Ominous Rex

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Invictus
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Ominous Rex

Post by Invictus »

For a while I've been doing a complete rewrite of Ominous Rex, a villain written very early in the history of Comix but almost never utilized. As he really deserved more than the paltry writeup I've given him, I'm transforming him into a serious villain, an indomitable adversary in line with the Comixverse of today with its massive preponderance of powerful superheroes. Hopefully, I'll do him (in)justice without breaking too many things. Parts 5 of 5:


Ominous Rex


I: King by His Own Hand

The man known as Ominous Rex came to power in the latter days of the Atlantean hegemony, a grim and hardy barbarian from the northern reaches of what we today call Europe. By force of arms he had won himself a small kingdom by the first few years of his manhood, uniting several savage tribes under him as chieftain. As though this was not enough to mark his future greatness, the young warlord was also born a crow-haired witch child, demonstrating a hungry talent for the rude magics of his homeland. Bargains with tabooed spirits in wild places advanced his arcane skills to new heights and in dark avenues, soon outstripping the tradition-bound warlocks and shamen of his tribal confederacies. As he conquered each new tribe he pressed their magic-users into teaching him their secrets, in exchange for wealth and prestige within his growing empire, brutally denouncing and destroying those who refused. Though it was a perilous path, Ominous Rex had soon gathered himself unapproachable martial and mystical might for a warlord of his birth, using his magic to strike in deadly and unpredictable directions against those rival kingdoms he could not overmatch with horse and sword. As his domains grew, so did his ambitions – his armies would not stop until they could march no further, but what he found when he reached the sea redefined his ambitions altogether.

The barbaric kingdoms in which Ominous Rex grew to manhood had only felt the most impersonal and perfunctory touch from the superpower that was Atlantis, and only in terms of distant rumors and legends. It had been centuries since the seafaring empire had extended their interest as far inland as those places. However, the kingdoms of the Atlantic coast were different - molded by regular Atlantean trade and conquest into well-organized vassals of enlightened and sophisticated aura, though populated only by admiring natives of the mainland. The northerners saw them as soft and decadent and thus easy targets and in some respects it was true, but even so their crude imitations of Atlantean technology and military tradition proved to be an unprecedented challenge for Ominous Rex's armies to overcome. There was little question that the southerners held the initial advantage in warfare, but Ominous Rex adopted their technology and tactics with inspired speed. His forces also held a trump card in the form of sorcery, he and his mage cadres unleashing nightly terrors against the southerner camps and cities until one by one, their resistance crumbled and his armies were able to sweep in. This was a triumph beyond any the sorcerer-king had won, and it was an accomplishment enough for Atlantis herself, magnificent in her isolation, to take notice.

Now if this was the Atlantis of centuries ago, the Atlantis of golden pyramids and silver knights, Ominous Rex would not have found his conquests as easy. Instead of soft and decadent vassal states, he would have come across burgeoning colonies holding the coast, where garrisons of gleaming skyships and mageknights would not only have effortlessly repulsed his primitive armies but pursued him into the north to put an end to his reign, for the Atlanteans of then did not suffer the slightest challenge to their supremacy. But the Atlantis of now no longer has such an appetite for bloodshed. Its superiority had been amply proven over countless military victories and scientific achievements, and a people gifted with these fruits have been content to withdraw to the heartland of their island-empire to spend their days in luxuriant introspection. Therefore, they watched the meteoric rise of Ominous Rex's barbarian hegemony with more amusement than concern, expecting it to fall apart in a generation just as its predecessors had. However, when the confederacy they named the Omin grew larger than any European hegemony they had seen arise in many generations, swallowing the coastal Atleantean-culture monarchies they still felt some lingering kinship to, the Atlanteans grew alarmed. Of course, there was still no conceivable way a band of savages on the other side of the ocean could mount a threat to Atlantean preeminence, but something still had to be done on general principle. The idle officers of the Knight caste clamored for action, but none would risk the absence of their troops in the metropolitan coup-intrigues that exemplified Atlantean politics of the time. It was eventually decided that a diplomatic solution would suffice, and envoys were dispatched to the European mainland to register Ominous Rex as a Tributary.

The sorcerer-king himself bridled at the mere suggestion of subordination to another empire, but the strength of his armies were exhausted from subjugating the southern kingdoms, and he well knew that it was not yet possible for his empire to weather the displeasure of mighty Atlantis. So after making a great show of consideration that left the highborn envoys impatient and vulnerable in their barbaric environs, Ominous Rex acquiesced. The Atlantean envoys were delighted – after all, they were first people in ages to deliver the Empire a new Tributary, a most singular achievement – and drafted the resulting agreement with generous terms. The empire of the barbarian king would be supplied with enough technological gifts and wonders to give it the upper hand over virtually any polity in the Eurasian continent, with only the possible exception of the Lemurian remnants; in return, Ominous Rex would become Atlantis’ hand in her continental affairs. It seemed an equitable, indeed proper, arrangement for the Atlantean diplomats who studiously referenced contracts of tribute drawn in their empire’s vigorous past, except it overlooked the fact that Atlantis no longer had any “continental affairs” to speak of. And the acquisition of a powerful if resentful vassal in the region does not suddenly add any to Atlantis’ core geopolitical interests. However, the envoys were selected from the lesser nobility by the Knights precisely because they were pliable, politically estranged and expendable. The envoys on their part proved their ignorance of Atlantis’ core geopolitical interests and left it to their betters to find a use for Ominous Rex.

This may not have been the Atlanteans’ worst mistake, because the envoys found the occasion momentous enough to invite Ominous Rex to a tour of Atlantis itself. Such was rightly considered a great honor for a barbarian of the frozen north, even for one of Ominous Rex’s stature. The sorcerer-king was eager to accept, having grown dissatisfied with hearing mere legends of the island-continent, but he was still determined to maintain his composure when he arrived at the place of wonders. This quickly proved impossible as his skyship transport swooped over the shining metropolis that rose from the sea and assaulted him with its incomprehensible scale, and inside was a repletion of magical and technological wonders which to the average Atlantean considered mundane. He was almost blinded by the light from the great golden pyramids erected amongst the Atlantean heartlands, rivaling the mountains in size and housing the remains of the empire’s earliest and greatest leaders. He was given an inspection of a company of mageknights conducting a war-exercise, with living armor bound to their skins and bolts of death blazing from their hands. He was given a brief passage through countless sumptuous and gilded museums and libraries and monuments, and realized the true extent of the heights of glory and knowledge that his host has attained. About the only thing that was denied to him was an audience with the Mage-King himself, but then the current Mage-King had never been seen outside the inner palace. All of it humbled him, but furthermore all of it dwarfed him. Ominous Rex returned to the relative squalor of his empire, profoundly shaken. The Atlanteans surmised that such an unmitigated display of power would have forever reminded their vassal of his place in the great order of things. This was true, but this was not the only thought that the grand tour set in motion. As he brooded an ocean away, Ominous Rex may have already started to realize the lengths he must go in order to cast down this impossibly vast obstacle to his goals.


II: First and the Fallen

With dark wheels turning in his mind, Ominous Rex was almost blind to the equally daunting task before him when returned to his homeland: a vast new empire which required consolidation and pacification. His tribal blood-kin, the first under his flag and veterans of a hundred campaigns, were ever his most fearless and ferocious followers. But now that they had come up to the sea in the west, they clamored for their king to lead them to plunder and slaughter in the endless reaches of the east – a move which would leave their supply lines overstretched and their rear unguarded, as Ominous Rex well knew. On the other hand, his southerner vassals were valuable in that they possessed great material wealth and advanced systems of law, which could only be unlocked if their resentment towards being subjugated by those they despised as uncultured savages could be overcome. To forge the greater Omin into a shape more amenable to his plans would require both time and authority, but fortunately Ominous Rex had no lack of both. His right to rule was proved by his unchallenged supremacy in both might and magic and by the binding oaths of loyalty sworn by his mages and generals. A cocktail of sorceries already preserve his youthful vigor beyond its natural limit, pushing his own body towards superhuman power. Furthermore, he had been appointed by Atlantis itself to be the steward of the continent, and that no-one else could gainsay.

Across the empire, anticipation buzzed like amber-lightning as the great Warlock-King made his first decrees. Great stone cities were erected in the northern climes to house his barbarian warriors as he remolded them from roving warbands to the unshakable backbone of his new legions. Southerner laws were scrutinized and adapted throughout his domains, an imperial council of advisors was assembled from his myriad subjects, and everywhere war-slaves and corvee-bound laborers were put to work constructing barracks and roads and monuments to his glory. Lesser chiefs and princes were made his governors, and his sons and apprentices, long steeped in his ruthlessness, were sent out to become his magistrates and inquisitors. And finally, a brand new capital was to be raised on a sizable isle to the north, where all the glory and power of the Warlock-King would be concentrated and where all his new nobility would hold court. Its name was Ominous Gard, and both its topless walls and lofty view was meant to signify one thing – to whom the true rulership of these lands belonged. Throughout all this, the Atlantean envoys marveled at the vast and exciting enterprise, soon realizing the influence they could wield in these hinterlands far away from their overbearing superiors. They stepped in to advise and supervise wherever they could, unwittingly imparting a great deal of Atlantean ingenuity and knowledge to Ominous Rex’s savants and advancing the technology of the empire by leaps and bounds. Eventually, cargos of amazing Atlantean weapons and artifacts arrived in the hands of the Warlock-King’s generals and soldiers, further cementing the new world that they found themselves living in – where the old orders of peace and war were both upturned and where their king was the only guide they could follow.

Meanwhile, the Knightly Ladder debated what purpose they should put their newest acquisition to. To them, the Omin and their upstart king was an unwelcome drain on their attention as they fenced with sword and word over the minutest of political advantages, eyes locked on each and every one of their fellows which, of course, were their true enemies. Official deliberations were drawn into the traditional cycles of duel and debate, and the result was that during the early years of their relationship Atlantis extracted nothing but symbolic obeisances from Ominous Rex such as minute tributes of artifacts and produce, primitive curios for the jaded highborn. Each demand stung the Warlock-King, but it was a bearable pain as he hastily reorganized his domains for the next stage of his plans. The unexpected dithering of his new masters also gave birth to suspicions that the strength he beheld at the heart of Atlantis was more illusionary than he had first thought.

Eventually though, a proper military commission did come to the Omin. Even in the long afternoon of its glory Atlantis was not without enemies, distant and inconsequential ones they might be. There were the roving skyfleets of Lost Lemuria, remnants of a rival empire long crushed by Atlantean legions; the degenerate snakemen tribes haunting the continental heartlands, scattered and ineffectual but harboring an oblique vendetta against all humankind; the scampering and opportunistic Morlock-men, whose twisted, depthless warrens in the Hollow Earth make a mockery of Atlantis' all-important oceanic defenses; and few but formidable monsters of all descriptions, either natives of the last of the world's places untouched by the civilizing hand of man, products of Atlantis' past technomagical sins, or simply relics of a long bygone age. If any of them were powerful enough to threaten the Atlantean mainland, Ominous Rex of all generals would not have been entrusted with the duty of destroying them. But minor irritations were all that remained to Atlantis after centuries of triumphant conquest, foes more suitable for the news-sheets and the betting pools than the weary hand of state. What was more suitable, the Highborn thought, than pitting a toy empire against toy enemies? The stream of messages across the Atlantic was soon supplemented with maps, intelligence and lore of a wider world than any of the Omin had expected.

Of course, a campaign which would merely be an inconvenience to a mageknight legion posed a major logistical challenge to Ominous Rex’s untested armies. However, the Warlock-King was eager to prove equal to the challenge – not out of a newfound sense of loyalty, and not entirely to prove the might of his empire and expand its borders – but because it was a golden opportunity to scour the world for any unconventional advantage he could gain over Atlantis. And the sheer scale of the scheme he had hatched would require every conceivable scrap of magical power he could locate. Thus Ominous Rex fearlessly led his armies once and again beyond the bounds of his empire, trusting the adaptability of his generals and the overwhelming power of his sorceries to triumph over every new foe. And although the military triumphs did appease his subjects and satisfy his Atlantean masters, Ominous Rex and his inner circle of mages were more concerned with understanding the origins of his more inhuman foes.

From driving the snakemen from the borders of his empire and following them back to their home-nests, the Warlock-King learnt that some external force had hatched them out of the preserved eggs of long-extinct reptiles, letting them breed and run wild. Such an accomplishment involved rituals of reanimation over timescales he did not think were possible. In his brutal underground expeditions against the Morlock-men, Ominous Rex secretly plumbed and mapped the ley currents that concentrated magic throughout the world, discovering the remains of many forgotten Atlantean tap-nodes in the process. In his battles against the Lemurian warbands, initially alone in his skychariot drawn by shackled god-beasts but soon joined by increasing numbers of winged servitors and airborne vehicles of indigenous construction, he captured many downed skygalleys and uncovered the principles behind magical levitation – the same technomagic which powered the invincible Atlantean fleets. Ominous Rex's list of victories grew long, his empire was sated with glory and his patrons were suitably entertained. But more importantly, all this fueled the growth of his occult knowledge and mystical prowess, slowly outstripping even the living sages of Atlantis who, in turn, had long neglected the archives of their forefathers.

Meanwhile, under Ominous Rex's sparing hand his empire continued to grow. His descendants kept order in the new cities, replenished his expended armies and enacted his unfolding directives in matters architectural, political and cultural. The contentment of his subjects was purchased with a system of peerage through distinguishment in battle, a spectacular cult of victory and occasionally a direct display of magical force against the dissident. Elements of Atlantean art and dress were slowly introduced, creating the impression that the people partook in their lord's own divinity. The image of Ominous Rex as a distant but supreme tyrant was thoroughly entrenched into the minds of the people, endless tales of his conquests in exotic lands and his seemingly eternal rule reinforcing only his timelessness in the engineered dynamism of his domains. New cities were founded at a frenzied pace as if to anchor down every new territorial gain, each featuring progressively more grandiose architecture and topped with epic monuments constructed from increasingly exotic materials. Entire captive populations were moved there from their conquered homes, some of which, Atlantean envoys noted with suspicion, were the very tribes and races which the Knightly Ladder had ordered destroyed. Either by reason or by bewitchment but always backed by overwhelming force, former enemies were put to work in these massive construction projects in return for settlement, enjoying for their labors the fruits of peace and Atlantean civic technology. Forcibly civilized, these monsters and barbarians did thrive – in numbers even if not in spirit. It looked very much, each generation of envoys reported back to the metropole, as though the Omin was using its military commission as an excuse to build up a challenge.

And as the Warlock-King extended his reach across Europe, it was as though he had gathered every wicked tribe of Earth under his banner, his barracks-cities bursting at the seams with magically enchanted and inhuman minions. The overflowing manpower was trained and paraded ceaselessly while not employed in erecting fortresses, roads and shipyards, manufacturing and sequestering away huge stocks of grain, lumber and weapons. But ultimately, Ominous Rex knew he could never build up a conventional military threat to Atlantis itself. The sciences of the island-empire were still eons more advanced than her continental tributary, and if the Empire truly roused itself to direct all its centuries of accumulated warcraft against his kingdom, his monstrous legions would be crushed in a day. Ominous Rex also knew that the Atlanteans with their spies and skyships observed this as readily as he did, and he counted on their assumption that he was so bathed in his own megalomania that he would contemplate mounting a military challenge against the might of Atlantis. Let the misshapen hordes polish their spears and erect their rude stone fortresses, Ominous Rex knew the highborn generals would think. A single fleet of leviathans and their attendant sky-knights could rout them as soon as they had the nerve to raise their banner. And indeed, nothing about the Omin contradicted this impression. The empire sustained itself on the momentum of ceaseless conquest and sooner or later it would reach the limits of its Atlantis-given commission. And from there on, its hungry legions would inevitably set upon a foe it could not defeat, or risk starvation and collapse. Even though the superhuman leadership of its ruler had managed to stretch this course across centuries, the learned among the Atlanteans correctly surmised that unlike their own empire, the Omin was still destined to go the way of its countless barbaric predecessors.

Ominous Rex also feared that he was running out of time, but for different reasons. He knew that the empire he designed from the ground up would eventually exhaust all fuel within reach, but this was only incidental to his goals – he never intended his current dominion to last forever. Ominous Rex was more concerned with his own state, which he did intend to last longer. Though he had attained a yet unprecedented plateau of mystical power, his body was given over to a ragged patchwork of enchantments struggling to hold back centuries of age and battle wounds. His skin was livid under countless layers of tattooed runes; his bones were slowing and painfully transmuting into black brass as he settled into immortality; and even his eyes were not his own – the left he sacrificed to win the friendship of carrion birds and the right he paid for the services of a thunderstorm; and he replaced one with a recrafted Seastone of Lemurian origins and the other he gambled from a prince of the Dreamlands. His soul was on the point of disintegration, scarred with dead ends and weighed down by countless dark pacts. His mind was home to reams of dark lore bargained from nameless powers and lost places too numerous to name, their presence a constant distraction from his will to lead and rule. The cost of this was manifest in his increasing seclusion in his arcane sanctum of Ominous Gard, spending precious time in bloody experiments instead of leading his armies in the hinterlands or holding court to deal with the affairs of state. He no longer removed his battle mask or his dragon-scale hauberk, for his true appearance could no longer pass for kingly, and he feared that the fear of his twisted form could overcome even the fear of his augustness. In his relentless obsession towards destroying Atlantis, he lost without even noticing his capacity for the simple joys in conquest and kingship and the mundane pleasure in good wine or a warm fire. And most of all, he feared that Atlantis would finally peer beyond his grand subterfuge and discern his true plans, which would provoke a reckoning he was not yet prepared to face. Therefore as reluctant as he was, he was forced to rely on a group of unlikely allies – the Atlanteans currently residing at his court.

There were many reasons for an Atlantean to be amongst the Omin instead of their civilized and isolationist homeland. Some were criminals and renegades, exiled or escaped from polite society and finding rude comfort in this strange, chimeric empire. Others were eccentrics who exalted the primitive or dedicated themselves to studying the habits of backwards peoples and found the Omin palatable to their deviant tastes. All these émigrés conducted themselves as Atlanteans did and received the full share of awe that all Atlanteans in the flesh attracted, but they were quite incidental to the empire of the Omin compared to the envoys sent by the Atlantean organs of state in their official capacity. On paper these envoys were ambassadors vested with full plenipotentiary powers by the Pact of Tribute, and even the Warlock-King himself must honor any request they made in their official capacity. In reality the envoys' Atlantean patrons had little interest in micromanaging a distant vassal, and in any case only sent across the ocean the underlings they found the most disposable – the useful ones were better kept within arm's reach. The men and women who were in place to exert major influence on the policies of Ominous Rex's empire were therefore on the whole venal, incompetent and reluctant to be present at all, easily placated by the Warlock-King and his cunning lieutenants.

But while all Atlanteans spending time in the land of Omin were outcasts in some way or another, some resented their homeland to an extent that Ominous Rex found it tempting to recruit them into his own cause. Nevertheless, even the most diehard renegade would recoil at the true extent of his plans for their birthplace, so the Warlock-King picked his approach carefully. He had his courts accommodate their interests or sympathize with their plights, gradually compelling them to lower their guard with little gifts of art and casual cantrips. Even the hints revealed during a drunken conversation were rich in the small details of Atlantean politics, and much useful information could be sifted from the lectures on Atlantean superiority the more officious envoys could summon up. Others were more understanding and in contrast returned small favors such as maps and illuminated tomes, even going as far as to play down in their regular missives the matters Ominous Rex did not want Atlantean suspicion to be drawn to. With these small measures, a desperate Ominous Rex assured himself of Atlantis' continued decline, that its magical arts were neglected and its royal line but crept on, that the Knightly Ladder was increasingly entangled by complacency and formality while its soldiers grew fat and shiftless. In the end though, the subterfuge Ominous Rex ran was a delicate one, and he was always careful not to overplay his hand and arouse too much suspicion for Atlantis to remain in its blithe ignorance.

There was one exception. Quys Il Zanna was one of the last envoys Atlantis sent to the Omin, a self-professed “professional conspirator” born to a Witching bloodline judged too Fallen to Twin with its Knighting counterpart, leaving her ancestors bereft of a place in Atlantis’ current political order. She climbed her way back into the outer echelons of power over a tower of lesser conspirators, proving herself to be enough of a nuisance among the highborn for them to press for her exile; her reassignment across the ocean by the Silver Pyramid had the very effect. Bereft of allies and all her bridges burned behind her, she felt quite doomed. However, there was one thing in the rude court of the Omin that appealed to her sophisticated tastes – the unrestrained practice of magic. Free from the strict social proscriptions that governed spellcraft in Atlantis, Il Zanna was quick to discover that her talent far exceeded what the homeland allowed of her social standing. She joined the endless numbers of aspirants from across the empire who aspired to answer Ominous Rex's insatiable need for sorcerous lieutenants, practicing their craft under the watchful towers of Ominous Gard to win the recognition of their distant Tyrant. But compared to her rivals, Il Zanna complemented her considerable talent with well-practiced wiles and the weapon-like wielding of her status as an Atlantean. Therefore when it was her turn to be approached by the Warlock-King's confidantes, she made an indelible impression – enough for Ominous Rex to demand a personal audience with her. Their meeting went well, with Ominous Rex seeing a perfect mix of charisma, ambition and appetite for treachery which suited his plans, while Il Zanna was fascinated by the man's boundless ambition and arcane mastery. This caused a personal bond to develop between the two, based not quite on trust but a frankness of agenda. Il Zanna went beyond the usual favors of the envoy and used her allotted trips back to Atlantis to smuggle out valuable arcane records from the vaults of the Silver Pyramid, tomes detailing the astrological and geomantic foundations of the Atlantean state. In exchange, Ominous Rex revealed vistas of magic to her that she could never have conceived of, and in her pupillage the last of her remaining love for her homeland was put away. By the time Ominous Rex felt confident enough to divulge his true plans to the newest member of his inner circle, Quys Il Zanna could only voice acceptance.

The turncoat envoy was the only Atlantean in Ominous Rex's innermost circle, a handpicked few who were entrusted not only with the full scope of the Warlock-King's plot but also with the duty of carrying it out. Only they were privileged with laying down the secret mortar between the stones of the Omin empire, and even so without any full grasp of its purpose. Generations of such mages were taught secret rituals they would never use, as the immortal Ominous Rex bided his time against the dimming resplendence of Atlantis. He knew that the empire could not fall entirely without a firm push, which he intended to provide; yet he was never certain if his preparations down the centuries had been thorough enough, for he only had one chance at direct aggression against his immeasurably more advanced patron, one surprise blow which must shatter Atlantis beyond recovery. Any counter-blow the wounded empire could muster would be the end of him. And yet, the more time he took to perfect his plan the more likely that Atlantis' rising suspicion would crest the dyke and draw him into destruction in any case. Despite Il Zanna's reassuring spywork, the dichotomy gnawed at Ominous Rex's mind. When was the right time to release centuries of accumulated effort, which he had spent the better part of his life building? Was it too late to modify his plans to a less risky end? Was the defeat of Atlantis, a goal he had pursued alone and with monomaniacal focus since the very beginning of his reign, truly the next page in his saga? But such doubts crashed against the indomitable rock of his will and were silenced. He had walked his current path the furthest of all, built his tower so high that there was no way down. All that remained to him was what he must see to the end.

On the day of one of the many festivals he had instituted for such a purpose, Ominous Rex called his closest confidantes upon the wind and issued to them long-practiced instructions. Summons were issued, occult stores were unsealed and a hundred bootstrapping spells wormed themselves into earth and root even as feasts were held, parades were marched and great sporting games drew in the crowds. The Omin rejoiced as they were told to, wallowing in the plundered wealth of one continent and the borrowed customs of another. At Ominous Gard, every stone hummed with power as the Warlock-King entered a forbidden chamber where sigils of unfathomable complexity writhed on its floor and silver-inlaid corners danced unnatural dances over its round walls. As a cadre of his most talented and loyal mages filed in around him, their servitude ensured by hooks of power sunk into their very souls, he swore that the day would be Atlantis' last.


III: The Bane of Atlantis

Atlantis has not seen dawn for three days.

Watchfires were stoked atop the towers of Cuzil which Greets the Dawn, and the Day-Guild couriers huddled around them in their orange cloaks, keeping their legs warm and limber for their first morning sortie which they despaired of arriving. Beside them the Sea Wardens hunched red-eyed and white-knuckled against the easternmost parapets, desperately seeking any glimmer from the edge of the ocean to alleviate the panic of the citizenry. The low docks of the city were half-empty, lonely piers stretching anxiously to embrace any ships arriving from the barbaric lands of the east, bearing news from places where the Sun should already have risen.

The gardens of Many-Hued Orfas languished. There was neither nourishing sun nor rain, only an inky canopy of banded clouds covering the sky. The field slaves claimed in increasing numbers to see strange patterns in the ever-shifting clouds, twisting serpentine runes not unlike those adorning the libraries and lintels of their masters. But mystics the men of Orfas were not, and they spent the better part of their wisdom in trying to preserve the breadbasket of the empire. Some offered great sacrifices from their remaining stocks of cattle in old and matronly rituals of fertility; others went into a frenzy of harvesting and sequestering even for crops yet to ripe, driving warehouse prices in the city to ruinous levels. Even the fabled sun-crystals gifted by the Silver Pyramid were plucked from their jeweled plinths and mounted on makeshift towers overlooking the fields, but they were far too few.

Men fled the open plazas of Izatomo, the Fortress Imperishable. The columns of flanking statues, solemn heroes of ages past, fell into shadow unwitnessed. The Highborn Criers still appeared at the appointed bells to announce the going-ons of the empire, but no Lowborn Answerers appeared to challenge them, as was their custom. Alone they spoke the triumphs and reminiscences of past and present into empty air, their authority unwitnessed. Even the shadow-plays were not performed within their makeshift stalls, such was the price of lamp-oil and the absence of audience, that the players judged that even their most daring satires would be unwitnessed. Tension wracked the city in high notes, a deadly stabbing here and a barracks brawl there, punctuating a terrible, ill-omened unease. This was not unfelt even in the sequestered chambers of the Knightly Ladder inside the great Golden Dome, where Armiger-Senators were enmeshed in legislative rituals of such complexity that no unscheduled concern should have been able to penetrate. But even here, at the very heart of Atleantean complacence, their dance of word and sword faltered as their provender diminished and their servants fell to the grist.

In seven-spiraled Irymon, men and women were clutched by a growing emptiness in their hearts. For the heart of their city, the mirror-sided Silver Pyramid itself, emplaced upon the summit around which the metropolis clustered, was dark. The monument threw all light that fell upon its walls back at Irymon, faithfully illuminating the beauty of the ancient city, but after these three days of strange twilight it no longer gleamed with even the faintest reflection of starlight. Great bonfires cast dancing shadows across lonely forums and many a whitewashed street was blackened by soot for the first time. Even the highborn of the city, whose homes had no windows facing the unbearably bright glow of the Pyramid and mechanical clocks to keep their time, experienced their unease. As for the lowborn who made their beds in the lower spirals, catching the distant light of the Pyramid for their own use with a cunning and long-outlawed system of mirrors, they for the first time slept without being disturbed by the jeers of the night slingers and the sounds of breaking glass. But even they lit their lamps and fumbled about their daily business with nothing but dread. Irymon of the Guiding Light was lost, the fabled Magisters of the Silver Pyramid just as helpless as the edifice in which they worked their sorceries, and the blind streets were overrun with Illbloods and ringing doomsayers.

In the dark he climbed, guided by purpose as he always was. Callused hands scrabbled then clutched rock and small bushes, blindly yet firmly. His gaunt body moved foot by foot over the rise, all but invisible in the twilight, until he crested the steep and deserted hill that overlooked much of the darkened city. Unlike his cowed and superstitious followers, he had no fear of the strange darkness, setting out as he often did along paths yet undiscovered by the city watchmen. But this time, he did not bear the luridly illustrated banner proclaiming the tenets of the Black Sun, the order of which he belonged; neither did he wear the marble bells of the Doomsayer, nor the white mantle of the Fool Caste. By flouting these accoutrements he had no right to be outside his hovel at all, let alone so far outside the walls of seven-spiraled Irymon, the city of his birth and the target of his ministry. If the night watchmen, most of whom recognized his face with the familiarity of contempt, spotted him, it would have been a beating and a night in the stockades at the very least, or another spell of exile handed down by the magistracy if they were feeling officious. Nevertheless, such threats did not deter him, and they would not have at the best of times, filled as he was with the purpose of his Masters. Upon a time like this, when it was the watchmen who cowered in their barracks and madmen who ruled the streets, why should he even pay lip service to the mocking allowances the Highborn made for men like him?

The panorama of Irymon was almost unrecognizable, owing as it were to the lack of light. It took him a moment even to orient himself to the direction to the city, such was the absence of the Silver Pyramid which normally would have stood out for many miles around. He made out the ascending spirals, outlined in the dirty yellow of distant bonfires and unguarded windows, the architecture of the city picked out by crude measures that its designers never intended. It was, in all, the very image of the high laid low and the mounting hubris of Atlantis chastised.

However, his Masters did not call him out here to gloat at the sight. An omen has passed; so momentous that none could miss it, not even the assorted buffoons and madmen who shared his pulpit at the Market of Prophets. An omen that any damn fool could seize to proclaim their vindication was not an omen he could celebrate. Instead, he fasted for two days and two nights, and at the end of that span received a message of unsurpassed clarity from the Masters: exit the city and witness.

Which was what he now did, crouching on the hilltop with his limbs trembling from exertion. He waited.

A wind was blowing from the east, gradually increasing in strength and carrying with it a strange coppery taste. He hunkered down and gathered his thin tunic around himself. He wouldn't have noticed it had he stayed in the city, buffered by countless buildings. But at this forsaken hour of the timeless twilight, he grew quietly certain that the wind had never been as strong as this, and its strength was still gathering.

A blue flash erupted beside him, snapping him out of his frostbitten contemplation. He bounded up in surprise, half rising and half tripping and finally sprawling into the dirt. The numbness in his skin was quite suddenly banished by a blossoming of otherworldly power. As he blinked from the afterimage, apprehension rose inside him. Had the Magisters of the Silver Pyramid somehow located him? Or had an emissary of the Black Sun descended here, in fulfillment of their earlier summons? But the figures who stood in the place of the flash resembled neither, and what they were saying further fed his confusion.

“...like I said, what a nice vantage point. The city is right over there like I said it would be. Don't get so blasé, who knew that this now would be absolutely littered with tesseracts? I wonder why I don't come herenow too often. Yes? Of course, the sky. Shame about that. Oh, hello there.”

He realized that one of the newcomers was addressing him. Standing up cautiously, he trained his Sight, another gift from his Masters, onto them and saw three auras, all strange. “Greetings.” He volunteered. “Ill met in the last days of Atlantis, we have indeed.”

“Ah.” The figure who spoke earlier, a man, judging by his surprised voice. “So you know already.” His age and features were indistinct in the darkness, but so matter-of-factly did he acknowledge what he had be preaching in the streets of Irymon for years – and in the traditional cant of the Worrisome Fool, no less! - that the prophet grew suspicious.

“What do you know of the doom of Atlantis?” He asked doubtfully, all traces of routine preaching gone. “What order do you claim? In what year did it fall foul of the Star Ban?”

“I know what I know.” The man said casually, his manner completely unlike the ranting and spitting doomsayers that he was familiar with. This time, he realized, the stranger spoke in the dialect of the Lower Spirals, precisely the same tongue he used when he posed his question. “And I'm not really cut out for religious orders, if you ask me. If that's what you are asking about. I have no idea what you were asking about, sorry.”

The prophet opened his mouth, but felt something brush against his mind – a numinous extension of one of the other figures, its aura potent but its form invisible to his physical eyes. Then the man spoke again, “I see. Well, how should I explain this? We're not Atlantean. We're just passing through. And when we pass through these nows we sometimes see, ahem, been seeing, I say, your language isn't really equipped for this, considering your scholasticism – we see things out of order. For other people. Not us, obviously.”

The prophet tried to wrap his mind around the unfamiliar concepts, but settled for everyday experience. “You are saying that you are from the future? I haven't heard such a thing in the Market of Prophets for a long while. Plainly nonsense, as only the Black Sun can predict the end of Atlantis, and in its own way.”

A note of petulance crept into the man's voice. “Hey mister, are you saying that I'm lying?” At that instant, the third figure's aura began to expand and darken, and he involuntarily took a step backwards. “Peace, peace.” He murmured, lost to the rising wind.

“Oh well.” The man suddenly sounded cheerful. “It doesn't really matter, does it? You know Atlantis is going to be destroyed, I know Atlantis is going to be destroyed. We actually agree after all. We should sit down and have a nice chat, if the weather wasn't so bad.”

“Destroyed?” He exclaimed, belatedly as his mind caught up with the stranger's incongruous tone. “In a way, to be sure...the Descent of the Black Sun bearing the true Masters of the world in ecstatic reunion, while the corrupt structures of Atlantis will be swept away and the chosen will be spiritually remade...”

The man raised a hand and scratched his head with a degree of theatricality that would not be out of place in the pulpits. “But that's not how it happened.”

“But it must be! If not now, then soon enough!” The wind was practically a gale now, and he shouted to make himself heard.

“Uh-huh.” The stranger looked up, where the banded clouds were racing. Despite the wind, his stance was casual yet unnaturally stiff, as though he was fixed in place by a greater force. “Not your luck this time, I guess.” With effort, he turned to address the other two figures. “It looks like this will be our last stop after all. Let's call it a day, shall we?” He saw the third figure, slight and silent all this time, nod.

“Wait!” He cried, bent double. In the distance, the flickering lights of Irymon were wavering, going out. He imagined that even some of the sturdier slumhouses in the Lower Spirals would be collapsing now, if not blowing away outright. As the howling winds intensified and clogged his nose and mouth with the unnatural scent of blood, he dropped down even further and dug his fingers into the ground.

In the omnipresent twilight something even greater and darker bloomed, trailing the sound of errant bells. The wind seemed to abate slightly.

“Yes?” The man turned to him one last time, seemingly exasperated.

“It shouldn't end like this! It can't end like this!” He screamed, slowly losing grip.

The stranger looked nonplussed. “Well, obviously it doesn't.” There was a blue flash in his hands, and shadow and strangers were gone.

The wind resumed its full force. Its scream was joined by his own and a thousand others, spectral in tone and terror. The solidity beneath him gave way, and he was tossed like a leaf into the raging air.


The twilight that spread over Atlantis, unnatural and impenetrable, was in many ways the mere penumbra of the doom that made its way across the ocean. It was an unavoidable side-effect of the sheer magnitude of power involved, the sheer size of the sorcerous vengeance that Ominous Rex has unleashed upon his unsuspecting patron. The universe's notion of fair play, perhaps. A grinding, sizzling tide of purest sorcery leapt like a goaded beast through the ley currents between the twin empires of Omin and Atlantis, crushing the hapless souls caught in its wake with its mere density. Even unenlightened eyes could see the magic as an indistinct, rushing mass, driving a storm of displaced air before it. And if the bearer of those eyes survived contact with the wave, they would have easily traced the its origin to the stone city-fortresses Ominous Rex had decreed built. However, none did – neither the ocean sailors plying their innocent trade across the Atlantic nor the patrol skygalleys swooping east to investigate the enigma, their enchantments failing and their essences torn from their shells. For all purposes communication ceased across the Atlantic, and for three vital days Atlantis languished in incomprehension as the mighty ritual, centuries in the casting as the master-blow of the Warlock-King, wound to its completion.

In that sense, it was also a perilous three days for Ominous Rex, the greatest window for failure throughout his entire plan as his empire collapsed around him in timely order. The basest of his subjects committed themselves wholeheartedly to the anniversary festivities of his ascension, following centuries of prescribed custom. Under the watchful supervision of his lower-order disciples, they made the required sacrifices of cattle at public squares, staining the cobblestones with blood. Censors were lit and great bonfires were ignited with piles of scented wood, filling the monotonous streets with head-lightening vapors. Under this happenstance the celebrants offered their prayers to Ominous Rex their god-king as was their wont, receiving in turn inspired visions and blessings of bliss. Then the seals to the wine stores were cracked, and the inscription-rimmed clay jars of sacred liquor, impregnated with spices and less sweet reagents, were distributed by the Warlock-King's sorcerer-priests. A vigor was aroused in every man, woman, child and monster who took the drought, granting them the stamina required for the next few days of endless festivities. Thus prepared, thus devoted, they danced and sang in the heady atmosphere as the sorceror-priests retreated to their towers to cast their final spells, triggering the sorceries which by that time had already wound their way into every celebrant.

In every city across the Omin Empire, the jubilant commoners found their reason submerging, their bodies succumbing to some invisible yet universal rhythm. In the streets great masses of dancers twirled in unconscious unity, their very souls sapped slowly from their bodies by the potions they imbibed, by the enchantments their priests laid, by the confluence of ley and sorcerous energies channeled by the very architecture of their homes, all of which was within Ominous Rex's design. Every fortress-city was an enormous soul-trap for its inhabitants, their very geometries plumbed along rediscovered Atlantean principles and their monuments inlaid with precious and occultly significant metals precisely to act as foci. One by one, dancers fell dead as their souls were drawn away to fuel the next stage of the ritual. Even those who rested or declined to take part were caught in the momentum triggered this mass departure, the spirits similarly torn from their bodies. By the end of the three days, almost the entire population of the Omin Empire, no matter civilized southerner, well-drilled northerner, steppes tribesman or Snakeman broodling, had been drained of their lives.

This sacrifice, the largest in known history, spread its dark echoes into the strata of the Omin Empire's soil. Each street junction was the focus of a neighborhood, each stature-adorned public square was the focus of a city district, and each mage's tower set at the center of the butchered metropolis was the focus for all districts. And each city stood at some strategic point or confluence of the flow of magic across the entire continent, which Ominous Rex's lieutenants now directed the accumulated power of the gruesome ritual into. Many perished as the rushing power overcame them, their souls torn apart and joining the flow into the world's ley network. Similarly, the coursing power was too much for its containing masonry, and city after silent city folded in on themselves as the ritual was completed, succumbing to inevitable flaws of age and scale in their geometry. Ominous Rex and his hand-picked circle at the capitol of Ominous Gard was at the center of it all, maintaining the coherency of the ritual and the integrity of their own citadel with diabolical skill. Into the raging currents of anguish the Warlock-King directed his ice-cold hate, shaping the flow of power into a weapon of wide-sweeping, yet utterly specific purpose.

Ominous Rex had studied the structure of magic for centuries, on how the Atlanteans made use of it and freely availed themselves of its fruits. Atlantic techno-magic was not possible without the rich veins of geomantic power that flowed under their homeland, tapped and captured by artifice that Atlantean mages spent many a century to perfect, and many more to proliferate. Eventually, even the Atlanteans themselves began to neglect the foundations of their supremacy, its wonders rendered mundane by familiarity. In their isolation, they had forgotten that the roots of magic they drew on was part of a network that permeated the entire world, flowing independent of all the impregnable defenses they had encircled themselves with. Ominous Rex knew that striking at these foundations would bypass all these defenses, and by smashing them he would decisively destroy Atlantis as a power. And drawing upon his learning of all the various dark magics he had inherited, he discovered a method to do so.

The enormous wave of raw power that crossed the sea was devastating on its own, that was sure. It may even have been sufficient to smash through the ancient wards that past Atlantean magisters placed over sea and air to protect the island-continent. But brute force alone would not have wiped out Atlantis' eastern shores, let alone the sprawling civilization in its entirety. However by riding the ley currents, Ominous Rex's spell swept past Atlantis' formidable fleets and mystic barriers, all designed to defend only the substance of the Empire. The sorcerous wave thus penetrated every nook and cranny of Atlantis, far too powerful for the few individual mages who realized the nature of the threat to hold back. The millions of souls, torn from their hosts in agonizing ecstasy and rendered by the Warlock-King's dark will into his malevolence writ large, flooded the magical flows of the Atlantean continent, instantly shattering their natural equilibrium and tainting them beyond the recognition of the spells that relied on them.

Crystals dimmed. Skygalleons fell and shattered. The long-forgotten underground mana taps failed and with them the great municipal enchantments of the Atlantean metropole. The exalted caste of Mageknights, bred from the purest stock of native Atlantean magery, suffered the greatest backlash and were slain to a man, wiping out in a single stroke the entire martial leadership of the Empire. In their dying moments, perhaps some of them finally realized why Ominous Rex imported so much on Atlantean architecture but so little on other aspects of their glorious culture, such as art or music; why he was so eager to comply with the Knightly Ladder's directives of conquest, expanding at a precipitous and unrestrained pace; why the vassal's efforts at pacification and consolidation relied so heavily on magic and the construction of increasingly grandiose cities, ignoring their emissaries' advice on the suitability of those sites. It was out of neither blind awe nor megalomania. It was simply so that Ominous Rex could build himself a geomantic fetich of sufficient size and power, tapped into the same fundamental flows of magic that powered Atlantis, to specifically target their glorious empire for destruction.

But even that was not the full extent of Ominous Rex's most epic spell. The shock that the Omin Empire's fetich-death channeled into Atlantis catastrophically disrupted its magical flows, but arguably even that effect was a convenient coincidence. What Ominous Rex based his ritual on was one of the oldest, deepest principles of magic: the law of sympathy, of connections between objects transcending the physical. The sacrifice of his empire was therefore both fuel and summons, demanding its price in Atlantean blood. That Atlantis paid in part with the initial devastation of the spell: from the deaths that resulted from the three days of darkness, the preceding windstorm and the physical impact; the backlash that slew the Mageknights and many more witch-blooded besides; and the consequence of the Empire being temporarily deprived of all its vital and life-sustaining enchantments of levitation, wellness and containment. The rest was exacted in full as the spell surged across the island-continent, toppling towers and slaying the panicked citizenry as they scrambled amongst the wreckage. The golden pyramids cracked and crumbled like the false mountains they were; geomantic machinery embedded everywhere overloaded and exploded; enchanted fabric ate like acid into their wearers' bodies; the contents of libraries representing centuries of wisdom spontaneously caught alight. Great fissures burst open along the land's abused ley currents, the ground itself tearing apart in protest of the abuse. Merciless and indiscriminate, the spell only subsided when it had extracted its full toll, barely an hour after it struck Atlantis' eastern shores. Oh, there were survivors. There were many survivors as no spell was flawless, especially one drawn over centuries across a continent, relying on so many fallible underlings and ignoring so many unknown factors. Given another age, the survivors of the cataclysm may well rebuild themselves to a new height. But Ominous Rex knew and the stunned survivors knew that the power of Atlantis, the accumulation of so many centuries of conquest and learning and of glory and suffering, had been irreversibly broken.

At the nexus of the unholy circuit of energies coruscating over two devastated continents, Ominous Rex finally felt a measure of fulfillment. The Omin, his people, had completed their duty faithfully and to the last. The knowledge of their obedience was an euphoria that temporarily overwhelmed the bone-warping agony of directing such uncontainable magics. For a moment, his mind was free from the weight of subtlefuge and strain of arcane calculations, blank of lingering worries about Atlantean retribution. Pure triumph echoed in his heart. His greatest work was done.

Yet, it was not over. Even though it was no longer fed by of the fuel of departing souls, the flows of power did not cease. His fellow sorcerors, lesser in their talents, writhed as they exceeded their tolerances, only their soul-tethers to the Warlock-King himself keeping them standing. Unknowingly, the storm that Ominous Rex had set in motion was far larger than he had calculated. The world's geomantic power pulsed, confluences from as far away as the other side of the world sending out their own streamers of power as they broke into turbulence. Hosts of spirits that Ominous Rex knew nothing of were stirred into activity, their elemental outrage suddenly registering in his mystic senses. The growing cascade of magic spread further and further, revealing unspeakable vistas of knowledge and power to the Warlock-King, whose soul was by now almost submerged through his audacious acts into the very world. His mind gulped down on the torrent of newfound insight even as it panicked over his slipping control over the errant ritual. Then the expanding wave of power halted and drew back, a worldwide echo rushing back to Ominous Gard, delivering magnitudes more information than even the initial eruption. Ignoring his screaming caution and self-preservation, Ominous Rex welcomed the titanic surge of uncontrolled power, letting it immerse him in the world's collected, immanent reaction to the prodigious stone he cast into its arcane currents.

Abhorrence. Rejection.

A hole in reality itself tore open under his feet, and Ominous Rex fell from the world.


IV: The Hollow Emperor

Down, down, down fell the Bane of Atlantis. Past the deep fountains, past the hollow earth, past the lowest hells, strata upon strata of earth and history and magic and memory dissolving beneath him until only a featureless void beckoned from below. It was a rift of his own making, cutting through everything and leading to nowhere, the conclusion of the unspeakable ritual’s power rebounding onto its caster. Perhaps the fabric of reality was pierced by the sheer concentration of magic Ominous Rex gathered. Perhaps it was exile imposed by the quiescent spirit of the world, roused by an act of such epic hubris. Perhaps there was no moral judgment involved, and the cosmos simply reacted to expel a deeply agitated part of itself. In any case, by the time Ominous Rex registered the first tides of backlash, he was already accelerating irreversibly through the metaphysical rift, cast out of the world which he had vowed to rule. The afterglow of his epiphany in the very previous instant, when he was immersed more deeply in pure magic than ever before, was replaced by a crashing hollowness as the ley lines disconnected from him, taking with them the whispered secrets of the world. The shock was enough to draw out and laid bare his ancient memories – his initial fumblings into spirit-calling as an apprentice shaman; his grueling quests into the frozen north to seek secrets his ancestors would not teach; his ebullient ultimatum to his former masters; his battles of skill against the soft but subtle sorcerors of the south; his laborious and humbling education on Atlantean script; his dictation of grand blueprints to querulously protesting architects – and Ominous Rex saw that every step he took was taken to bring him closer to the throne of the world, and if the world sought to deny him at the cusp of victory, then it was at this moment, more than any other, that he must call forth every shred of his skill, every drop of his will to reverse his fate.

So Ominous Rex cast his sorcerous grasp upwards, back into the world he was rapidly ceasing to belong to. The first thing his desperate will seized was the most immediate: the intricate arcane chains with which he used to slave his inner circle of sorcerors to himself, reinforced by blood and oath and still crackling with leftover energies. Like a cord, it still connected Ominous Rex's soul to those of his closest conspirators, arrayed beside him in the central ritual chamber. But even as the Warlock-King yanked on it to slow his descent, he realized that none of his fellow casters had survived the channeling of the ritual, their spirits unequal to the titanic power which had poured through them. Reduced to husks without resistance or volition, they tumbled like statues into the rift along with their king.

Undaunted by failure, Ominous Rex clawed further. His will climbed through the unraveling sorceries and grasped the citadel of Ominous Gard, which was not only suffused with geomantic potency but constructed to resonate with his particular brand of arcane mastery. All the years spent among its chambers and parapets had granted the stronghold an intimacy that Ominous Rex did not feel for the rest of his far-flung empire. From these memories the Warlock-King drew strength – the strength to anchor himself to a place in the world where he must belong. Alas, for a brief moment Ominous Rex's fall did arrest, but only for a brief moment. Caught between the inexorable pressures of aspiration and descent, Ominous Gard groaned. Its towers trembled and its walls sagged. The cowering fief-servants who survived by some quirk of the castle's geometry looked about with fresh fear. Then rents opened amid bursts of crumbling mortar as the foundations finally gave way. The edifice of centuries, the proud and cruel capitol of the Omin Empire toppled quietly into the rift.

Howling soundlessly in frustration, Ominous Rex summoned up every last recollection of the world, his world, the world he had so tantalizingly grasped a few instants ago. For one last time he reached out to the fading strands of the Atlantis-slaying ritual and poured his soul through its vast matrix - and into the remnants of the empire he had raised, his mark upon the earth. Torrents of sorcery rushed in reverse from the falling towers of Ominous Gard into the grand charnel cities under its rule, through silent thoroughfares and up blood-stained foundations, causing ruined masonry to spark and lifeless corpses to twitch. Already greatly fatigued from three days of channeling, Ominous Rex pushed himself to his very limit in order to spread his spirit as widely as possible, worming his way into all that he had previously deemed expendable. The reflexive, almost instinctive act may not have been conceived as a dare, but a dare it was - either the force drawing him through the rift must relinquish; or risk catastrophic damage to the the ley network as his cities, each and every one still attuned to enormous geomantic wells, are torn forcibly from the landscape and cast into the void with him. Either way, Ominous Rex will not be separated from his works.

The world, if it was truly capable of doing so, took up the dare. Rifts opened and closed all along the continent. Distances warped as earth smoothed over atrocity. Currents of magic dangled and were truncated, and the order of spirits and men alike became jetsam as continent-spanning ley lines carved new channels in deep places. The world excised the desperate Warlock-King and all that was in his foul grasp, and paid the price in its lessening.

Thus passed Ominous Rex from history, and with him the cruel memory of Omin and the grand legacy of Atlantis. The aftershocks of his brief triumph and departure were many, such as the unsung saga of Jago, the Forgotten City, whose northerner defenders held out against The Avenging Ones for two and twenty seasons before it fell; the wanderings of the Western Fleet, whose stragglers circled the world for vengeance and finding none, quested instead for a new home; and the tale of the broken Highborn survivors who spent the rest of their days composing songs of lamentation which, unearthly in beauty, they carried weeping to their graves. Some tales of that age have even survived: in figures such as En Razu the Slaughter-Smith, who once fought against the Warlock-King and another time at his side, but kept such memories to his breast in later ages and found no profit in recounting them; or in the man who would later be known as the Theozoologist, who spent the subsequent millennia alternating between dark derangement and ultra-terrestrial rapture, his brief brush with the Warlock-King's works buried deep in pain and age. The rifts through which Ominous Rex's dark empire was drawn no longer exist, the gaping wounds in the world almost entirely erased after millennia of incidental effort by Nimaru and Shrykar, wizards and shamen, none of whom comprehended the true significance of the breaches they discovered and healed. Only a faint disjointment remains buried beyond the reach of all but the most dedicated antiquarians of magic. Eventually, man forgot and rose to new heights.

But for Ominous Rex, his tale was far from done. His spirit came to awareness fitfully, piecemeal. It surveyed its surroundings and sensed nothing, for there was nothing to gaze upon. Nothing existed and nothing passed within the void he had fallen into, except the tattered web of his consciousness and the blind pieces of matter it was attached to – but then there was no “within” and no “into” either, and his scattered self dwelt only in islands of self-definition, not-drifting timeless and directionless in ultimate exile and unspeakable solitude. However even so, qualia remained and sympathy persisted for the spirit of Ominous Rex. The fundamental precepts of reality were not provided to him – so he supplied them to himself and in doing so preserved himself from oblivion. His spirit was in innumerable pieces, separated by limitless, uncrossable gulfs of nothingness – but they were of the same reality and shared the same self-meaning, so he called to them and they came, blindly and without movement, drawing metaphysically closer and closer until the mere reference between them resonated enough to recreate space and time anew. The sheer labor of the latter task could not be measured as the nature of the timeless abyss did not discriminate between an instant and an eternity, but it broke Ominous Rex again and again as he exceeded his limits. There was nothing beyond himself to offer succor, nothing to relieve the indescribable anomine that caged his perception. Without beginning and without end he raged, hurling himself into himself and breaking against himself and growing to hate himself and losing count and desperately yearning for himself until nameless kalpas had passed, and finally, with an impossible strength of will won from countless false starts, all that was suffused with his spirit was united. In other words, all that fell through the rift he coalesced into an order of a sort, and within time of a sort flowed and directions of a kind functioned. In these relatively hospitable confines, the spirit of the Warlock King was finally gathered in one place, strong enough to spiral into the familiar body emplaced like a pharaoh in the very center of the tremendous mass. Entombed in a realm of his own design, Ominous Rex was once again himself, and once again he surveyed his surroundings.

Mystic light sparkled between stiff fingers, and Ominous Rex's surprise grew just as quickly as the circle it illuminated. What power! What squalor! Around him was a crushed puzzle of a world, lost masonry and packed earth from a score of locales compressed into an inelegant mosaic. Here and there were the soulless but whole bodies of his former subjects, limbs and torsos protruding without order. It was a grotesque sight, the totality of his dead empire recongregated into a structure defying sanity and reason, a monument to his shattered ambitions. But even the very quality of his first tentative spell told Ominous Rex that there was more to his sorry home than this. Every mud-brick and every drop of frozen blood resonated with his own aura, a faint but comforting hum of power amidst the desolation. This did not surprise Ominous Rex, for he knew he had in his final gambit took every part of it into the void with him. What surprised him was the unmistakeable presence of ley flows under the rubble: turgid and cold as broken slush, yet warming and coalescing and beginning to circulate magical power. Furthermore, in the power that flowed he felt traces of the familiar, of ripples in rivers and echoes of birdsong, of whispers through branches and shadows of sunlight. It belonged to a world that it was no longer a part of, a still pool of possibility that the world relinquished when it cast the Omin Empire out. Ominous Rex realized this and also that the very same power rushed through his own body to fuel his spell of light. Through the process of reconstruction, he had left his indelible mark on both the leftover power of his grand ritual and the surging backlash captured from the world's magical currents, aspecting them permanently to himself. Other than multiplying Ominous Rex's already prodigious mana reserves many-fold, the power formed a cache of worldly impressions that, if he so desired, he could retreat within himself and taste to remind himself of his true home. The same pool of impressions preserved him during the early and most trying period of his exile, and now it steeled his defiance against his ultimate fate.

Turning his attention towards himself, Ominous Rex found another surprise. The trial of the void had for the lack of a better word purified him, removing every wound and scar of his countless battles. In part, the agonizing and unspeakable process through which he regained control of every fiber of his being had left him more skilled and in control of his own powers than ever before. In part, his fall from the world had severed his ties to the otherworldly patrons which he had relied on as Warlock-King, and this wiped clean the mystic slate carved into his soul. Crippling curses cast by entities he had offended or betrayed ceased their ravages on his body and mind. Claims on his soul by a host of beings expired as though it ceased to exist, even though he retained whatever power he bargained for in this closed realm. The obligations he owed to spirits of land and air for their assistance in conquest similarly vanished, leaving him for the first time in his life sovereign over everything in his sight. There was nothing which could oppose Ominous Rex here other than a few broken and terrified spirits which had been swept along with his fall, barely sentient in their trauma. In all the wreckage of Ominous Gard, in all the shattered and transformed remnants of his vast dead empire, his was the only will that mattered and his was the only soul that inhabited it. An empire of one floating outside reality which might as well be an empire of none.

However, Ominous Rex knew that there must be a way back. If through the sympathy of matter he had been able to reassemble the Omin Empire, why couldn't he draw the entire realm back into reality through the same principles? The time and effort required would undoubtedly be immense, perhaps dwarfing even his last accomplishment and exhausting his realm's leftover magic in the process. But time was not a factor, for Ominous Rex had restarted it anew in his realm so it no longer corresponded with the days and years of the real world. Neither did Ominous Rex worry about effort, as his confidence had been boosted immeasurably by his grim triumph over the void. And even if Ominous Rex found only the slimmest chance of success, he would still have went to the ends of his power to find a way back to the world – it was he who sacrificed everything to create a world without Atlantis and it was natural that he should inherit it. With this new purpose in mind, Ominous Rex marshaled what little resources he had and re-ordered his twilight realm to accomplish the task.

Time flowed on in the re-christened domain of Ominous Gard. The shattered stone and soil of the makeshift stronghold, held together by nothing but natural attraction, was reshaped into a hollow sphere containing everything else inside. He extracted all that was of worth from the packed rubble and transmuted what remained into a rock-like solid shell. Though there was no “outside” - as beyond the sphere there was nothing but the void, which contained not even space - this paradoxical geography symbolically reinforced Ominous Rex’s base of operations to his satisfaction. Inside the shell, Ominous Rex quickened the latent magic that lingered around him and concentrated it into a miniature geomantic system to better power his sorceries. With the more intact of his magical treasures he reconstructed a working sanctum, adequate for the creation of more efficient spells of reanimation and transportation. There was also the matter of the hundreds of thousands of corpses which he managed to extract from the rubble whole, ranging from common victims of his killing ritual to monsters and devoted sorcerors who belonged in his service. The absolute majority were useless as servants as they were dead beyond recovery, the essences of their souls extracted and dashed to smithereens in the ruins of Atlantis. However, a small proportion of disembodied souls and displaced spirits remained available to Ominous Rex, trapped in his realm by the magic they rode. It was a matter of simple necromancy to assign new bodies to these souls under conditions of subservience. There were also the souls of his inner circle, which shared the dubious fortune of being bound by geas to their master and were therefore available to Ominous Rex’s effortless recall. They retained much independence after Ominous Rex re-embodied them but lived only with the knowledge that their soul-debts to him were weightier than ever. For the vast remainder, Ominous Rex could easily channel magic through the sympathetic connections he now shared with every speck of matter inside his own realm and reanimate them with his will alone. Thusly, the Omin Empire lived again, a shadow of its former self and more of a puppet to its Emperor than ever.

The Omin Empire, ensconced within the remnants of itself, had been reborn for only one purpose. Undead drudges salvaged usable material from its walls to construct reality-bridging mechanisms under Ominous Rex’s direction. Over the pale ley-flames of makeshift forges, they conducted alchemical experiments to produce the strongest and least wasteful reagents from the materials of the spent realm. Endlessly, Ominous Rex sought to refine his techniques and inch closer to the world that he still remembered. Much was wasted from these early attempts, from teams of ghouls that stepped from incomplete bridges into the void to precious wood and water that was irreversibly tainted by failed experiments. It seemed to him that the natural affinity between reality and his little fragment of it should draw the two together without hindrance, but he reckoned without the coming of Chernoborg That-Which-Divides, who indwelt the void between all things and brooked not their convergence. It is difficult to say what degree of fight the dark god gave to Ominous Rex and his labors, inscrutable and beyond the affairs of mortals as it generally behaves. However, it cost far more time and sweat to open the first-ever portal between the world and Ominous Gard, which admitted no more than a pinprick of sunlight, than Ominous Rex ever anticipated. Nevertheless, the triumphant sorceror knew that once one connection had been established, the rest would come more easily.

The first portals between the two realms were tiny and unstable things. But as Ominous Rex invested increasingly sophisticated dimension-piercing apparatuses and more of his realm’s ley-flows into the endeavors, he received more fruitful results. The portals eventually stayed stable enough for magically impregnated pieces of darkstone to be pushed through, serving as foci to further strengthen the connection between worlds. Smaller and more complex portals suspended in special void bubbles were opened, siphoning away tiny streams of useful mana until Ominous Rex judged the chances of discovery too high. For Ominous Rex did not want to betray any hint of his imminent return to the world, as he had discovered that the act of reconnection had once again reunited the errant timeline of Ominous Gard with reality’s. More time had passed in his homeland than he had expected, and from his brief scryings he was immeasurably alarmed and distressed by the new heights humanity had raised itself to, inimical to both sorcery and tyranny. The long-held dream that he could simply stride from his stronghold with his undead legions and lay claim to a new dominion of Omin was perpetually dashed. Atlantis was no longer confined to an island-continent, aloof from the world; Atlantis was the world.

But Ominous Rex had always been a patient conqueror. His plot against Atlantis of old had taken centuries of subterfuge to wind to its completion, while his sojourn in the void had steeled his temper even further against his own impatience and immortal urges. If the world that he faced was once again more wise and powerful than he had ever imagined, then once again he will adopt its strengths and learn its weaknesses. He will seize it by the throat and cast it down in magic and cataclysm, and he will lord over its burning ruins and finally find rest.

So spies Ominous Rex sent forth, subtle spirits armed with spells of stealth and reception. There was much he must know about this new age, the magic and society of which have both grown infinitely more complex than before. Even before he formulates the earliest stages of his new grand plan, he must grasp every factor and potential threat to his shadowed realm, of which there are many. Experience has demonstrated that he cannot afford to fail as he did and spend a thousand years picking up pieces before turning his eyes back on the world. Experience has demonstrated that he can no longer afford to invest all his effort into an overarching plot which hinges on a decisive moment centuries to come. This new world changes with unrecognizable speed in the mere span of decades, and Ominous Gard must also shake off millenia of myopia to match its pace. On the other hand, Ominous Rex must also refrain from showing his hand too early for as immeasurably more powerful he is now compared to the barbarian warlord he was, he once again finds himself a helpless outsider whose only edge is the secrecy of his counsel. Stealth was his watchword even as he expanded the contact between his world and ours, drawing mana, stealing away souls at the margins and retrieving the surviving shreds of contingencies he had left behind. Every exchange of substance is another grappling hook sunk into the pliant flesh of reality. Every transit makes the next easier. Furthermore, Chernoborg is in retreat, pursued by the God of Machines and Progress, his chosen champion. The closer Ominous Gard draws to reality, the more power its Emperor can leverage against it.

However, time also works against Ominous Rex. Ominous Gard now all but hurtles metaphorically towards the world it was once a portion of. Its collision with the present is inevitable, and the violence such a collision will do to both realms can only be guessed at. Needless to say, Ominous Rex intends to take full advantage of this potential cataclysm and its aftermath. From his distant throne, he must ensure that all his pieces are in place and every advantage there is to gain has been gained. His growing ranks of infiltrators, composed of shackled spirits and subverted mortals and hollow vessels imbued with his own will, scramble with increasing haste to fulfill the designs of their master. No less than two of Ominous Rex's inner circle walk the earth in fair guise, mastering the magic of this era and relaying it back to him through their tethers. The sheer abundance of the age has given Ominous Rex's legions a limitless number of targets – though its guardians have also multiplied beyond count, they cannot watch over every flock of souls, every place of power, every unlit corner amid the topless towers. A hundred schemes tumble from his dark genius, some decoys and some traps and some fulfilling their purpose even when thwarted, testing the mettle of those who might oppose him. The day will come when his ambition will once again bear fruit, and the heroes of the world must beware.

For on that day Ominous Rex will come for the harvest.

And this age will be brought to an end.


V: The Once and Forever Tyrant

Step into the shadowed realm of Ominous Gard and one would alight on the inner surface of a sphere, some dozen miles across. There is no sun and no moon, and there is no color to the vague hillocks of ancient masonry and alchemical slag, nor to the emaciated watchtowers that stand over them, nor to the dull tread of the undead work-gangs across the unbroken night. There is no heat and no air, and a visitor must either do without such amenities or be provided for at the sufferance of the lord of the realm. The only entrance is through dimensional portals generated from within – otherwise, not even souls seeking a more familiar hell can escape the closed world. As you walk across the ground (uneven and unnatural unless paved into roads, a tangle of crushed stone and packed earth and corpses cooled to the hardness of baked clay, half a tilted adobe rising here and half a head protruding there, face frozen between ecstasy and horror) you may suddenly find yourself amid a suffuse glow, flowing and parting around your body like the gentlest of breezes. And in this glow your hand tingles with magic, and you might strain to hear the faint tweet of a bird or doubt the sensation of a warm summer sun, snatches of memories from an old but familiar world. Look up across the sky now and to the other side of the realm’s concave surface, and you would realize that the glow streams all over the miniature world, too diffuse to be plotted while immersed in it but recognizable as faint traceries of light and magic when viewed from afar. These are the ersatz ley lines of Ominous Gard, coaxed into structure by the Warlock-King and still bearing with them hints of the world they were torn from. The greater part of these sedimented memories have long been extracted by Ominous Rex, crystallized as morsels to dangle before the orphaned nature-spirits who serve him in this night-spawned realm. Only the smallest scraps of memory still remain in these streams of magic, fed upon by the most tiny and furtive wisps that still remain free of Ominous Rex’s grasp. But such is risky even for them as all magic within Ominous Gard is but an extension of its lord’s own power, and when he broadcasts his will every stream glows with his watchful presence or even worse uproot themselves, becoming hydra-headed torrents of life-seeking malevolence that twist and lash across the landscape. For the most part though the ley lines remain quiescent, sometimes passing tantalizing close to the laboring dead; but on the most part the dead of Ominous Gard are but automatons set into motion by their master, their souls obliterated in ages prior, and all joy and temptation is lost to them.

Follow these tenuous streams of mana, avoiding the watched roads and clambering through an empire’s worth of disarrayed metropoli, and you will see a growing light when you gradually approach the places where the ley lines converge. It is warmer here, in relative terms, and the ruins around your feet are thrown into sharper relief. There is a strange form of life in these twilight zones, a silvery ooze between the cracks in the rubble. If you can spare an age to observe these minuscule, stringy strands, you will see that they shift minutely and glacially to some unknown rhythm. These are souls reduced to their basest state, their normally pneumatic substance coagulated by the immanent cold of the Abyss into something akin to mold. All that remains of them is a certain raw volition held against dull entropy, slowing starving in the epistemological desert that is Ominous Gard. So wretched are they that they fall beneath the notice of the Warlock-King, and some among his entourage even laud them as paragons of noble endurance, embodying a state of existence that all living things should aspire to. Though they are entirely helpless, more vigorous spirits know not to graze on them for sustenance for when one devours them one also inherits their experiences – of anguished thoughts crawling along cold, empty eons, naked and alone on the very edge of the universe.

Where ley lines conflux in Ominous Gard lies its centers of activity. Here the broken ground is flattened into platforms or raised into more solid structures, and the ambient magic is concentrated into ghost-forges and ritual-circles of minimalist design, harnessed to further the multifarious ambitions of Ominous Rex. Crucibles of clay and silver are propped aloft with the arms of petrified giants, while empty grain silos are patched and converted into catalytic reactors. The bulk of Ominous Gard's soulless dead are concentrated here, ferrying materials and overseeing the arcane processes. They are in turn overseen by other servitors whom Ominous Rex have granted a brighter spark of self-determination, circling spectrally over the works or emplaced in the ubiquitous watchtowers that cluster protectively around such strategic locations as there are. Other dead move as construction crews, building and rebuilding obsolete ritual industries at new confluences as the ley lines slowly swell and multiply with stolen mana from this world, always leaving a few of their number behind at every completed edifice, dismembered and converted into part of the mechanisms themselves. Occasionally, you may even see manufactories designed by a more advanced hand: solemn juggernauts of cyclopean bronze served by no crew at all, or moving on many ponderous legs to relocate themselves over some new resource. At these mockeries of industries tokens of favor are forged and imbued with subtle curses before being distributed between the Warlock-King's growing ranks of supplicants; reagents intended for large-scale use are milled and refined; and new undead are animated and old ones re-energized as they are immersed in ink-black baptism pools. Mana siphoned from the outside world is channeled and filtered at these sites until it takes on the ghostly aspect that allows Ominous Rex to draw on it as an extension of his personal power. Leftover energies from such rituals illuminate these scenes with eerie light, and occasionally a particularly potent empowerment hurls a great pale flare upwards, banishing the night over great swathes of the inverted sphere. These industrial sites dot Ominous Gard wherever the web of ley lines that envelop the realm cross, and when you gaze upwards to the other side of the sphere you might mistake the light they cast for faint stars.

As you approach the poles of Ominous Gard, the terrain rises. The broken and haphazard structures that form the ground begin to clear, buildings rising in more regular and useful forms. You realize with a shock that this is not a natural outgrowth of the forces that molded the realm but a deliberate attempt to create habitation, excavated and furnished by unmistakably living hands. There is light from the windows, warmth-tinged compared to the ghost-flames of the ley industries, and there is air of a sort and more earthly sounds, all the results of painstaking yet unregimented effort, so out of character in this place. It would not be inaccurate to call the conglomerations of apartments, towers and alleyways at each pole "towns", catering to the vital needs of the rabble of supplicants, savants and sycophants that Ominous Rex has plucked from our world. The outermost reaches of the miniature settlements are little better than shantytowns, but the architecture becomes more solid and the furnishings improve as you ascend to the center, the ground itself growing steeper and steeper until it becomes a single stalagmite into which the tallest structures of the town merge, rising across the hollow interior of Ominous Gard until it joins with its twin from the opposite pole. Spikes and crenellations bulge grotesquely at the meeting point, forming a bolus of architecture suspended at the precise center of Ominous Gard; this is the Warlock-King's inner keep, the true seat of his power from which he overlooks his entire domain. A palpable halo of wards and enchantments orbit the fortress, occasionally touching off a spray of sparks and a crackle of lightning as incompatibilities in spellwork collide. Nothing is allowed to approach the keep by either flight or the polar stalagmites without Ominous Rex's personal permission.

Even far removed from the terrible fortress where Ominous Rex himself holds court, his authority can easily be felt. As you navigate the labyrinthine passageways of the outermost shantytowns, you can spot stockpiles of food and fuel in crude adobes blockaded with debris; wires strung over your head and leading between mud-brick walls and improvised roofs; tallow candles and torches and salvaged light-bulbs keeping the eternal night at bay; and the occasional figure hurrying on some errand, wrapped tight against the cold. You may even recognize them, as chances are you were once one of them. Everywhere there are footsteps and hushed conversations, but few raised voices; the very nature of the dismal realm is inimical to human life and the supplicants here are constantly taxed by their struggle for survival. The influx of bodies frequently outpace the supply of victuals and life-preserving enchantments, and those whose skills are unequal to the matter of survival in this place must depend on the charity of their seniors. Even those who step proud and ambitious from the obsidian portals soon learn that their new world is as merciless as its master, littered before them with the bones of the equally proud. Nevertheless, the place where these wretched men dwell in crude and borrowed comfort is a vital layer in the Warlock-King's grand strategy. At regular intervals the terrible members of Ominous Rex's inner circle descend among the shantytown bearing arcane puzzles and missives – the former to be solved and the latter to be obeyed to the letter. Less regularly some supplicant is summoned to the heights of Ominous Rex's fortress-seat itself, and they either return clutching some scrap of magic which they must work to repay tenfold, or never return at all. All here labor with knowledge: poring over illuminated scrolls and printed textbooks, plotting strange maps and drawing up nonsensical blueprints; updating the wisdom of Ominous Rex to the utmost extent of their own and adapting it to overcome the world of today. Political theory and Enlightenment philosophy; circuit diagrams and corporate handbooks; Hermetic craft and shamanic secrets: all are demanded and all must be wrung from the minds of supplicants to the last drop.

For the lower order of supplicants who haunt the shantytowns, there is a thin edge between expending all your worth to the Warlock-King and risking his ire by appearing too reticent or secretive, and many who come to Ominous Gard never find this balance at all. For the shocked cultists dragged here by botched summonings or the dregs of society abducted by opportunistic field agents, almost all find themselves brought before Ominous Rex soon enough, their minds and souls vivisected by the Warlock-King himself for whatever scraps of remaining value and their empty cadavers joining the drudging dead. A minority can count themselves lucky to avoid this fate if the Warlock-King's operations just happen to require fresh meat, but the touched men who find themselves placed back on the old streets are little more than vessels to volitions not of their own, expendable sleeper agents who will find little relief in returning home. It is a rare occasion indeed where an unscrupulous thaumaturge can establish enough contact with elements of Ominous Gard to prepare himself as thoroughly as possible before succumbing to the irresistible summons from the dark realm. And even so, it takes a cunning thaumaturge and not a lucky one to not be immediately picked clean of his tribute on arrival, for few who arrive before him are ever allowed sojourn to the world again, and as their own knowledge grows stale and thin the only advantages they have over newer supplicants are their familiarity with the shanties and whatever rewards they have managed to win for their service. Some of these vultures work by extending their meager hospitality and offering quick friendships to fresh meat; the better to exploit you with. Others turn to lurking among the twisting alleyways, waylaying you and taking whatever you own through whatever gift for brigandage they possess. Some may genuinely regret throwing in their lot with Ominous Rex and seek to cooperate without precondition, hoping through numbers to secure some chance of survival and escape from the realm. However, all such lowly processors of lore are aware that they cannot stay in the shantytowns indefinitely; they must either ascend to the next rung of Ominous Gard's hierarchy or face their inevitable obsolescence.

The great majority of Ominous Rex's present-earth supplicants begin their careers in the shantytowns, where they are left to themselves to prove their worth. Though the Warlock-King understands the need for urgency in expanding the scale of his operations upon the world, old habits die hard and to him the familiar sight of the rabble of petitioners competing for his favor reassures him that his supreme position is untouched. And so, when some skill or worth in the rare supplicant catches the eye of Ominous Rex or his lieutenants, they may decide to value them for their capabilities rather than their finite knowledge. Such wishes are made clear with public bestowals of favor by his inner circle, and such fortunates, usually particularly canny mages or particularly dangerous metahumans, earn a place in the higher spires of the polar conurbations, one step closer to their master. They receive greater authority and access to the realm's industries and even luxuries in this sparse realm such as undead servants, and many do not hesitate to expand their influence further by trawling their old contacts in the shantytowns with nets of patronage and obligation. They, in turn, are ensnared even deeper into Ominous Rex's multifarious schemes as their responsibilities multiply. A different fear comes over them as they must now thwart more subtle sabotage from their peers and manage their master's outposts in the world from a great distance, not to mention the prospect of a longer and harder fall if they fail in Ominous Rex's eyes. The supplicant's climb through the hierarchy of Ominous Gard hardly ceases at this point, as yet another tier of favor reveals itself to him: the trusted lieutenants who act as the intermediaries between the humble supplicant and the Warlock-King and who form his true court. But to achieve this trust the supplicant must surrender his very soul to be bound to Ominous Rex's own, ensuring his eternal servitude. This is a step before which all have hesitated so far, and Ominous Rex has yet to feel the need to force the issue. Perhaps when his most devastating plans stand poised for completion, he will require more unquestioningly loyal instruments than ever. But for now, his inner circle is the very same one which stood with him when he cast Atlantis into ruin.

The central keep of Ominous Gard is more reminiscent of its old namesake, a single structure fortified against all outsiders and designed to amplify Ominous Rex's immense sorcerous power. It can be claimed that Ominous Rex had in fact used the wreckage of his old stronghold to rebuild his new sanctum, but he is not a man known for this degree of sentimentality. Nevertheless, it is only within the twisted confines of the fortress where some traces of the old glory of the Omin Empire can be seen. You ingress through a side-door watched by revenants bound in ghoulish frescoes, taking in the sights as you work your way inwards. Here is kept the Warlock-King's greatest treasures, as well as his most potent servants. Skulls of his former enemies line the ceilings, enchanted to spot unwelcome presences. The armory of Ominous Gard, now without use, resembles more of a trophy hall. An anthropologist will find here an entire era of the world preserved in instruments of violence, unfolding genealogies of blades reflecting the rise and fall of utterly unfamiliar - yet unmistakably human - cultures. Stored here are the last intact examples of Atlantean arcane craftsmanship, ironically escaping destruction by the goodwill of their former keepers. Also stored here are relics of an even older era such as Lemurian reedspears and Snakeman whistlewhips, which are even more removed from the civilizations of today; a fact not helped by Ominous Rex's continent-spanning campaigns of conquest and cultural hegemony against their creators. In one corner is even his old skychariot, a monstrously ornate vehicle replete with Lemurian kill-carvings upon its pitted armor. The skychariot's yoke is long and wide, designed to shackle the eight god-beasts which drew it across the sky, each a totemic spirit of the northern barbarian tribes dragged into the material realm and brought to heel by Ominous Rex – who was ever fond of such displays of domination. In the old days the very sight of the skychariot was synonymous with his supreme tyranny over his many subject peoples, and even now an oppressive aura lingers over the thing. You continue inwards and the presence of sorcery grows suffocatingly dense as you arrive at the Warlock-King's personal studies and workshops. Unspeakably ancient grimoires in crystal and vellum, each of which could make the fortune of a modern magus or form the foundation of an entire magical academy, sit uncomfortably alongside his supplicants' works in scrawled notepaper. Half-completed spellwork sketched in light and liquid shadow is pinned to the walls. Here and there are curios from the modern world which have caught Ominous Rex's interest, some alarming in their implications, some shockingly mundane. Make your way past those and there is no way forward but to Ominous Rex's throne room itself. Shield your eyes as the chamber is harshly lit by the sheer power that crackles through it. The bare rock here has acquired an eerie, molten sheen. Traceries of light and destiny that shift along the floor and walls proclaim his majesty better than any inlaid gold or studded gem-work. The Warlock-King's throne is an unfolded chrysalis raised seamlessly from the floor. It is composed of a nameless, transcendent substance that shines like crystal, forged by miracle and refined by will. He is upon it. He has been expecting you.

How to describe Ominous Rex?

The scars of history should rest upon him like the rings of a tree. He was scion to a line of barbarian warriors long extinct. He was the prodigal shaman of a tradition long refuted and digested. He was Warchief of the Eight Tribes, their hunting grounds swapped for barracks and their songs rewritten to glorify him. He was a Tributary-General of mighty Atlantis, the title given without purpose and assumed in deceit. He was the greatest of the Fallen Sages, his brilliant insights into the magics of a more savage era dying with the ritual suicide of his disciples. He was master to the spirits of a thousand things between heaven and earth, but the earth now turns and heaven is rent and the spirits of old are long forgotten. He was God-Emperor of the Omin and the unquestioned master of a million souls, a people forcibly unified that made the best of its lot and prospered in its own fashion, all offered up to the unreachably distant altar of victory. His body and soul was reduced to tatters by the slow march of his ascension, every step and every bargain proof of what he was willing to pay, all of which was ultimately washed away by his trial in the Abyss. He sits before you with a renewed body and a reforged spirit won by his unconquerable will, the only constant that remains from the beginning of his journey. He has lost everything, but now he has a world to gain.

Ominous Rex's frame is straight and strong. His movements are spare but sure, except where there are sudden lacunae as though his concentration lapses and his body has no notion of what to do at its own accord. His great age is not evident and the skin which is not hidden under his armor is pale and unblemished. His hair is white, plainly dressed and swept out of the way of his battle-mask. No two viewers see the same mask on Ominous Rex's face, but for now he is sovereign over his own visage and his mask is a simple pane of darkness as he regards you with mild curiosity. You do not risk holding his gaze as his mask is almost as dark as a window into the infinite Abyss, but you do note with a shudder that his eyes under the slits of his mask have the exact same shade. His armor is worked from metals of five colors, and upon his shoulders rests a cloak of dragon scales. He wears a sword at each side of his waist, one of rust and one of stone. For Ominous Rex this is courtly dress suitable for audiences with his trusted subjects, you somehow realize. You have seen more potent panoplies in his workshops blending Atlantean principles and modern technology, and you wonder why he chose to appear before you so. He wears a few rings and amulets, more ornamental of his self-conscious status than for any practical purpose – as in any case his own powers have far outstripped such baubles. Ominous Rex has inherited the magics of an entire age. He had scoured far and wide for everything there is to learn, tasting the lowest of spirit-callings from tribes even his fathers had considered weak to the most refined and impractical of Atlantean thaumaturgical theory. From the best the savage age could offer he built his unique repertoire, commanding knacks that would not rediscovered for thousands of years. He has supplemented this with a vast quantity of self-taught modern magic, less well-understood by himself but adding immensely to his versatility. Even so, he primarily conducts himself as a sorcerer from the era of his birth, and thinks little of using his masterful sorceries to aid him in physical battle. When his knowledge outstripped his astounding innate talent, he quested for power as well and in the fullness of time his raw might swelled like an ocean fed by innumerable streams. But as you already know, the price he paid was immense. If he had walked his path more judiciously and quested for knowledge just for knowledge's sake, he could have eventually replaced Atlantis more naturally in mystic attainment, becoming a reinvigorating light in a waning age of knowledge. However, Ominous Rex chose to bend the entirety of his achievements to the purpose of carrying out his grand conspiracy. In doing so he forsook the chance of becoming what in later ages would be called a Great Sage and instead stepped unwittingly onto the path of the Fallen Sage, a creature whose imperfect synthesis of his impossibly vast repertoire slowly destroys him from within. A Fallen Sage who happens to rule a cruel empire may have leaned on it to delay his own ruination for a time, but ultimately he would have faced the consequences of his failure.

It is with the greatest irony then that by stridently ignoring such consequences, by choosing to blot out the memory of two empires instead of fostering one, Ominous Rex broke through the dead end of his thaumaturgical development via his inadvertent fall into the Abyss. However, it is also true that a lesser sorcerer could not have accomplished his complete rebirth of the self, a torment that not even he himself wishes to repeat. Ominous Rex's arcane powers are now balanced in a way they never were, re-founded on an understanding of what he terms "The Deepest Law", sympathetic magic performed on the most basic level where objects can be made to resonate with each other by the mere fact of their existence. It is through this Abyss-granted insight that Ominous Rex establishes his link to his undead servants, his bound souls and the ambient mana of his realm. It also means that he requires virtually no preconditions to attune himself to new sources of magic in this world – mere proximity to his own power is enough to slowly grant him influence over it. Subjective centuries ago when pinhole-sized portals were the largest channels which could be opened between the world and Ominous Gard, the Warlock-King had already began to seed unseen places with trickles of sand and grit thaumaturgically inundated with his own realm's brooding essence. Though the influence of such an act was minuscule, the minuscule leverage was enough to enlarge the connecting portals and in turn send through more elaborate grappling hooks. Today the portals between the two realms are great hovering obsidian mirrors, easily allowing passage for whole groups of apparatus-bearing raiders, and could be expanded even further if not for the concerns of secrecy. There are also more permanent outposts in the deep places of the earth, where the ambient mana of Ominous Gard has encroached so far that the landscape itself has taken on the realm's character. Although the feedback Ominous Rex receives from all places under his power are but whispers, it increases exponentially as he concentrates on any particular locale, artifact, or servant, allowing him to control it directly and make alterations to its nature. Ominous Rex may even form new spirits out of nothing but his own reserves – the nature of his mana as the assimilated essences of his former subjects is particularly suited to this, and this is a trait he is capable of granting to those soul-bound to him, as with others.

Ominous Rex watches the modern world as closely as he is able in order to test its points of weakness, as well as to find potential allies. The survival of En Razu the Slaughtersmith in this age is known to him, and he hopes that their mutual familiarity will assist him in securing the assassin's services. The true identity of the Theozoologist would be more of a surprise to Ominous Rex, but he holds no particular grudge against surviving Atlanteans and would merely treat him as a pawn to a rival power. Nevertheless, the Warlock-King will be intrigued to discover how the deranged technomage has adapted Atlantean science to the modern era. He is wary of metahumans, for their powers seem both unbelievable and undeserved. However, Ominous Rex knows that such gifted humans remain human at the base and can be swayed and recruited like any other. More pleasing to him is the voracious appetite the people of the modern world have for practically any vice, no matter how self-destructive, which Ominous Gard is all too capable of supplying. The same rituals the Warlock-King had used to extract the memories of the world from his leylines could be applied in the world itself, only producing a concentrate far more vivid and plentiful than the scraps he feeds to his pathetic servants. It is for all intents and purposes a narcotic when imbued into material form, and there is no lack of downtrodden masses who are willing to drown their sorrows in such hits of carefully filtered bliss and nostalgia, eventually becoming susceptible dependents to the Warlock-King's cause. However the drugs market is a crowded one with many equally nefarious backers, and Ominous Rex has found more profit in the direct propagation of magic itself. Rituals to ask assistance from hitherto-unknown spirits which are themselves pawns of Ominous Rex produces yet more supplicants and grappling hooks, while more direct bargains of power and debt with a thousand petty magicians rolls like a slow wave of corruption across the arcane world. The more men practice old and ill-understood magics unsupervised, the greater the chance that one will fumble and cause untold catastrophe – the arm of Ominous Gard merely provides the tools to enable them to. Ominous Rex is fully aware that the modern Atlantis is too mighty for him to directly destroy, and he will seek every opportunity for the fractious inhabitants of the world to do it for him.

Ominous Rex is not aware of that one future foe represents the greatest threat to his designs upon the world: the Tellurian, the Defender of Earth. His confidante Quys Il Zanna was at the heart of the operation that laid low Artos the Omen, and she had reported the unusual concern the costumed superhero had displayed in reaction to the decoy's overuse of his borrowed magics. This point is not yet of great concern to the Warlock-King, as the Tellurian since his emergence has always been a rather enigmatic figure and few in Ominous Gard can claim to have a clear picture of his motivations. Although his lieutenants detect something ethereal and more than metahuman about his presence, he does not in truth stand out among other caped heroes in deed and Ominous Rex has so far relegated him to another of their kind, to be dealt with in due fashion. To most, the Tellurian is indeed nothing more than a regal figure in opera armor who is master over the four Classical elements. However, nobody is aware that his appearance and abilities are no more than a subconscious decision made by his host, Eric Dearfield, except for Dearfield himself. The Tellurian is a reified spirit, a mass of power given shape by human will and controlled by the mind of Dearfield as he slumbers, dissipating as he wakes. The Tellurian is like no guardian spirit which has existed before, uniquely powerful and uniquely sensitive to the consolidated wellness of the entire globe. Thus, the magic used by Artos was also strangely alarming to his mystic senses, bringing up primordial memories of pain that still resound faintly through the world's aurasphere. In many deep places, the ravages of Ominous Rex's world-spell still persists as traces of elemental outrage and unnatural truncation, untouched by the turning of ages. A skilled enough shaman can unearth and puzzle over any one of these traces, but only the Tellurian's holistic instincts and universal reach can put all these traces in perspective and recover the big picture of Atlantis' destruction and the disappearance of the Omin Empire. Thus perhaps outside the Great Sage Daniel Stephenson, the Tellurian is best placed to uncover Ominous Rex's true nature and marshal the world against his encroachment. Furthermore, he may even be able to discover surviving spirits from Ominous Rex's era who had specifically made a pact or cast a curse on the tyrant. Such mystic connections were severed when Ominous Rex fell into the Abyss, but the Warlock-King, greedy sorcerer that he is, retained all the perks and privileges he had bargained for when he restructured his powers. If the Tellurian can help these spirits remember their claims and put them forward as Ominous Rex himself emerges into the world, it will strike an unexpected blow against the validity of the Warlock-King's magics and create a chink in his perfected armor.

Beyond all concerns, a day must come when Ominous Gard must complete its eventual reunification with the world. If Ominous Rex has been defeated in the meantime and the merging proceeds uncontrolled, the results will be cataclysmic for both realms. But even if it proceeds under the best-laid circumstances, it is a dissolution of an entire reality, an irreversible gesture that Ominous Rex has abdicated his dominion to challenge ours. On that day, Ominous Rex must sunder his crystal throne, the origin point of his re-creation and the keystone of his realm. And with a groan the inverted sphere of Ominous Gard will crack and unfold, opening itself to the Abyss for an instant even as the fabric of the world itself tears open to admit its entry. Only then will the Warlock-King set his new throne upon the earth, perhaps to rule over a vista of ruination, perhaps to crush the gathered resistance of the world. But for now he is a world away, his foot poised over the final step of a path began in uncounted ages past.
Last edited by Invictus on Wed Dec 29, 2010 7:08 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Ominous Rex

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

I very eagerly await more, because I am very much loving your description of antediluvian times and bygone eras, and the eldritch civilities and stuff. It's great stuff, really, and I dig the Atlantis and the geopolitics of PRE-CAMBRIAN TIMES OF LORE! When the Great Dragon Lord of Albion locked tight the gates to his ARBOREAL REALM!
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Re: Ominous Rex

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While I've been following your redevelopment of Ominous Rex quite closely, I have to say that the product is excellent. Because of prior association, I always think of Ominous Rex as the hooded sorcerer, fitting a particular archetype (something like 'bad Doctor Strange'), so it's kind of unusual to think of him as he once was, which was a brawny barbarian. Something like ... magic Conan.
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Re: Ominous Rex

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The next part of Ominous Rex's life is here, clocking in at 3638 words.
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Re: Ominous Rex

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OMIN

I fukken love the sheer epic scale of this and the dark designs and machinations of Ominous Rex. Yes, by all means, he IS a classical dark lord brooding in his black spire on his frostbitten throne, doing unspeakable evil and consolidating his rule over the barbarian mongrel hordes of inhumanoids to wreak havoc at the golden gates of the shining empire. But you pull it off so nicely! We get to see the depths of his twisted schemes and the sheer scope and effort of his plot, the innumerable conquests, the painfully long process of constructing a great power through nation building and subjugation, and then suddenly his slaying of and bloodpacting with evil beasts and dark things and his crusades through unspeakable vistas in his god-beast sky-chariot!

I like how his descent into unspeakable evil is driven by his singular desire for power, his lust for it, and at the same time also his sheer desperate situation and how he strives - with every fabric of his black will - to overcome his position and gain the advantage needed to smite his foes, drive them before him, and hear the lamentations of their women.

Simultaneously, the way you pulled off Atlantis was great - ancient empire grown weak and complacent through centuries of inbreeding, once-great and still mighty but hamstrung by all manner of domestic complications and issues, so self-assured of their dominance and such stuff. Four-chinned nobles hobnobbing with each other, smoking obscure and lho and spice - oh, the spice! Their decadent resplendencies making them content to wallow in their own excesses! Before they RUE the coming of their DEMISE!

I am very much fond of your prose. It reminds me of the more understated way classical authors wrote their literature, I've read Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, and their writings are not so dependent on florid or livid purplish prose but rather in well-constructed content and clear concise delivery. It works, and I think the way your prose is so clinical (and not like my complete bullshit :mrgreen: ), is great. I'd buy that for a dollar!

So, yes. I think this is a superb blending of old-fashioned fantasy lore, with a fair share of antediluvian pre-Cambrian eldritch trappings, and while you're basically making this up I like how it touches on all sorts of things with its anachronisms and how the prose allows one's imagination to conjure and visualize, giving away just enough but not too much for the reader to go on with. That's good. The care, detail, effort and execution of the article is great. :D

This is how you do a goddamn dark lord!



Now I cannot wait for Ominous Rex to DESTROY ATLANTIS.
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Re: Ominous Rex

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Thanks for that. It's funny how much Ominous Rex turned out being the classical Dark Lord, even though I didn't start writing this profile with the goal in mind. If it works though, then it works - solid, orthodox takes on tropes just makes all the twists and subversions running around in the same setting all the better.

The important thing to note in this chapter is how he has evolved beyond Conan - as Ford rightly sees, the visual impression of his early life - or maybe from another point of view, he has fallen from that ideal. The increasing reliance on magic and the crazed striving against his destiny, I think, demonstrates that. In any case, by the time he's done with Atlantis, there will neither be women nor lamentations.

(Reading a bit of Elric helped.)

As for the writing style here - it's not one I actually enjoy using a lot. But I will be shifting gears in the next chapter where shit really gets real. 8-)
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Re: Ominous Rex

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You know I love your fringe whacko esoteric incomprehensible stuff, and you know I breathe that stuff for air (while drinking PREGRINISMS for water like a fish).

And I think during the first chapter I also noted the Conan and Elricisms. I love how you play with it. I've read none of those works, but you can see trappings of those Conans and Elrics throughout modern fantasy (none of which I also read!), and I love your take on them. Oh, Vic. *swoons* :mrgreen:

I cannot fucking conceive or guess or even imagine how you are going to DESTROY ATLANTIS. The DESTRUCITY is going to be incomprehensible, the power of creation through destruction that binds the universe to the fathoms of the oceans which the gleaming city shall descend unto for the strength of one man's will shall undo the creation of eons by the righteous wrathful hand of destruction that shall lay low the gleaming spires and the citadels carved of Pre-Cambrian rock as the great Dragon Lord of Albion closes the gates to his arboreal realm and the infernal legions of the dreamlands of the unknown kadaj springs forth eternal as the Ominous King of Once and Future enacts his will upon primeval Earth before naught and upon he apocalypse he wreaks mankind shall recultivate its lost civilizations in the fertile crescent moon!

:)
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Re: Ominous Rex

Post by Mobius 1 »

I may not possess the eloquence of Shroom, but I too can vouch for just how epic this quality affair is. Ominous Rex obvious works on a great level of tragedy - not only do you see the end coming from the beginning and derive great pleasure from tracking the machinations - but you are drawn in to see just how hard it comes crashing down on in, how hollow his victories end up being and just what his goals for the modern world are.

It's that watch-the-trainwreck feeling I savor in reading this, though one has to truly wonder how wrapped-up in themselves the Atlanteans are to toss away most suspicions of the Warlock-King. In this respect the they-had-it-coming sense is full tilt, though the constant reassurances at the beginning and end of the chapter of the empire's retained potentcy in more than enough to sate my questions. The sheer effort of the writing style helps, I think, to place Rex on the top of the OZC villain pile.
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Re: Ominous Rex

Post by Peregrin »

This is gonna be five parts? Goddamn, this is fucking huge. There's enough material for a 'verse of its own just in the prologues to Ominous Rex' profile... I guess the intent is to make him the ne plus ultra of "dark overlord"-type fantasy villains. I can't wait until the man who would later be known as the Theozoologist makes his appearance!
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Re: Ominous Rex

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Shit hits the fan in the latest installment of Ominous Rex's life and times, clocking in at 4275 words!
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Re: Ominous Rex

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Oh your god. :o

The Theozoologist screaming as Atlantis is shattered, while Bells and Pockets bear witness and GTFO pronto, and the sheer devastation Ominous Rex wrought upon the Atlanteans, oh man! It wasn't Poseidon who struck the great island-city down, but it was the Last Dragon Lord of Albion! Oh man, utter decimation!

That is truly great. Goddamn, Ominous Rex!

And I love the unnamed cameos! This is truly brilliant stuff. :D

Holy shit, man. He sacrificed his entire empire, the souls of millions, just to destroy his enemies! To crush them, see them driven before him, and to hear the lamentations of their women! Sweet Jewsus!

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Re: Ominous Rex

Post by Invictus »

Get back to studying, Shroom. :mrgreen:
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Re: Ominous Rex

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The last day is no study day! For de-stressings! :P
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Re: Ominous Rex

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It's Ominous Rex versus the world and her seven superhero ex-boyfriends in the final installment of his backstory! 3874 words!
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Re: Ominous Rex

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Goddamn Ominous Rex! :D

Now that's one "interdimensional evil dark overlord seeking to invade Earth with his legions of darky darkness" that I can totally dig. It's nice to see how he also ties nicely with other similarly eldritch Comix characters, such as En Razu and Theozoologist. Is it possible that the incomprehensible creature known as Diabetes could be one of those slaved subjects of Ominous Rex?

Man, how Ominous Rex had to reconstitute himself as well as recreate his shattered empire from its ruined remains, in the darkness of the void, is totally cool. As is his now millennia-spanning quest to rule all Earth. This guy's so totally 100% different from his original incarnation, it's incredible!
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Re: Ominous Rex

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I think it is safe to say that, with this final chapter, Ominous Rex has totally gone beyond his origins as a character here. While obviously he became more detailed and had more depth to his origins with the earlier chapters, I think this chapter really sets the tone for him. He isn't just some dude from another time and place trying to conquer our world, because the struggle to become that dude from another time and place is very tangible. This multi-part history works really well, and was part of what made Lord Fahrenheit such an excellent article too. In all, this is a piece of work which has essentially raised the bar for character creation. Nicely done.
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Re: Ominous Rex

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

^ I agree with Ford.

I think, though, what is notable here is that Ominous Rex does not have a very complicated character, he is almost just the will to power personified. He doesn't want to conquer the world for any particular reason, he is just driven to do it, because he wants power, it's a desire that goes beyond rational justification. There are times when it actually makes him kind of pitiable, because he couldn't stop if he wanted to, he couldn't even consider stopping or trying to do anything but conquer and destroy, and he will never, ever be fulfilled by it. Then even that kind of sympathy is soon gone, and left with nothing but an appreciation of the epicness of the story, because Ominous Rex is pretty much outside of most human experience, with his insane simplicity of purpose.

The good thing about this article is the way that it brings that out and gives the impression of such an epic and inhuman figure, a creature that would brush aside all human concerns, who would make himself into a wrecked monster dependant on the favour of spirits, who would build an empire only to murder all its people so their deaths would serve him as a weapon.

I agree with Shrom, though I would change his opinion: I can get behind this dark lord, I don't think there's room for any others like him, simply because the world could not hold out against them.
And if there was going to be another one it would have to have an equally epic backstory, which is a tall order indeed.
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Re: Ominous Rex

Post by Malchus »

Hm, parts 4 out of 5 are up. Cool, one more installment and I can finally stop myself from actively avoiding the other people's comments. I've restrained myself from reading every installment past the first when it was first stated that this was gonna be an epic 5 parter since I want to read the whole thing as one. From the first part, and from the massive amount of text I had to scroll by quickly, I can tell that this is gonna be one helluvan article. I can't wait for part 5 so I can finally read everything that's been written.

Please, no spoilers for me, you guys. I wanna enjoy this as the epic story it's going to be when finished.
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Re: Ominous Rex

Post by Invictus »

Malchus wrote:Hm, parts 4 out of 5 are up. Cool, one more installment and I can finally stop myself from actively avoiding the other people's comments. I've restrained myself from reading every installment past the first when it was first stated that this was gonna be an epic 5 parter since I want to read the whole thing as one. From the first part, and from the massive amount of text I had to scroll by quickly, I can tell that this is gonna be one helluvan article. I can't wait for part 5 so I can finally read everything that's been written.

Please, no spoilers for me, you guys. I wanna enjoy this as the epic story it's going to be when finished.
If you like - though the actual narrative part of the profile is finished by Part 4. Part 5 is just the powers and abilities stuff.
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Re: Ominous Rex

Post by Invictus »

The circle, is it not complete at 5359 words as the Dragon Lord of Albion locks tight the gates to his arboreal realm?

Happy New Year O1!
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Re: Ominous Rex

Post by Ford Prefect »

That was ... a grand tour and a half. I think that, with this, Ominous Rex's previous incarnation as a hooded dark magician within a black castle has been totally eliminated. Ominous Gard is at once the black castle, but also something much more significant. I am definitely impressed.
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Re: Ominous Rex

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I really love what you did with this. You took the basic concept of dark lord in a dark realm of blackened dark darkness and all that old tired stuff and rewrote it in such a cosmic way that it has become beyond compare! It's damn good stuff. It's like poetry. And... is that LCL flowing in Omin Gard?

Now Malachuschus can read the articles in its vast cyclopean entirety and gaze upon the antediluvian terror that is OMINOUS REX. THE TOMORROW TYRANT! THE FOREVER KING!
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"Sometimes Shroomy I wonder if your imagination actually counts as some sort of war crime." - FROD
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Invictus
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Re: Ominous Rex

Post by Invictus »

Shroom Man 777 wrote:I really love what you did with this. You took the basic concept of dark lord in a dark realm of blackened dark darkness and all that old tired stuff and rewrote it in such a cosmic way that it has become beyond compare! It's damn good stuff. It's like poetry. And... is that LCL flowing in Omin Gard?
Ominous Gard is an epistemological desert. Flows of feng-shui energies that barely show up against the background noise in our world stand out in Ominous Rex's.
"This explanation posits that external observation leads to the collapse of the quantum wave function. This is another expression of reactionary idealism, and it's indeed the most brazen expression."
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REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 1 - Rey Quirino Versus the Dark Heart of the Philippines
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speaker-to-trolls
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Re: Ominous Rex

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

And so it was that the great Dragon Lords assembled, for one. Final. BATTLE!!!

I've got to say I particularly like this way of doing the powers and abilities section without breaking the narrative structure of the article, just shifting it into the present tense, which is to say nothing of the content and the sheer weird, hard edged, non-Euclidean horror of Ominous Gard.

So, since you mentioned his innner circle in this article and how those who stand with him are the same ones who stood with him when Atlantis fell, does this mean that his minions actually get summoned back to Ominous Gard in person, or just that they stand with him in spirit by being enslaved to his dread immortal will?

One day we must write the saga of his final move against the living world, it shall be the greatest story in Comix, and it shall be called The Omens of Oblivion!
"Little monuments may be completed by their first architects, but great ones; true ones leave their copestones to posterity. God keep me from completing anything."
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Malchus
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Re: Ominous Rex

Post by Malchus »

I have finally completed reading this as a single whole. Let me just say, I'm gad I decided to do so in one go. Shroom is right. Ominous Rex is, in summation, pretty much your standard all-powerful mysterious dark overlord of evil foreboding doominess. But, as always, what matters when it comes to characters is, well, the character himself and the execution of his story (or in this case backstory).

This is a simply excellent conception of a mystical dark overlord, and this entire thing is less of a character article and more of a story in itself. No, better yet, it's a great prologue. It's a great opening that establishes the guy, his situation, and other interesting bits of background detail that leaves us hungry for more. I agree with speaker; one day we must write an Ominous Rex story to accompany this prologue. Make it a join O1Comix project or something if we have to. The Comix magnum opus!

EDIT: Also, I was pleasantly surprised to see a certain trio pop up in part 3. :D I loved how they were all vaguely described and unnamed, as well as Justinian's lines.
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I admire the man, he has a high tolerance for insanity (and inanity - which he generously contributed!). ~Shroom, on my wierdness tolerance.
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