#xaderavcar

[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]

One of the fun bits of Blood Among the Stars

Is that it takes a classic fictional trope, that of soulmates, deals with the idea that the tie can go with a partner who's as toxic as it gets, and whether or not that individual would be capable of at least trying to rise above their worst and most malevolent traits....and if they did how much would it actually matter?

For Xaderavcar, Vishori Heshatani, Meremi of Hataria, Vuhl H'ven Dugara, these are not abstract questions.

The consequences of having that tie and what it means to have the Undying Flame as one's soulmate with that entity in turn simultaneously at her relative best and just as unpleasant as she always is serves as a pretty brutal deconstruction of the premise.

The Lightdancer and her own polyamorous group are the reconstruction of it. They got their central point in the previous tale, Lightdancer. In this one the Azar's own Oversoul gets to move to more prominence due to some short-sighted thrill-seeking and ill-considered hostage taking.

#omniverse tales #blood among the stars #urhalzantrani #oversoul

[lightdancer1]

Next few chapters of Hammer of the Stars gets into the War of Liberation:

Due to both elements of the setting and the character Xaderavcar's interest in history books (a nice means to do stealth worldbuilding in a logical in-universe fashion). This war is one of the central elements in determining the history of the Kingdom of Hataria. Chaliel the Liberator, who self-emancipated, orchestrated a slave rebellion that turned into a civil war that overthew the House of Xhonoi.

He was a fairly brutal warlord entirely happy to have entire cities burned and everyone in them killed and the ground sowed with salt to make a point. He *also* won the Battle of the Jehexaderavcal Moon, which is this universe's equivalent of the Battle of Gaixia that sealed the rise of the Underlans.

For the generations of Chaliels 10,000 years later the deeds of the Liberator are famous, he overthrew one dynasty and orchestrated the mass hanging of it in exchange for the death of his first family, and he built another by his fanatical brutality that endures even 10,000 years later. His descendant Xaderavcal the not-yet-unifier survived a fairly unstable upbringing including abduction by the Architects of Fear on a couple of occasions and drawing the eye of the Urhalzantrani, for whom the stars are right.

The fear that a lapse of ten thousand years has brought history full circle and those raised to be weapons might in the end become solely so is one of the arcs that gives Xaderavcal's take on that past a different note entirely to that of her sister, for whom it's more academic.

The Kingdom of Hataria, which is the second-largest dynastic system in the Empire and the one with landholdings just shy of the Imperial Family, is meant to be the only nod to a part of the USA. Specifically the North/New England, which abolished slavery but its wealth relied heavily on the profits of it.

Slavery was abolished for about 40 years by the time of the story across the entire Empire, so that legacy is also intertwined around the ways that the legacy of the Liberator and his war against the House of Xhonoi affects and afflicts his descendants.

#hammer of the stars #house of chaliel #xaderavcal the unifier #xaderavcar the scholar #bizjarran empire #house of xhonoi

[lightdancer1]

Xaderavcal the Unifier:

Was designed likewise from the very beginning as a nod to Dune, the superpowered warlord who unifies a fragmented system that was falling apart and does so by hammering it into unity by means of vast armies....and then dealing with the aftermath of the success. Where the Omniverse Tales differ from most settings is that the Unifier's career proper begins after the Restoration Wars instead of being set before or during it.

She is phenomenally powerful, able to vaporize galaxies with an assertion of telekinetic will, to move stars without difficulty by her hands. She can endure the highest levels of heat and cold alike without effect, she can move between stars at the power of thought and thus faster than any known FTL. She can control every single mind in a Galaxy without stressing the vast powers that she has, modified by the Omega Program into a more warlike shape but not appreciably altering or bestowing power on her in any given way.

In short, she's a character who has zero physical threat from anything shy of the Urhalzantrani or the Great Old Ones, enabling the stories to work at a different level where she knows this and sets out to enjoy challenges that are actually much moreso that involve less of the brute force fisticuffs aspect.

Paul Atreides was a seer whose sight brought about the very events that he tried to prevent. Xaderavcal the Unifier is the first (and her sister Xaderavcar the second) of a new Age of Legends when entities powerful enough to be Gods walked among mortals.

And as Paul Atreides was shaped by the Bene Gesserit, she in turn is a product of the influence of the Architects of Fear, who are one of the unifying elements of my various works.

#xaderavcal the unifier #bizjarran empire #architects of fear