Kings of Edom

The Kings of Edom are the rulers of the Qliphoth. The phrase “Five Kings of Edom” refers to the five greatest kings, but there are in fact many more kings than these five. The Kings of Edom came from the Qliphothic World and invaded our own Multiverse billions of years ago in the company of servant creatures. Whatever dimension they visited, the Kings consumed or destroyed. Eventually an alliance of dimensional powers was able to defeat the Kings, destroying many. But others were too powerful to be destroyed, and these beings were bound in “hidden, empty prison dimensions and barren worlds.” (Arcane Adversaries, p. 41) Cults devoted to the Kings survived and prospered, often channeling the Kings’ power, being transformed into Qliphothic entities themselves, and ruling in the Kings’ name. The Elder Worms were examples of this phenomenon, when they ruled Earth in the pre-human era.

The Kings of Edom are not gods in the traditional sense, nor are they demons per se. They do not need worship nor do they embody any human evil; they cannot be made to honor pacts, and they cannot be compelled to service. In the Champions Universe, the Kings are a homage to H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and they have many similarities to beings such as Azathoth and Nyarlathotep. The Kings of Edom exist as adversaries of cosmic horror; they can never be defeated or destroyed. They can only be avoided, misled, or trapped.

Named Kings

Some of the known Kings are described here. There are many more whose names are as yet unknown.

• Vulshoth is the “Eye of the Void,” one of the most well known and powerful of the Kings. He is trapped within an armored shell which lies in a pocket dimension called the Black Maze. His prison has weakened, however, and Vulshoth can now communicate with servitors and cultists. Were anyone able to gaze upon Vulshoth with their waking eyes, he would appear as a giant, gobular mass of slimy tentacles surrounding five huge ruby-red eyes and a central parrot-like beak.
• Deizzhorath the Dissolver is a King made of mathematics and energy rather than matter. He is imprisoned in a special dimension in which every point is a Gate to a million other points, tangled and knotted through space and time. The Dissolver manifests when the fabric of reality is twisted; he can manifest locally at these points and obliterate reality. His mind is described as timeless and placeless rather than evil. He is not worshipped because he never responds to such worship.
• Esleggua the Fear-Eater is a huge pillar of fanged mouths and slimy tentacles. His howl destroys the capacity for fear and empathy, turning those exposed into sociopathic servants of the Kings.
• Mgatraor appears as a cone of blue-black jelly with a single huge eye ringed by long, slender tentacles. Mgatraor specializes in reshaping matter at will, building non-Euclidean structures that have special powers.
• Orogtha is believed to be one of the greater Kings, but his physical appearance is not known. He is called the Great Spawner, and specializes in mutating and reshaping living beings.
• Pthaar, also known as the Phantast thanks to his powers of illusion, was trapped inside a star which eventually came to be orbited by Sinnuris, a planet of sentient life. Pthaar is now worshipped by the people of Sinnuris as the Master of the Scarlet Sun, and they seek to free him from his prison. Pthaar’s relative freedom of action, his unlimited powers of illusion, and his planet full of insane devotees make him one of the most powerful of the Kings.

Servants

The Kings of Edom are worshipped by human cults, served by sorcerers, and have legions of boneless minions at their beck and call. Some of those are detailed here.

• Squrm: Huge squids flying on slimy, membraneous wings and with a single twin-pupiled eye, squrms are black, streaked with putrid yellow, green, and brown. They fly in erratic looping motions and their bodies are flexible enough to squeeze through small openings. Through tentacular gestures, a squrm can move objects in space, dissolve solid matter, create entangling webs from thin air, or hypnotize human beings. They also have plenty of tentacles and a beak, should they be hungry. Wide, smooth, flat surfaces such as parking lots and glass skyscrapers are poisonous to squrm; they die after extended contact.
• Spawn of Vulshoth: The King of Edom known as Vulshoth can transform about a dozen willing supplicants into a single copy of himself. Alternately, he can direct his followers to build a special temple which, through the wonders of non-Euclidean geometry, focuses Vulshoth’s will enough for him to manifest a Spawn without sacrifice. In this latter case, however, the Spawn cannot leave the temple unless it consumes a large quantity of blood, and even this allows only brief excursions. A typical Spawn grabs its victims with myriad tentacles and sucks their blood until death results. It also possesses a host of psychic powers from mind control to teleportation and telekinesis.
• Mind Thief: Mind Thieves look like large spiders or small crabs, but they have a large and fanged mouth. They crawl into a victim’s skull and control his actions, tapping into his memories, skills and powers. Along the way, they eat the brain of their host. They’re not very good at pretending to be human, however, and UV light, X-rays and other forms of energetic radiation harm a Mind Thief even when it is hiding in a human skull. Victims of a Mind Thief will avoid sunlight and always wear hats. When subjected to intense energy of the sort it loathes, the Mind Thief usually takes a nice juicy bite of human brain before leaving the host, almost always a fatal wound, so those who seek to get rid of one must surprise it or destroy it almost instantly.
• Angler: The angler cannot be completely understood or perceived by human beings. It appears as a roughly dog-sized accumulation of angled lines with from three to six crooked and interlaced “legs.” Their bodies are one dimensional, pass through all matter, and ignore almost all threats. They scuttle along walls or any other flat or angled surface, heedless of gravity, but cannot cross a circle or curve. The minds of anglers are so alien that they remain a mystery to human occultists. Anglers have many similarities to the Hounds of Tindalos, dog-sized hunters in the Cthulhu Mythos who cross time and space by moving through corners.

Foes

When the Kings of Edom invaded the Multiverse billions of years ago, they were stopped by an alliance of beings who exist so far back in the past that we cannot accurately identify them. Among them were beings now known as the "Fire Bearer," "the Lords of the Jeweled Spider" and "the Angel of Cold Shadow." Signs of these ancient powers can still be found. The Crystal Spider emblem found in Canada and on Monster Island, identified by Ironclad, is the best known protection against the Kings of Edom, fulfilling a role in Champions Online which is not unlike that which the Elder Sign fulfills in the Cthulhu Mythos.