Born of the hate between Gods during the
The Forgotten War , the Titans are terrible beings of near-divine power. While eventually, through the coordination of the Primes, they were beaten back and locked up in ancient, powerful prisons. So while their existence happened because of the Forgotten War, it also ended said war. Every now and then, often with mortal help, one of the titans rears its ugly head. This is usually a time when several poleis need to work together to defeat it.
Perikos, The Great Hydra
Legend tells that the Great Hydra is the most ancient and powerful of all the titans. A beast with a hundred heads, he was shackled by Polemos’ hand, and rages still beneath a volcano on a lost island in the Great Ocean, bound by chains of orichalcum forged by Skafos himself. He is destruction and death. From his prison, chained beneath the world, he spews fire from the mountain, and when he strains against his chains the very earth trembles and splits. It is his greatest desire to break free from his bonds and be unleashed upon the world once more. It was his fires, the erupting flame of his hundred heads, that scorched Tres into a wasteland of ash-covered ruins. The Great Hydra would see all the world burnt before him, reduced to charred bones and smoldering ash. His children are the hydra, cunning and powerful ancient beasts. Like him, they seek to be worshiped as gods, coveting the placations of mortals. They are worshiped by the orcs of Tres, who revel in destruction and value strength and power above all else.
Latreia, The Mother of Monsters
The Mother of Monsters is the gorgon empress who rules the underground kingdom of Sysseria. She is the first of her kind, the gorgon that birthed all others. She is unique among the Titans, in that she already existed before becoming a Titan. She was a powerful Archfae, and according to some, Phaedrus' paramour. When the existence of the Titans was not yet known, she came to Katalix upon his throne of bones with charms, and incense, and honeyed words; she seduced the death God, and from their union she bore a thousand daughters. She desires above all else to be worshiped, to be loved, to be adored by mortals, beasts, and fae alike. All Sysseria is a cult in her image, its temples carved with serpentine motifs, each housing one of her terrible daughters, born in her wicked likeness. In ritual sacrifice they breed with mortals, creating gorgon Phaedran, monsters born of monsters. These Phaedran rule over Sysserian humans, vast hordes enslaved by magics and the crack of forked snakeskin whips. With these legions at her command, she holds designs on all the mortal world. Her assassins and spies armed with poisoned daggers and venomous words spread her dark influence through the veins of the land, working from the shadows of every city. Where guile fails her she seeks domination through strength, sending her enslaved hordes and serpentine abominations crashing against a wall of Kith shields and spears.
Kata'Kuos, The Devouring Maw
The Maw, a creature of unfathomable scale, waits beneath the waves, down where the ocean is vast and dark and still, deep in the recesses of that abyssal void. Wounded by Kyma's Harpoon at Tritos’ fall, the creature writhes in the depths, always in pain, always hungry, black blood pluming out into the sea from a wound that never heals. Some sailors claim she rises as a great whirlpool, ringed by the deep shadows of a thousand tendrils, out beyond the end of the sea where waterfalls cascade past flesh and endless rows of jagged teeth, drinking in the sea and hungering to swallow all the world. Others know this to be just a tale, for when the Devouring Maw rises, all the world will drown. A great wave will take the land, and all will be as Tritos, lost beneath the waves. The Maw’s blood, black as ink, billows out into the sea, polluting the tides of Aeseron. Sailors call it the black tide, an oily sheen upon the waves. When it comes, so too do the servants of the Maw — Merrow, twisted merfolk born of drowned men, who raid ship and shore and drag mortals, live and screaming, down into the cold silence of the deep. Other creatures of the deep are drawn by the tide, heralds of destruction feared by sailor and siren alike. Some say the are the children of the Maw; others that they were once beasts, now twisted by her blood, leviathans from ancient times whose tentacles can crack ships and splinter stone.
Skoulikis, The Worm
The Worm is dead, slain by Apsidos and Katalix in their fierce battle beneath the world. Though only its dry husk remains, it whispers still, worshiped in the Underdark drow kingdom of Nys as a dead god, as well as by some necromantic cults in Rakefia and Thanatos. It promises power, eternal life, for those who would serve it. Nyssian liches long ago struck this bargain, trading their mortality for something more. Their priests place their organs in canopic jars of stone, filled with the coagulated ichor of the Worm, neither dead nor living, but suspended in between. They pledge their lands and their peoples to the service of the Worm. Ever does the Worm thirst to live again. It seeks resurrection, through the actions of those that serve it. From it came the blight that corrupted Nys. The bones of their vast civilization lie half buried in ancient tunnels and tombs giving way to yawning caves, carved ages ago by tireless jaws. This is where the drow dwell. They serve their Lich Queen, Lolth, AKA the Mother of Spiders, an undying necromancer of near god-like power eternally bound to the Worm. life-forceWorm drank deep. Now an insatiable blight spreads across the tunnels under Aeseron. And as the land decays, the dead rise; a symptom, perhaps, of the Worm’s occult design. Fae are twisted by its curse, and mortals fall sick, only to return as shambling husks or silent shades, robbed of their mortal rest.
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