Empress Phere

Empress Phere is a character in The Vivacious Deadlock.

Weapons and Abililities:
Where her right eye used to be there is an artefact known as a Hollow. Hollows are incredibly potent and versatile, when affixed to a person they become extensions of that person, and enhance the abilities of the area that they are replacing. Specifically Phere’s Hollow enhances her vision, allows her to see where she chooses to see. Phere also has powerful elemental magic, though this particular skill is one that she has not used for a long time and is a more than a little rusty with.

Description:
Phere is of a decidedly regal bearing, she wears an elaborate black and purple full length dress, which is somewhat impractical. She wears a tiara replete with glittering amethysts, and an eyepatch to cover her right eye. She has long black hair, very pale white skin and her remaining eye is blue. Beneath her eyepatch is a powerful artefact called a Hollow. It is slightly larger than her eye was and more perfectly round. It is black though its surface is patterned with fine purple images, representations of what it sees. Phere sees herself as a god, and perhaps not without reason. She is indifferent to the suffering of ordinary people, believing them to be incredibly flawed and a massive waste of her time. She is more than a little paranoid and uses her ability frequently to check that people are not plotting against her. She is slow to act; contemplative almost to a fault, but quick to defend herself. She is not used to having to depend upon herself, having relied upon heavily armed guards for a long time. She insists upon being called by her title.

Biography:
The world in which Phere was born into was being torn apart by war, specifically the kingdom in which she was born was being hit the worst, one of the smaller kingdoms but possessing a tactical value it was being attacked on multiple fronts by powerful enemies. Their existence was precarious, constantly under siege, only just managing to survive because their enemies would begin attacking one another if any one looked like it might prove victorious. For the first fifteen years of her life Phere never saw outside the heavily fortified keep that was her home, she showed aptitude to become a mage and trained hard to do so day and night. Her prowess did not go unnoticed and she was recruited to a select task force nicknamed The Seekers. Their purpose was to find alternate ways to fight this war.

Their major success was in locating a place called The Deep Forge, an ancient ruin deep in the earth but with technology surpassing anything that they had on the surface. As they explored this long abandoned ruin they discovered that it was for want of a better word a factory, wherein the world itself had been built. There were tools for creating life, for terraforming what had been a lifeless planetoid into the world that they knew today. The repercussions of this find were astonishing, though perhaps forgotten at the time as the Seekers sought to weaponise what they had found in order to save their kingdom. They made an army and importantly they discovered the Hollows. Each of the Seekers took one and replaced a part of their body with it, gaining various abilities, some more useful than others.

The Seekers returned to the surface with their army and their powers and won the war easily, leading their small kingdom to conquest over the larger ones, and they returned to their loved ones, happy that it was finally over. However the king of their own kingdom had seen the power that they wielded and believed that it would not be long before they demanded the throne for themselves. Desperate to keep hold of his position he sent his newly minted armies to kill the Seekers. It was a surprisingly effective plan, most of the Seekers were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers, some were caught unawares. A handful escaped, Phere was amongst these. She found her fellow Seekers, an easy task now that she could see as she wanted, and brought them together to kill the king.

They split the world between them and made a pact of peace, that they would not seek war against one another and that they would not revisit The Deep Forge and claim the godlike powers within. Phere ruled her kingdom diligently at first, attempting to be a good ruler and use her abilities to aid her people, but as she saw them making the same mistakes time and again, she grew distant. Eventually all she saw were the flaws of her people and she gave up interacting with them. She became paranoid that the other kingdoms would want her gone, and spent most of her time watching them and watching her own people for signs of a potential uprising. Until one day she simply vanished.

Theme Song:
Muse - Hysteria