Name: Lotan Felheart, the Black Dragon
Age: Ancient, easily in excess of 1000 years.
Gender Male
Race: Svariel
Culture: A people as ancient and prolific as the Astoriel have their fair share of dissidents. Whether heretics that forsake the worship of The One, or secessionists that desire an empire outside of the Enclave's influence, there have been those that have broken away from the greater whole of the Astoriel over the ages. These fragments and outcasts are known as Svariel, or the Dark Kin, and are sometimes called Dark Elves by more ignorant races. As they are a collective of numerous splinter factions, there is no cohesive culture among the Svariel, aside from their collective rejection of their peoples' collectivist values and religion. Common enough among them is the desire to use the magical and technological might their kind has cultivated over the eons to empower themselves, and subjugate other races. Dark Elves are frequently seen as untrustworthy or cruel by other races, and not without good reason; they are frequently pirates, marauders, unscrupulous mercenaries, or subjects of the bloodthirsty empire of Malerion.
Racial Features: Svariel are not biologically distinct from their kin within the Enclave, and are indistinguishable from them by an outsider. However, each "Elf" can intrinsically sense the presence of The One (or the lack thereof) in their kin, and can sense whether they are Astoriel or Svariel instinctively. Additionally, Svariel are far more likely to modify their bodies drastically through the use of transmutative magics or biological engineering; it is not unheard of for enclaves or covens of Dark Elves to possess wings, serpentine bodies, additional limbs, or any combination thereof.
Appearance: Lotan is a tall and imposing figure; his fey Elvish features marred by his pallid and sickly complexion. His hair has long fallen out, and a single eye as dark as a moonless sky stares imperiously. His pale, lithe flesh is covered in numerous dark tattoos; pirate symbols and prison markings. His presence is that of a predator, an ancient monster sat atop a horde of bones. In private company he dresses in rich, dark robes, which cloak and frame his lithe form voluminously. In more serious matters he wears an armored bodyglove, and cloaks and raiments that evoke the
image of a warrior-king. He is particularly fond of a golden
mask that depicts a high-crested, tentacle-mawed visage, further evoking the image of a hunter of the deep.
Occupation/Concept: In the uncharted and forbidden realms of Elysia, Lotan is a lord among lords. Among the many pirates, corsairs, privateers, brigands, and freebooters, he commands the greatest power out of any of them. A Pirate King the likes of which have not been seen since ages that have faded to hazy memory, he is the terror of the void and a blight on many worlds. He and the rest of his corsair warband, the Void Dragons, are known to strike without warning, and vanish without a trace. They oversee many illegal trades among their secret paths between worlds, and plunder the riches of empires as they see fit.
Training:
- Deadly and experienced close-quarters combatant; adept with blades, whips, sidearms, and such.
- Legendary pirate; expert in naval battle, boarding actions, and piloting small craft.
- Master of ancient lore; speaks many dead languages and has great knowledge of lost empires, specifically their secrets and their treasures.
Powers:
- Mind Flay: Lotan can invade his enemies' minds and assault them with waves of ruinous psychic agony.
- Voidbolt: By conjuring a bolt of pure void energy, Lotan can tear his enemies apart or wrack them with debilitating pain.
- Voidform: Lotan's flesh becomes one with the void, allowing him to survive in such lethal environments as open space.
- Vampiric Touch: Sucking the very life energy of his enemy away, Lotan can heal his wounds and sustain his failing body.
- Word of Death: Lotan speaks an ancient curse in a forsaken tongue: those too weak to bear its horror perish instantly.
Equipment:
- Ghost Armor: A bodyglove adorned with lightweight armored plates that do not slow Lotan or restrict his movements. The suit has a light force-field installed, as well as an in-built holofield that can obfuscate his appearance.
- Masque of Serakith: Lotan's golden mask, taken from the corpse of a favored Malerion prince.
- Nidhogg-Scale Cloak: A night-black hide flensed from the flesh of a great void-serpent, it is durable against many varieties of weapon and energies.
- Venom Blaster: Lotan's preferred side-arm, which fires crystallized shards of horrifically virulent neurotoxin.
- Agonizer: An elastic, electrified lash, which buries into the flesh of those it contacts and overstimulates their pain receptors.
- Nightfang: Lotan's personal blade, a chaotic relic forged from the bones of demons. Its touch envenerates flesh on contact, causing debilitating and necrotic wounds.
Airship: The flagship of Lotan's fleet and his most prized vessel is the
Forever Worm, a lost relic of an Astoriel battleship. Blisteringly fast and armed with potent Darklight weapons, its true strength lies in its advanced cloaking technology, which can evade a great majority of modern sensors. Lotan's personal craft is
Star Vampire, a custom craft capable of breakneck maneuvers and armed with miniaturized Darklight cannons.
Motivation: While Lotan's wealth and power are both immense, he is living on borrowed time. Millennia of exposure to cosmic radiation, several lifetimes' worth of debauchery, and foul and forbidden magics have all taken their toll on his supposedly-immortal body. Only though stealing the life-energy of others does he remain potent; without this vampirism his health would quickly deteriorate and he would perish. As time wears on, it takes more stolen lives to keep him hale and healthy, and Lotan fears the end immensely. For these reasons, he seeks out a cure for his condition, or any other means of keeping his flesh from failing in perpetuity.
Personality: Lotan is considered by some to be more a force of nature than a man. Capricious and imperial, his sights and ambitions often seem to be set beyond the realms of mortals, and his motivations are often difficult to discern. While seemingly stoic and inscrutable, this is a veneer over his burning ambition and sharp cunning. Lotan projects a dignified charisma, with the silent majesty of a dark idol and passionate fury of a warlord all at once. In most pursuits he is vicious and unshakable, with the tenacity of a starving hound. He delights in dark decadence and long-planned revenge, and no values higher than his own freedom and personal power.
Flaws:
- Cursed Flesh: Lotan's body is failing, slowly yet surely, and the end can only be staved off by sucking away the life of others.
- Outlaw: A legendary villain, Lotan has a tremendous bounty in every government that has heard of him, and numerous other criminals (many among them his own underlings) wish to see him dead.
- Villainous: Trusting no one and trusted by no one, Lotan leads a difficult and solitary existence. Amorality, vengeance, and paranoia rule his daily life, and not all of the knives he perceives pointed at his back may be real.
- Debauched: Lotan has... peculiar tastes. Centuries of hedonism have driven him to extremes of decadence and debauchery.
- Eye on the Prize: He has a hard time seeing things to his right.
Bio: Long, long ago, the man who would become known as the Black Dragon was born a slave on a pirate galleon. His ancestor had been an outcast noble among a lesser Svariel principality, and so his entire lineage was condemned to servitude. Lotan was born and raised on a slaver-vessel, and from a young age he was brought up as a slave-soldier. Vicious naval combat and near-suicidal boarding actions were his life from early adolescence onward, and his skills were honed to a razor-edge so he could as much as stay alive. When not raiding other vessels for wealth, his pirate masters forced him to fight his fellow slaves in brutal gladiatorial combat for their amusement. Even at a young age, a fire of ambition and malevolence burned in Lotan, and he planned his revenge.
He conspired with his fellow slaves over the course of years, mapping out their ship and the habits of their masters to plot out their revolt. When the fated hour came, many of the slaves faltered and betrayed their fellows to their masters. The revolt would have been a failure, with Lotan slain at the hands of a horde of turncoats, had he not Exalted at that moment, and driven the revolt forward with his own sheer strength. While the fighting was vicious and cost him his right eye, Lotan eventually won his freedom with a sword's edge.
For many years after he wandered Elysia, frequently as a pirate himself, or some other manner of sellsword. He sold his services to many crews and unscrupulous governments, and often enough ran afoul of the law and served time in some brig or prison before eventually springing loose. All the while he accumulated experience, wealth, contacts and power, and slowly ascended as a mighty pirate lord of his own right. All the while, he pursued a peculiar interest in empires that had fallen under the demonic sway, and the forbidden magics they practiced. This "void magic," which controlled such matters as dark energy and the mind often gave him an edge over his competitors, to say nothing of his latent power as an Exalt.
Lotan's true ascension came after centuries of piracy, as he set his sights on become the most powerful pirate lord of all; a king among kings. The mightiest pirates of the age had formed a triumvirate alliance, and Lotan sought their deaths. By cutting deals throughout the noble court, Lotan was able to infiltrate and abduct the crown prince of a mighty empire of the age, and framed the trio of pirate lords for the crime. The empire went to war over the slight, and the battle between them and the pirate lords was apocalyptic in scale. Once it had ended, all of his rivals were dead, and the empire's military had been crippled. Lotan struck then, consolidating the remaining power of the the pirate lords under his own banner, the warband then forth known as the Void Dragons, and plundered the territory of the weakened empire freely. This masterstroke cemented his status as a king of the underworld for centuries to come, and his infamy and power have only grown since that momentous ascension.
Extra Info: Lotan is sometimes accompanied by a bound Devil called
Whisper of N'Zoth (often shortened to Whisper). A diminutive creature that often rides upon his shoulder, Whisper is a font of dark knowledge and terrible secrets. As its name implies, it often whispers to Lotan, telling him of methods of furthering his pursuit of void magics, or locations of relics and loci of power. These have been lies as often as not, as it seeks Lotan's death to release itself, but cannot act directly against him by the nature of its binding. Its true form is allegedly horrific and powerful, but none but Lotan have beheld it.
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