Lunathea of Nells

(a.k.a. Brood Blood-Kin)

There was no remarkable birth nor circumstance which saw Lunathea into the world. No prophecy foretold her arrival and her blood was as far from the lines of nobility as could be, yet she would become one of the most influential people in Ethnis.
She was conceived as the daughter of a whore in the slums of the Marianiyan Territories, a hell rife with disease and governed by blood. Her mother put her to work as soon as she could walk, scavving through the putrescent muck pits and shallow graves for anything worth a meal.
When she was thirteen years of age her mother sold her. It was not a selfless notion meant to save Luna from being a whore like herself, it was an act of spite directed at her madame, who would have collected all the profit otherwise, and it allowed her a chance to move to another city.
At first Luna defended her mother's actions to the slavers, saying that she had a choice and at least her trade had given her mother a place to live. As time wore on, however, so too did her resolve. Day after day of their jeering, of them reminding her that she had been sold to them, not forcibly taken, forced her into a rut of despair. She refused to eat, to drink, even to stir from sleep. As far as she was convinced, this was her time to die, to be free of this merciless world once and for all.
Of course, the slavers had bought her for a purpose. As the girl slept they entered her cage and, with the help of a local Chaesanchei captured her soul in her body and turned her into something not unlike the shadow of a thrall and of a zombie cobbled together.
Hunger pains overtook her, forcing her into a state of wakefulness that sent lances of pain through her periodically. She fell into a delirium, constructing a false world around herself, a skewed reality cleaner and more livable than her current purgatory.
Immortality took over, and the torture began. They pushed her at first with the fear of death, for she did not yet know her own conditions. When they did kill her they left her in the putrescent pits, submerged in a cage until her body reformed and the spark of life returned. Despite the horror, she'd forgotten what they had done, that she had died.
Death upon death held no respite for her aside from a languorous numbness that she began to grow aware of. Pain no longer became material, she could watch the impalements, the garrotes, the flaying and the iron maidens with a detached interest, learning the techniques of her captors and memorizing them with studious zeal. The limits of the physical form and the lack thereof of metaphysics became her interest, she resolved herself, for the first time since she'd been captured all those years ago, to escape. Through the clout of pain and the haze of being a zombie, she managed to formulate a plan.
Though they held power over her in the form of steel and water and fire, the minds of her captors were weakened by their own cruelty. She could taste their cowardice when she was in the realm of the dead, loathing voices in the dark wove songs of revenge, of slaughter. She complied and, though dead at the time, she broke open the minds of her captors and churned their sanity like her panicked throes had so often churned the putrescence.
The voices which commanded remained even into the coldness of life as, for the countless time, she woke from the dead and pieced herself together with the aid of her new thralls. She took the opportunity to prolong their death, to give them a slice of the experience they had given her. When the last of their blood finally escaped them she bound their souls to their skulls to create Grimoires of them so that she could continue to torment them even in death.
Years passed and Lunathea was named for the brood of thrall zombies which she had accrued. Her approach to gathering followers was naïve and blatant, capturing, torturing and converting the odd urchin and traveler who passed close to her as she traveled the roads. By the time she had garnered the attention of the distant tower of Nchr'ei she had already amassed a small army. Interested by the blatant audacity of her actions they found and recruited her into their ranks, the cost of joining being her army.
Her arrival was marked by an attack the budding prodigy could not counter, a mentally debilitating attack from an unknown source which drove her to her knees and left her open for one of the Nchr'aementho to swoop in and deliver unto sathiidism. As she sat there bleeding and coughing, her nature and what had just happened was explained to her. Again, the pain did not cloud her mind as she listened. She could only smile as she learned she was among peers of a fellow mind and power. Brood the Zombie became Brood Blood-Kin.
First a zombie, then a necromancer, then a Kyzan and finally a sathiid; by the time she'd finished puberty she'd already had a more full story than most people have in their entire lives. Her plans were only beginning. With the agony of being a zombie being left in the dust and the clarity of ageless immortality spreading out before her, Brood, now Brood Blood-Kin, had the opportunity to test as she had been tested, to play with the bodies of the animate and the inanimate. It did not take her long to draw the gaze of the Queen of the Nchr'aementho, Lady Undyr’rh.
Brood Blood-Kin developed into a frightening yet beautiful woman, attentive to the whims of vanity but not a slave to them. She was the apprentice of the Lady now and thusly had to keep up appearances as a Blood-Kin, Pure Blooded Kyzan.
The Lady’s fascination with what she called Dark Unity had spread to her, infecting her with the concept of a collective gestalt. The woman who had previously been quite open with her plans and obvious with her intent fell silent, retreating to a hermitage in the mountains to continue her studies in peace. Frequently she would return to the city to make an appearance, but it was no longer the daily public showing the people had grown accustomed to, they breathed a sigh of relief.
Brood's hermitage at Bogswamp Manor (on lease from Togue Jadey) lasts a year, after which time Lady Undyr'rh's Knight, Lath, joins and begins to train her. He does not enjoy the assignment, and is quite wicked to her as a result. Even under his cruel tutelage she learns, expanding her understanding of solid magic and taking advantage of her scarred past. Eventually Lath comes to grudgingly respect her power, but leaves before the feeling becomes permanent. He is replaced by a group of Blood Kin whom Brood is tasked with training for the Pathogen War against Valuser'rh.
Among those she's training is a Chea, Theris, whose skills she feels far surpasses those of his peers. (cont)
At long last she finished her studies. After a decade of serving the Lady it all clicked into place, the sublime understanding of metaphysics: how and why it worked and what it all meant in the grand scheme of things. The answer, whatever it was, exhilarated her and pushed her to a new level of understanding. The fearful, dodgy girl who had ran through the streets as a girl was gone. Brood Blood-Kin had a power to compete with the Monoliths of Aempis and a wit faster than almost all could boast.

Related Quotes

Raised within a cradle of razors and nursed on her own gore. The lot dealt Lunathea was damned from birth. If ever a torture method could be devised she was fated to become intimate with it as recipient and perpetrator.
"I want what we all want, I want peace and Unity. However, nobody understands what unity is because they cannot comprehend what it is to feel the agony they exact upon others. Only once we share the same nerves can we truly be United." - Brood
"A sense of worthlessness is an exquisite breed of pain. It gets under your skin in a way that needles and insects cannot. When it overtakes you, you participate in your own torture as an unwelcome guest who undermines your every motivation, who is intimately aware of every shortcoming, every nuanced flaw. It is a voice that gains more volume the more you try to muffle it." - Brood
"She's the moon: the sort of beauty entire epics are written around yet something most only have the fortune from seeing from a distance. She's a stunning orb of rapture in a sea of a heavy, strangling darkness." - Theris
"Pain is empathy or apathy, the more it is felt the more it becomes either. Brood possesses both. Apathy for the fears and worries of others, but also a drive to make all share pain in a hive mind so that all can come to accept the universal truth." - Theris
Dirge's gaze was as dark in the material sense as it was in the figurative depths beyond. The fossil of a soul cross-crossed her eyes like cracks on a mirror, fissures through which the cold, stern resolve of her disdain sept through. Her gaze held a self-righteousness that would dwarf the zealotry of the Somnolent's most dedicated Angels.

Social

Religious Views

"In a hivemind of pain we will all find equality."

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Honorary & Occupational Titles

The Girl in Cell Four
Brood the Zombie
Brood Blood-Kin
FINAL DIRGE

Gender

Female

Eyes

Glacial Blue

Hair

Hip-Length, White

Height

7' 4"