Theophage

The Last Supper: Regarding the Dark Animist Dahni Obrove’s Blasphemous Quest; Or, She is God’s Judge; Or, Divine and Dash; Or, A No-Legged Woman Ain’t Got No Soul; Or, Fae Ex Machina
Fifty years ago, Dahni Obrove was perplexed and unhappy. As her tribe’s next appointed life mage, it was her duty to bolster and strengthen the souls of the people. However, use of her magic had led to the discovery that her people, the half-serpent Nagmia-Lamga, do not have souls in the usual sense. Instead, Nagmia-Lamga received their identities from something as ghastly as personal experience and the interaction of chemicals in the brain. Euch. The magic still worked well enough, but the energy Dahni redistributed would disperse amidst the souls of the living matter which made up her people’s bodies. Nagmia-Lamga’s cells had souls, but the bodies composed of those cells did not. It was very unsettling to Dahni.

When Dahni asked her teacher about this troubling discovery, the wisewoman revealed that the people’s missing souls were believed to be an intentional omission by their mother goddess, Apu. The old tales stated that the Great Mother Apu had shed pieces of her own body in order to create the Nagmia-Lamga, granting them strong bodies imbued with an aspect of divinity. Without a soul, Nagmia-Lamga could rely fully on their strong physical forms, rather than a metaphysical pocket of life energy. They lived for hundreds of years and possessed tremendous strength, all thanks to the goddess’ decision. Dahni should consider herself blessed, her teacher said. As a life mage, she is able to use her power to make the people even stronger!

This explanation didn’t satisfy Dahni, and she did not feel very blessed. Clearly, the goddess had made a mistake. Nagmia-Lamga weren’t better off for not having souls. What good was a long life and remarkable vital powers if it meant bearing such a painful emptiness? What of the afterlife? Living so long without any hope of eternal reward at the end didn’t seem like a very fair deal. To Dahni, knowing the cause of her pain was all the more painful. She refused to stay quiet and do nothing about her affliction. Since souls weren’t something the snakefolk were born with, perhaps one could be acquired.

Dahni left her village and stalked the roads leading from the nearest human city. The Nagmia-Lamga had a standing alliance with the humans, so Dahni had to enact her plan discreetly. She took the opportunity to capture and devour a lone traveler, and then, once he was securely trapped within her, committed the forbidden act of tampering with the man’s soul, to try and make it acclimate to her Nagmia-Lamga body. Yet try as Dahni might, the soul refused to accept her. She tried again, swallowing another human and repeating the process, with slight variation. Dahni tried again and again, but none of them would take. It seemed that Nagmia-Lamga were not only born without souls, but they were by design meant to never have them…

By the end of the week, Dahni’s body was full of captive souls, each free-floating within her belly, unable to leave and unable to become acclimated to her. The souls Dahni had collected had no effect on the emptiness she felt, yet she was unwilling to release them or convert them to energy in the hope that one would take. She couldn’t return to the village because of the shame she felt for having failed, for purposelessly taking human lives.

Eventually, all those souls buzzing about Dahni’s body cavities attracted the attention of the world’s gods, in particular the members of the human empire’s extensive pantheon. A life mage could redirect the flow of energy into a being’s soul, but to manipulate the soul itself was the sole privilege of the divine realm. For committing the taboo, Dahni was punished by endless derisive whispers in the day, nightmares interrupting her slumber, and an unrelenting bellyache at all times. The gods intended to break her from within, to tarnish her soul like she had her captives’. Dahni tried releasing the souls inside of her, but the gods would not accept that as penance. She would endure constant suffering for her crimes, the only escape death, and the oblivion that all soulless Nagmia-Lamga faced at the end of their long lives.

During the days of her torment, Dahni began to resent the gods, especially her people’s Great Mother Apu. Why were they punishing her for trying to fix Apu’s mistake? Dahni only wanted to be whole! She had made a mistake, but it wasn’t as if the Nagmia-Lamga’s cries of pain were answered in the past. The gods would not help them, and were instead punishing Dahni for trying to find a solution on her own. She hated them, all of them.

Dahni’s anguish and frustration was heard, though not by any gods. A stranger appeared before Dahni, lithe, beautiful, and wearing iridescent wings, like an insect’s. Dahni had found herself in the company of a fairy prince. He used his strange magic to quiet the taunts of the gods, healed the knotted, cramping pain of her troubled innards, and then offered her a deal. He would help Dahni escape the world and the harsh retribution of the divine realm, if she promised to become stronger and one day return and fulfill her ambition of becoming whole.

Dahni was about to explain to the stranger that it was impossible, that Nagmia-Lamga were incapable of acquiring a soul, but he stopped her. What did the myths say? The goddess Apu shed pieces of her body to create her children. Dahni was removed from the initial act by generations, yet she was still a fragment of Apu, was she not? Human souls were incompatible parts; what Dahni should instead be attempting to return to her point of origin, and overcome it. To become complete, Dahni had to swallow the body of her goddess.

To aid her, the prince offered Dahni access to the network of fairy rings. She could flee this plane and study the nature of souls on other worlds, perfect her art, and later return to face Apu.

Left with little choice, Dahni accepted the fairy prince’s offer. Fifty years later, she still isn’t very happy, and the ache of her absent soul still wears on her. She is spurred onward, however, by the hope that she might one day finally be rid of the gnawing emptiness within her. One day, she’ll make the goddess Apu answer for her mistake.

Lukewarm-Hearted Snake; Or, She Reaps what She Sews; Or, Additional Information
The general conceit behind Theophage’s character is easy enough to grasp: She’s a big purple snake-woman who will eat someone up and then fiddle around with their base intrinsic essence in the hopes of someday using what she’s learned to take out her grudge against her race’s creator goddess. She can summon elementals to help her out when necessary, along with other life magic-flavored tricks. She has room temperature blood. She is about 22 feet long from the top of her head to the end of her tail.

For the curious, however, we’ve provided additional background and expository details below.

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Nagmia-Lamga have a system in which seven chieftains are selected to oversee certain professions within the village. One chieftain leads the craftsmen, another handles diplomacy with the outside world, and so on. These chieftains in turn select a promising hatchling to serve as their apprentice, in an endless cycle of learning and mastery.

Dahni Obrove was chosen to become her village’s animist-chieftain. Animists are specialized mages who manipulate the flow of life manifested in the form of anima, a ubiquitous and all-pervasive energy. Within everything that possesses a material form (Excluding the Nagmia-Lamga), from birds in flight to stones on the ground, there exists a knotted singularity of anima known as the soul. Animists use their magic to bring strength, growth, and healing by redirecting anima into a person or object’s soul.

Within a Nagmia-Lamga village, animists are relied upon to increase the output of farmer’s crops and livestock, as well as to support the warriors with infusions of anima and summoning elementals to fight alongside them. Unlike other professions, there are only ever two animists per village, the chieftain and their apprentice.

Dahni still uses normal animancy alongside her manipulation of souls, but in universes where the rules are different, the magic is fueled by whatever “life energy” is native to that universe. As an extension of this, because reality is infinite and variable, there are some cases where magical and physical law are quite different. Anima isn’t a ubiquitous force found in every universe, and therefore not every soul Dahni attempts to interact with is comprised of it. Nevertheless, she is adaptable, and often finds souls of a different nature easier to toy with than those in her home plane.

Most animist taboos relate to different variations on fiddling with a person or object’s soul directly, rather than merely rerouting anima into a soul. Notable offenses include attempting to wrest a soul from the afterlife, altering a soul to change a person’s body, and attempting to coalesce enough anima to create a new soul. Dahni’s crime, of course, was removing a soul from its host body. Time will tell if she attempts the other types of taboos as well.

Nagmia-Lamga chieftains, and their apprentices, receive distinct tattoos over their bodies which correlate to their role in the village. Animists, like Dahni and her teacher, are decorated in a branching swirl pattern, representing the flow of anima through the world.

A Lamga-Nagmia’s lack of a soul does not mean that they’re incapable of experiencing emotions, merely that such things are guided by internal and external physical factors, rather than a metaphysical mass of life magic. However, their lack of a soul does inhibit their ability to feel empathy for other living things that they are not already close to. This makes it very easy for them to swallow living things whole without any lasting feelings of guilt, usually. Dahni Obrove’s shame came mostly because she had failed to absorb a soul of her own, rather than the fact that she murdered several travelers.

Most Nagmia-Lamga go their entire lives not knowing the source of the gnawing lack within them. Many choose simply to ignore it, but part of an animist’s duty is to explain the absence of a soul and provide comfort to any members of the community that thinks to ask.

A key difference to note between Nagmia-Lamga and other half-serpent races is that their blood is maintained at a base of 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Nagmia-Lamga are not too hot-blooded and not too cold-blooded, making them comfortable to lounge upon but unsatisfying for vampires to imbibe on. There is no recorded evidence of a vampiric Nagmia-Lamga.

The patterns and colors of Nagmia-Lamga’s tails vary. Dahni Obrove’s tail would be plain and unadorned if it weren’t for the animist tattoos swirling over her body. Her tail was initially a deep blue color, but upon accepting the assistance of her fae benefactor, it became purple.

Nagmia-Lamga’s level of growth and maturity is irregular and inconsistent with their age. Dahni Obrove was 30 years old when she first commited the animist’s taboo, but appeared to be only fifteen physically. At 80 years she seems a snake-woman in her twenties. Her teacher and the other elders were, at the time of Dahni’s flight, a couple of centuries old, yet appeared to be just going on fifty. A fair guess would be that Lagmia-Nagma age “rapidly” to maturation over the course of 50 years before leveling off, after which they age much slower, but no one has thought to document this yet.

The length of a Nagmia-Lamga’s tail normally corresponds to how tall they might be if they were a normal human with normal human legs. Their tail is usually twice the length of their would-be human form, plus the length of the legs they don’t possess. Understand? Dahni’s human torso might have stood to reach six feet in the alternate reality where she’s a human and not a snakefolk, and therefore her tail should be twelve feet, plus the length of the legs she doesn’t have. The animist is lucky, however, to have grown an extra four feet on her lower half, leaving her with a sixteen foot long tail part (sans the portion where her legs would be). All this adds up to Dahni Obrove being twenty-two feet long from tail-tip to bouncy and voluminous brown hair.

There is no easy way to determine how a Nagmia-Lamga’s age relates to their size. Most assume it just works out by magic.

Nagmia-Lamga regularly shed their skin.

A Nagmia-Lamga’s body does not naturally produce any venom, however they are resistant to most toxic substances and use those produced by local wildlife while hunting.

Nagmia-Lamga stomachs come in two parts. The top half, housed in their human torsos, is used for storage of meals and a pre-digestive process meant to soften their bodies, after which they are deposited in the much harsher and caustic second stomach located in their serpent tail-halves. Not that any of this information is important, since one should try to avoid being swallowed by a Nagmia-Lamga at all costs.

Dahni Obrove and her people come from a world called Lathyrus. The planet is dominated by a massive ocean occupied by one large continent, several smaller landmasses, and scattered islands. It was through their capitalizing on seaside trade that the human race created their vast empire. Their territories extend across the main continent and to many island colonies.

Nagmia-Lamga society is located primarily on the outer edge of the massive and towering Kludyhst Forest, a dominion of giant beasts and ancient monsters. The snakefolk live in their scattered villages led by the traditional system of seven elders, hunting the tamer wildlife that exists outside of Kludyhst proper. Sometimes they become lucky and a gargantuan antelope stumbles out of the denser and more mysterious parts of the forest.

Nagmia-Lamga can be found in many different locales and environments. The forest-dwelling variety are on amicable terms with their coastal and island-bound cousins, while another group lives alongside the dwarves in the mountainous regions outside of the human territories. There are rumors of a tribe that has adapted to life under the sea, but this is as of yet unconfirmed.

The alliance between humanity and the Nagmia-Lamga has proven prosperous for both races, despite it being a relatively recent development. For years, the Nagmia-Lamga had an advantage over humans thanks to their raw physical might backed up by their animist’s life magic. Eventually, however, humanity outpaced them in advancements of both magic and technology. Rather than elevating the conflict, the humans and Nagmia-Lamga formed an alliance. The empire agreed to offer protection and admittance to their colleges of magic for any snakefolk willing to apply, while the Nagmia-Lamga agreed to fight alongside the humans if a greater threat should someday appear.

Nagmia-Lamga will often enlist aboard merchant vessels, where they are welcome members of the crew. The human sailors receive an added bit of muscle in case things get rough, and the Nagmia-Lamga receive a taste of the adventure-filled world outside their secluded enclaves.

The Hither and Thither Expanded; Or, Drawing Back the Curtain!
Dahni Obrove is the alternate universe analogue of Daniel Obrove, crown prince of the Kingdom of Ulex. She is not his former life, his blood relative, or a close acquaintance. She's the Obrove if Obrove were a fallen animist on a quest to seek justice against the goddess who wronged her, while the sorcerer-prince is Obrove in the form of a young noble filling the days until his ascent to the throne with a life of adventure!

More Obroves can be found on their alt list, here.

There are more "Danalogues" to come, eventually, so we kindly ask that you...

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