Titer

Needs: slime
The first of the Imperial Ghouls Daria has recruited to her cause, Titer's eerie serenity and warm, melodic voice are a strange contrast with her feverish devotion to the cult's ideals. She belonged to a wealthy family before taking and failing the Trials, and has taken easily and gleefully to the elevated status she enjoys in the cult, especially the near-royal treatment she receives as an Imperial Ghoul who is a prospective stepping stone for the coming of the Blighted Emperor. Titer takes special pleasure in ordering around the Necromancers assigned to wait on her, feeling that it's the least she is owed after being looked down upon as a failure by Necromancers outside of the cult.



emperor thoughts (BODY HORROR CW for anyone reading this): since imperials are not jumbo jet sized in my lore to make sizes and cohabitation more reasonable (the average fae is roughly the size of a small pony/exceptionally large great dane and the average guardian/imperial is roughly the size of a large pickup truck/large pickup truck with trailer attached for the added imperial length, Americans will use anything other than the metric system etc but I gotta be visual about this so my head doesn't explode) emperors start out as significantly larger than the average imperial, but not kaiju-sized. prior to the surge of magic from the bounty of the elements, at least four complete or mostly complete dead imperials were needed to generate the magical coalescence necessary to form an emperor; the increase in magic across the planet has lowered the number to three.

immediately following formation, emperors are roughly on par with whales in terms of size, with the largest eleven-headed emperors reaching blue whale proportions (roughly 75-100 feet) -- their initial bulk is formed solely from the original corpses that they are composed of. an emperor in this state can be put down relatively easily by a dedicated enough group of fighters, especially in the few days after it forms, when the newly resurrected beast is disoriented, fragile, and largely immobile. magical adepts who are sufficiently attuned to the magical field around them can detect and triangulate signatures characteristic to the coalescence of an emperor, a technique used to locate newly formed emperors and eliminate them before they become mobile. over the course of this brief period, a newly formed emperor's raw coalescence of magic develops and matures, creating a scaffold that binds the emperor together more strongly and allows it to stand and then walk. emperors grow larger and increasingly magically powerful by consuming and/or absorbing other dead imperials; unlike forming an emperor, which requires complete imperial corpses, an emperor that has already been created can absorb parts of corpses, ranging from detached limbs down to blood or bones, either by eating them or simply pulling them onto its own body if in close enough proximity through the force of its magic. emperors have a powerful urge to hunt and eat other dragons regardless of species, although only other imperials will add to their bodies. a particularly unscrupulous individual bent on creating their own emperor as a weapon could theoretically fuse three imperial corpses together, then feed it with the bodies and body parts of other imperials until it reaches a truly monstrous size. Luminax was able to grow to such titanic proportions by absorbing corpses from shallow graveyards -- first ones that it dug up, then ones that it churned up by its passage alone -- and by eating imperials from settlements it destroyed. the destruction wrought in the Emperor's Wake and the number of dead imperials it has been able to consume has made Luminax into an unusually and terrifyingly large Emperor, which has reached almost a mile in length and is still growing by the day, held together by an intensely powerful concentration of magic that has held back gravity to prevent it from collapsing under its own weight. while there is theoretically a limit to how large an emperor could grow, based on the calculated ability of elemental magic to bind matter, in practice this limit is so large -- nearly the size of the planet Sornieth -- that there may as well be no limit to how much an emperor can grow if it is not stopped other than the supply of imperial corpses provided to it.

a fully formed emperor is a horrific (and thankfully rare) sight, a titanic beast formed of flesh in various states of decay haphazardly shoved together. The imperial parts it eats and absorbs graft themselves onto its perpetually decaying main body with little rhyme, reason, or care for the typical rules of biology that govern how living bodies are put together. the only thing that cannot be added to an emperor after it forms is a fully functional, magic-wielding head -- the main heads of an emperor always come from the corpses that originally created it, and the heads of the corpses it absorbs instead decorate the rest of its body, sometimes appearing to be partially conscious as they drool, blink, and roll their half-closed eyes in a state of uncanny unrest. once an emperor reaches a certain size, it is nearly impossible to stop its runaway growth -- large enough emperors can cause imperial corpses to surface just by treading near them, and the destruction they can wreak on unprepared clans and cities with minimal movement can kill yet more imperials that add, in turn, to its body. emperors also radiate intensely powerful, uncontrollable magic auras that damage anything that comes into contact with them, in addition to the more targeted magic wielded by their heads.

emperors that have reached Luminax's size are almost impossible to kill, and barely look like dragons anymore -- they may have hundreds or thousands of extra limbs, wings, tails, appendages, and faces, with some even adding on full duplicate segments of their bodies arranged in horrifyingly haphazard configurations. emperors of this size have immensely potent magic auras that can damage witnesses who so much as look at them and warp the environments they pass through. dragons who have gotten too close to Luminax and lived to tell the tale are often partially or fully blinded, and speak of having heard whispering voices in their heads that speak awful truths to them; many are never the same afterwards. when emperors are this massive, they are held together and propelled by magic alone, allowing them to spiral outwards into seemingly impossible forms -- if the pure magic radiating from them doesn't drive an observer mad, the uncanny anatomical construction (or lack thereof) of the emperor's physical body just might. while Luminax is the only emperor to have reached this size in recent memory, dozens of legends from thousands of years in the past speak of monstrosities such as these, many times larger than even Luminax, formed from massive inter-flight battles that drove onlookers to terror and madness from merely glimpsing them. according to myth, these most terrible and gargantuan of beasts, more moving mountain ranges of decaying flesh than anything else, could only be slain by the intervention of the gods themselves.

in fear of becoming part of one of these monsters of legend, it is a near-universal custom amongst imperials to cremate their dead and bury the remains in deep graves, regardless of flight -- thankfully, ash can neither reform into an emperor nor feed an existing one. in the rare environments where no fire magic or kindling is available, such as in the most remote locations of Reclaimer's Glacier in the most isolated and traditional Ice clans, or in the deepest depths of Leviathan Trench, dead imperials are disposed of in the most secure ways available -- frozen solid and buried deep in the ice, or disarticulated as much as possible and then fed to scavengers before having their remaining bones buried in separate locations. while dead imperial body parts that have been separated from their owners will often uncannily twitch towards each other and attempt to fuse, and can be used to grow an emperor that has already risen, full corpses, not parts alone, are needed for the initial formation of an emperor; separating the body parts of dead imperials sufficiently enough is an effective safeguard against reanimation. as the millennia march on and the world-destroying monstrosities of the past fade into myths told only to scare hatchlings, many imperials have become more lax about these customs and more permissive about burying their dead uncremated. Before Luminax, no confirmed emperor awakenings, where the emperor in question became mobile and caused damage outside the location where it arose, had occurred for centuries. until this time, all whispers of possible emperor awakenings were either unconfirmed sightings, where the monster and destruction in question could easily have been something else, or rumored experiments by especially arrogant scientists or wannabe conquerors that no one could conclusively prove actually happened. Luminax's awakening has prompted a sharp return to the traditional burial practices among imperial communities.