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saskiavalentineapologist · 11 months

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we're going to start the "love and war crash course posts" off with my greatest obsession in the campaign: the Matriarchs.

The Eldari Empire is where the bulk of the campaign is set in. it is ruled by 7 half-sisters known as the Matriarchs. Each of them has their own house/family that specializes in a different school of magic, each rule from their individual cities, they all share the same dad (who we hate). We have a complicated relationship with the matriarchs. Some of them are wonderful. Most of them are bitches. All of them have so many issues. My thought process was such upon realizing the extent of Them:

SO. obviously i am very normal about these women. these seven, powerful, morally grey, issue-having older women.

my boyfriend chase walked right into this one. he didn't see it coming, but he should've, and now here we are.

i am going to introduce each of the matriarchs under the cut. i want to thank korppipoika (linking them and not @'ing them because they don't need to see this) for drawing portraits of the matriarchs for me. I commissioned all of them so my boyfriend could have a poster of them in his room. i am the best girlfriend

so. the matriarchs.

we're going to go in order of age, starting from the oldest and the worst matriarch.

this is Adele Alnwick. her specialization is enchantment. mind control. you might be able to see where this is going.

Adele is on our shit list at the moment because we met an NPC (Badger) who was my character's (Gilt's) childhood best friend. Some shit went down, we got separated from Badger, Adele got her hands on her, and now Badger is evil mind controlled and wants to kill us.

we do not like adele.

we don't know a ton about her. Her whole thing is "house of corrections" type behavior. you go to her city of Athuum, and you either come back changed or don't come back at all. Athuum is subterranean in the mountains and also surrounded by lava.

She has one son, his name is Naite, and naite was mind controlled his whole life and escaped through the lava to get away from his mother.

if that ain't a testimony to the kind of person Adele is, i don't know what to tell you

next up is the complete opposite end of the scale: the matriarch we love the most.

Meet Freya Lovell.

the Eldari Empire (magic) has been at war with the neighboring dwarven faction (Ymir Conglomerate) (science) and the neighboring human faction (The Grand Imperium) (religion) for the past 100 or so years. House Lovell holds the line against the dwarves from the city of Thantos.

...how do i even begin to introduce Freya Lovell

she's half-giant, 10 feet tall. she is gentle. she is kind. she is a warrior woman who bonds with people (gilt) by kicking them through solid stone walls. Gilt views her as a mother figure and a mentor figure, as well as a dear friend. her specialization is abjuration magic. shielding. protection. she has a spell over her city called Heaven's Gate to make sure no dwarven projectiles hit Thantos. Thantos is shaped like a wedge or a shield. her keep is between her people and the battle line.

we met freya at a point where everything had gone to shit so hard in the campaign. we were wanted fugitives, we had no hope, no allies...and we stumbled upon a field where suddenly we couldn't use magic. and she sat in the center, and as we got closer we realized how big she was. she introduced herself, and gave us our first powerful ally, a home base, and hope besides.

i love Freya Lovell.

Freya had a human husband named Nicholas. he has since passed. Freya had two children with him. the first is her son Castien. they never really connected with each other because he was a bookish lad and Freya more readily bonded with his sister, her daughter Kalia.

about two years ago, there was a nasty battle. freya was out of commission after receiving her scars from a dwarven siege monster (think metal dragon) and so kalia and castien went out in her stead.

kalia died. castien lost his leg. after he recovered enough to realize what had happened, he ran.

...for two years freya was convinced she was the only surviving member of her family. and thanks to Gilt and Lost, we've returned her son to her. her daughter's corpse was taken by the Ymir Conglomerate and turned into an elite soldier known as "a Jack" (playing cards type hierarchy). we have defeated kalia, and are currently working on restoring her control so that freya can have her daughter back, too.

i would kill for freya lovell. we are house lovell in this household.

next up

Octavia Gilkes.

so there was an eensy lie in the above description of the matriarchs. the empire used to be ruled by seven powerful hot older half-sisters. four years ago, in a battle with the Grand Imperium, Octavia's mother Augustine Gilkes, the Illusion Matriarch, was mortally wounded. In her final moments, she activated a spell known as the Hell Wall

the hell wall would trap anyone who entered the city of Thannath in a powerful illusory reality that they couldn't escape from. for four years, anyone who entered the bounds of the city was trapped in this illusion and starved to death.

because Augustine died, the matriarch powers were passed to her only surviving child and only daughter, Octavia. for four years an 18 year old girl was trapped in a prison of her mother's making, a prison where nothing was wrong, everything was perfect, and she couldn't escape. she didn't even realize something was wrong, most of the time.

we traveled to Thannath to see if she could be an ally. through a very complicated series of events, we managed to bring the hell wall down. we found octavia ratty, dirty, emaciated, crying in the same room as her mother's corpse.

and we brought her to thantos. and on the way we were telling her outlandish stories from our adventure, stuff that the hell wall couldn't make up. stuff that would assure her that she was back in the real world. she didn't believe us until she encountered freya's curse.

all the matriarchs have curses. part of their magic. we don't know Adele's. Freya's is that no one can use magic within 100 feet, any type of magic. Octavia's is that her emotions take physical form and can get away from her, so to speak (and literally). when octavia's curse got cancelled out by freya, she collapsed into Gilt and Lost's arms, sobbing her eyes out, because she finally realized that she was truly free.

how many times had she been rescued in there? how many times had she believed she was free only to wake up back in it?

octavia is my daughter. i love her to pieces. second best matriarch.

next.

Helena Farraday.

...Helena goddamn Farraday. we don't know much about Helena.

What we do know is that Helena's curse is that she sees everything going on everywhere all the time all at once. she's the Divination matriarch, and literally Sees All. she's the surveillance state embodied in a person.

she never emotes. never smiles. never speaks above a whisper. hardly blinks. she looks like a statue most of the time

she has a loving husband named Actias Farraday who sees everything she is and sees every single weird quirk as a feature and not a bug. he loves his wife to pieces. the two of them have the most wholesome relationship in this whole damn thing. i have written smut about them.

they have four children. two are spies in the other powers. the other two are the secret police.

helena sees the future. but if she tells anyone about it, it changes. so helena is doomed to see everything that will happen to everyone everywhere all at once but cannot say a word about it.

...we have no real opinions on Helena Farraday. she's the one we know the least about. she seems chill, and i have no ill will towards her.

oh the next one is a treat

Ethalind Newmont.

where do we even fucking start with ethalind. she's the matriarch everyone thinks of when they think matriarch. she's 7 feet tall. she's on all the propaganda posters. she's the evocation specialist. literally her thing is destroying people from long range.

she's also a massive hedonist and throws elaborate orgies in the capital. she has had 9 kids with 7 different dads (2 sets of twins). she is the matriarch with the highest kid count. i know in my heart that she has a breeding kink.

i love her.

she's terrible.

her curse is that her magic literally eats her body if she uses it to destroy. her arms are just bone, but her Transmutation sister made her rings that transform her arms back to normal as long as she wears them.

the palace in the capital city of Varantha is white and gold. opulence taken to its extreme. the transmutation sister literally makes gold but ethalind has more of it. everything is white and gold, ethalind is a stickler for it

she shirked her duties, actually. she prematurely passed on the matriarch powers to her eldest son through a magic artifact and fucked off to do...whatever she does in her free time idk.

honestly i support this decision, having magic that destroys your body sucks, she's honestly a girlboss for deciding that ruling wasn't making her happy and fucking off to have fun. i love her for this

we saw her at a party once. she took 15 minutes start to finish to make her entrance and when Gilt told her that she understood the impulse to "set it down" (her responsibilities) ethalind took her out onto the veranda and bitched her out for 10 minutes straight.

she is so insane crazy. none of the matriarchs are hinged in the way they are supposed to be, but ethalind is deranged. she is unhinged. she is such a fascinating npc and i love her. can't wait to see more of her

Lorelei Omand. the transmutation sister i have talked so much about.

lorelei is another one we don't know a ton about. we don't know her curse. she's the first matriarch we met because we were passing through Mymeara and happened to rescue her youngest kid, only daughter, blatant favorite (Lola) from a kidnapping plot ordered by lorelei's youngest son, Dominic.

she turned him to gold as punishment. really horrifying implications for her entire palace being solid gold.

she has four kids, each from a different suitor that was kinda hand selected for her?? she hasn't expressed much interest in like actually pursuing someone herself, she's had people paraded in front of her and went from there.

the only issue i have with lorelei is that she shows obvious, blatant favoritism to her daughter and kinda neglects her sons. listen. freya isn't mom of the year. but lorelei is still worse. she's good with lola!! but not so much with the rest of them

lorelei is the only sister to be half-human, and also doesn't have pretty long hair like the rest of her sisters. she's insecure about it :(

and. hoo boy. oug h. here we go. last one

Saskia Valentine.

she's enemy #2, after Adele. She's my girlfriend's character (lost)'s mom. if ethalind is nuts, saskia is batshit.

saskia killed her nephew (ethalind's youngest) on a live zoom call. saskia fucks otherworldly entities to have kids that she uses as war machines. saskia is the conjuration specialist, and spends 10 years prepping for the fuck of the decade so that she can have another war machine baby. she has 7 kids, 6 horrendously powerful sons and Lost :) 6 different dads, Lost and her eldest brother share the same demon/force from before creation dad in a neat bookending of the bunch

saskia resides in Altensar. nobody knows what in the goddamn hell is going on in altensar. saskia doesn't like sharing, and people tend to not come back if they go up there. she's terrifying.

whenever chase does her voice, i am overcome with murderous rage. i hate her so much every time i listen to her talk. however, she is so incredibly sexy and i want her to step on me. you know? she inspires so many contradictions, and i don't understand how she does it.

lost is something called a "seraph" which we have heard briefly mentioned by a hologram of the matriarch's mutual dad, Adamwyn. we don't like grandpa. im not convinced that grandpa isn't in saskia's basement

OH YEAH

saskia was the youngest and dear ol dad's favorite. which tracks so much to me that it makes me angry. it makes so much sense. she was spoiled rotten by her dad and doesn't even stop to think, let alone think that she might be wrong about something

i love her. she's so fascinating. i hate her. i can't believe how attractive she is. i want to strangle her. if she kissed me i would fear for my life due to my proximity. i want her to kiss me. i want to be on a different continent from this woman at all times. do not let her near me. but i also want to play with her hair and listen to her talk about her evil plans.

she inspires so many conflicting emotions. i don't understand. im in love with her. i hate her. i think she's sexy. she makes me so irrationally angry.