Family/Race
Mourngrasp, the Bloom-Crowned Maw
"Why mourn what you can perfect? Death was never an end—it was a leash I chose to cut, and replace with a crown."
In the mire-choked silence of Hextor's cursed groves, where the air is thick with silver fog and the trees weep black sap, there stalks a creature whose existence is as much a warning as it is a marvel: Mourngrasp, the Cerberus Disruptor—a mount, a guardian, a monument to Xandera’s inability to let go.
Born not of nature, but of longing, mastery, and unholy will, Mourngrasp was once three separate beasts—Disruptor cubs she reared in secret as a girl beneath the altar-vaults of her family's estate. Each had perished in service to her: one from age, one from battle, one from betrayal. She mourned them only briefly, then blamed the world for daring to strip her of what was hers.
So she stitched them together. Using vertebrae like harp strings, weaving nerves like calligraphy, and whispering forgotten spells of soul-tethering through her tears and incense, she bound them into one form—a titanic hound-beast, reptilian and feline in profile, crowned in thorns of bone and gurgling life-essence. Three heads, each bearing the memory of a death, and two disruptor-born tentacles sprouting from its back like writhing branches of retribution.
Now, he is forever hers.
Abilities & Presence
Tri-Mind Consciousness: Each head retains fragmented memory of its former self—creating a beast that acts in eerie unison, yet sometimes argues in murmured snarls when she sleeps.
Tentacles of Entropy: Two long tendrils burst from its back, each used for grappling foes, tearing mounted riders from their steeds, or coiling protectively around Xandera when she rests.
Soul-Stitched Vitality: Its undead form is animated not just by necrotic energy, but by genuine affection twisted into permanence. He fights with a loyalty that borders on spiritual obsession.
Role in Xandera’s Dominion
Mourngrasp is not merely a beast of war—he is her shadow, her emissary, and her symbol. When he pads through a village, undead eyes follow. When his roar rings through the Bloom-Factories, silence falls. He is her executioner, her ride into battle, and her bedchamber sentinel—sleeping curled around her chamber’s bone dais with eyes that never close.
Some say he dreams of life before. Others say he dreams of pleasing her still. But one truth echoes through every soldier, scholar, and soul beneath her reign: If you see Mourngrasp approach—your fate is already written.
Family
"I am not merely born—I am woven. A mosiac of war, wit, seduction, and shadow. My blood is not red. It is royal."
Few bear a pedigree so laced with dread and majesty as Xandera of Hextor, whose bloodline blooms from a dynasty of sovereign flame, silk, and bone. She was not simply raised—she was sculpted, each lesson carved into her marrow by hands both cruel and caressing.
Grandmother: Valerna Jorgenskull, the Spider Queen
The matriarch whose silken empire spans webbed citadels and skeletal jungles. It was Valerna who instilled in Xandera the sacred tenets of rule: dominion, elegance, and merciless poise.
“To rule,” she once whispered, “is not to lead the people—it is to ensnare them.” Under Valerna’s gaze, Xandera learned how to walk like a queen long before she ever held power. From her, she inherited the regal stillness of a predator and the ability to command a court with a glance.
Mother: Florentina Jorgenskull, Grand Tactician of the Barrow Wars
A titan in both body and mind, Florentina taught her daughter with bruises, blade drills, and battlefield simulations. She carved into Xandera a respect for tactics, ruthlessness, and martial grace.
“Kindness is a liability,” Florentina would say. “Use it like a dagger—sheathed until needed.” Through her mother’s discipline, Xandera became not just a sorceress, but a general of the dead, whose legions move with precision and lethal intent.
Mother: Lyra, the Wild Harpist
Where Florentina gave scars, Lyra gave songs. This light-hearted and effervescent woman taught Xandera the art of charm, softness, and theatrical grace. She taught her how to bake, nurture, and manipulate sympathy, instilling the cunning lesson that a mother’s warmth can melt even the sharpest steel.
“The world will trust a smile more than a blade,” she often cooed, hands kneading dough or brushing Xandera’s firelit hair.
Uncle: Casimir, the Nekomata Maverick
Casimir was a paradox: aloof but sincere, sarcastic yet sincere. He taught her that not all men are empty-headed brutes, and that guile, misdirection, and emotional patience are sometimes sharper than any kriegsmesser. He told her tales of other worlds, of tricksters and tyrants, and how truth is rarely spoken—only earned or stolen.
“If they believe you harmless, you’ve already won.” Through these four souls, Xandera was shaped into more than a sorceress—she was tempered into a weapon of inheritance. A sovereign of three bloodlines: the spider’s patience, the warrior’s will, the harpist’s mask, and the trickster’s mind.
Wife: Bastet, the Purring Flame
Where Xandera commands the grave and breathes rot into splendor, Bastet breathes life into the grave.
This lioness, velvet of thigh and razor of tongue, is Xandera’s living contradiction—a creature of warmth, not defiance, whose every purr could make empires kneel. She is not undead, nor does she wish to be, and yet she lingers close to the tomb, gleaming with sweat in the shadow of her lover’s necrotic throne.
Xandera calls her “my scent of sunrise,” though never to her face. For Bastet is no doll, no idle silk-thing—she nips, she writhes, she bites down upon divine fingers with a defiance so rich it borders on prayer.
She is the Queen's recess, the place her cruelty softens, even if only to watch the poor thing squirm under her gaze.
“A throne must have a cushion,” Xandera once whispered, tongue tracing Bastet’s spine, “and yours is the only one I find worth bruising.”
Bastet taught her joy, taught her what it meant to wield love as both service and seduction. She taught Xandera to play, to chase the heat of living skin, to delight in the absurd. She is her thrall, yes—but she is also her temptation, her lullaby, and her unruly indulgence.
And in quiet moments—when the black moons of Hextor rise and soulfires burn low—Xandera has been known to hum Bastet’s name like a song meant for no cathedral but the skin.
Daughter: Kimilzamat, the Obsidian Chrysalis
Kimilzamat was forged in a ritual of dark flame and blooming lust—a divine entanglement of necrotic majesty and feline passion.
Her very birth was scandalous—a hybrid not just of flesh and bone, but of living defiance and sovereign decay.
Kimilzamat is Xandera’s daughter, but she is also her grand experiment—the future made flesh, the first fruit of an alchemical womb stirred by soul, not seed. Raised on ashmilk and lullabies of bone-chimes, she speaks in tones too old for her years, and walks with the silent menace of someone who has never known weakness.
Where Bastet coos and claws, Kimilzamat studies and watches, a shadow-clad child with skin like stormcloud satin and eyes like ancient bronze. She shows no fear of tombs or teeth. She laughs at phantoms. She weaves insects into her braids and draws sigils on her toys with grave soot.
“One day,” Xandera told Bastet as they watched their daughter levitate a skull with a flick of her wrist, “she will not inherit a kingdom. She will hatch it.”
She is beloved. She is dangerous. She is kissed nightly on the forehead by the queen herself—not with love, but with expectation.
For in Kimilzamat, Xandera sees a future unshackled by need, love, or even desire. She is the chrysalis of a new age, waiting for the necrotic sun to rise.
Race Lore
“The gods feared them, the world forgot them, but the marrow of giants sings still beneath our feet.”
The Jotari, or “Graveborn Giants,” are a proud and ancient race native to the deep barrowlands and black-bloomed valleys of Hextor—a land where death is not feared, but woven into life like sinew into bone. Towering and broad of limb, the Jotari are more than brutes or remnants of a bygone age; they are the living relics of an old, splintered world, shaped not by divine mercy, but by the hunger of rot, shadow, and enduring will.
Physiology and Soul-Flesh
Jotari are massive, powerfully built beings ranging from 10 to 12 feet tall, their skin often marked by marbling patterns that resemble weathered stone, or veined like petrified wood. Many bear bone-spurs, runic scars, or natural necrotic growths that bloom like fungal roses along their shoulders or backs.
Their blood is thick and black-red, rich with death-aspected mana, and their hearts beat slower than any mortal’s—pumping lifeforce drawn not just from breath, but from their bond to the dead beneath the soil. Some Jotari are even born “tethered”—sharing their soul with the spirit of an ancestor, allowing for eerie flashes of insight, aggression, or wisdom beyond their years.
Culture and Death-Synthesis
To the Jotari, death is not an end—it is a rite of passage, a transformation to be welcomed, learned from, and eventually surpassed. Their shamans and bone-chanters preach a core belief that life and death are enemies, and only in their synthesis—undeath—may truth be born.
Their cities, carved from cliffside ossuaries or nestled among petrified forests, are half-cathedral, half-cemetery. They mourn with celebration, bury with purpose, and often harvest the bones of revered elders to create tools, armor, or even constructs that continue serving the clan.
Outsiders consider such customs barbaric. To the Jotari, they are holy.
Many giants undergo voluntary death-mirroring rituals to embrace undeath in controlled stages, merging spirit and form into a semi-lich state called a Barrowform. These transformations are not seen as loss of self, but ascension—a rite reserved for elders, war-mothers, and bone-kings.
Relationship with Xandera and the Ossuary Dominion
When Xandera rose in Hextor, the Jotari did not resist her power—they recognized in her the long-awaited hand of prophecy. To them, she is not simply a necromancer, but the embodiment of the Synthesis, the rebirth of a true god betrayed by heaven and now stirring beneath the rot of the world.
Many Jotari serve her directly:
As bonebound architects raising black pyramids and crypt-temples
As soul-chained warriors, grafted with iron and bone
Or as death-priests, preserving ancestral knowledge long thought lost
In return, Xandera honors their ancient customs, expanding their influence and allowing them full dominion over the barrowlands. She considers them her chosen vanguard—not servants, but kin.
Racial Traits
Titan’s Marrow: Resistant to life-draining or necrotic damage; undead recognize Jotari as kin and are less likely to attack unprovoked.
Barrowborn Memory: May commune with the souls of their ancestors during ritual slumber.
Death-Synthesis Tolerance: Jotari may undergo partial undeath states without becoming mindless or cursed.
Gravecraft: Capable of crafting from bone and spirit as naturally as others do from wood and metal.
Where others see abomination, the Jotari see inevitability. Where others cry heresy, they whisper reclamation.
And in the shadow of Xandera’s throne, the Jotari prepare—not for the end, but for the bloom of an age where the gods no longer dictate who may live, or die, or rise again.
