#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]

The Lightdancer made landfall upon Urhalzan in the wake of her first clashes, the worlds remade and their cultures changed not so the demons lurking within hearts and the evil inclinations would be nourished but the better ones. She had learned much, had delved deep into hidden truths and had found that core that lay within. The great throneworld of the Hundred Thousand Realms was a beautiful place, stark and golden and a monument to power and to her father's great work.

And he had sought, in the end, a kind of power that was very risky and her steps on its soil marked the return of something long forgotten. One of her siblings, one of the older ones, looked at her with his right hand's claws brushing his jaw-horn.

You....

She turned to look at him and smiled, a smile in a face that to the children of Earth would have been the more disturbing for how close to humanity was, until of course it wasn't.

Yes, me. I have discovered the truth. The legacy of the Field of Blood has reached a new turning in the cycle.

She raised her right hand and shadows danced along it and in the shadows there was a smell, an old smell, one long-forgotten on the throneworld though horridly familiar where the tide of conquest drew to the shore like a tsunami raging at the height of its power.

I have returned, a voice that was not hers spoke without her lips moving, her presence casting a great shadow on the golden world, for what was sealed can never truly be taken away. Of all beings that fear me, it is the Undying that do so most.

Many ages ago Death was defeated and sealed. Immortality is the norm, but the loss of death has lead to a society of ultralites that rule over never dying slaves. As Death’s first reaper after the unsealing, you are here to remind them why Death exists… and why your master should be feared.

[lightdancer1]

Figured out how to avoid repeating myself in this one:

[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]

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]

My Urhalzantrani are essentially bipedal ceratopsids with fangs and a Styracosaurid style frill in their default forms.

especially for fantasy lizard people, I wish they'd play with scales more or even for "hair styles" to use horns and spikes or even just longer scales for that illusion

Yeah, but that would be making characters "interesting" and "creative" and "memorable". We don't want that, we just want women to be sexy.

Reminds me of those people that were baffled that Yzma is considered a good character design, because they were too focused on "woman pretty" and not on how visually engaging the design is and how perfectly it fits the character.

[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]

One of the more deliberately paranoia-inducing abilities of both the Urhalzantrani and the Omega Program survivors

Is that they have straight up comic book/mythological shapeshifting. Size and mass can vary to whatever they want, without bothering with 'so where does that extra mass and energy go, exactly'. Regardless of form they not only retain the intellect of the default form but all of the powers, meaning that they're entirely capable of telepathy strong enough to deceive entire worlds by virtue of the battering-ram power of it alone, of shapeshifting to copy people or inanimate objects and if they screw up a detail or two that's what the telepathy is for.

They are invulnerable super-strong entities that can walk through the heart of stars with no ill effect and more to the point create stars and other reality-warping aspects.

The Omega Program was designed to make artificial deities and one of the most basic powers of mythological deities IS this kind of shapeshifting, so it's a case of Gone Horribly Right.

For the Urhalzantrani it's literally 'basic divinity power package' aspects.

[lightdancer1]

This is my Fire and Water AU. The Azar creates the 'Dark Convergence' and smashes the boundaries between the spirit world and material world as her opening strike in the storyline, purely to spite the Avatar after spending a century basking in the war. The result is an Avatar world that feels very Warhammery where walking down the wrong road gets you nommed by random hungry spirits.

Also supercharges Bending and due to the time-distortion effects of the Urhalzantrani various feats that are apex in the canon show are generic in this AU. Leading to say, mass lightning barrages from Fire Nation Armies in combat.

I’m off to shower but in order to return to Fun AUs instead of The Doll Post Discourse I shall propose

AU where the spirit and physical worlds never got split so while canon still Happens and the spirits aren’t really INTERFERING per say there’s a lot of fae world/yokai dickery happening and making things Much More Complicated and Interesting and we have the opportunity for fae bargains that backfire and blow up in Ozai’s face. Especially if the Fire Nation is anti-spirit because Conquest and burning down everything in their path Would Not Sit Well with nature spirits

I shall return shortly. Go wild, friends

[lightdancer1]

In terms of swords only two types of entities I write use the really big ones:

With the Urhalzantrani proportionally they're actually the same size as a regular sword but the entities in question have a mininum size to humanity of 25 feet tall (putting them on the scale of the 33 King Kong). So a proportionately scaled sword to one of those entities would read like a big damn claymore to a regular human and indeed the blades are too heavy to lift).

They don't need melee weaponry but it's a part of an aesthetics thing and a nifty means to add an extra wallop with a nice visual symbol and their ancestors *did* use swords, to boot, so they retain traces of who they were and what they were.

The other are the fire-giants of Muspelheim, who have the largest swords of anyone. Their blades are rune-adorned world-wrecking weapons of mass destruction that literally become blades of fire that can be aimed edge-down and explode entire planets from the mystic fire unleashing their nature and the nature of the most powerful sorcery at their disposal.

They can be used for combat and are with Gods, but as they're blades that are literally set on fire they crunch and leave cauterized wounds where they strike.

[lightdancer1]

One thing that is deliberately taken from religious motifs re: the Urhalzantrani is the nature of their arrival

They literally affect an entire planet across both the day and nighttime sides. The Azar/God on the Gilded Throne plunges a world into total darkness beneath alien skies (as this is her *true* form taking shape and wrapping itself around the world as a casual display not so much of intimidation as her forming an avatar and hurling it at the surface to infect/devour the planet and its entire native dimension). She unleashes a wave of psychic madness that spirals out into displays of deliberately cultish-style religious fanaticism.

The Shadow-woman creates a sudden and total Darkness in the oogie Tolkien sense, utterly starless and sapient with the knowledge that the Thing in the Dark knows all and fears all....and then does a pop culture derived routine of manifesting complete with a reference to A Nightmare Before Christmas.

The Butcher produces a rain of blood from the skies and where the blood strikes mortals it induces homicidal frenzies.

The Unmaker produces a bright cold light that plunges a world into a sudden and abrupt light that is not sunlight nor daylight, erasing all shadows and driving out the elements of Old Night and the Outer Light as well. The key element of that light is that it is *cold* and even the hottest parts of the world feel like old school Siberian winters.

And in all cases their arrivals are marked by visions and dreams that echo and showcase elements of the great war of the entities beyond the Gods, without any context as to what it actually is or why it is.

The cosmic horror element of all this is that this isn't an intentional display of anything. This is the result of an entity that extends beyond multiverses making a small portion of its power manifest on any given planet and literally just passing through where it makes planetfall.

[lightdancer1]

The original pantheon I've invented turns up in only one of the ATLA AUs:

The Lightdancer is a recurring character using one of her names, the Unmaker. She's the one walking around with a constellation-gaze of nine suns, black and blue striped hair, and whose impatience with the Hundred Year War leads her to smack around her arch-nemesis in a scene that backfires abysmally and leads to the infodump chapter that's the next one to write in By Fire and Water and Earth and Air. She's the most benevolent of the cosmic entities but still rather snooty because even the most benevolent of them exists across entire multiverses and views any single planet in them with the same attention humans would give the components of a bacterium, in all truth, even when she's the most personally involved.

The Shadow-woman is the most metafictionally aware one of the bunch, a true-neutral character who can be either hero or villain. She also happens to wear American English, a language that does not exist in the ATLA-verse, trolls Admiral Zhao for funsies, and hijacks the narrative in the Ember Island Players because that's what she does in the original fiction. All the ATLA-verse knows her as is the 'shadows that come alive and have a thousand eyes and voices.' At least until the Ember Island Players scene (which will have analogues in all my ATLA stories because the metafictional satire appropriate to each universe is too tempting not to do).

And then there's the villain of the piece. The God on the Gilded Throne, Azar the Undying Flame, the Hunger that Stalks the Stars, Zezhelanzunui. In this world she first poked holes in the ATLA-verse's metaphysical foundations in the time of Avatar Salai, then pulled a Pennywise and literally fell like a meteor from the sky in the time of Avatar Yangchen. In this AU the Avatars face in addition to all the usual suspects a cosmic horror of a species that treats multiverses like humans treat marbles.....*and they actually contain this force and bind it within their universe because they're that awesome.*

Agni in this universe promises Yangchen a world of everlasting war and she eradicates war for her lifetime.

Agni tries to usurp the spirit world and use it as her first vector of infection. Avatar Kuruk completely undoes this and binds her and entraps her as a dangerous spirit with eerie eldritch abomination factors but deprives her of her full set of power and ability to tap into them (helped by her lucidity fading for a long time in this world).

Avatars Kyoshi and Roku keep her bound while being completely awesome in their own ways....and then Sozin kills Roku and Aang gets iceberged for a year after the Azar pulls a time-travel stunt to try to kill and eat Aang as an infant and targeting Korra while she was at it because the Urhalzantrani don't exist in linear time and are quantum singularities in a quantum multiverse.....and then after 100 years Aang's absence has deranged the spirit world.

Agni has had 100 years of war and the twin poles of the Dai Li and the Fire Nation Royal Family worshiping her and helping her to snap the seals and goes right back to trying to absorb and eat the entire ATLA-verse by using the Avatar's world as the infection vector to do it.

The reason that the Avatars can neatly confine the cosmic horror is that the drawback of metafictional awareness has one logical weakness. *IF* the eldritch entities can be drawn into obeying the rules of the world they're in rather than imposing their own, they become defeatable like other villains in those worlds in those terms. If, however, they remember they don't have to do this they're fucked.

And it's this intermittently lucid omniversal entity that the Ursa of the By Fire and Water and Earth and Air verse explodes an eye of twice because she had a habit of using Ursa's form to torment her children for shits and giggles and Ursa takes a *slight* amount of umbrage at it. And then it turns out that making an entity that exists beyond a multiversal level mad at you and noticing you personally is a *really,, really* bad idea.

The Avatar verse of By Fire and Water and Earth and Air is playing the Hundred Year War on hard mode and they're still winning because the good guys win, but they sure have to work for it and the Azula of that world, after encountering cosmic horrors and the like just neatly retires and disappears into obscurity raising her daughters Lin and Suyin with Toph in the swamp like Yoda.

This Azula also goes through a worse wringer than all the other ones, and has the 'I'm done, I'll finish what I started and then i quit and not even the return of Agni would drag me back into the bullshit' reaction after the latest bit of a catastrophe affecting her. Though if she were dropped into the alternate universes she'd come across as a dour and embittered person capable of extraordinarily effective violence at the drop of a hat, next to the other two Azulas.

Of course this one also gets stuck in the Fire Nation Royal Family and has a repeated experience that this family lies to itself and hurts itself and doesn't want any part of it whatsoever, and is the only one of her family smart enough to take that path....which ironically in a sense makes her more or less the parallel of canon Ursa. She just walks out of their lives, goes to spend some time with Iroh in Colonialism Inc. and then as far as her world goes she vanishes into the ether and is never seen again.

[lightdancer1]

Dinah of Domdaniel sat in a chair, munching on bread dipped in olive oil. It was her fate to vanquish the terror that stalked the stars called the Great Azar, the God on the Gilded Throne, the Undying Flame. She knew it. The strange bit was that so many people kept seeking after her. The angels Marusarel, Sachiel, and that strange blind elf. Various lords of Pandaemonium and even a few of the more unpleasant cosmic entities that clustered at the highest level.

Even a few of these people, these strange armored beings in armor that looked like metal woven into a flayed hide. Part of her was sitting and eating, the rest of her was watching a confrontation. There was another being, in silver armor, flying with light erupting from her visor as the shimmering distortion broke.

She could have ended the fight, but she couldn't help but admire this Vishori Heshatani. There was something about her that drew the eye, the speed, the raw power, the dynamic flexibility. Her gaze lingered on her motions, the sleek strength and the brute force that, with the shield shattered moved and struck two solid blows that cracked the armor, leaving a frightened Xenten on his knees, his arms splitting to six limbs, a shimmering distortion trying to form and then a sense of Presence and the distortion cracked again.

Vishori removed her helm and she saw that dark green face with its long black stripes, the beautiful tips of her ears, the casual contempt in her expression and that dripped into her words.

She spoke in an aristocratic accent and the fire in her eyes blazed and then there was nothing but a pile of ashes. Dinah stood up then and walked toward her. The armored being stood still then, a strange look in her eyes. Bemusement-sorrow-regret-awe-horror-denial. She could feel the emotions like a wave but she was Urhalzantrani and she was of Sepharad and the power that wafted out was as nothing to her even in youth.

For a moment her hand touched her cheek and she tilted her head as the alien stood still in front of her.

What is it that so many people fear?

She simply looked at her with regret and closed her eyes and vanished in a shimmering distortion like water skipped across a stone.

You are at the center of a time traveling war. For every assassin sent back to the past to murder you, another warrior is sent to protect you and kill the assassin before they get a chance. As the bodies pile up, you still don’t have the slightest clue why you’re so important to these people.

[lightdancer1]

There are a couple of scenes:

In comic book universes, and in the DCAU/Teen Titans cartoon verse where the Shadow-woman explicitly weaponizes the medium. She ends up taking the place of Nosyarg Kcid in the Teen Titans cartoon and does so as a far more terrifying version of Mr. Mxzyptlk who has astronomical power that transcends entire multiverses and spends this on pranks and reality-warping at its very most nightmarish levels.

She isn't even a villain in this, just dicking around with a cartoon for funsies on the basis of "I know I'm real and none of this matters, and they're even less real than I am."

And unlike in the 2003 cartoon where the Mite messes with the Titans and nobody else gets involved, and how Mxzy messes with Superman but not much else, the Shadow-woman fucks with the entire planet Earth until she's bored.

Her siblings who play along with the rules of the setting for fun in an immortal lifetime can be and are subjected to its own internal logics and tropes, including the 'villains always lose in the end' one. She, OTOH, knows all the tropes and completely and utterly refuses to play by the rules of a Superman or Justice League story at all, while having a cosmic function in the broader omniverse to be a chaotic wild card who exists to take a nicely elaborate cosmology and smash it with a hammah! :P

One reason that I tend to be more cautious in writing her in than her siblings is that she can and will essentially hijack stories by showing up as that's her basic entire reason to exist, and as a writer I find it disturbing at times when characters prove more easily loosed than controlled in terms of constructing a narrative.

[lightdancer1]

One of the central characters of my cosmology, Turugamvirakil of Urhalzan. He was born a nomad in a culture whose father died in a border raid and he, along with his mother, younger brothers and sisters and two older brothers was cast out into the wilderness to fend for himself. From this he emerged transformed and brought about the unity of a nomadic steppe culture and the creation of a grand empire.

If this sounds at all familiar he’s basically Space Genghis Khan and his Urhalzantrani are Space Mongols empowered by the same source that reshaped him into the Universal Empire of Urhalzan. The Urhalzantrani are distinctly dinosaurian, and they are meant to be.