The Bridled Infinity
VERTHAN Demon of the Third Circle First Soul of the Endless Desert
In time immemorial thunder rolled across an infinite silver desert. A cloud of black sand haloed in gold, the primal heart of law reared rampant in a black sky. It roared and bellowed from a hundred jaws of obsidian glass, and struck the earth as it strode with a thousand legs of lightning. Its strides stretched from nowhere to everywhere, from yesterday to tomorrow, each step a sheet of lightning crashing from one end of the sky to the other. As the silver desert knew no finity so too did her cacophonous thunderhead, her beating heart, run wild and free.
Verthan knew no rival in ancient times, not even among the vast presences of its mother-world’s peers. It kicked quills free from Isidoros’ back and strode through the waters of the river Adrian unharmed, and it was happy. But it was unfulfilled, and knew this to be true when it finally beheld the greatest of its mothers’ kin. A shining tyrant, a twin-hearted presence of empyrean perfection. At that moment the beast of the silver sands’ eyes opened, and it became The Beast Which Beheld God.
And then its god died, and its corpse sewed shut the sky, and the Beast Which Beheld God found its strides circumscribed by a boundary, a five-day line of blood in the sand. And so it raged, and lashed with its many legs, and kicked stars free of their mountings in Heaven.
Heavenly archives say that Xas Maketh, sun-Chosen warlord of the First Age, heard Verthan’s rolling thunder and was reminded of the rumble of hooves across the plains of his homeland, and so likened the beast to a horse. With burning ambition in his heart he decided that he would tame it as one. Records of their battle differ in their precise accounting, but all agree that the two must have dueled for fifteen days. The beast’s spirit was not tamed, but its body was sundered. Its many jaws were folded and dislocated until they could be held by a single bit and bridle of orichalcum. The swirling expanse of its back was broken and bent to a shape better suited for a saddle of moonsilver. Its thousand legs of lightning were lashed and twisted together to fit four adamant horseshoes, and so Xas Maketh had his steed.
Yu-Shan’s poets still trade songs about the hero Xas Maketh and his handsome black horse. They say that to commemorate his triumph the Solar rode into heaven at the head of a great parade, astride a horse with a slick black coat as dark as the stones of the Underworld and a mane and tail of shimmering gold. It leapt from the peak of an earthly mountain straight to Heaven’s gate, and Xas’ many thousands of adherents followed in its fulminated foot-treads. Some poets speak too of the horse’s eyes, and how they brimmed with tears at the glory of the celestial city.
No histories speak of what became of Xas Maketh’s steed after his death at the hands of his treacherous lieutenants, but some say that a solitary survivor traded the Bridled Infinity to a maiden of blue glass in exchange for safe haven in the Demon City.
Notes and abilities: Verthan can bear a rider anywhere in all the cosmos, riding the lightning that shines in the vast black void of Cecelyne’s starry infinitude. No matter how distant, no matter how impossible, Verthan may reach it with but a moment, though to his rider an age may have seemed to pass. All who can discern his track may follow.Â
The golden hairs of Verthan’s mane are unimaginably precious, and some of the First Age’s greatest artifacts have bundles of Verthan’s hairs at their cores. The beast is loath to part with them, though, and any rider who tries to pilfer some risks being thrown from the Demon’s back and lost in the starry void forever.
Verthan despises the ruin that has been made of his body, and reserves his voice and his intellect for those to whom he feels some kinship. To those trapped in bodies they hate, bound by cruel names so that the ignorant might understand them, he shares his knowledge. Secrets of space-bending sorceries of lightning and whirling sand. His history - the impossible places past summoners have used his power to reach, and their reasons for doing so. He also shares what he has seen: hidden oases, ancient cities, and lost treasures that only a being capable of striding through the sky high above an endless desert could possibly find.
