Endboss

The page is covered in childish doodles of what looks like dragons building a statue of a crown-wearing spiral wrapped around the planet.

From the moment she hatched, it was clear Endboss was going to be trouble. It wasn't the fact that she'd made a crown out of a bit of her eggshell so much as it was the crude throne that she'd fashioned out of the rest of it. From there, she progressed to using her burgeoning magical powers to chuck small objects at anyone who wasn't currently paying attention to her. But such wastes of her power are below Endboss now. Nowadays, she's learned to leverage her cuteness to get what she wants, and to leave the magic for things that work more directly towards her plans for world domination.

Of course, to any clueless adult's eyes, she's just a hatchling begging for an extra chocolate-dipped cricket. But this hatchling's going to rule Sornieth!

...She'll rule Sornieth later. Her father is calling her for dinnertime, and Midboss promised java sparrows tonight! (He'll regret giving his daughter that much extra energy.)

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In order to prepare for her inevitable role as supreme overlord, Endboss has had to learn from the best. Or rather, learn what not to do from the best of the worst. As much as she loves her father, she doesn't think for a second that he has any capability to rule. Or be evil. Or successfully make it through a day without having to call for somebody to help untie himself from whatever knot he's invariably got himself into. When Endboss rules the world, she'll be sure to give him an irrelevant but powerful-sounding role to keep him happy.

Victor is a bit more capable, but her dad's boss is still but a fae in an imperial court. He's far too obsessed with revenge to look at the big picture, to see that once his adorable undead have ravaged the land he'll be left just as pitiful and irrelevant as he currently is. Not that he'll be offered the chance — Endboss would rather conquer an unravaged land, thank you very much.

Perhaps it's better not to learn from others then, and to instead go straight to being the one in charge. She's already recruited her first minion — a young nocturne named Seren. He's not particularly good at anything, to be honest, but he is eager and loyal. And to Endboss, that's far more important. Skills can be taught far more easily than loyalty. And Seren's already made progress! For example, he's learned how to throw himself into a hopeless combat to buy Endboss time to escape. That's very important. Not if only he'd learn how to pick fights a bit more wisely, instead of sneak attacking basically everything he sees. Even if Seren is replaceable, that doesn't mean Endboss wants to go through the effort of replacing him...

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But how, you may ask, does a young hatchling plan to take over all of Sornieth? With careful planning, hard work, copious amounts of arcane magic, and however many explosives she can get her tiny little claws on. Alder stocks quite a lot of those, and he's not going to if a few go missing. And if he does notice, that's what ridgebacks are for! Why would anyone blame a hatchling when there are multiple instinctive kleptomaniacs wandering around?

Then, all Endboss has to do is cause some trouble. (She's very good at that.) Some mutated wildlife here, a bit of wanton destruction over there, and before long her target clan will be consumed by panic over their own personalized apocalypse. Once they're nice and desperate for help, Endboss will show up, and with a showy display of arcane power solve all of their problems that were totally not caused by her in the first place. Her offer to keep the problems solved in exchange for their loyalty will be irresistible, and then Endboss will keep repeating the process until she has a legion of subservient clans. There'll be a few more multi-armed cobras slithering through the Starwood Strand as a side-effect, but it's not like the Isles weren't full of that kind of stuff anyways.

However, many clans will be strong enough to withstand Endboss's sabotages. She'll have done the scouting work first, of course, so she won't have bothered trying to conquer them peacefully. Instead, she'll just steamroll them with her new army made out of the clans who'd previously sworn fealty to her. It's a bit old-fashioned, but it has the benefit of being much faster than trying to individualize the inevitable defeat of every single clan in Sornieth.

If all that fails, Endboss's Plan B is to build a huge tower (or just steal Aeric's), plunk the biggest crystal she can find on top of it, and use it as the amplifier for the largest mind-control spell ever cast. It's not as classy or subtle as Plan A, but on the other claw it does present many opportunities for some excellent bouts of maniacal laughter.

And once she's taken over Sornieth, will Endboss be satisfied? Of course not! Her dominion will be infinite! There's this big contraption in one of the fortress's highest rooms that is a model of all the moons and planets in the solar system. One day, all of them will belong to Endboss! She even wrote her name on the big metal ball that represents Sornieth to show everyone how it belongs to her. The fae that made the contraption did not agree with her proclamation, which has put her near the top of Endboss's list of enemies to vanquish.