Ravessi

“If the killing void was animated, if death itself was imbued with sentience, if the very concept of nothingness was anthropomorphized, then the resulting monster wouldn’t be a fraction as ravenously destructive as the Ravessi.”

- the Novhar Erdohan on the Ravessi

Brief History

Believed to be the very first race given sentience by the godly Architects more than a million years ago, the Ravessi were, from the beginning, designed to be executioners. Wrought from strands of the Abyss itself (the chaotic nothingness that surrounds all universes), the Ravessi were destruction personified, harbouring an insatiable hunger for all living things. It was in their core nature to need to destroy and erase, to the extent that they were essentially slaves to their own hunger, and could not be considered truly malicious.

As the Architects travelled from universe to universe, seeding life in a never-ending experiment, the Ravessi were loosed upon any worlds the creators deemed unsatisfactory. They would flood those worlds, and indeed sometimes entire universes, unravelling existence itself until nothing but baren rock remained. And, even then, with their mission complete, they remained ravenous, craving further destruction, but limited only to what the Architects commanded.

According to the Novhar themselves, the Ravessi arrived in the Vast Infinite alongside the Architects, and so predate the VI. Because the Architects landed on Eld around a million years ago, the Ravessi are infinitely older even than this. No one truly knows when they were given life.

What is known about them: their part in the eventual destruction of the Novhar.

Around 100,000 years ago, the Ravessi were tasked with eradicating the Novhar, who had betrayed the Architects by fostering life of their own. However, before the Ravessi could complete this task, the Novhar had already retaliated. Given the binary opposition of their nature—the Novhar being masters of life-giving aasiur, the Ravessi masters of planet-eating Abyss—the fight this time was far fairer than it had even been before. In fact, where the Ravessi had previously triumphed over all targets, here the Novhar were able to drive them out of Eld and lock them into the Abyss that had spawned them. After accomplishing this feat, the Novhar then destroyed the Architects, robbing the Ravessi of not only their creators, but the entities who directed them.

90,000 years later, ten millennia before the present day, the Ravessi were released from the Abyss by a Novhar traitor named Erdohan. They managed to devour the Vast Infinite world of Incáraï, and the northern portion of Eld, before being pushed back into the Abyss a second and final time. However, before the Ravessi were imprisoned once more, they managed to destroy the surviving pockets of Novhar (or so they believed), thus completing the last task the Architects had assigned them.

For 10,000 years, the demonic Ravessi have remained trapped in the Abyss.

Until 4 years ago, when a single individual found its way to a remote desert planet on the fringes of the VI.

Physical Appearance

Because they were crafted from the Abyss itself, their true forms defy mortal comprehension. They actually exist as a hivemind, and so in their natural state are one united entity of ridiculous size. The Novhar have been recorded as describing this intact hivemind as resembling a seething, coiling mass the size of a continent that acts as a black hole in that it draws life and aasiur into its maw.

However, when parts of the hivemind fragment to form smaller individuals, they are slightly easier to define. A Ravessi fragment is described as being monstrous and draconic, with vestigial wings and talons large enough to carve up entire villages. In this reduced form, they stand of a height with the Empyrian Tower (which itself is more than 1,000 feet tall) and are occluded by a dark and demonic aura designed to shroud the details of their physical bodies from their enemies. They are variously covered in armoured plates of reptilian scale, insectoid chitin, and primordial ooze, a patchwork pelt that shifts and ululates to better confuse and terrify the mortal eye.

Like their Novhar brethren, they are capable of taking on a mortal guise. Though not nearly as practised in this (there have actually been no recorded cases of a Ravessi fragment needing to disguise itself as a mortal), they can render themselves mostly human, though they will seem off to observers. Unlike the Novhar, the Ravessi are believed to be capable of taking on the form of an existing mortal without needing to kill them first.

Ravessi Magic

Composed from aspects of the Abyss itself, the Ravessi possess a brand of magic that champions this nothingness. Unable to conjure aasiur, the source of all life and magic in the VI, the Ravessi are instead masters of manipulating mal-barath.

Mal-barath is the name given to the power the Ravessi exert when they erase life and devour planets. It is a dark and destructive force, capable of eating away flesh, bone, aasiur, and the very landscape itself. It turns living matter into ash and reduces everything else to desiccated rock. It also kills the atmosphere, and in limited swathes can appear to warp the sun and sky.

• For example, in the far north of Eld’s main continent of Indaver, where the Ravessi managed to destroy huge tracts of land, the sky appears in a constant state of diseased daytime, with the sun seeming to pulse oddly, as if sickened. The clouds are a bruised green and purple, and the air reeks of rot and decay. However, the sun and sky haven’t been altered, but the mal-barath has made it seem that way.

Mal-barath, when expressed, can be wielded like aasiur. It can appear as bolts of pure darkness, or as black fire. It can also be forced into a living being via physical contact, and in this case appears without fanfare, devouring the victim from the point of contact and literally unravelling them until they are entirely dust.

All Ravessi fragments can wield mal-barath. However, a lone fragment is less powerful, especially if trapped beyond the rest of the hivemind. This is because aasiur naturally repels mal-barath, and so a Ravessi fragment cannot wantonly devour the planet without the aid of the rest of its kind without risking aasiur literally overwhelming it and snuffing out its own lifeforce.

Miscellaneous Facts