#cosmic horror varda AU

[lightdancer1]

Also working on this one, which is the Tolkien AU I’ve mentioned. In this AU Varda becomes an eldritch nightmare oozing soul-eating radiation and able to tap into the power of the Music of the Ainur. Her handmaiden becomes Sinmara of Muspeldor, and both builds a vast realm of Men and Eldar (which in this universe is the equivalent of Orcs) and becomes ensnared in the Peredhil Saga and ultimately meets her own demise thereby.

It’s a much more distinctly pagan take on the cosmology, down to having the arch-villain of the Second and Third Ages be Sinmara of Muspelheim down to explicitly calling her equivalent of Mordor Muspeldor in her variant of Black Speech. Which means “Land of the World Destroyers”.

The main things that differ is that it’s Light Is Not Good rather than Dark is Not Evil, and that radiation and the atom bomb pervade the symbolism of evil rather than the shadowy deception and trickery of Sauron. Varda and Ilmare are much more forthright, but they also can and do literally nuke entire regions in star-flame so they don’t *need* plagues and the like.....and when *that* hits its incarnation point of decaying into weakness, it becomes a perpetual motion leaking hydrogen bomb at a very high yield.

#varda elentari #ilmarë #cosmic horror varda AU #beware the light of the infinite stars

[lightdancer1]

Doing more work on my Cosmic Horror!Varda AU:

Up to the War of Wrath. As with Melkor it’s a long slide downhill from ‘living mountain glowing with evil soul eating starlight’ to the power incontinent leaking nuclear reactor of the War of Wrath. The gap between the Elentari and the Morgoth stems largely from the most obvious thing.

Melkor is the jack of all trades, so his goals are far more ambitious and his depletion works in reducing him to a fragile thing that gets curbstomped.

Varda is full tier magic + physics living nuclear reactor on steroids person. 

The problem with *her* becoming a shell of herself is she is *still a living nuclear reactor only now she’s losing the power to restrain that power.*

Thematically, too, she starts fiddling with the more powerful and deadly elements of starlight and its permutations, like Black Holes, supernovas, and neutron stars as a reflection of her broader self dying, in a sense. The different fates of dead stars and wielding them as weapons is a reflection of her mind slipping from ‘a perfect universe orderly and marked likewise’ to ‘BURN THE EARTH TO ITS CORE’.

#varda #valar #Cosmic horror au #War of the Jewels AU

[lightdancer1]

I do design all my stories regardless of universe or fanfic or original to take place in the same broader cosmology

This cosmology is the one where the Seven Outer Gods created an endless series of dreams in a Thousand And One Nights pattern to keep the Daemon-Sultan, the embodiment of the narrator/author in a cosmic horror setting asleep, and thus the stories continuing. Beneath them in the present epoch are the forces of Pandaemonium (lawful evil) and Azarath (chaotic evil and a straight up cosmic virus that seeks to devour and assimilate and remake existence to perpetuate the self-destructive frenzies of its author) and the more or less benevolent forces of Urhalzan.

Each of these forces transcends individual multiverses, be they fictional or be they original. Occasionally the references are very blatant, as in By Fire and Water and Earth and Air and the Arda AUs where in every single case Ungoliant is one of the Thousand Young of Shub-Niggurath and thus a vastly powerful and utterly eldritch force, and a tangential encounter with Shub-Niggurath put the angelic Melkor on the path to corruption and madness by revealing that Existence is much broader than Ea, or Varda encountering the light and gilded empire-entity-virus of Azarath in the Varda-verse.

Most of the time it's indirect, and in allusions in various occult texts or in dreams that are horrifying visions of otherworldly spheres and easily dismissed as lack of sleep and stress (and intentionally written as such because it permits a reflection, equally, on the stacked tiers of dreams and a commentary on the blurring of dreams and reality in the broader setting).

In this broader cosmology there is a duality between the standard Cosmicist utterly nihilistic scenario where the Outer Gods know their attempt to extend reality is futile. Azathoth the Daemon-Sultan will awaken, they will cease to exist and everything within that sphere will be as if it never was. Death the Unmaker will end the dream, and that is all that shall be. And then Azathoth will begin the *true* creation, for stories never end, and the true creation is unbound by the whim of the author (a narrative idea taken from Frank Herbert's Chapterhouse Dune).

And yet within this bleak and unsparing system good exists because it *is* good, and doing the right thing is because it is the right thing. In the bleak and nihilistic cosmology, goodness and rightness exist of themselves and have meaning because the various species and worlds within this omniverse made them. The Gods dismiss the ideas and deem the will of mortals beneath them and only in a sense of raw power is it so....but it is the very one that in the end is the end of all things who takes actions to motivate the very concept of innate Goodness with the capital G, and defies the broader element of the setting.

Though of course a being that transcends multiple multiverses in any one world is as utterly eldritch and incomprehensible as the malevolent cosmic viruses and Pandaemonium, or as it's called in other settings 'Hell.' Demons are not red entities with horns (that would be the Xeltrigan species, who as an extra irony end up the equivalents of Christianity in this setting). They're entities that fundamentally crack reality around their very being and have an appearance like refraction in water. And even the mightiest of Gods cannot *make* a mortal act, short of obliterating the mortal's independent existence to replace said individual with an extension of themselves.

Mortals blame gods and demons for their actions but the true entities are vastly distinct from those who worship them, though they can be every bit as assholish as their followers.

#omniverse tales #omniverse tales cosmology #all my stories take place in this broader setting #though it's not a relevant factor in every single one #and in many of them never comes up at all

[lightdancer1]

The FWEAR-verse, like my Varda-verse, plays the setting on hard mode

Super-hard mode, even. If these people were dumped in most AUs the mere reality of facing entities empowered by a cosmic horror virus that possesses them and transforms them into empowered shards of themselves would grant them more powerful bending and far superior reflexes. They would come across essentially as veterans of the 40K universe entirely aware of a multiverse and just how horrible its most horrible extents could get in the FWEAR-verse.

In the Varda-verse the Legendarium good guys face bad guys whose powers are soul-eating radiation and they STILL win because they're that awesome.

The Avatar of the Fire and Water and Earth and Air verse is more than slightly more powerful than the bog-standard Avatar, if *this* Aang met most of his AU counterparts he'd be a mini-eldritch horror in his own right much like a 40K Primarch. Even by the more eldritch Aaang of my non-canon AU standards he's the odd one out...and so are his predecessors.

In this AU Kuruk *literally smacked around an entity that would throw around the entire set of multiverses the ATLA settings take place in like a softball and made it cry uncle* even if it killed him at the age of 30.

In thus AU the Avatar is less 'Superman + Jesus' and more straight up Doctor Manhattan. Full on 'God exists and he's American' territory. And because the Avatars are more powerful and formidable so are their enemies.

#atla aus #by fire and water and earth and air #the universe where the Avatars put an Outer God in timeout #and forgot that the Outer God could and did bite back #hence in this AU that iceberg nap wasn't an accident #kuruk sez nice redecorating the spirit world shame if I happened to it

[lightdancer1]

The AU version of Sauron and that evolution gets a lot of attention, too.

Ilmare is the most powerful of the Maia and would otherwise have been their chief canonically, and here this is ‘literally equal to lesser Valar’ tier by itself. Already bad news. When Varda reacts to Luthien Tinuviel confirming her existence by raiding her sanctuary and walking off with a Silmaril with her lover Beren (yes, they literally go up against the personification of a nuclear reactor and STILL get the Silmaril) she decides “Hey now, I deserve a daughter, too, if Melian gets one.”

This being the Omniverse Tales version of Arda this happens by her literally warping and mutating Ilmare’s soul with a major portion of her own essence, moving Ilmare straight up to Aratar-tier power.

Ilmare before all of this already has the Surtr element of a gigantic flaming sword and her presence literally being sufficient to outright burn to ashes entire regions like Dor-Lomin (which in this AU is destroyed with no survivors bar one, the house of Hurin dwindling to extinction and leaving Tuor the only survivor along with his descendants).

After this, of course, she goes straight into a much more total Surtr element. The name Twilight is too likely to be associated with the sparklepires these days, so I altered the name slightly to Nightfall, which has the same oomph. Where Ilmare unsheathes Nightfall, annihilation follows, and her goals and MO become very different to Sauron of Mordor.

#ilmarë #cosmic horror au #varda