The Legend of Captain Avarra. APOCRYPHA

The Legend of Captain Avarra, Undead Godhunter and Ghastly Pirate Queen

On quiet summer nights when the moon is new, and the sea is still, after the children have gone to bed, the Elders may tell the story of the Dread Pirate Captainess, Lady Avarra, who defied the gods and lived to tell her tale.

~~~
. They say that the gods took the Godhunter’s love from her three times.
First, the callous and juvenile God of the Sea struck down every living member of the Great and Noble House of Avernica, and laid a curse of Ruin upon their ancestral home, all for the sake of settling a petty wager with his brother.
Second, after she dared to survive the curse -- to be violently cut, gasping for life, out of her dead mother’s womb -- she was raised as an orphan by a strict but essentially charitable sect of Virgin Lunar Priestesses and, upon coming of age, had the further insolence to build a life for herself out of the ashes or her decimated House. She spoke out against the violent and mercurial whims of the gods, condemning them for toying with mortal lives and refusing to sacrifice her worldly comforts upon their altar. For this crime, the God of the Sky lured her husband to his death and stole her child as punishment, hiding the infant’s soul in a pocket dimension, locked away from space and time. k The Twin Gods’ more serene younger sister, the Goddess of the Moon, heard the widow’s desperate prayers and took pity on her grieving mortal soul. She wove the Godhunter’s sorrow into an enchanted shroud and offered unto the Godhunter the chance to take up the Mantle of the Twilight Champion, to ride against her corrupt brothers that she might vanquish their evil from her land and win the chance to save her daughter. The goddess’s chosen agreed, and became the Heroine of the Four Kingdoms, slaying many foes and gathering allies as she went. She united the fractured kingdoms and became beloved of all the common peoples, who sent great armies to her aid when after many years, she finally sounded the call to arms with her mighty and Blessed War Horn.
The Lady-Knight of the Waxing Moon led her friends to victory in many great battles during the war to overthrow the Gods of the Sky and Sea, but in the end, the Moon Goddess betrayed her champion, and so the fledgling United Wizard’s Council, the Great Rebellion, and its leader were all doomed. Her child died in captivity, and the wrathful gods imprisoned their sister and divided up her power between themselves. They left the Fallen Champion alive, however, and cursed her with immortality, that she might roam the broken lands forevermore, hopelessly seeking the lost spirit of her infant daughter and haunted by the memory of her failure.
After this third and most painful loss, the Celestial Huntress despaired. There was no deity left that she might ask for aid, nothing left to lose, and no one left to fight for. Still, for the sake of defiance and spite alone, the Darkened Heroine refused to accept her punishment.
Instead, she renounced her faith, and swore vengeance upon any and all godly beings who would accept her challenge. She embarked upon a journey to regain her power and reassemble enough fragments of the rebellion to aid her in one final revenge mission, to snuff out the Divine Spark from the world once and for all.
~~~
Lady Avarra wields twin swords -- Hope and Mercy -- and occasionally an ethereal great-axe, Oathbreaker, which is forged from the ravaged shreds of her dead patron goddess. After many centuries of traveling the seas and skies, she is now known by many names, such as the Ghastly Captainess, the Hell-Bitch of Saltmarsh, the Empress of Thieves, and the Warden of Wayward Souls.
She is honored and even worshipped by many Courts of Thieves throughout the magical realms, members of which often consider all deaths at sea to be sacrifices in her name and believe that any man who witnesses her ship’s passing and lives to speak of it will be blessed with favorable winds for the rest of his mortal life. The doldrums are a sign of her disfavor.
She is the leader of a spectral and deadly pirate-slaver fleet, which is crewed by mortal thralls, animated undead, and both willing and unwilling spirits that she has either bought, bribed or press-ganged into service. She rules over her roaming warbands of lost souls and her vassal captains, the Seven Lich Lords, with a magical and bloody prosthetic bronze fist.
She sails the spaces between the mortal and immortal planes aboard her prized transdimensional vessel, the Hero’s Hubris, searching for plunder, weapons, and killable deities. Her crews occasionally interrupt the standard transit of souls between planes when they cross the Rivers of Time, and always attempt to fish innocent souls from the Rivers as they do so, with sporadic success.

Her truest wish, the desire that she dare not speak aloud, even to herself, is that she does not truly want the gods dead. She only wants to force them to lift their curse and to restore her daughter, husband and noble house to life, thus releasing her from her many sins, debts, and woes.
Failing this objective, she is determined to seize their power, and would then likely use it to end her own life, heedless of the collateral damage. She is resolved, if only subconsciously, to extinguish her soul and end its suffering at all costs, and secretly desires oblivion much more than revenge.
She expresses her pain and loss through righteous fury, bloody murder, and wanton destruction, but hides her chaotic impulses beneath a veneer of dedication to justice, karma, balance, nonattachment, and rebirth. Her only pleasures in this hollow afterlife come from righting perceived injustices and violently punishing evildoers. She compulsively seeks out new causes to fight for and opponents to battle.
She desires the Stones of Power solely for her own selfish purposes, and if given the opportunity, she would be sorely tempted to end all human life and even existence itself, if she believed that this might tangentially result in an escape from her eternal torment.

…..

In her quest for power to wield against the gods, she is tracking down the source of a story that she has heard about one of the god’s myriad part-mortal spawn, a local trickster deity named Zerhulios. Zerhulios was a demi-god and a Grandson of the Sea, bastard son of the God of Storms and a Sea Hag (a saltwater sorceress). He is particularly beloved of islanders, merchants, and sailors around the Reaper’s Hook archipelago due to their tradition of oral storytelling; children and lusty young men favor stories about Zerhulios because he was most well-known for getting drunk, singing bawdy songs, and playing magical pranks on both gods and men.
While the gods were only mildly inconvenienced in his games, any man who took a bet or played a Game of Cards or Round of Dice with Zerhulios would be sure to meet a bloody death soon after, unless the man could out-cheat a Demi-Divine Trickster. Stories about Zerhulios are also a favorite of parents on this island, who use them as cautionary tales to warn their children to be wary of strangers and careful with their coin-purses, and also to illustrate the many dangers of gambling, whorehouses, hard liquor, and going out into the jungle after dark.
Zerhulios has not been heard of for some time, they say, because his last and final prank was to steal a celestial torque, the Crown of the Volcano King, a legendary magical artifact forged aeons ago by the long-dormant patron deity of Reaper’s Hook. It is said that when he laid the enchanted circlet upon his own half-mortal brow, its power overwhelmed him and he exploded, scattering the Eight Gemstones of Power across the volcanic archipelago. The most powerful gem of all, the secret ninth stone, remains clutched in the fist of his charred skeletal remains, while his furious spirit lurks nearby, awaiting an intact body to possess. He and the jewel (The Arcane Jewel of the Architectrix) are trapped in the center chamber of a labyrinthine tomb, hidden deep below beneath the tunnels and catacombs running through the volcano.