Chronicles of Pietro Ludvigs (original fantasy)

[Academia Nut]

Yeah, while my own attempt was rather simplistic, it at least gave my more artistically inclined friend (ironically a fellow engineering student) the material to work with so that it would be easier for people to picture what exactly the vanver are supposed to look like. Of course Cherach is a bit of an outlier, but it still gives a good measure I think.

Plus now you can see why Pietro may be just a wee bit smitten with her.

[Alan Bolte]

Excellent, thank you, and thank your friend!

[Academia Nut]

Arrrgh! Stupid writer's block. But I think I'm slowly chipping away at it by making a sort of slush pile where I can store ideas for a later date, and if you guys are interested, I have a sort of encylcopedia entry on something called an Avatar of the Death Lord, something that will not be appearing for quite a while. Perhaps a tad spoilerish, but nothing too serious.

[Academia Nut]

Hmmm... it would seem that posting messages at 3 in the morning means that no one ever notices...

Anyway, since I feel the need to post something, here is something from the slush pile.

Avatars

Avatars of the Death Lord, occasionally called Blood Titans, are the ultimate expression of blood magic, especially considering that conjuring one will be the last act of any blood mage during his or her lifetime. Conjured out of blood and earth, these are the pinnacle of human battle weapons, a single one capable of turning the tide of an entire campaign despite their short life spans. Of course, the tremendous amount of blood required in the forming of one and the sacrifice of a blood mage makes the creation of an avatar an often desperate move.

The first Avatar was conjured up by Jayendra at the end of his long and successful career. Having gathered together a band of a thousand warriors, he had managed to carve out a buffer zone about the Holy Valley so that the settlement there would be free from elven raiding, but his army was confronted with overwhelming numbers and forced to engage in a pitched, do or die battle by a force of almost three thousand elves, over three hundred of them mounted on nightmares. The battle was long and bitter, with those first warriors giving as good as they got, but superior tactics and equipment could not overcome the greater physical strength and speed of the elves along with numbers, the mobility offered by the nightmares, and their magical illusions.

As the last of his warriors lay dying about him, Jayendra used his abilities to summon their blood to him in an attempt to create a shield. What happened instead was the birth of the first Avatar. The bodies of the fallen, both human and elven, dissolved into blood and formed about him, while the earth offered up soil and clay and stones, to create a monstrous body about Jayendra, shaped like a man but over four times the size, and bearing a sword as long as the Avatar was tall.

With skin of iron and diamond, flesh of clay and brick, and toxic breath of boiling blood, the Avatar slew dozens of elves with each swing of its sword and exhalation from its cavernous maw. Elven weapons shattered upon its impenetrable skin, and their illusions did no good for it bore their blood and so it could see through such things. Every elf that was slain by the Avatar added its flesh and blood to the flesh of the Blood Titan, strengthening it, making it grow larger and stronger. After about the fiftieth nightmare slain, the Avatar also gained their ability to dance upon the winds, and it took to the air to ensure that none would escape its wrath.

But for all its might, the Avatar did not last long beyond the battle. Its fuel was blood, and with every breath it exhaled the life giving fluid, causing its skin to grow thicker and its flesh harder. While this made it tougher, it also slowed it down to the point where it was no longer animate, but a lifeless statue. Jayendra, trapped at the heart of the Avatar with an impenetrable layer of steel, diamond, and rock hard brick, was slowly crushed to death and suffocated.

While both armies were utterly annihilated, the elves refused to attack the Holy Valley again for another hundred years, terrified of the colossus standing guard at the mouth of the western entrance to that sacred place, allowing the survives to rebuild and the warriors to be reborn.

Over the course of the First War, twenty-seven Avatars were created, the smallest being the one created at the Battle of Weller’s Pass, where as part of a holding action the defender created one with less than five hundred bodies on hand, forcing the elves to retreat and wait for the Avatar to expire, giving the rest of the retreating army time to get away. The largest was intentionally built for the Siege of the Snow Queen’s Citadel by sacrificing over twenty thousand traitorous dwarven slaves and using the almost forty thousand human bodies already lost in the assault on the ramparts. That truly titanic Avatar finished the battle with a single stroke, obliterating the citadel with its mind bogglingly huge flaming sword. So enormous was the sword, and so intense was the heat radiating off it that many who saw it died from heat stroke and the icy walls of the fortress were evaporating before the actual impact. Whereas most Avatars expired after the battle, the Avatar of the Siege took nearly three days to finish solidifying, during which it annihilated two other, minor elven holdouts. Some suspect that the blood of over a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand men, dwarves, and elves went into that Avatar.

Since the end of the First War, only one Avatar has been created, the blood mages refusing to enter into any wars not directly involving the elves. That Avatar was created at the beginning of the Vanyian Purge when the elves began stepping up their raids upon the Vanyian and Olvanyian regions and after slaughtering an entire town, the current blood mage at the time took revenge by using the dead to create an Avatar and attack the nearest elven mountain stronghold. While the damage inflicted was relatively minor in the long run, the Avatar was used as a rallying cry for the entire subsequent crusade that drove the elves into the Kelvanyian Territories.

Inanimate Avatars are objects of intense worship and veneration, each one having an entire monastic order dedicated to its upkeep. While the first four were created about the Holy Valley, few battles were fought close to the city there as the war progressed. The next five were actually physically dragged back to the Valley after the battles, but as the war went further and further away the decision was made to cease transporting the Avatars, especially as there was a definite tendency towards growth as the battles became bigger. In fact, with the creation of the staggeringly monstrous Avatar of the Siege, the phrase “To move an Avatar” became an expression of impossibility.

A typical Avatar shrine will feature a temple complex built around the holy colossus, with the Avatar itself in the central courtyard. Typically the last few footprints it left will be preserved as sacred pools allowed to fill with water either from the rain or the springs that tend to pop up about the great gouges left in the earth by the enormous weight of an Avatar. Pilgrims will gather about these relics of the First War and pray, either to the martyrs that make up its flesh or the bones of the saint buried in the heart of the statue, and some are even allowed to touch the feet of these monstrous constructs. To a one, all of the Avatars are so old that their steel skin has gone brilliant red with rust, but so thick and so blessed by the Deathlord are they that not one has yet to crumble away with the passage of time.

---

So yeah, pissing off the humans in this place = major pain.

[bilateralrope]

Nasty.

[Darth Yoshi]

But man, what a way to go.

[LadyTevar]

Wow... The Death Lord's serious about killing the Elves. What did their Goddess do to HIM?

[Alferd Packer]

Perhaps we've been given a glimpse into Pietro's ultimate fate? Or, more interestingly, what if he figures out a way to invoke the avatar at will, gaining a temporary boost in strength and hardiness at the expense of being nearly crippled for a period afterwards?

[Junghalli]

You should theoretically be able to dig the Avatar's controller out. The main issue would be getting to him before the concrete completely hardens and he suffocates.

One possibility I can think of is to strap a big trumpet-like thing to the guy's face and have it stick out of the Avatar, and having him breathe through that.

It might also be a good idea to have dress in some kind of leather body suit, so they don't have to worry about getting the hardened concrete off his flesh.

[Academia Nut]

Maybe with a smaller Avatar you could break out the blood mage inside, but the problem is that there is a certain critical mass required, the 500 guys used in the rear guard action is pretty close to the bare minimum. Also, if you want to dig the guy inside out, you have to do it very close to the end of the Avatar as it will attempt to heal the damage done. And considering that its skin is made of steel and diamond with a concrete backing, breaking open the skin will be a bitch with modern tools, let alone the medieval/renaissance equipment they have to work with.

Of course, with the larger Avatars, like the Siege Avatar which is in the "smack Godzilla around" size range (I picture it being in the 150-300m size range as it took out multiple layers of fortification with one swing of its sword, and the sword is as large as the Avatar) there is no hope in hell of getting the blood mage out alive, what with the fact that you'll probably need bunker busting munitions to crack its hide.

[White Haven]

And as human civilization grows in numbers and technology and density, those numbers are only going to go up. Imagine if, say, the Elves sacked a city of a half-million people, and were almost done massacring it...is there any upper limit to the Avatar of Blood's size?

[Alferd Packer]

Another vector would be this: Pietro would become the Avatar accidentally. Then he frantically tries to extricate himself from the Avatar before it hardens permanently. Hilarity ensues as he destroys half the countryside scraping huge chunks of blood and rock off of him. A scene like that would have some of the pitchest black humor you could write.

But I got the idea of invoking the mini-avatar from Baldur's Gate 2, where the main character gains the ability to invoke the avatar of Bhaal at will (and at great personal cost) and turn into a killing machine. But no matter.

Some other random thoughts: What happens if you pile, say, a ship full of dead bodies, add a blood mage, and sail it a hundred miles out to sea (or some appropriate distance past the continental shelf), then invoke the avatar? Given an appropriate amount of blood, but lacking any convenient earth for mass, does the spell crap out? Or is it able to draw the ocean floor up for the blood mage? Or does it simply encase the mage in a giant blood clot or scab?

[Junghalli]

Hmm, extending the breathing tube idea, I wonder if it would be possible to give him a hole he could crawl out of. Say, you put him inside some kind of heavily padded suit before you do the ritual. The suit gives him enough wiggle room that hopefully he can wiggle out of it and into a pipe just wide enough to accomodate him. Maybe put some kind of hatch over the pipe so it doesn't become an Achilles heel the enemy can use to take out the Avatar by shooting a golden BB through and killing the controller.

There's also the possibility of cracking the hide with explosives, assuming they have gunpowder.

And as human civilization grows in numbers and technology and density, those numbers are only going to go up. Imagine if, say, the Elves sacked a city of a half-million people, and were almost done massacring it...is there any upper limit to the Avatar of Blood's size?

As it's held together with concrete and iron there should be an upper limit determined by the structural strength of a concrete building with iron members. Of course, that's for the inactive Avatar, while active it's held together with magic so who the heck knows.

I suspect by the time cities that large are common Elves are going to be a nonthreat. Cities that big imply a modern industrialized civilization. If guys with swords can stand up to them I don't see them having much of a chance against guys with machine guns and mortars, unless they develop the same tech (doesn't seem likely), or develop equivalent magic weapons (more plausible). The thought of Avatars being used in industrial-age warfare like WWI-style conflicts though ... you could get some ridiculously huge ones.

[Academia Nut]

Well, the structural limits for concrete and steel (note steel not iron, it has a carbon content along with composite layers with sheets of diamond) are pretty damn high as buildings like the Burj Dubai show, so the upper limit of Avatar size is probably somewhere in the 1km range, although that would require millions of sacrifices and/or victims to go into its construction. Of course at that point the sword is superfluous as just walking would be capable of wiping out armies with the ground tremors and the fact that it is probably going to punch down to the bedrock with every step it takes. At that point modern armies would have to bust out bunker busting nukes to deal with the bastard. Escape tunnels wouldn't really work though because the Avatar's size is not constant, it grows as it kills, and in any case it would consider the tunnel the same way your body would consider a pole stuck in you: a foreign body in need of elimination. It would simply cover over, crush, and fill in any tube you tried to stick in it.

Also, if you want to know what the elves did to piss of the humans, you can probably come up with a decent (if apalling) theory from the dream sequences (primary clues are in Ochre's and Jayendra's sequences), and also marvel at the fact that they were willing to bury the hatchet with the elves afterwards, although that was more for pragmatic survival reasons than actual, real forgiveness. As to what happened between the gods, well not even TithoniousSyndrome knows that one exactly, but its pretty gruesome as well.