Post by redsycorax on Feb 20, 2024 2:55:08 GMT
On Earth-Lucifer, events took a very dark turn indeed with the adoption of widespread darkmagic on this world. It diverged from the datum in 1665, with France's "Affair of the Poisons", in which a Satanist cabal tried to poison and overthrow King Louis XIV. On many other Earths, it failed to do so and the King's assailants were apprehended and executed, any 'power' that they might have had the product of their fervent imaginations. However, on Earth-Lucifer, the conspiracy went undetected, analogue darkmagic successfully assassinated Louis XIV, the Sun King, King of France, and seized control of his country through imposing Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, Louis' corrupt brother, as his replacement. It would be comforting to report that things ended there, but they didn't. In England, royal libertines took interest in the events across the Channel and connived to preserve the reign of the lubricious Charles II and engineer a changeling heir for the realm. Accordingly, Charles' Queen, Catherine of Braganza abruptly died and was replaced by a fertile second consort. Charles II lived past 1685 in this world and his infuriated Catholic brother James II tried to overthrow him in 1688, but was captured and killed. The "Glorious Revolution" of William III and Mary II never happened here, nor did the reign of the stolid but virtuous Queen Anne, last of the Stuarts. Instead, the changeling heiress presumptive, Henrietta, married Philippe's heir and a Satanist Anglogallia emerged to usurp control of Europe. Ruthlessly, it launched devastating attacks on Lutheran Germany, Calvinist Switzerland and then, in 1715, it sacked Rome itself. When Puritan America tried to break away from the vicious and corrupt motherland, Anglogallian sorcerors descended on it, utterly obliterating what would never become the United States here in 1745. On the other side of the globe, Chinese and Japanese necromancers seized analogous control of the Middle Kingdom and Home Islands, extending their own malignant control across the whole of Eastern Asia. Aware that they would be vulnerable if the European and Asian powers regarded them so, Polynesia and Native America installed their own darkmagic theocracies to forestall that contingency.
It is now A.DE 339. For most of Earth-Lucifer's inhabitants, life is 'nasty, brutish and short'. However, that isn't the case within the darkmage elite...
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LONDRES: INSANCT MESSALINA COVEN:
Zak Zatara ran a hand through his dark, wavy hair as he materialised in the unhallowed of unhalloweds, genuflecting before the statue of Great Baphomet that dominated the sepulchurally silent hall, where desolate winds howled, almost drowning out the screams and despair of its Sacrificial Class victims as they were extirpated on the altars to one or another member of the demonic hierarchy. To maintain the Imperial Alliance's control over this reluctant world, thousands were required to yield their lifeforce to satiate their masters, mistresses or magistrix. He nodded to his fellow members of the Nightmare People, this corrupted world's darkmage rulers- Inza Nelsyn, the current Doktor Kaos, holder of the dread Helm of Abun; his mother, Archpriestess Zatareina, who spoke her chants backward as her tradition required her to; Archpriest Jym Kurgenin, wielder of the regime's enforcer, the Ghoul; and Myriam Konstantine, unofficial mistress of the current Anglogallian monarch, King Andrew III.
"Well met, my fellows."
To some, it might seem curious that the Nightmare People were all so seemingly young, only in their twenties, or so it deceptively seemed. Their immortality was the product of demonic pacts and specific acts of human sacrifice, infanticide and other necromantic offences against humanity. However, and refreshingly, they were restricted largely to this solar system. Venus-Lucifer, or Astoreth as it had been renamed, had a deceptively hellish name, but in this universe, it was a steaming jungle world, where free nonmage humans and whitewiccans defied the grim hegemony over their neighbouring world and its moon. However, if they could not explore their solar system or universe due to their thaumaturgic confinement to Earth and Luna, the Nightmare People could move in another direction.
To alternate universes.
TO BE CONTINUED [3.55 PM, FEBRUARY 20, 2024]
It is now A.DE 339. For most of Earth-Lucifer's inhabitants, life is 'nasty, brutish and short'. However, that isn't the case within the darkmage elite...
++
LONDRES: INSANCT MESSALINA COVEN:
Zak Zatara ran a hand through his dark, wavy hair as he materialised in the unhallowed of unhalloweds, genuflecting before the statue of Great Baphomet that dominated the sepulchurally silent hall, where desolate winds howled, almost drowning out the screams and despair of its Sacrificial Class victims as they were extirpated on the altars to one or another member of the demonic hierarchy. To maintain the Imperial Alliance's control over this reluctant world, thousands were required to yield their lifeforce to satiate their masters, mistresses or magistrix. He nodded to his fellow members of the Nightmare People, this corrupted world's darkmage rulers- Inza Nelsyn, the current Doktor Kaos, holder of the dread Helm of Abun; his mother, Archpriestess Zatareina, who spoke her chants backward as her tradition required her to; Archpriest Jym Kurgenin, wielder of the regime's enforcer, the Ghoul; and Myriam Konstantine, unofficial mistress of the current Anglogallian monarch, King Andrew III.
"Well met, my fellows."
To some, it might seem curious that the Nightmare People were all so seemingly young, only in their twenties, or so it deceptively seemed. Their immortality was the product of demonic pacts and specific acts of human sacrifice, infanticide and other necromantic offences against humanity. However, and refreshingly, they were restricted largely to this solar system. Venus-Lucifer, or Astoreth as it had been renamed, had a deceptively hellish name, but in this universe, it was a steaming jungle world, where free nonmage humans and whitewiccans defied the grim hegemony over their neighbouring world and its moon. However, if they could not explore their solar system or universe due to their thaumaturgic confinement to Earth and Luna, the Nightmare People could move in another direction.
To alternate universes.
TO BE CONTINUED [3.55 PM, FEBRUARY 20, 2024]
