The Plague Emperor

Plague Emperor Albedo (a.k.a. Andros)

Born to the name Albedo, the Plague Emperor is possibly the most influential spellbinder in Sekaian history. His story began in Demidium, Sula, during the height of the Golden Galdusian Empire. He was born to an innocent breeder girl whose name is lost to time, cursed with the power of chaos-speech. Normally this would be an exceptional gift, but in the Golden Galdusian Empire, a society that worshiped the Rakh'norv, God of Order, as its highest ideal, it was a death sentence.
His mother hid his powers to the best of her ability until he was old enough to understand that his powers weren't to be taken lightly, and ultimately, Albedo grew up feigning powerlessness, as a telekinete with minimal power. He would be considered the lowest of the low in the magocratic society of Galdus, denied both breeding and ascension privileges, but at least he wouldn't be dead.
He was eventually taken as an indentured servant by the consigliere of Demidium, Lumus Aurelion, and made to serve alongside his collection of augmentees, magically altered humans that were forced into servitude by ascended spellbinders. Within this group, Albedo befriended Conditor, a geomantic augmentee whose powers were used in construction. Under Aurelion's household, Albedo grew resentful and miserable; in this misery, he heard the voice of his spiritual father, the Sovereign, God of Individuality.
The God explained that his soul was crafted to be a vessel of one of the seven vices he admired the most in mortals, living to invoke such vices in his surroundings. In Albedo's case, he was the Sinchild of Wrath whose spiritual name as Andros, and his passive ability to invoke rage in his fellow men had, unbeknownst to him, already saved his life. When seekers came close to his mother's hiding places, they would grow eager and bloodthirsty, accusing each other of being the local chaos-speaker, and killing each other in the process, if not significantly wasting each other's time.
As such, Albedo realised what his ultimate purpose was. He needed to make all those that passively accepted being under the thumb of the Galdusian regime grow angry, to fight back against the tyranny and fight to make their own lives. He began with his best friend, Conditor. He would ask him why he erected monuments in Consigliere Aurelion's name when he could tear down his manor just as easily. He asked him why he accepted his body being violated and converted to a rocky form against his will, and if he ever considered using his new amplified powers to fight back.
Albedo's wrath-invoking rhetoric changed Conditor, and his meek acceptance shifted into righteous fury. The augmentee started by crushing a fleshly overseer, then Albedo followed up by revealing his status as a chaos-speaker, protecting his friend from the overseers' pickaxes with summoned, fleshy tendrils. Soon, every downtrodden servant and augmentee was marching alongside Albedo and Conditor, working together to tear Lumus Aurelion's estate apart.
The newly-formed resistance would skulk through the streets of Demidium, gaining allies and crushing enemies, until eventually, they hijacked a Galdusian air-fortress, convincing the telekinetic augmentee used to power its flight to work for them. They took the fortress to the island nation of Ilazar, a distant, poorly-fortified fingernail of the Galdusian empire, and settled the flying fortress north of the Isleborn Ilazari's pride and joy, the port city of Zemelnya.
Albedo freed the telekinetic augmentee trapped within the fortress, disabling its ability to fly, and moved into Zemelnya proper. From there, he rapidly removed Galdusian presence from the city to the Isleborn spellbinders' delight, following up by removing them from the rest of the isle. Indebted to Albedo, the people named him their Tsar.
For years, the Galdusian Empire cut their losses. They accepted that the chaos in Demidium and the loss of the relatively worthless island of Ilazar had occurred, but provided Tsar Albedo stayed in Ilazar, they were unwilling to provoke him further. However, an unknown Galdusian authority would later undo this peacekeeping effort by sending an assassin, Atlas, to Ilazar.
The geomancer would build trust with Albedo and his growing court, and while dining with the Tsar, he would abruptly use his geomancy to shatter the rocky body of Conditor. Not only was this a monstrous murder of Albedo's closest friend, but also a gross violation of hospitality rules that Isleborn and Plagueborn (the name of the immigrant community Albedo brought with him) alike cherished. Albedo barely needed his powers to sweep the nation up into a white hot rage.
Once Atlas was killed, torn to pieces, and spread about the city of Zemelnya upon a thousand pikes, Albedo wept and screamed his rage to his people, and the people screamed back. An entire nation was now mobilised in an all-consuming bloodlust, but there was one issue: The most powerful Galdusian spellbinders were not feeble, easily killed bags of flesh. They were incorporeal beings whose souls were loosely attached to magically enchanted stones. If the Plague Emperor brought a wave of angry men five times the population of Ilazar, it would still not be enough.
In his impotent fury, he entreated his spiritual father, the Sovereign, for assistance in fighting ascendants. Fortunately for him, the Sovereign considered ascendants to be a cowardly breed of spellbinder, fleeing both afterlives in exchange for a dull life without feeling, where all natural expressions of individuality were muted or destroyed.
As such, the Sovereign agreed to create seven magical devices, one for each sin he was enamoured with. All disembodied souls such as ascendants within their area of effect would be sucked into the device upon activation, and would later be able to be consumed by its wielder for energy usable in spellwork. All consumed souls would be destroyed, denied an afterlife or reincarnation, as punishment for their foolish attempts to flee cessation of existence. An additional cost to the devices would be that the user would increasingly become prone to their associated sin, as well as eventually becoming the soul to power the device's basic 'soul suction' ability once they died, only to be extinguished once the next wielder died to replaced them.
The Isle's Tsar was ready to take on the Galdusian Empire, and with his seven soulstealer-wielding subordinates (Rezna, Marekh, Shazrich, Noth, Koresh, Lindra, and Far'surez) they tore through the Galdusian Empire, turning their greatest achievement, the attainment of arcana-assisted immortality, into a crippling weakness. In addition, he used his chaos-speech to summon multiple daemons, notably the monstrous Rakh'dor ge Krazdan, whose form grew with each fleshling the Galdusians threw at him, and the beautiful humanoid daemon, Rakhdor ge Luzma, whose romance with Albedo would inspire an entire subculture of daemons to mimic and romance mortals.
The Sinchild of Pride, Darvith, was a Sulari ascendant of the time, and was partially responsible for the prideful, supremacist attitude of Galdusian society. When he heard of his spiritual brother's exploits, he was quick to abandon the Sulari capital of Tertia and leave the ascended Golden Emperor Audacium Aeternus for dead. The Golden Emperor, in his desperation to find a way to escape his inevitable fate trapped within one of the soulstealers, begged the Rakh'norv for a better state of being, so orderly the Sovereign's dark magic couldn't affect him. The God of Order was quick to respond, and converted him into an unmoving, floor-fused crystalline pillar, only able to interact with anything through telepathy and telekinesis.
When the empire saw their emperor, rendered useless by the God they trusted to lead their society to greatness, Galdusian morale plummeted, and the city of Tertia was a ruin within days. By the time the Plague Emperor arrived, he saw the maddened pillar that remained of the Golden Empire, and though he attempted to put the emperor out of his misery, he simply couldn't kill him, as the Rakh'norv promised.
From there, he declared the Galdusian Empire fallen, and his vengeance taken. He annexed the ruined remains of the megalopolises of Galdus into an empire of his own, named after a mocking appellation the Galdusians used to disparage his kingdom when it was merely an annoyance to Galdus; the Plague Empire.
From there, a renaissance bloomed from the consumed Galdusian Empire. The Plague Emperor would free the non-spellbinder and non-necromancer species of Galdus's numerous footholds, and to add insult to injury, crippled the Galdusian Empire's chances of recovery by commissioning Dark Architect Fortitudinis to create numerous nasite Plague Obelisks close to their major, trans-national norvite-powered teleportation gates, which interrupted and choked any semblance of international Galdusian logistics.
The communities once enslaved by Galdus were now free to rediscover their own culture, be treated as individuals regardless of race or magical ability, and know that every failure or success they achieved was their own. Conditor and Albedo had once talked of the free world they dreamed of, and as the Plague Emperor, he'd made their vision a reality. He hoped that in his peculiar sentimentality, his father, the Sovereign, allowed Conditor to view the fruits of their desires from the Underworld.
Rugged individualism gave way to its own issues, and even before Albedo's passing, signs of fragmentation, infighting and collapse began to plague his fledgling empire. Albedo would die at the age of two hundred and thirty one, knowing that ultimately, his empire would collapse. He trusted his role as Tsar to his immortal lover, Rakh'dor ge Luzma, and made her promise to release any nations who wished to be independent the moment they requested. Ultimately, this led to his empire, despite all the cultural advancement and liberty it brought, shrinking into a mere freehold in Ilazar within sixty years following his death.

Physical Description

General Physical Condition

The Plague Emperor once had brown hair, a somewhat handsome (by spellbinder standards) face with a small nose and flowing locks. His fashion choices were initially standard Ancient Demidium clothing, blue and gold kimonos, but once he embraced his identity as the founder of the Plagueborn he wore red and black almost exclusively, generally long, flowing robes with tassels and a zig-zagged, red-black nemes, shaving his hair to account for this headdress. By the end of his life, he was purple-skinned, wrinkled, and shrunken, with false golden teeth and glass eyes.

Social

Contacts & Relations

Conditor (best friend and advisor)
Rakh'dor ge Luzma (daemonic affiliate and lover)
Rakh'dor ge Krazdan (daemonic enforcer)
Rezna (subordinate, wielder of the Soulstealer of Obsession)
Marekh (subordinate, wielder of the Soulstealer of Hunger)
Shazrich (subordinate, wielder of the Soulstealer of Craving)
Noth (subordinate, wielder of the Soulstealer of Emptiness)
Koresh (subordinate, wielder of the Soulstealer of Ruination)
Lindra (subordinate, wielder of the Soulstealer of Vindictiveness)
Far'surez (subordinate, wielder of the Soulstealer of Vanity)
Dark Architect Fortitudinis (subordinate, personal architect)
The Sovereign (godly father)
Luxifros/Darvith of Tertia (spiritual brother and mortal enemy)

Religious Views

The Plague Emperor founded the religion of Ilazari Maltheism, which essentially encouraged communication with the dark four gods to embrace and accept one's darker impulses as part of a healthy balance that prevented repression. He was also the Sinchild of Wrath for his time period, and considered wrath to be a necessary part of ensuring that justice would prevail through outrage.

Alignment

Chaotic Neutral

Species

Spellbinder

Ethnicity

Galdusian

Honorary & Occupational Titles

Tsar of the Ilazari Plague Empire
Sinchild of Wrath

Age

231 (deceased)

Life

4434 BGA 4203 BGA 231 years old

Circumstances of Birth

Galdusian Breeder

Circumstances of Death

Old age and heart complications

Birthplace

Demidium

Gender

Male

Eyes

Crimson

Hair

Brown, pale grey in later life

Skin Tone/Pigmentation

Pale white, discoloured purple in final century of life

Height

7'4''

Aligned Organization

Plague Empire of Ilazar

Other Affiliations

• The Seven Sinchildren

Known Languages

Old Galdusian
Isleborn Ilazari
Chaostongue
Deathtongue
Sovereigntongue