#urhalzantrani

[lightdancer1]

New chapter up:

Our sister's defiance of the laws raises the reality that has drawn these entities to act. Her role as the one voice who can speak as the great diplomat and as a source whom all can rely upon to speak means she has become indispensable beyond the rules and her adhering to them would become a catastrophe in its own right. From that fear they spoke to the legend, asked it to intervene.

His hand was on his sister's shoulder and he could feel a fierce heat like that of a fever. 

So it did, and now she is here. 

Silence fell. 

How do we aid her, brother? 

A brief flash of sorrow crossed Destiny's face. 

It is the nature of what has been and what will be that we cannot. Not at at present. 

A silence fell, for a time. 

I do not accept that, big brother. 

Desire took a step forward. 

Our sister, for once in her life, refused to accept something. She learned from the fate of my twin, the first version of her, and she actually acted for our big brother. 

Dream did not push Desire's hand from his shoulder when they set it there, curious as to where Desire was going with this. 

Are we to sit back and allow the rule that for one of us to aid another, even unasked, is to be a kind of great evil? 

[lightdancer1]

Another glimpse of a different one from said original fiction:

There was a blur of motion and then a being hovered in front of her in white armor, eyes gleaming a brilliant red as the veins around them mirrored that light.

There is a reason that sorcerers are cautioned not to call up that which they cannot put down. Before I encountered the children of Urhalzan I was already a being able to throw planets with ease, and the light you see can ignite stars. I, the Last, the Eternal.

She smiled then and then she cracked her neck slightly with a noise that made all a roaring sound of silence, blood oozing from cracked eardrums that would never hear again.....and yet her voice echoed as if nothing at all had happened.

The Unmaker, the Fateful Lightning, the End of Empire, the Refining Fires, the Eye of Eternity. They all travel in a troupe, and you are fortunate the second and the fourth are not here. They would be making short work of this. But then I do not need them.

She raised her right hand, the fingers of the gauntlet pointing to the skies like small mountains.

I am the Voice of the Stars. The Music of the Spheres.

She opened her mouth and seemed to inhale and then harmonics echoed and she landed, shaking her head.

By then the clouds of magma on the sky of dark obsidian had faded and the Refining Fires had landed beside her.

I told you. Doesn't matter how obscure you think you are. Eternity is vast. Sooner or later some damn fool is going to read a book they shouldn't, recite a couplet, and then bam! Perfectly fine afternoon ruined by someone who wanted to unleash a contained god for power.

She shook her head.

Even if they got the actual gods they wanted instead of us, they wouldn't control such entities either.

Well they got me.

Verulzanzunui nodded, a clawed finger tapping against her chin.

They'll learn. Break a world or two if you have to. It might seem counterproductive but the powerful who'd need to do keep tabs on those things. We have eternity in the palms of our hands, what's a single world, or even a single planetary system?

[lightdancer1]

A small excerpt from the next chapter of Of the Lost:

The passage of three soldiers into their world and a starship had casually rocked its foundations in time and space. Swiftly they had entered, swiftly they departed. The arrival of the Hammer of Doom was preceded by a psychic-mystical bow-shock that had the more powerful and even the most middling psychics worldwide falling to their knees screaming with nosebleeds and blood dripping from their mouths, while the mystics stared in blank open-mouthed shock.

Usually the Hammer made her passage smoother, taking less time. The bow-shock rippled out and then a Sun shone right next to Earth and wrapped around it from the vantage point of the Watchtower. It was an eerie, unholy thing. Night was banished, and there were visions of strange alien wars, an armored giant that wielded strange grey smoke wreathed with lightning in a pyroclastic pattern, obliterating whatsoever her gaze fell upon and others. An armored giant whose hands became cannons and unleashed chains of vicious striking energy, a golden-armored being with a bloody red maw and a sword of fire that wrought ruin wherever it struck. A being in a white leotard with eyes that spat twin blasts of flames. A sorceress with dark hair and pallor enhanced by makeup whose hands wrought power that nothing that looked upon it could truly grasp.

A being who flew like a blazing torch that smote the air, eyes shining in righteousness. And beyond all else the silver-armored giant, a being whose presence in fuller form brought most of Earth's psychics save the most powerful to a stunned silence and a set of comas that would last for two weeks. The light formed into a silver-armored shape with a bright blue cape who was small and yet visible around the world, a constellation's gaze that was cold and detached, black lips peeling to form a serrated-fanged grin with a cold and detached fashion.

A quarter-hour had lapsed, the light was gone, and then the giant fell like fire from Heaven, landing in a cloud of dust and with an impact registered worldwide on the Richter scale, her arms spread out at her side and her cape billowing in the wind produced by her impact. She tilted her head and looked at the place where the deed she'd come to check on had happened.

Gotham City had been rocked a century prior by the appearance of the strange monster-men from beyond the stars. They were rank and file troopers of a kind who numbered in Legions. This one, a lord of their kind, had a weight about her that brought a kind of gravitational distortion where objects bent around her, and then her head angled up.

Teleportation flashes and a streak of green light. She curled her lips. No time for this, but better sooner than later. Two Green Lanterns, one a dark-brown haired woman with light brown skin, one a buzz-cut Black man with a goatee, two Kryptonians, the Martian Manhunter, the Aquaman, and a shaken, bloodied Raven and Zatanna Zatara whose hands glimmered with light.

"Surrender now," the words of Superman were curt. "We know your kind aren't friendly."

They could only see parts of what loomed before them, cold light radiating from her skin and her armor. Dark hair with streaks of neon blue through it like a tiger's stripes. A constellation-gaze of three eyes in sets of three across her forehead, the fanged teeth within the black lips, fingers on gauntlets that flickered slightly, a cynical curl to her lips as if of amusement or disdain. The ground cratered beneath her boots, the strange gravitational effect near her presence, the cape swishing and the way that the metal of her armor did not cast a luster as metal ought.

I am here to save your world. That more than anything else is what should matter to you. And I cannot be harmed by any artifice of human hands or of human make. Nor of yours, nor of anything in all existence in realms far beyond this one. You would waste my time and the survival of your multiverse, for the sake of pride and misunderstanding.

"Then surrender, and talk to us."

After I examine the impact zone and see what my kind have wrought here. There are things that can only be satisfied with one's own gaze.

She turned and knelt, her immensity making the ground crater beneath her and then two Green Lantern rings formed chains that sought to reach for her right arm, as her rightmost triad of eyes turned to them.

No time for this, but I am going to enjoy it all the same.

[lightdancer1]

Next chapter of The Path of the Lost up:

And it provides a neat illustration of both the Butterfly Effect in that Dream of the Endless is able to escape imprisonment in 20 years instead of in 1989 as a casual byproduct of the events in this chapter.

[lightdancer1]

Figured out how to avoid repeating myself in this one:

[lightdancer1]

A small glimpse of one of the entities from my original fiction:

Once she had been a mortal woman named Erin, and then there had come the Change. The offer, the instruction at the side of an arch-mage. She had been a mortal woman, and now she was more. Her eyes shone like stars, and her body had grown with the changes. She no longer adhered to the religion she'd been taught as a child, for how could she? This was an Existence of Gods and what passed for a creator was worse than anything of the Biblical narratives.

She still knew the teachings, and couldn't resist an ironic quotation.

There were Nephilim on the Earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of the Gods saw the daughters of men, and took wives for themselves, whomsoever they chose.

Power danced around her right hand as she leaned forward, watching it trail and move in a serpentine fashion, the hissing pattern of its motions rasping the air. There was a noise and she paused. A man. How ironic that as a child she'd delighted in old stories written by bitter men afraid that anything unlike themselves was unhallowed and monstrous.

"I come to cast you down, witch, in the name of-"

She stood up at her full height, then.

Begone.

Unlight rippled and moved in a serpentine fashion and then there was nothing as she shook her head.

Living these tales is ever so much stranger than reading them.

You're telling me.

She turned to see the hulking interwoven mass of flesh and metal with his flesh dark brown as the metal was bright silver she called Vincent and others the End of Empire.

You know I never did understand. I call myself a name empowered by that transformation and it sticks with me through what's going to be a very, very long life. Why do they call you the Eye of Eternity again?

Erin shrugged.

Could be worse. Could have called me the Hair of Twilight or something.

Yeah, Vincent brushed his chin, silver in that moment.

At least they didn't call me the tin man. Hah.

[lightdancer1]

In terms of Urhalzantrani culture the Oversoul is one of the more important factors of it

In its original form when they were a nomadic culture of the steppe, it was a means of at least theoretically negotiating both a tribal truce across the lines of the old culture and of enforcing a sacred edge to marriage over the older custom of simple kidnapping. Theory and praxis were not the same things.

After the Unification and the shift to the Deathless Empire it became in reality what the older sacred traditions said it was, a linkage of souls that brings a kind of unity and peace to the individuals that have it. The Oversoul, unlike other takes on the soulmate idea is a voluntary thing at the start, people choose it and then it brings together a set of people who form a bloc, or a unity.

Each individual from Urhalzan has one, and the various cosmic entities in my world either already have most of theirs (Lightdancer) all of theirs (Azar) or are in the beginning stages of building it (Butcher and Shadow-woman).

At times mortals, or what at least start out as mortals, can wind up drawn into it without fully expecting the full meaning of it. This is a factor that ends up blindsiding more than a few people in the cases of the Shadow-woman and the Lightdancer.

[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.

[lightdancer1]

Thanks to Lovecraft being public domain:

One of the bits I use to integrate both my original and my fanfiction work is my take on the Necronomicon/Al-Azif. I usually refer to it with the Arabic name, and since the original Cthulhu mythos referred to volumes I give it 99 volumes. In my stories one of the volumes refers to the Oathkeepers/Kelzhandari, aka the Urhalzantrani....and one of them, even if not by name or more than veiled allusions, is all about the seven Endless who in my own cosmology have a mirror with the Seven Outer Gods.

Abdul Hazred is one of the Riddah prophets in my particular history, and essentially an archetypal evil sorcerer in a specifically Levantine/Hijazi/Arabic context.

As the in-universe ur-example of the Lovecraftian main character, Hazred was a celibate nerd who deciphered the deep truths of the universe, including the Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth cycles and various spells that can actually do measurable damage to various eldritch entities or summon them with a guaranteed result.....though if the person who does the summoning forgets not to call up what they can't put down it's on them when whatever they summon invariably turns on them.

The great lords of Urhalzan/the Kelzhandari are volume 91, the Endless are volume 49 (seven times seven, natchurly).

Those are the only set of volumes that I have with specific numbers, while the Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu cycles dominate a much larger portion of the narrative, along with various myths and couplets of the Dreamlands. And as far as it goes, Lovecraft did the 'collective unconsciousness of sapient life manifests as dreams and dreaming as fantasy' thing more successfully in the long term than his predecessor Dunsany and both predate Gaiman's Sandman mythology.

I do integrate aspects of Pegana and the Lovecraft Dreamlands as a part of the Dreaming in the Sandman-centric tales. Celephais and Sarnath and Kadath in the Cold Waste and the various monsters of Lovecraft's dreamlands, as well as the Gods of Pegana (Mung is Death, the figure who has a book that holds the future of the world and when the future ends the world ends with it is Destiny and that one in particular is so close to Destiny that if Gaiman didn't riff on that for his cosmology it is an identical concept, at least).

[lightdancer1]

Me coming back to the Azula and Himiko fanfic after several months of forgetting i was reading it, and opening the fic to where i left off only to be absolutely blasted by the dai lei brainwashing / revealing the truth of the world / Yangchen v Agni spacetime brawl chapters.

Fantastic fic but absolutely incomprehensible place to jump back in with my poor memory. Your amazing fucked up Omnipresent gods do&say such poetic whimsical dastardly things. Is there a meta post you can direct me to that you talk about these Outsider gods in ?

(Also, is it the “same” Agni in this fic & your Dragon of the west fic, as in, Agni is Omni-universal and is aware of what is going on in both these AUs?)

My tags 'Urhalzantrani' and 'God on the Gilded Throne' are the ones to look up there.

And no, most of the time I have Agni as a deity who incorporates a mashup of Huitzilopotchli and Amaterasu, as per the Fire Nation's Mesoamerican past and Japanese mirrors. With more than a few aspects to not copy real life religions for a fanfic which I consider a disrespect to real life religions.

[lightdancer1]

And then there's the Butcher

Who was the last one added and was a part all along of the multiverse, when that became a fully established element of the cosmology. She reflects what I call 'parallels' insofar as they are the equivalent alternate universe selves of people. In her case she is a parallel of the main character of the series, Xaderavcal the Unifier. This particular parallel would seemingly be 'Mary Sue' except that she gets there by an extradimensional incursion slaughtering her family and the basic function she fills was a case, prior to reading anything about the World Eaters, of being her family's equivalent of Angron.

As in 'she introduces herself in a rain of blood and wherever she is, whatever she lands on isn't.' She's less the Executioner and more the Destroyer. And like all her kin she has many names, most of which are various euphemisms for annihilation and butchery because that's....exactly what she is and how she goes about doing it.

As the Urhalzantrani are an entire species of immortal imperialists she's essentially imperialism stripped of its refined traits and as such a parallel to the arch-villain and the irony that one of these is the 'hero' and one of these is the 'villain' is meant to show that at a cosmic level if it's Azarath flaying your soul and reconstructing you as a flesh-puppet for the mad God on the Gilded Throne to torment indefinitely or this one, people might be forgiven for wondering where the difference actually lies.

[lightdancer1]

By her 1,000th iteration the Death of the Death Cycle

Has essentially wrung dry all the prospects that she can self-terminate and end her cycle (and this universe sees her bringing in the big guns and the big guns in question fail and the Urhalzantrani go 'that's not supposed to happen' and things get worse, which is why this is both one of her most damaging experiences and one of the shortest).

From there she starts wearing jackets and armor, at different points, and ends up with a biker vibe next to most of her other counterparts, including an increasing preference for an undercut. So she'd seem both rougher-hewn and with a sartorial and hairstyle difference that'd make her distinctly stand out from all of her counterparts in different universes.

By the 14,000th she's in full on 'I've lived too long and seen too much bullshit' mode and becomes an anti-nihilist who simply tries to make peace with her cycle and to live through each iteration with a kind of joy in life that oscillates between manic and full on Surtr mode.

[lightdancer1]

And last but not least, The God on the Gilded Throne, the arch-villain

In the original take on these stories as an expy of Raven, she's the expy of the Azar of Azarath (hence the term Azar and Azarath being associated with her). The 80s Azar was a near-immortal demigoddess who manipulated Raven into being the proxy for an annihilating bit of soul-magic to kill her father and was in a multi-multiversal enmity with him as per the Terror of Trigon.

The original version of her had her be incompetent and selectively oblivious. This version evolved into the personification of Imperialism, Tyranny, Western civilization, and being the most direct Cosmic Horror of the bunch. She is a feral maddened entity who is Firstborn of Chaos, operating as the same kind of Chaos as Event Horizon and Warhammer 40K (and indeed in my cosmology she is what becomes the Immaterium/Chaos in 40K AUs and that's not even as far as her evolution as Chaos goes, it's more the second baby step).

The Lightdancer is the End of All Things and Death, essentially. The supervillain is always the mirror of the hero, so where she's Darkness, Death, and Finality, the God on the Gilded Throne is a cosmic virus that devours and flays souls and remakes them in her image and in her likeness, longing for death and unable to die. She devours and re-sculpts universes from sub-atomic particles to the widest ranging galactic superclusters, reforging worlds to a point that there is one God, absolute and indivisible, on the Gilded Throne. All that is in Azarath is her, remade, living their greatest dreams twisted into their greatest nightmares.

As such she's also the one that appears most frequently in crossovers with my fandom work as she can be a more insidious virus-like thing spreading from a temple in a more subtle Lovecraftian horror or go full-scale 'Opening an Eye of Terror by Goatseing the universe for shits and giggles'.

In trope terms, as she evolved into one of the arch-villains she took notes primarily from Morgoth Bauglir, inverting the main aspect of Morgoth that in diffusing himself into existence he weakened himself out of spite. She makes herself infinitely stronger and is too big for the Unmaker Force to crush before she can rebuild herself, the only entity for which this is true. She also takes notes from Christian theological definitions of God....but is not an expy of Darkseid so much as a shadow-mirror of Leto II of Dune fame.

Also as a nod to Lovecraft her face is modeled after the human relative known as Paranthropus boisei, while her appearance is everything he would have loved (blonde, blue-eyed, an imposing Germanic shape) and as per Western civilization all the various strands meet, but chiefly that of the Graeco-Roman and modern overseas colonialism aspects.

The other Urhalzantrani deconstruct the older ideas of eldritch abominations. She reconstructs them and is one of the two with interests in humanity and by far the most malevolent. And all she needs to do to devour a universe is send an avatar to a single planet and by her presence alone the plague of her existence spreads until that universe is remade with most entities only understanding the agonizing changes as they spread and then All Are One in the Azar.

As "Azar" means "Fire" in Avestan, one of her main names she goes by is 'Undying Flame' and she's associated with imagery of Hell and light. As another part of her being an anti-Morgoth is that instead of a Dark Lord on a Dark Throne there's a being of Light on a Gilded Throne. Morgoth wanted to wreck the universe because it couldn't be his, she hungers to devour all things because she's a feral raving being of chaos who was once a person, knows what she is, hates it, and the one thing she wants most eludes her for eternity. Namely.....the ability to die.

[lightdancer1]

By contrast the Shadow Woman

Originated as the expy of the 2003 Raven, hence her various stylistic influences. Originally, too, it was more of a case of both versions co-existing and butting heads, but she evolved down the most alien lines of all of the original concepts of the Tales. She went from 2003 Raven to a full-time trickster and a force of true neutrality able to be both the hero and the villain and a cosmically powered Bugs Bunny type who's metafictionally aware.

In short imagine if Nyarlathotep and Bugs Bunny overlapped in specific aspects and you faced a cosmic entity capable and willing of rewriting narratives whenever it suits them and able to literally wield the very story it's in against the humans around it.

Also in one of my edgier elements I've ultimately kept intact she had a Xipe Totec moment she pulled on the Archangel Metatron when she was in a bad mood and that angel kept pushing at a fledgling Urhalzantrani that kept warning him to leave her alone. And thus she made her armor for her more evil appearances out of the literal tanned hide including the wings of the Angel of the Lord, because that's what happens when she's the villain.

In her more heroic appearances she wears golden armor, as a true neutral figure she takes a few leafs from the Comedian.

She's also the only American-spawned entity and as a true blooded daughter of the USA has a handheld Avenger autocannon geared to fire 100 megaton rounds that never miss, which in most cases is blatant overkill.

[lightdancer1]

It's kind of funny in retrospect

I designed the Lightdancer initially as a pastiche of Raven who incorporated aspects of Superman, and of Wilbur Whateley. That's why her most destructive ability, the Lightning-Smoke, around which her entire characterization ultimately evolved is simply taking Raven's 80s smoke cloud teleportation and her soul self and mashing them up.

The bone-hued pallor was chosen to make her seem inhuman, the starlight eyes that became characteristic of the Urhalzantrani for the same reason.

When the Urhalzantrani became a species and I came up with the idea of making Azarath the Timurids to the Urhalzantrani Mongol Empire, the whole idea of a deathless imperialism rooted in wholesale genocidal conquest and Space Mongol Empire that spreads a concept of abolishing death that sounds great until you get to all the fine print, then I had the idea that the easy way to make the superheroic figure stand out was to give her power based on death and the end of all things in a deathless society.

Technically she looks like an expy of Death of the Endless (which was why I spent about my first decade or so of awareness she existed annoyed at the aesthetics she had and little interested in exploring it and then I bought her TPB after realizing that I'd actually read my first Sandman story in an old 9/11 TPB and the rest is history) but the actual roots are two very different characters.

The Lightdancer as an expy of Raven had the whole 'causes the end of the world' factor the entire time, but as she's evolved into a take on Lovecraft's cosmic horror and on a harsh deconstruction of a Derleth style 'benevolent eldritch abomination' she's gone down different paths. She still retains the superheroic aspect, however.

[lightdancer1]

One simple factor I've been developing as the new Sandman stories evolve:

The Death Cycle's cosmology is a fixed point in time and it's not changing to include any of this, thankfully. Got that whole thing planned from Point A to Point Z and have all that worldbuilding both separate and its own thing.

That said with the rest I'm developing the idea that there are at least a few ironies in how Death and Dream become the closest of the Endless and even moreso at a superficial level. 'Death gets the glove' is one of the classic storylines in all universes, with all species because mortality has that fear of death and dying (and where the Urhalzantrani end up crossing into things this gets dialed up to 11).

Dream is lord of stories, so it would be a very logical conclusion that with this being so classic an idea of narratives that the lord of stories and the Reaper are not friends or friendly. And Death *does* have at least some resentment that whenever her little brother's sphere gets ginned up and any species goes through its mythical era she gets a Midnighter Moment.

Add to this that Dream and Desire were initially close and that Death spent so long as a hard, brittle, isolated loner and it ends up mattering a very great deal in any given scenario just how these changes happened.

In the Death Cycle it has a very specific cyclical answer and Death gets extremely frustrated by the same toxic pedestal syndrome recurring until she really starts bucking the trends and finding out the hard way that iterations aren't nearly that flexible and pushing too hard at them is why some universes might last 24 billion years and others 4.