Twin Blights of Glawiad

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All the curses that brought us here…

This content is a part of Galvyria.

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"Twins are an omen of destruction. Every pair of twins brings misfortune to their family, their nation, and their planet. This is a curse from a power beyond even the Primordials, a punishment for the violent fighting of the one pair of twins within them. Death was simply one half of the retribution. The other half is the cruelest curse the universe has seen. My brother and I escaped the misfortune we wrought upon the land by virtue of exile, but it did not save the places we tainted.

The most evil pair of twins in all of history, the Twin Blights, seemed to follow us everywhere we went. The Haemagora, a twisting cacophony of flesh and bloodlust, bent and reshaped the bodies of those it killed into visceral warriors with little sentience. The Apathesia, less destructive of the Blights, drained the spirit out of all it touched, causing colors to ebb and the forms of living things to fade to a hivemind of shadow and ash. How horribly ironic that my brother and I had Echoes that resembled the monsters of our era. And yet, how wonderfully fitting that we fought back against the blood and darkness of the realm with our own."

-Mestocyrn Bleshyrin, in an excerpt from Twilight Verryas-L'mier's autobiography

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Glawiad's most prominent mass-extinction event took place over mere centuries. Over 95% of life in the realm was completely annihilated, either twisted into a fleshy mass with barely enough sentience to function or withered away into a literal shadow of its former self. The Twin Blights unleashed upon the realm are the cause of this. While nobody figured out the cause of their appearance before their memory had faded entirely from the realm, the most popular theory during the war against them and the reconstruction period was that it was a pair of twins with extremely powerful and uncontrollable Echoes, separated across Glawiad at birth in an attempt to keep the curse of twins from activating. A sound theory, but no evidence was left after the destruction of the Blights.

The planets that the Blights began on were completely absorbed, becoming enormous cores that acted as a surrogate brain for each one. The names and cultures they once had were assimilated into the monolithic death that the growing pestilences represented. From their new cores, the colorless ashy void and writhing mass of gore spread greedily through the endless expanse of space, consuming every planet they could get their tentaculous growths around and gaining new points to jump from. The single ray of hope for these worlds was the existence of Skyshards, with a few worlds acting as bastions with groups of heroes protecting their home worlds from these elevated islands.

Haemagora

As half of Glawiad looked up into its night sky, a writhing mass of crimson streaked across it. A tangled web of planets consumed by the violent Blight lingered in the air. Though they looked to the bulbous network of muscle and bone from so tiny a scale, the people knew it was looking back into them. They felt its hungry gaze, heard its low rumbling of rage. The Haemagora, Blight of mindless gory bloodlust, glowed its deep vermillion like an open wound in the vivid fuchsia realm around it.

The Haemagora, to the best knowledge of researchers of its time, was a Blight made of the concept of bloodlust itself, in every sense of the word. Made of seemingly ethereal flesh and supposedly with the capacity to feel pain, the Haemagora was the Blighty with the stronger personality of the two. It stretched in every direction it heard the beat of life, grasping at worlds with its toothy extremities. It seemed enraged at any presence of life it did not command under its bloody web of muscular spires. Covering the area it controlled with a fine mist of gore, the Haemagora made much of the realm impassible.

While its main body did a decent portion of the work, the Haemagora mostly created monsters, twisted piles of flesh and anger that were molded from the bodies or corpses of formerly normal living beings. They were initially just driven by omnidirectional rage, barely being able to function at all. As the Haemagora's monsters were met with resistance and even defeated in droves, the Blight grew angrier. Pulsing near its Core, some new monsters grew the slightest fragment of intelligence. The Haemagora took interest in the monsters its heightened rage had produced.

Over time, the power of the monsters increased as the Haemagora spent more and more time making each horrifically deformed warrior better than the last. It fervently molded flesh and bone into weapons and preserved as much intelligence as it could. At a certain point, the Haemagora began experimenting with assimilating living people into itself. Grasping at what variables it could bend to control the rage and actions of the subjects, figuring out how to mend its flesh puppets when they broke, and even learning how to alter Echoes to some extent, the Haemagora laughed with newfound wonder. How full the realm of Glawiad was of subjects to steal and turn into its army. How easy it was to conquer world after world, turning their Skyshards to dust and piercing the cores of the planets themselves with its mass of muscle and blood. While a few of its absorbed minions were freed, the high of conquest permeated its mind deeper.

The Haemagora had learned, near the end of its life, how to create new life and Echoes from nothing but its own mass. The ability to create the perfect warrior, custom Echo and body, infused with its own will and consciousness. The Blight screeched in joy as it worked on its perfect fighter. The first attempt was a mirror of itself, a fighter with disturbing movement and an Echo that let it twist the flesh of others. Unfortunately for the vermillion blob, the heightened intelligence of its new original warrior gave it just enough independent thought to be severed from the Blight's control by the group it wished to crush the most: a small group of ten defenders on the solitary Skyshard of Sespira.

The Chaos Force was the Haemagora's nemesis, in a sense. Having stolen its nigh-perfect project, they brought the Blight into a temper tantrum state that had never been seen before. Forging its disgusting mass of flesh into a hideous form of incredibly dense muscle and a sinister Echo, the next juggernaut was made. This one had even higher intelligence than its last attempt, having artificial memories of hatred for the Chaos Force and the fighting tactics to use its curse Echo at maximum efficiently. However, the absolutely moronic strategy of increasing the problem factor predictably backfired, and the Haemagora's prized possession became a valued member of the Chaos Force, naming himself Kurosejm.

The Haemagora died shortly after creating one last being, its collaboration with the Apathesia. Its shriek as its exposed core was destroyed by the Sangria Paladin sent shockwaves throughout the fields of light and made Glawiad shiver one last time.

Apathesia

The skies above went dark, slowly at first, but accelerating each night. Aestrai lost their luster and went a dull white, and the fuchsia backdrop of the glimmering realm was consumed by a pale black ash. The hollow whispers of the deceased were reduced to a soft wailing that resembled wind. The darkness peered into the eyes of the mortals who gazed into it with boredom, deciding it may as well consume them into its withering embrace as another addition to itself.

Often called the Blight of Numbness, the Apathesia was the colder, less striking, and less violent of the two. The planet it consumed for its Core was perhaps the only part of it that had any color, a solitary drop of indigo in the endless grayscale expanse of its domain. Slowly encompassing and turning the Skyshards of planets to mere powder, the Apathesia covered thousands of worlds like translucent black sand. The residents were doomed to a horrid slow death as their bodies turned to shadow and the will they had to live withered away in tedium. The lights in the shadowy ash-peoples' eyes leaked and went dim, before the husk of a being finally collapsed into a pile of deep gray particles.

While having much less of a personality than its twin, the Apathesia was much more strategic and intelligent seeming. It spread around large swathes of Glawiad to prevent populous worlds from escaping its grasp, ensuring it would absorb every drop of willpower and Essence they had into itself. It also communicated with the Haemagora through pushing Aestrai into patterns, urging it to do the same with its tendon-covered worlds.

Few groups held off the Apathesia for long. With its strategic planning and more dispersed nature, it was able to infect and slowly drain the will out of all who resisted it. Drifting towards the center of Glawiad, the Blight hummed solemnly to itself in a lullaby of dust and shadow.

The death of the Apathesia was quiet. A wispy, airy cackle may have happened, but it would have been drowned out by the Haemagora's flailing end. The Sangria Paladin's simultaneous execution of the Cores drained him of his fighting ability to an unrecoverable extent, leaving him to die on Brimstata, but the elimination of the Twin Blights was well worth it.

Amalgam - Haemathesia

The Blights reached for each other. This was noticed by the Chaos Force, and they planned to destroy both Cores of the Twin Blights before they had the chance to touch. They fought off increasingly powerful assaults from the Haemagora, and due to the split interest between protecting Sespira and setting off to obliterate both Blights, they were too late by 30 seconds. The Haemagora and the Apathesia created a new monster, a coldhearted and detached beast who reveled only in suffering and tainting the universe around her. Haemathesia, the Witch of Armageddon was born in the skies of Brimstata.

The original Blights lingered for another minute before the plan was carried out and their cores were obliterated. The new one, however, had no such tether yet. And she would never get it. One of the Chaos Force members, a young and powerful Astrin, sacrificed her entire future in a spell to seal the world the Witch was on away from the rest of the realm. The Sangria Paladin, while unable to fight any longer, stopped the other threat: Brimstata being a potential Core for this new blighted witch. He sacrificed his life by merging with the core of Brimstata. The Paladin took it for himself, ordering it to produce a line of demons as powerful as himself until the Witch of Armageddon was put to rest.

The amalgamated Blight retained a sense of self for thousands of years, seeing herself as an individual god amongst the universe instead of a force to assimilate it into. Eventually, however, the Sangria Paladin's demonspawn defeated her, laying her to rest for almost a million years. Even when released again, the people of Glawiad had gathered enough strength to finally end the legacy of the Twin Blights and destroyed her once and for all.