The Furies: The Terror Of The Last King

The world trembled on a date Sargassans try their hardest to forget. It was near the end of the Intolerable War against the Aptoan Empire, when the highest holy woman of the Church of Sargasso, the angelic benefactor upon whom the saviors of Sargasso looked to as their mother and mentor, stood in contrast to their cruel, senile King and was brutally beheaded. She had taken the unwanted, trod upon women of Sargasso and given them a place to live, to work, and ultimately, made them the heroines of their nation against the yoke of Aptoan power. On that day that symbol died so a King’s paranoia and hatred could be appeased.

Unfortunately for all, this act would create a force much more powerful than any in the King’s delusions. This article talks about the origins and makeup of the Furies, lost souls that act as counterparts to the Seraphim Order.

Origin of the Threat

While most of Adel is beyond bigotry, and has nearly always been beyond bigotry, one low period for their egalitarianism arose after hundreds of years of imperialist control by the Aptoans. During the Aptoa rule, particularly in Sargasso, a semblance of patriarchal control arose that made life difficult for women and girls. During this period, the church of Sargasso under Esther Benedictine II began to house and educate girls in special convents. When the Intolerable War broke out, the Aptoa attacked these locations as they attacked any other possible harbinger of revolution. Esther Benedictine discovered a way to help protect her beloved, misguided nation – the Freyja ritual which would turn her girls into Seraphim paladins.

During the Intolerable War, the Sargassan elite directing the people against the Aptoans raised a former cleric named Audarius Volg as their king. Audarius, having served under Esther for a long time, had always been paranoid and suspicious about her and her convents. As the war wore on, Volg was forced to accept women into his army as fighting men diminished – and was forced to accept the Seraphim as his premier fighting force, as they proved capable of defeating the Aptoa.

Near the end of the Intolerable War, the unspeakable happened. Volg completed his sickest power fantasy and finally had Esther Benedictine executed for treason against the state, and beheaded before her adoring public and the Seraphim who so admired her. Many Seraphim quietly, broken-heartedly continued to fight the war, believing they had to protect the nation that Esther so loved. But other Seraphim saw it differently. This act convinced them that everything they had been fighting for was worthless. All along they had been tools to a blighted, fallen system. For them, the world ceased to be worth protecting, and the ideals of their Saint had been desecrated for the final, brutal time. These Seraphim organized and acted.

The king was slain. His family nearly wiped from the face of the world. His palace burned, the capital city of Sargasso ravaged, its people slaughtered. What the Aptoa failed to do, in just a few days the Furies did, and brought low the Sargassan government. The Seraphim host was split into two – the King-Killers as they were called, and the Saviors of Sargasso. Eventually, the remaining, anguished Seraphim rallied their nation and ousted the Furies, preventing them from causing more harm. The Furies escaped into the wastes of Noshiki, the only shelter in this era of world-wide war. The Seraphim rebuilt society as Esther would have wanted it, creating a new royal line and keeping alive her teachings of solidarity, generosity and equality.

The Intolerable War ended. Today Adel has returned to its religious roots of equality and community.

For the Furies, however, the Intolerable War never ended, and will never end. Within the inhospitable land of Noshiki, the land tainted by all that was vile about the Lost World, the Furies struggled and succeeded in surviving, and becoming mistresses of the waste – and in turn the waste enhanced their suffering and their madness as its vengeful reply. The whispers of demons and old gods permeate their minds, and the blood of their Saint is ever dripping before their eyes.

Makeup And Modus Operandi

Like the Seraphim, the Furies are composed of women who’ve undergone the Freyja ritual, a divine investment procedure drawn from the goddess Inunkuru, that is extremely dangerous to apply to biological males – it tends to cause crippling gigantism and bone problems at best, and painful death at worst. The Seraphim have refined their ritual to be less painful and more safe, and it augments their natural strength and maximizes their careful training. The Furies still use the original, unrefined ritual with little in the way of safeguards. Becoming a Fury involves extreme pain. All Furies are exposed to the darkest and most horrid places in the Noshiki wasteland. Their investments occur in ritual locations of specific importance to them. The original furies who escaped Sargasso are still alive and well, ageless in their hatred thanks to the wasteland they inhabit. Many of them have become even more beautiful, healthy and youthful due to their suffusion with the raw energy of Noshiki.

The Furies left Sargasso with all the equipment and knowledge they possessed, matching what the Seraphim have even in the present day. While the Seraphim take girls under their wing as volunteers who wish to protect their nation, the Furies pillage villages and towns of girls and women to subject to the ritual. Those girls who are crippled by the ritual are kept as servants or “pets” while the ones who are empowered are “Nymphs,” the Fury counterpart to the Cherubim trainees of the Seraphim. These conscripts, traumatized and exposed to the demonic and defiled expanse of Noshiki, slowly come around to the ideology of the Furies, and are fully immersed into their culture. Once they’ve achieved the rank of “Lilim” or standard Fury they are given the regalia of a fallen sister – unlike the Seraphim, who entomb equipment, the Furies must recycle it out of need.

The Furies vary in their ideals – the tainted land of Noshiki has driven many incoherent, and some have no ideology except to acquire power for themselves and cause wanton havoc. Those who have stronger wills seek to carry out sacred vengeance upon the world. They believe that the nation and ideals they fought for are fallen, and that only the total destruction of the current civilization can create a just and equal world. By purging every government, slaying every monstrous instrument of power, the Furies will reset civilization. The Furies do not know that the Intolerable War already devastated and erased every such power structure that oppressed them. For them, the new world merely continues the Fall of society.

Furies attack quickly and seemingly at random, and can strike anywhere. Make no mistake: they are not all insane or erratic. Many Furies are as calculating as the most devious Elf, and can enact any conceivable plot. Many Furies seek to be further immortalized as Demon Queens, and to use the awe-inspiring power they’d gain to utterly ruin Sargasso, or any government that happens to be within their grasp. Furies are not a single host, either. There are numerous warbands with anywhere from tens to hundreds of individuals, each warband with their own leaders, their own mythologies and goals.

It is entirely possible for Seraphim to fall and become Furies, albeit they won’t overnight trade-in for a suit of Lilim armor and a thorn-covered sword. The Seraphim are placed in a tough position. They are the awe-inspiring saviors of the land, often held as ideals, as icons and inspiration to the people, but they are not objects – they are people, fallible and emotive. No Seraphim wishes to be a mere icon, she is a person. But she has taken on an incredible responsibility, one only her fellow Seraphim could understand. The Seraphim must deal with a flawed world, with flawed leaders and mentors, and they must do so while remaining true to the teachings of what they consider a perfect Saint.

Not all of them can cope with that: particularly if they must be faced with the desecration of this ideal. Seraphim must take great care fighting Furies. Most convents have a level of secrecy surrounding the origin and continued activity of the Furies, for the protection of their young Seraphim.

Powers, Allies, Equipment

The Furies are incredibly and imperceptibly strong. A Nymph can seem outwardly a teenage girl and still pick up and throw an adult, or overpower and throttle a man dead with her bare hands. Power courses through their very veins, and as far as Repulsion magic is concerned, every Fury can manifest damaging energies as well as the average mage. What furies lack in subtlety, they have in power and endurance in spades. An adult, full-fledged Fury is a terror to behold, and entire expeditions into Noshiki have fallen to just a few furies. They are truly an enemy that all adventurers should approach with extreme caution.

Furies use Arrowlances much like Seraphim do. These weapons utilize an arcane engine to fire a bolt at rapid speeds through kinetic force. However, most of the Fury’s arrowlance engines have broken down over time – a Fury typically uses her own magic to shoot her arrowlance. The equipment situation will vary across warbands. All furies have their armor and regalia, even the Nymphs have at least an angelic breastplate – otherwise they wouldn’t be Furies. But many might have to use repeating rifles or revolvers for their ranged weapons, and crude clubs or maces for melee weapons in the absence (or disrepair) of their Seraphim blades. Some might even have crude claw gauntlets for close combat, made from the shards of broken swords.

The angelic armor of the Seraphim is present among the Furies. The colors of their armor have faded over time, giving them a generally ghastly look. For some furies, their power has warped the shape of their armor from sleek and beautiful plate armor of the Seraphim to be jagged, arthropodal, spiked or otherwise twisted in shape. Often they haphazardly recolor their armor, producing a part-rusted, part-faded, part-recolored aesthetic that would be comical were it not a sign of your coming death. Regardless of how the armor looks, it does what all Seraphim armor does – it aids their physical endurance and strength.

Furies do not use Golems, and like their counterparts have special types of armor to fulfill those roles.

Lilim: The basic suit of Fury armor is titled this way. It is a suit of full plate armor minus the helmet. Its enchantments help the Fury make the best of her added strength and endurance, as well as protecting her from attack.

Banshee: Furies often allow female necromancers to join them. Although they do not give the Necromancers the Fury ritual, they craft a special armor for the Necromancers among them, known as the Banshee armor. The Armor is partially flesh and bone, and gives the Necromancer a boost in her durability and health, though not her strength.

Delphyne: A heavier suit of armor, with thick arms and legs, a bulky torso that stretches over the head. It offers incredible endurance and strength on the ground, much like the Seraphim’s Amazon armor. It is used to break through obstacles and to tear enemies apart in melee with power rivaling larger and bulkier monsters.

Harpy: The Fury’s flying armor, counterpart to the Seraphim’s Valkyrie. It has much the same layout, a light armor suit with blade-like wings and an arcane engine. Like most fury technology, the arcane engine has likely blown out, and the Fury must channel her magic through the suit to get it to fly.

Succubus: The leader of a Fury warband wears the Succubus armor, a winged Lilim suit. The wings of a Succubus are usually fleshy or organic, rather than a piece of technology – they did not, in fact, originate in the suit. Rather, the Fury’s dark powers caused the wings to manifest over time. The rest of the armor might also have some biological traits.

Furies can also summon demons to help them where necessary, and they typically employ Necromancers. Female necromancers among the Furies must pledge their loyalty by having their heart removed and kept by the Succubus. Necromancy can keep them alive without their hearts, so long as the Succubus doesn’t crush the organ. This threat prevents betrayal.

Where Furies go, they are often followed by the gray miasma of Sargasso. Fury often travel through unsafe teleportation, spawning demons and bringing gray mist where they go. If the mist is allowed to propagate further (that is to say, if Furies are allowed to remain for too long) it may begin to distort reality, and drive people within it insane. The mist will typically vanish when the Fury’s ritual casters, known as Medusa, or the Fury’s Succubus, are defeated or driven off.

Furies As Antagonists

Against anybody but Seraphim, the Furies are powerful and terrifying antagonists. They are cruel, cunning and vicious. Everything that the Seraphim have, the Furies in some manner also have. The Seraphim are renowned as the most honorable, selfless crusaders for good. The Furies are the opposite, the blackguards, the dark knights, the paragons of the deep and the dark. Furies can be anywhere and doing anything – they could be encountered in the arch-dungeons, or across the land, embedded in a political or military setting, or pitted against archeology teams in the deep ruins of the world. But when they are the antagonists, the characters pause and feel trepidation. Perhaps no other enemy in Adel evokes the kind of terror and sense of danger that the Furies do. Survival is put into terrible question wherever a group, any group, is pitted against them. Even Seraphim paladins would gravely consider their options before fighting their destined enemies, such is their fearsome might.

Furies are human in nature, albeit twisted and malicious, and might evoke familiarity. Their personalities can vary. Some might be downright gleeful at the prospect of coming violence, while others may see conflict as a terrible necessity to cleanse what they see as a broken and unjust system – regardless of whatever nation they’re in, and what its current leaders are like. Some might be quiet, catatonic except to pull a trigger and swing a sword, utterly broken by what they’ve experienced, while some might make the adventurers question their own sanity, for not seeing things as clearly as the woman trying to kill them sees.