#anzaea

[lightdancer1]

Been fiddling a bit with the Omniverse Tales:

In particular with expanding on the family and siblings of the protagonist, Xaderavcal H'vat H'vorxixnon. Her people, the Hatari, rely on patronymics (though the full name, like Hispanic peoples, includes names from both lineages and is essentially a family genealogy from three or four generations back, which is why the full name is almost never used).

Her father, King-Bishop H'vorxixnon H'ven Soroundon, is the Bishop of Chalae and the ruler of House Chaliel, the second-most powerful dynasty in the Bizjarran Empire. The Chaliels were, in the past, also essential bulwarks of Underlan power and when that foundation cracks, so does a fundamental part of the Underlan system. Fordin VI didn't give a shit, his son and grandson do but by then the rift is too deep to repair. He is also a radical firebrand in a context of both a civil war and its aftermath, with speeches modeled before the war on William H. Seward but after the war he's essentially Thaddeus Stevens as a royal.

Anzaea Roes, her mother, is the daughter of Alavan and Kalmi Roes, who are essentially a pair of Caligulas leading the fourth-most powerful dynasty (the third are the Vintrons) whose tyranny is sufficient to be its own worst enemy, as is the program of Utawalization they put into effect. Ironically, by virtue of Xaderavcal's own rise Anzaea achieves the very aims her family seeks....on behalf of a more powerful, richer dynasty. She is also the wealthiest woman in the Empire and modeled on a blend of J. Pierpont Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Alfred Nobel. She would essentially be a 'Robber Baron' archetype in a very literal sense, and as a rich, powerful woman is subject to a long list of libels and smears in what's deliberately modeled on real life here.

They have four children old enough to play roles in politics. Xaderavcal herself is the Unifier, the victor of the forty-year Restoration War, a revolutionary in the very pattern of her ancestor, the previous unifier, Chaliel I. She is Junior Diarch of the Empire and a survivor of a super-soldier program created by the super-science cult called the Architects of Fear. As Xaderavcal takes more than a few leafs from Paul Atreides and Superman (with Anzaea accordingly taking a few from Lady Jessica and H'vorxixnon from Leto I, if ending somewhat happier than the other guy) the Architects of Fear are essentially the Bene Gesserit as an alien science-cult with sufficiently advanced technology to be a cosmic force in their own right.

Her younger sister Xaderavcar is a professor of theology and a writer, the person who briefly could have been selected as the dynasty's future but elected not to press the issue when her sister returned, escaping the Architects of Fear. For all of the rumors surrounding Queen Anzaea's family life the rumors are entirely true with Xaderavcar, who is basically a rolling stone, wherever she lays her hat is her home. She also has more power, in a very literal sense, than her sister for very literal reasons and a small demonstration of it is that she can blatantly indulge in things that repeatedly violate the codes of her caste and challenge reality to notice it when she uses her powers to prevent them doing so.

The middle child of the ones old enough to be involved, Suvaono, is both the Bobby Kennedy and the Andrei Zhdanov to Xaderavcal's JFK/Stalin (she's the Junior Diarch of a space empire, you're a son of a bitch by definition if you reach that position). She is a political hatchetman who takes a great glee in doing what she does, and has more direct knowledge and experience in greater detail.

And then there's Maxidren, who's a speedster to Flash proportions with access to something modeled on the Speed Force within copyright guidelines to avoid all the problems that otherwise come with this particular power (if also a fair bit tougher than any Flash to withstand the inertia and friction and capable at the most extreme speeds of being her own FTL engine and thus on an inhabited world of shattering it and killing all life if she does that on an inhabited world, that's the most unsporting way in the Empire to Blaze a world and more thorough than dropping an asteroid of dino-killer size on it). Maxidren is the guide to the more veiled extralegal aspect and here works with Lord Agati Heshatani, master of the Directorate of Intelligence Consortia, modeled on the KGB, as the Empire is presented as a de facto totalitarian state with all the trimmings and this is hardly soft-selled.

#omniverse tales #house chaliel #h'vorxixnon #anzaea #xaderavcal the unifier #xaderavcar #suvaono #maxidren #my ocs

[lightdancer1]

One of the not so small contrasts in Blood Among the Stars

Is between each of the major realities shown and their iterations of Xaderavcal the broader entity.

The world of Xaderavcal the Unifier is the 'main' timeline, neither the best of all possible worlds for the broader entity, nor the worst.

The world of the Butcher has a very few survive a massacre of her family and then the now-eldritch abomination Butcher returning for the first stages in the main arc of the story, which has moved from prologue to body of the work.

The world of the God-Empress has her becoming an autocratic overlord without equal or comparison.

In each case her sister, Xaderavcar, and her mother, Anzaea, serve as foils to each version of her and to each other. The 'main' timeline one does live in her relative best of all possible worlds, given her own past. The one in the God-Empress's world is the least happy but resigned to living in a glorified blend of 40K meets the Twilight Zone episode with 'wishes to the cornfield' kid. The one in the Butcher's world has far more power than either of her counterparts but is massively shellshocked and is far freer with the use of her own gifts for a variety of reasons.

#omniverse tales #blood among the stars #anzaea #xaderavcar #xaderavcal

[lightdancer1]

A snippet from the upcoming chapter of Blood Among the Stars:

You're alive, they heard the mind-voice speak. How?

Queen Anzaea of Hataria leaned back on her chair. Not the throne, for this was not a matter of state, not yet. She then bit her lip and sat up, hiking up a part of her informal outfit and there was a vision of a wicked and jagged scar where flesh didn't seem to tear so much as dissolve in places and healed.....strangely.

"I was tougher to kill than the archdemon expected me to be." Her smile was a bitter one, the lines of grief carved on an otherwise-ageless face moving like water in a riverbed. "I have power and skills of my own, and they do not know what they are, or how it works. To be fair in this case, neither did I. There aren't many entities that could live from being disemboweled and having their heart removed, however briefly." She looked at her hands. Father? Is he-

She shook her head. "Ravvy, Maxi, and I are all that's left. Once this was one of the largest families in the Empire, and there were no worries about such things. Now it's almost extinct." Her voice cracked with the last words and then she looked at her with that sense of wonder.

"And you, you've changed. It took you, the Kelzhandari. It must have made you one of them."

Xaderavcal nodded.

As far as I knew you were all gone.

Anzaea's lips were thin.

"As I said, we're harder to kill than they expected. Maxidren survived, in spite of their best efforts."

Suvaono?

Anzaea sighed. "I can take you to the graves, if you like. Can the deathless mourn?"

Xaderavcal nodded.

We mourn as anyone else does.

#omniverse tales #blood among the stars

[lightdancer1]

A sketch from my original stories

Anzaea Chaliel, Queen of the second-largest state in the complex bureaucratic nightmare known as the Bizjarran Empire, stood at the edge of a balcony on the palace she had lived in for nigh eight hundred years now. Life Extension was a marvelous technology, it altered the pattern of telomeres and other aspects of aging to grant most beings a span of around a thousand Bizjarran standard years, which might be shorter or vastly longer depending on the world they found themselves upon.

At eight hundred years most entities would show traces of visible aging at last, the start of wrinkles and receding hairlines, of time's iron hand beginning a process that would move in very slow stages through the next two centuries. She, who had reached that span of years naturally, looked no older than her middle child, who was a youth who had just reached the age of majority.

The sillier and the more credulous held that it was royal breeding, as if the accident of whose specific genitalia had mated with whomst bestowed some natural power to defy the winds of time and even those of the ancient treatments from the time the settlers had landed here. She looked at her hand, dark skin, the color that most species saw as a kind of grey of such a hue as to be all but indistinguishable from black (how strange the ideas of mortals toward color and what it was and was not). Markings made her species' strikingness take one shape, a hue most species saw as a dark orange and which the Xeltrigan saw as a deep brown against a near-crimson hue.

She was clad in her work clothes, not yet willing to change, to shower, to go eat with her husband, who himself was still doing business, she suspected of the usual mundane political elements. She raised her right hand and let a bit of the truth that hid behind her agelessness shine. Light with a pattern of jagged edges, akin to bolts of lightning but flowing like a liquid materialized beyond her pointer and middle fingers, extending beyond them and dancing around her arm, moving in a serpentine pattern.

Bright golden eyes mirrored that energy, as it cast shadows along her skin, lips curving into a deceptively distracted smile. She raised her other hand and spread her arms, letting the energy trail and dance along her, eyes closed, her wide nostrils taking the kind of deep breath her ancestors had since they had evolved to be squat and stocky beings with a tremendous amount of natural strength. The light, if light it was, flowed around her and wound around her arms from hand to hand, through her hair and not merely mirrored along her eyes and mouth but seeming to glow from them as well without crossing through it.

She opened her eyes and the light was gone and her teeth were bared in a somewhat wider smile. Her hands flexed, as her arms moved. She envied the Baranir of Tamir III and the Halons of her world that they had evolved the capacity to throw things. Her kind were built for close in power, a thing of strengths and yet with sharp drawbacks.

Calmed and invigorated by letting herself relax from a busy day, she did decide, at last, to shower and to take the latest novel she was reading until her husband returned. Life was too short not to flex the small things, and the small pleasures. Her smile became more cryptic as the cliche crossed her mind and she looked at her hand again.

At some point the whispers would become overt statements, and even the ever-magnificent shield of willful blindness and folly would not silence them, for it was a shield that would not still when the next century passed and there were no lines, no traces of age. The cryptic smile grew as her teeth bared again.

Centuries of going from the freak that had fled one land to emerge as the queen of another, the ancestor of a figure who had seemingly resurrected the Age of Legends. A figure of technological and corporate power, and of the relatively archaic by comparison power of monarchy. One day she would cast off that power, as would he, and they would face new choices.

Life had been given to them with a strange gift, and it would be something to savor.

"Few who gain power like this," she mused "would relinquish it or look forward to it." Her hand flexed, fingers forming into a fist and light kindled over it, matched by a light of a nature loosely akin to it but from a wholly different shape, her husband's eyes shining with a bright light as their six glowing with dark blue within light blue within dark blue light met two golden eyes like those more of an animal than expected of a sapient lifeform.

His voice echoed in response to hers with a near tectonic rumbling.

"And yet one day, when it becomes plain that we do not age, we shall. We, and my brother D'gonrin."

His finger tapped his chin, brushing his beard.

"The more the reason to enjoy our lives now, and what fate has given us, no?"

She nodded, and his smile was as warm as hers.

"I intend to shower, desk work may be boring," he said, "but warmth does soothe any.....potential cricks in one's muscles. Be they real or carefully maintained art. You are welcome to join me."

Her smile radiant, the Queen rose to her feet and followed her husband, both of them moving in fully armored bodies like wolves padding on snow.

#omniverse tales #h'vorxixnon and anzaea