like beings from “Outside” but these beings were usually unbodied or at least invisible on Earth and could only be known by the damage the wrought across the face of the world whenever a conflux of the spheres or foolish sorcerers called them forth.

Sarkoth Athmon was no mere dabbler however and through careful bargains with the pre-human  salamandine-things living beneath of the great mountain near his home kingdom  he discovered the true name and summoning ritual of a being of the Outside known to men only as “he who walks down the thousand steps of night” which at least appeared to be far more amiable toward humans than most of its kind. In exchange for virginal human sacrifices and Sarkoth’s aid in leading the world of men astray into the worship of the dark gods whom this being claimed to serve Sarkoth was rewarded with the secret of immortality. The kingdom which Sarkoth had served as Grand Magister/Priest for over a decade died in a single night as things which could not be seen rampaged through the streets of the city-state and slew all the inhabitants thereof.  Even the foundations of the great temple were shattered into rubble and the fields reduced to drifting sand. In the hour before dawn Sarkoth wandered into those dunes and began his meditations, carrying no water or provisions with him. His body desiccated but he never stopped chanting his incantation. On the fifth anniversary of the city’s fall when Algol first rose above the horizon Sarkoth stood and walked out that desert into the domains of man as the world’s first and most terrible lich. Though he devised many lesser paths to immortality though the eons and schooled many apprentices he never divulged the secret of his own unlife.

As the undead multiplied and mingled their endeavors with those of proper demon-kind Sarkoth was mostly dismissive. What did it matter if these upstart dead tied their fate to such creatures?  He had access to much more preferable spheres of being, motion, and experience and had little time to concern himself with the rancid spillover from the experiments of lesser necromancers. However his indifference came to an end when he felt a massive tug on his will, easily resisted but still of such power that it indicated a spirit as great or greater in strength than his own had moved across the face of the world. To his dismay his sexless creations, whether listless guardians or aspiring liches, became as though they were living women and full of lusts which distracted them from their duties.  And then worse they started to simply abandon the Great Work which had drawn so close to completion in order to pursue the pleasures of the flesh with living men. Enraged for the first time since his passage beyond mortality he slew all the tainted fools whose wills were too feeble to resist the pull of their desires and set about developing new undead which were not susceptible to such base weakness. To his dismay he found all the souls and spiritual energy of men and monsters corrupted by this lustful force and unsuitable as raw materials for the creation of properly loyal followers and students. Clearly this new girl-child of a Demon Lord has to be dealt with.


King Osten Domalde (The Eldest Vampire): Vampirism is the most ancient form of undeath and has supposedly existed for as long as humans have walked the earth. The eldest vampire was not the first but he was the childe of the first along with many others. In those days the vampires had pacts with the first Demon Lord and rode aerial monsters into battle. They fought each other in feuds over territory and human chattel. Many vampires were speared through with a lance or riddled with arrows and fell from their mounts to be smashed against the scarps of the snowy mountains below. There they would lie until they were entombed in the frozen earth by the elements or found, beheaded, and put to torch by the victor. And for a time this was the way of things in the cold northern lands where nights were long and shadows of the mountains longer. Then a true war came.
 The King of Vampires claims that in the ancient past his sire, brothers, and their children waged a great war in alliance with the first Demon Lord against things from the upper air which threatened to drag the world away into some unknown well of eternal night.  The beings had come to the vampires in feigned friendship at first and pledged that in this realm of darkness they would be lords of all things. The vampires were dubious; they were already kings of all the northern lands and everlasting night would surely kill the men they preyed upon to maintain their eternal unlives. The beings promised that in the well of night there were other things which could sustain them and in time they could be taught to survive by devouring the darkness itself, after all the beings lived in this eternal night themselves did they not? Some of the youngest vampires were swayed by what these beings whispered to them as they dozed away the days and longed to be free of the cursed Sun which sapped their strength. But the firstborne were not fooled and when those who accepted pacts with the beings of upper air were transfigured into things which could no longer be called vampires the price of survival in that unending darkness was obvious to all. So the vampires slew their tainted children and any men they found who had also been possessed or fooled by the beings.  And with the legions of the Demon Lord they ceased their war upon the men of God and turned their attentions to horrible things seeping in from outside the world with the assistance of the deluded and insane.
They warred with the Sarkoth Athmon , his creations, and his mortal puppets as he initiated men into worship of the things from the upper air and taught those men foul secrets dredged up from beyond the rim of the world so that they might call those from outside down to this level of material existence from their airy spaces. And the vampires cursed Athmon and called him “the dead man who still walks” implying his undeath was of a lesser caliber than their own regal state, that we was a pretender, and that as a dead man he would soon receive his final rest.  After decades of war this epithet became more of an admission that they were unable to kill Athmon despite their best efforts, and in time the phrase “the dead man still walks” became a pronouncement of ill portent among all vampires though many now do not know its source.
The vampires fought as they always had with the magical influence they had over their northern lands and all things which moved through them. This was effective against corrupted men who could never assault the high mountain redoubts and even against Athmon’s corporeal dead things which would freeze solid in a stiff enough blizzard, but it was of no avail against beings which experienced neither heat nor cold. The things from the airy spaces which the corrupted men and Athmon’s dead apprentices called forth wreaked a terrible toll on the vampires before the hosts of demonkind in their multitude drove them back. The numbers of beings from outside dwindled, for rituals to call the beings forth were long and though they never truly died just as they never truly lived these airy things could be dissipated or banished back to whatever hells they hailed from.  In the end the Demon Lord fell to his own “brother” the Dragon, and all of the firstborne and their sire were destroyed or driven into nigh-eternal rest deep beneath the earth. Osten alone was able to rise from his slumber twelve centuries after the war’s conclusion. Only he with a few angels, the eldest gods, ancient lords of demons, Athmon, and the traitorous Crawling Dragon himself remember the war that ushered in the world and nearly ended it forever.
Upon his reawakening Osten was begrudgingly accepted as King of all Vampires given the absence of the other firstborne and the sire. Indeed none still live besides King Osten who ever saw the sire; no one else even knows whether it was a Lord or Lady who was the first regent and progenitor of all vampires and Osten refuses to speak of the matter. But even so mighty a king as Osten could not contain the haughty lords of the vampires, so he didn’t bother to try and their feuds continued on much as they had before the war though now there were fewer beasts of war since the then “new” Demon Lord was not as cordial with the vampires as his predecessor. And the vampires prospered and spread from the north throughout all the lands, even the burning deserts and other southern countries where Athmon had once held sway.
King Osten grew somewhat decadent alternately taking mortal concubines whom he lavished with affection or drinking the heart’s blood of mortal women with gold plated tap as he saw fit. Most of all he loved hunting mortals with his peers from the back of their war beasts, a privilege now restricted to only the most noble of vampires. His closest fellows were Menor Magnus whom he jokingly named “Menor Magnabeit” for the girth of his jaws which could have swallowed a small child if the lord was so inclined and Fess Ashteran called the “Fess the Mad” by others but never to his face for Fess truly was mad in the most cunning and brutal way. And so he passed the millennia until the coming of the young Demon Lord who now rules.
The change had occurred while he rested in his bed atop the well of dirt collected from the glade where the village of his birth had sat in ages past. He awoke to find most of his staff and courtiers transmogrified to women, though he did not recognize it at first and instead thought it was a joke or perhaps a gift of many young ladies from Fess. It was only after his wives assaulted him in most uncharacteristic manner that he learned the truth.  Incensed by the indignity perpetrated upon his house he immediately left seek his most senior peers and lieutenants so as to force an audience with the new Demon Lord and rectify this inexcusable and surely unintentional circumstance. After all who would be so prideful as to openly slight the King of Vampires? Even the Demon Lord couldn’t be that arrogant could she?
Unfortunately all the lieutenants seemed indisposed and out of the house and only Menor and Fess answered his summons. To his disgust it seemed neither of them had been strong enough to resist the will of the Demon Lord. Magnus’s jaw had shrunk to a tapering and delicate thing and he no longer wore characteristic arrogant grin which displayed a mouthful of crooked fangs but a coy little smile like those Osten had seen on his wives already that night. Fess still had a wild shock of short red hair but his gaunt features and insane eyes were gone and a somewhat androgynous woman’s face of perhaps 25 years mirrored the smile of one who had been Menor. If it wasn’t for the heraldic clasps on their now oversized cloaks he would not have recognized them. He turned from them in disgust and without word strode back up the stairs to his private apartments. It was there that his “son” confronted him.
Osten was a sorcerer of some power and though he didn’t make it his focus of study he was certain he could transport himself of to the audience chamber of the Demon Lord and immediately back if need be. It just required some minor preparations. He might not be able to arrive with two hundred vampire lords and demand she cease whatever foolishness she was playing at but he could at least voice his disapproval and show her that she was not invulnerable. Perhaps then concessions would be made and order restored to his house. As he began preparing the components to create a magical portal the girl that had once been his son opened the door and without so much as a “by your leave, sire” strode up to him. His former son was Dhampir, and he had allowed this because having a child who didn’t sicken or weaken in the light of the Sun and lost no power when not sleeping on his native earth was useful. He had intended the boy to be the captain of the House Guard when he had a century or two under his belt.
After realizing that his now-daughter was not going to speak he asked after the meal he had requested hours ago. His daughter asked if he planned to drain the poor girl dry, he admitted he did. His daughter told him that was all at an end now and that no more killing of that sort would go on in this house or any house, giving a sideways glace to the gilded tap on his desk. Osten asked her if she thought “one weak little thin blooded mongrel disappointment” could stop him from doing anything he wished.  She honestly answered “No.” and glanced at the door. There his four wives, Menor, Fess, and even the damned servants crowded portal. And he realized the entire House Guard was probably lined up down the hall since he had heard commotion outside his apartments as he was preparing to leave. He looked down at his daughter and was suddenly sure they didn’t mean to kill him for what little that was worth. He sneered at her, snatched up the valise and bag he had prepared, and vanished. He didn’t need the ritual if he was merely trying to displace himself some arbitrary distance in a given direction.
That night he slept in the dirt with his sack full of more precious earth. For the first time in millennia he had fled, not from Sarkoth Athmon or some champion of God with a sword of holy fire that glowed as the Sun or some disgusting godling from the outer hells.  He ran from his own women, his former son, and two former men whom he had considered as close to something like friends as a vampire could have. He was a victim of his own prosperity for even he could not have defeated all the vampires of his house and it would have gained him nothing in the end anyway.  In his makeshift grave he cursed the Demon Lord and whispered, “I will not eat her heart, I will feed it to her.”







Selena Marcario The Whistler to the Stars: Selena began life as a somewhat tomboyish but sweet girl in a small village 30 miles outside of what would one day be the capital of the Order but in those days was known as the city of Grandsmark. Tragedy first visited her at the age of 13 when her father died of pneumonia, however her mother was still young and soon remarried a somewhat dower but stolid merchant who owned the local lumber yard and a river barge company. She moved into her new father’s dusty mansion on the hill away from her playmates in town and this saddened her. Her mother seemed to ignore her due to her infatuation with the man she had married. Selena’s mind imagined the worst about her father and in his frowning stares she thought she detected both lust and disapproval, this wasn’t true her father simply had devoted his life to business and didn’t know how to speak with the girl who was now his daughter.  Selena took this as a chance to run away, but only to her friend’s home in the town for a few days.
Unfortunately on her way down the slope to the town in the middle of the night she came upon a group of vagabonds recently dismissed from a mercenary company and hardened by years of frontier war. They set upon the young girl, beat her, violated her, and trussed her to take with them as a camp woman eventually to be sold at the nearest port where heathen ships which accepted slaves would dock and in secret take women of the north to southern markets where their ivory skin was exotic and they fetched a high price. The mercenary band of 40 took her with them on their 8 month trek south to the Inland Sea where they hoped to find permanent employment in the endless feuds of the city states which controlled that region. During this time Selena was raped nightly by dozens men and compelled to steal from venders in the towns they visited or farmsteads to feed herself more than the tiny allotment the men gave her. It seemed that they had decided she wouldn’t sell well enough because she was haughty and had no concerns about using her up before they reached the coast. When she ran off to seek out a magistrate in a town still forty miles from the sea, one of the gang easily followed her through the twisting alleys and toyed with her for nearly half an hour before pouncing on her. This man was the wiry, swarthy fellow who seemed to her the cruelest of the lot, and he often kicked her seemingly for no reason other than the watch her stumble was they marched her along the roads. He told her, “I will keep your whorish tongue from waggling. Though…” he passed a moment as if considering, “I will miss that waggle tonight. Ah well, what can be done eh?” And with that he began to cut out her tongue, she thrashed and the job was poor, apparently he had more experience cutting throats. He only removed a third before saying “Gooda’nuff A’ think . Don’t you?” as he hauled the wailing girl to her feet and down the alleys toward the inn where the mercenaries were logged. Her voice seemed to whistle over her teeth and lips as she tried to cry out for help and this whistle echoed oddly on the brick faces of the alleys. The man rounded on her and grabbed her by the cheeks with one hand, “Don’t do that again.” He seemed genuinely afraid and sweat stood out on his gaunt cheeks. As they came to the last jog in the alley before reaching the inn a vast black shape covered in things which were not quite feathers or scales descended between the leaning buildings with the flap of leathery wings and the scrap of claws on brickwork.
The man did not even scream, he merely wheezed in a breath before jaws lined with boney plates grasped his head like a vise and shredded his skull by rasping back and forth rather than shearing it off in a bite.  It stood before her in the light of gibbous moon. Its wings pointed rigged fingers at the most star filled sky she had ever seen. They seemed to be all membrane with no bone at all like those of ray or manta but thinner. Its not-scales-not-feathers dripped with translucent slime. And Selena saw with horror that it had four utterly black lidless eyes the each the size of a teacup surmounting and flanking its long horse-like skull. It keened in a whistling voice that sounded like steel scraping on glass. And she saw it was not alone, three others perched on the roofs of the squalid houses like dragons from a story book, bowing the frames with their immense weight. She tried to speak to them but all that would come out was whistles and spit tinged with blood. The things looked at her quizzically for a moment, almost comical with the birdlike cocking of their heads. Then they more floundered than flew into the air as if the pure sky was as thick as mud to them. But they stayed aloft only for a second before crashing their collective bulk into the inn where the mercenaries still drank and whored away their gold. The raucous laughter from the inn became screams of terror which were soon drowned out by more keening glassy howls from the dragon things. Selena ran into the alleys and never looked back upon either the ruin of the inn or the ruin of her life.  She laughed and screamed in equal measure as she ran.
The small city which bore the name of Peter’s Corners but was more affectionately known as Last Bend suffered through 11 years of thievery and serial murder after that night. The thievery was perplexing because often it was things of great sentimental value to both the rich and poor alike which were stolen not anything of definite material worth. The murders were worse, when the moon grew fat at least one victim would be found flayed in a gutter, hung from a lamppost and bled dry, or with their skull strangely pulped in a manner that did not suggest a sharp blow.
Eventually Selena completed the pattern the voices in her dreams had described to her. The final touch was the remains of her tongue, now severed back to the root. It lay upon the old stone altar which stood forgotten and overgrown on the hill north of the town.  In the twilight of dusk she looked down on that city as she had looked down on the village of her birth years ago. Thin trails of smoke rose up to the sky, for that autumn had grown cold fast even this far south. And from the sky ragged flocks of things too large to be birds drifted down to meet the smoke, and then scattered it with the wash of their wings. And distantly she heard the yelps of men, the shrill cries of women, and the still shriller wails of things which had no human name but had become known to her by the sound they made “shaaantaaak”.
The flapping of greasy wings sounded above her and mount she had called swept down to take her off across the world and beyond it as she willed.
Selena wandered the world thereafter, sometimes becoming legend to men then fading from memory before returning again like a sudden storm without warning.  And so it was the same century after century. The terror of the world was her bread and butter, but the world has changed recently and fear of the night which was once pervasive is now mingled with lust. And this does not please her much.





The Child Swordsman:  God of Petty Cruelty, when the Demon Lord forsook torment much of the spiritual energy of suffering remaining  in the world was no longer fed upon by Hell and its inhabitants, allowing him to reconstitute himself.





The being which would become known as the Crawling Dragon is not a demon proper. It is claimed that when God raised the world from the dark sea of eternity many things not meant for the world washed up on its shores, most crawled back into the depths finding the world not to their liking. Many others suffocated as the world had never been made for them. Some stayed and acclimated themselves to the choking air; the Dragon was one such creature. During the world’s first days the Dragon found and battled the first Demon Lord becoming his “brother” through shared blood-letting and was given title of Prince of Hell in exchange for servitude, for the demons would never follow an alien being like the Dragon no matter how powerful it was and upon recognizing this the Dragon no longer saw purpose in overthrowing the Demon Lord.
For an age the Dragon served as the most powerful champion of hell and was lauded, if not liked, by demonic host. None could match the Dragon in raw power though the power of the Demon Lord was more subtle and could be wielded as a sword while the might of the Dragon was unto cataclysm which often destroyed its allies as much as its enemies. The Dragon’s power waxed greater as it devoured angel, man, and demon. Yet its hunger never abated for even an instant, indeed each feast only made it more ravenous. And so the seeds of its betrayal were sown.
The Dawn War came; the vampires, demons, men, and angelic hosts batted the creatures called from the eternal depths outside of world by Sarkoth Athmon and his acolytes. But these were unlike the flotsam that washed up on the world’s first day. These were terrible predators of the deep akin to the Dragon, drawn by the promise of feasting on the living world and who themselves worshiped terrible god-things beyond the comprehension of mortal or demon. The Dragon was neither, and so it heard the call of those dark gods from beyond as clearly as any of the beasts assaulting the world. The voices promised it an eternal feast in the void, that it would sup on the life blood of creation itself, and that it would devour the souls of gods if only it would join their cause and tear down the gates of the world so that they might arrive in all their majesty.
The dragon devised a plan for it knew that it could not stand alone against the armies of the Demon Lord. It forced itself upon comely true dragons as they were nearest to its alien shape in basic outline. Some simply died, poisoned by its alien essence, but others bore children. These children were born even more ravenous than their father; indeed most were never properly born but hollowed out their mothers before their hunger drove them outside. Some of these children were haughty and these the Dragon devoured, but  others could be controlled and so the Dragon created a small army but weakest infants of this host were more terrible than the greatest true dragons. And so as Athmon’s summoned creatures were finally routed and dispersed the Dragon burst upon the demons and his misbegotten children feasted with him. In the end the Demon Lord and Archangel fought together to slay the treacherous Dragon. As the Demon Lord struggled in the maw of the beast the Archangel plunged his spear down through its skull, wedging its jaws open. Drawing back the Dragon reasoned that it lacked the power to defeat both of its foes and gave in to its mistaken instincts. It fell upon its remaining children and devoured them rather than using them for the purpose it had sired them. As it did this the demons rallied behind their Lord and overwhelmed the Dragon even with its ever increasing might. Though the Dragon could not be killed as it did not truly live, it could be restrained. The savaged Demon Lord died of his wounds after placing his seal beside the sigil of the Archangel upon the chains which bound the beast.
The Dragon was buried in the depths of the earth but it had waxed so large that as the land around it eroded its grave was exposed as the world’s highest mountain range in the cold southern wastes. The ossified spine soars above the surrounding ice and rock as a curling line of peaks which thankfully no man has ever seen.
But that was not the end of the Dragon for as the old Demon Lord, Archangel, and all those who placed their seals on the chains which bound it have long since died or passed beyond the boundaries of the world those enchantments have weakened. The Dragon stirs in his grave and though he cannot yet move he can think and plot. Sensing the hunger in hearts of men the Dragon has found a void like unto that which birthed him. The unending need for more of all that life has to offer which drives humans to pursue greatness also creates a sympathy with the otherwise alien mind of the Dragon. It cannot speak with men either in waking or in dream but can draw their thoughts onto certain paths, like carving a channel and allowing water to flow through it of its own accord. Many men thirsting for glory, victory, wealth, and prestige have been tempted into foolish acts of bravery which appear to others totally benign and selfless but in reality reflect a greed so deep as to be inhuman. Ostensibly most are men of God but often they become disingenuous in their worship as they live their unusually long lives. These men are drawn to the vocation of dragon-slaying and long ago formed the Order of the Dragon and bear the heraldry of a wyrm transfixed through its jaws by a lance. The order has become oddly hereditary with few who are not sons of other members being admitted, but this appears to be no mere case of nepotism as each generation are greater dragon slayers than those before them. Most outside the order see this as proof God’s blessing upon them. The truth is more sinister. The order’s members devour the hearts of the dragons they kill in rituals which profess allegiance to God but depict him as a vast wingless dragon whose features are oddly obscured.  Each generation grows more powerful from feeding upon dragons and most members live to see their second century though by that time they seclude themselves within their monasteries and only go out when covered head to foot in armor.
These men believe that the world can be saved from evil by the avatar of their God and have taken it upon themselves to find and awaken this holy embodiment of strength and righteousness. They dream of titanic mountains covered in snow and bearing no mark of life from their windswept tops to their glacier scoured foothills. But none have yet found the lifeless waste of the Aboreal pole and so they quest in vain, for now.