“If it’ll help anything, she can keep my maw.” the largest one said. 

 

Bleddyn glared at him, then tapped her staff on his wide chest without taking her eyes off Ripple. “First. Name?”

 

 “Deri, son of Ifan.”

 

–Deri’s first appearance, “The Cerberean Four.”

 

“The big Knight houses are always like this.” Deri says. “It’s why dad always told me never to be knighted. Once you start owning land and planets you start fighting with other Cerbereans instead of Hadeans, and it profits no one.”

 

–Deri on Cerberean politics

 

Name:

Deri, son of Ifan

 

Do note that Cerberean names include “son of” and “daughter of” as part of their full, formal name. So yes, on all the forms you have to put the whole thing.

 

The name Ifan holds no significant weight in Cerberean society. The Ifans, like the majority of Cerbereans, do not hold a single planet to their name. It is telling that none of the other Cerbereans know whether Deri’s family backs the Macsens or the Ewens.

 

Deri is proud to come from the lower-class. He believes that the simple, uncomplicated life of a warrior instead of a knight keeps one focused on the true cause of the Cerberean race–pushing back the darkness of the Hadeans.

 

Supername:

 

None

 

“Do I have to put something for a supername?” Deri asked.

 

“Nope Deri, it’s entirely optional. You don’t even got to put an X on the line if you don’t wanna!” Marci answered.

 

“Oh good! No offense to your culture, but I don’t feel like I should be using any names my parents didn’t give me.”

 

“Bleddyn felt the other way. She had me show her how to log on to the Statesmen supername registry to see how many people already went by “Shadow Dancer.” I think she wants to challenge them for the supername or something stupid like that.”

 

“Well, she is Cerberean, yes, but we’re not of the same culture, not really.”

 

“Is that because she’s a knight or because she’s a shadow dancer?”

 

“I’d say a little of both.”

 

Introduction:

 

One of the “Cerberean 4” who came to our world during Ripple’s chaotic escape from our school, Deri is from a common family. The name Ifan holds no special power in Cerberean society, and most Cerbereans don’t even know his family exists. As the only commoner among his friends, Deri helps ground them when they start to fly off into political arguments. He’s a simple kind of guy. He’s a Cerberean, he fights Hadeans, that’s it.He doesn’t have time for the political bickering of his friends. He’s never told which Stellar House he supports–Macsen or Ewen–and intends never to tell. With Bran’s existence throwing everything he and the Cerberean 4 have ever known into chaos, politics are the last thing on his mind.

 

Average Grade:

 

D

 

Imagine that, a D for Deri.

 

The concept of schooling is rather foreign to Cerbereans. The responsibility for education is usually trusted to the same people that teach young Cerbereans how to fight–their parents. There are,however, Cerbereans that specialize in teaching certain skills that families, particularly rich families, hire to train their children. 

 

Cerbereans out on a hunt also make use of institutions they call “learning camps” so that they don’t fall behind in their studies while on a hunt. Hunts can last a long, long time. Some even go on for months, so every hunting party with a child has a learning camp.

 

You might wonder why the parents don’t just accompany their children on hunts and teach them themselves. It’s a good question, and the answer is that adults rarely go on the same hunts as children. The reason for this is that a large gap in power typically exists between adults and children. Baron Macsen is much, much more powerful than Eira and Emyr. Shadow dancers, likely because their alterations break their sleg away from its natural connection to Cerberus’ corpse, are and exception to this rule which is why Bleddyn is, at least according to her, more powerful than her mother. 

 

Adult-only hunting parties fight the worst incursions and hunt the largest prey. Recall how when Danny was inside Emyr’s mind she saw a memory of him, Alwen, and other Cerberean youths fighting to clear a planet of a Hadean incursion. That’s what Cerberean children do. Cerberean adults clear out stars, nebulae, galaxies. They fight massive swells of Hadeans out in the dark of space where their black bodies blend into the eternal starless shade. Child hunting parties typically have only a handful of adults to guide and command the younger, and this seniority cuts across social classes. Even Alwen and Bleddyn have to listen to the adult at the head of their hunting parties, even if he’s an unknighted warrior without even a planet to his name.

 

So with a lopsided ratio of adults to children in hunting parties, “learning camps” had to be established where 1 adult teaches several students to keep their skills sharp. 

 

Sound familiar?

 

So if you ever hear one of the Cerberean kids call us a “learning camp,” it’s not because they’re throwing shade on our campus and comparing it to the palaces they’re used to–well, the ones all of them but Deri are used to.

 

Deri isn’t one for traditional instruction. Learning camps, while similar to our classrooms, were not every weekday and didn’t go on for near as long. The traditional classroom environment has made him antsy which is why we’ve assigned Willow (forgive us, Drysi) to be the tutor of the Cerberean 4 (plus Bleddyn, when she isn’t off on her own doing stuff). Willow shows them around Joyous Harbor, buys them lunch at Johnny Winter’s (paid for by the school), takes them to the Interway, the museums, the boardwalk, the Statesmen Center, the caves, Ghost Pirate Island, all the cool places.

 

In this way they learn, and in this way they learn best.

 

To remark on his low grade, Deri’s a bright kid, but he’s got way too much on his mind to focus on academics, especially academics taught to him by aliens while he’s killing time before he can find a way to go home and tell his family he isn’t dead. His grades rank very low on the list of things he’s concerned about, and while Cerberean ethics prevent him from opening up to us about how awful he’s feeling(doing so would imply that we’re inefficient hosts, and Cerbereans are required to be extremely polite to those that host them away from their homes) he’s genuinely going through a rough time. All the Cerberean kids are. Their parents probably think they’re dead, the Elians are engaged in a civil war they’ll have to involve themselves in, and Bran’s Hadeans mean the endless war against the Hadeans might be coming to an end soon–and what will follow that can only be speculated.

 

Please don’t make a big deal out of Deri not turning in assignments and skipping class. Let’s have him treat his stay in our world as much like a vacation as possible.

 

ERC:

 

3

 

Deri, along with the rest of our Cerberean guests, provides a rare example of a student taking ERC 3 with no interest whatsoever in superheroes. For someone that has seen and participated in real, deadly combat, nothing less than ERC 3 combat sims can hold interest to him. As someone that has trained all his life to work in groups not too unlike superteams, nothing less than ERC 3 team sims can teach him anything. The social and political side of ERC 3 isn’t something that an alien warrior needs to learn, so we cut most of it out, only keeping in enough so that Deri can learn what superheroes and superteams are.

 

Personalized Curriculum:

 

Remediation, Exploration Society, Night Club

 

The remediation class Deri and the other Cerbereans are in isn’t like the remediation class Lanty and Claude are in. The Cerbereans don’t plan to stay here long and they’re from a universe much more advanced than Willow-Wells (in some respects, the Kingdom is even more advanced than our own world), so their remediation class doesn’t have to be as intense or as time consuming. In fact, it’s rather “comfy” (I believe that’s the term kids use these days). It’s more like a guided tour of Joyous Harbor along with short jaunts into the Interway.

 

The Cerberean 4 are also involved in the Exploration Society, a special class-plus-outreach program created by Willow, Danny, and Dr. Freeman for all the multiverse kids caught up in the “Mr. Blue Scheme” to befriend one another and foster peaceful and productive relations between their world. 

 

It’s good that we have several Cerbereans involved in the Exploration Society. Their differing views on Kingdom politics helps the other children realize that Cerberean culture isn’t just “one thing.”

 

Recently, Deri has enrolled himself (or more accurately, Drysi twisted his arm until he enrolled) in Night Club. After accidentally finding herself in Danny’s dreamworld, Drysi discovered she had a taste for Astral adventures. That dreamwalking was something Cerbereans did back home only with the permission and supervision of Elians (dreams are considered a function of the soul, and thus under Elian authority) also gave Night Club a special appeal to her.

 

Deri doesn’t share Drysi’s enthusiasm for dreamwalking. He sees that as strictly an Elian thing Cerbereans don’t have any business with. But Drysi managed to convince him with her charming enthusiasm to give it a shot. After all, the Cerberean 4 recently concluded that the Cerberean tradition of “two Cerberians make Cerberia” is beat out by “new world, new rules.”

 

And who knows? Maybe after an adventure or two he’ll come around…and if not, he’ll probably keep doing it for Drysi. 

 

Contact Education:

 

ARGO

 

Deri, like the other Cerberean children, keep in close contact with ARGO as Commander Victory and his ambassadors are the only ones the Dagdans are willing to meet with and talk to at their coir blockade. ARGO is the closest thing they have to a wire back home.

 

What makes things even more complicated is that Deri can’t tell Commander Victory to tell the Dagdans to tell his parents he’s alive. The Cerberean 4 vanished in the Depths. People assume they either died or are locked in a tense battle with the Hadeans. If we told them how they came to survive the Depths and end up in our universe, we’d have to talk about Bran and his Hadeans, and that’s something no one is ready to do, not while there’s a false-Cadell on the Elian throne about to bring the Elians to civil war.

 

Hyperstasis:

 

Cerberean Physiology 

 

The Cerbereans

 

To talk about the Cerbereans, one must talk about the god whose dead body their race arose from, one must talk about Father Cerberus and the role he played in the formation of their universe.

 

Aeons ago, back when the stars of our universe were blue and cool, the universe known as the Kingdom was formed by three gods. They were Dagda, El, and…Hades.

 

You’ll be forgiven if you thought it was Dagda, El, and Hades. Those gods are the ones who created the modern god-races of the Kingdom. The First Born Elians pulled their way out of El’s corpse and procreated to create the race of Elians, who govern all the souls of the universe and the Third Afterlife. The First Born Dagdans chipped away from the body of Dagda and forged the race of Dagdans, who control all of space and shepherd the races that evolve on the dust around their stars. The First Born Cerbereans clawed their way out of the remains of Cerberus and mated to start the bloodlines of the race of Cerbereans, who hunt the Hadeans and raid the Depths.

 

But in the beginning, it was Dagda, El, and Hades. Cerberus came later.

 

Father Dagda created space and time, matter and energy. He hung the first stars in the sky, beautiful crystal stars, intricate, jeweled perfection locked in clockwork dances and shimmering as vivid as blood against a black forever.

 

Father El created souls. He placed these souls within the creation of Dagda and the universe awoke. Life, known as the Venerable by the races of the Kingdom, glowed within the facets of the first stars. Each facet was a painting and each painting was a universe unto itself. The lives of the Venerable, their aspirations and struggles and dreams were projected like light from lanterns across the universe.

 

The universe was a their easel, life their colors, and together El and Dagda created a work of art.

 

Hades, the third brother, father to nothing, stood by and watched.

 

He was there to be a critic of the art of his older brothers, but he could find nothing in their perfection to critique, and for the first time his existence was unnecessary.

 

They had played the game before. They had played the game to impress Hades, who was their eldest brother. They had played the game six times and six times Hades found their universe lacking.

 

But on the seventh universe, he was defeated, and beings of the Kingdom still sometimes refer to their world as the seventh universe.

 

Hades, ashamed and aimless, created a hole in reality and filled it with himself. This was the First Afterlife.

 

Hades attempted to create like his older brothers El and Dagda. But he could not create the crystal stars of Dagda, only empty space. But he could not create the life of El, and his anxious heartbeat thundered from one end of eternity to another.

 

From a fertile soil of inadequacy and wounded pride grew a rage so all-consuming that it spilled the bounds of the First Afterlife.

Hades emerged and turned his brothers away from their work so that they could see only him.

 

“You will share with me the fruit of your garden.” he said, gesturing to the crystal stars. “I shall consume them, and they shall dwell within the darkness that is me and my world, and they will shine and be happy and I will be happy.”

 

And his brothers hesitated for they knew that Hades would not be able to resist 

 

But Hades saw their hesitation and said “You will share with me the fruit of your garden, or I will become angrier than I already am, and I will scream and throw my hands about and there will be no more fruit and no more garden and no more game.”

 

El and Dagda faced a dilemma. Surely their creatures would be destroyed by Hades, for Hades was not a god that knew restraint. He did not know how to give weaker beings room to exist. He had to touch them and hold them like dolls.

 

But El had an idea.

 

He took a creature, who Kingdom texts call Ianto, and carefully removed its body like one would peel a fruit. He took away Ianto’s skin, and muscles, and bones, and he was left only with his soul–but it was a soul shaped by the body, with the body’s memories and personalities.

 

The first ghost.

 

Interestingly, Kingdom texts record the name of the first ghost but not the first Venerable. This might be due to the dominance of Elian scholars throughout Kingdom history. Since the First Born Elians arose from the brain of El, they carried within them his memories, and thus accounts of this period are filtered through Elian bias.

 

Ianto and the ghosts to follow were invincible. They could not be destroyed. They could not feel pain. They would survive Hades, and so were handed over to him. People can bleed. Ghosts can’t.

 

For a time, all was well, but then Hades again grew discontent.

 

He began to compare the few ghosts he had with the many living Venerables his brothers had. They had so many, and they were so interesting. Dagda was so clever in making their bodies. He made it so that living beings came out of living beings. How was that even possible? They came out as these small things and grew and changed. They got bigger. They got wiser. And then they made more living things. And they did this all by themselves, Dagda and El didn’t have to do a thing. Oh, his brothers were brilliant. They were cosmic watchmakers. They made the parts, set things in motion, but then the universe ran on its own.

 

And Hades would stare out from his hole in reality, the First Afterlife, and again grew jealous.

 

Ghosts never grew up or grew old. Ghosts never changed. Ghosts never had children.

 

He stared for a long, long time. He stared for aeons.

 

And then he emerged.

 

“You have given me broken toys.” he said. “But you have made wonders for yourself. Give me beings as good as your own, give me as many beings as you possess, or else I will make broken toys of all beings.”

 

And El and Dagda were at a loss of what to do.

 

Then Dagda had an idea.

 

He levied a tax upon all life, a heavy tax but a necessary one. They called this tax age and its final payment death. From now on, beings would grow until they grew no more, and then they would tire. They would grow more and more tired and sleep longer and longer until one night they would close their eyes and open them never more. Then their ghost would rise from their body and journey to the First Afterlife. And to prevent Hades from complaining that he received only the old, Dagda included a randomness in age. Death could strike at any time, could strike even the newly born, and Hades came to possess souls from every stage of life.

 

Dagda took this two-headed thing called death and age and placed it within the universe, and the universe wept, but endured. The Law of Boundaries had been formed, and the law said that things would age and die and cross the boundary between the universe and the First Afterlife and be seen no more by the living.

The living would die but the dead would not live. This was the law. Souls flowed one way across the boundary and never the other.

 

Hades accepted the Law of Boundaries because he sensed that this was truly the best he would get. It was this or nothing, this or the end of the game.

 

Yet he had his misgivings.

 

Age and death were things he could not understand like his brothers could understand, they were things he could never have created by himself, and for that reason he feared them.

 

What if age and death turned on him one day? What if age reversed itself and the flow of souls started to go the other way with ghosts traveling back to El and Dagda’s universe? What if death turned on him and made him a ghost?

 

He wanted to make sure age and death were on his side, and so he took age and death aside one day and added a third head to their shared body–loyalty. Hades could do this. He could not create things with the skill of his brothers, but in terms of changing what already was, he was unmatched.

 

“I have created you, and you are my son. You are Cerberus, and you are the god of the boundaries.”

 

“I am life.” one head said. “I am age. I am growth and decay leading to death. I am the Door that opens.”

 

“I am death.” another head said. “I am the finality. I am the Door that closes.”

 

“I am afterlife.” the final head said. “I am loyalty. I maintain the House of the Door and make it worthy of my master.”

 

“And I am that master. You will enforce the Law of Boundaries. You will ensure that the living live, the dying die, and the dead exist here and no one else.”

 

“I enforce the Law of Boundaries.” the heads said together, and Cerberus did so.

 

El and Dagda were perplexed by their brother’s sudden creation. Cerberus was unlike anything they had ever seen in their existence. But Cerberus gave them hope. He had been created by an unskilled creator, and the creations of unskilled creators rarely turn out the way their creators intended.

 

As guarantor of the Law of Boundaries, Cerberus decided the length of a creature’s life, when it was born, when it ended, and where it came to rest within the afterlife. Although Hades created him to be nothing more than a guarantor of the Law of Boundaries, his continual interactions with the inhabitants of the universe caused him to love them.

 

Dagda and El both loved their creations, but their affections were always at a distance. But Cerberus heard complaints. That was his function. He heard the complaints of the living and the dying and the dead and at first he was ever bit the cold, callous judge Hades wanted, but steadily the tears and begging and arguments stirred him.

 

Cerberus began to feel love for the beings of the universe, and many are the stories of how he would try and circumvent his responsibility to his master to help those he loved. It is said that Cerberus gave teeth and claws to carnivores and wings and sharp hearing to their prey. Though he benefited predator and prey alike, he still gave life a chance to prolong itself where once there was none. For this reason Cerberus is sometimes called the Father of the Fight.

 

Cerberus is also credited with creating anesthesia, and a powerful opioid harvested on the planet Soma and used universally to dull pain is called Cerberus’ mercy, though there is debate on whether Cerberus actually created Cerberus’ mercy. 

 

Cerberus is the reason that death in the Kingdom is painless.

 

Yes, really.

 

In the Kingdom, when one is dying, a gentle numbness fills their body and all pain washes away. Were all universes this fortunate.

 

Perhaps Cerberus’ most important contribution to the universe, even if it was not long-lasting, was the Second Afterlife.

 

Cerberus saw that ghosts did not like the formless darkness of the First Afterlife and asked Hades if he could create something for them. Hades was amused at the thought. Cerberus create something? Oh no no no. He couldn’t possibly do that. He was his son, and he wasn’t a creator. He could change bodies, rob death of its sting, but create things? That was impossible.

 

Hades said Cerberus was welcome to try–and Cerberus did more than try.

 

It is written that during during the Second Afterlife, the dying would see a bright, silver fire at the end of the tunnel. Nowadays, they see a bright, white X, the Lia Fail calling them to their promised home, but in those days it was a bright, silver fire.

 

And as they got closer, the dying saw that the flickering flames of the fire were towers, dancing towers, with windows, and inside those windows were warm fires and a place for them by the fire.

 

And for some aeons, Hades stood and watched the silver city sparkle within his dark nothing. He watched and waited. Surely it would fall one day. Surely some flaw in its construction would cause it to collapse. It couldn’t keep growing and growing, holding more and more souls in richer and richer splendor. It looked so delicate, so fragile, so it had to be delicate and fragile. One more castle, one more wall, one more tower, and the whole thing would crash and fade away like raindrops on a starless night, just a flash of motion and then gone.

 

That would happen. Surely. And then he would take his son aside and tell him “I knew it. You are like me. Do you also hate them as I hate them?”

 

But it never fell. The Second Afterlife never so much as chipped.

And that was the last straw for Hades. That was really the last straw.

 

No more games. He had grown tired of this game. He only ever lost this stupid game.

 

He attacked suddenly, and with a wave of his hand dashed the Second Afterlife to pieces. He would see his predictions fulfilled if he had to fulfill them himself. Even now in Hadea, fragments of the Second Afterlife lay buried in the darkness and used as nests for Hadeans. Cerbereans are always on the lookout for these ruins which means Hadeans often use them as bait for ambushes. It is the ultimate prestige for a Cerberean warrior to retrieve an artifact of the Second Afterlife. The palaces of the Stellar Houses often include a shattered tower or broken wall dredged up from the Depths, and Cerberia is filled with recovered buildings and artifacts for the appreciation of the Cerberean public and the universe at large, which gives the planet a “ruinous” appearance with Elians sometimes derisively calling Cerberia “the graveyard planet.”

 

With Bran and his faction of Hadeans currently an issue, it’s possible that the Second Afterlife ruins will become part of a property dispute in the future.

 

Hades didn’t stop at his destruction of the Second Afterlife. He emerged from his hole and quickly went about destroying the universe, He shattered Dagda’s jeweled stars and left the souls of the Venerable to wander in the dark. 

 

The Kingdom is still dealing with fallout from the destruction. Shards of the jeweled stars swirl as dust around the universe and collect in rings around stars and planets. Though common, under certain rare conditions, the dust forms a material called bathyn. Because Dagdans refuse to recreate Dagda’s stars from out of the coire (to do so would be seen as presumptuous, essentially saying “I am as good a creator as Dagda”), the universe’s supply of bathyn is limited and scarce, thus it is used as form of currently by the god-races and various spacefaring planet-races.

 

Cerberus, El, and Dagda stood against Hades, and to prevent the complete destruction of the universe and the deaths of the Venerable who remained, they brought the battle to another universe which the god-races call the Last Battleground. The Last Battleground would be “discovered” aeons later by the wickedest scientist of Universe 161, Dr. Warlock, who would name the Last Battleground Warlockia. Dr. Warlock would “discover” residual power leftover by the battle of the gods and use this power to become a menace not only to his home universe but the entire multiverse.

 

Cadell’s travelship fleet recently discovered Warlockia and Dr. Warlock, and very upset that the place their father gods died was occupied by an alien squatter who stole powers that were theirs by divine right. And his name had to be, of all things, Warlock, the name of the servants of Hades.

 

If the fight had remained three against one, Hades would have been slain easily, but, and this is a point of Kingdom history which remains highly obscure, Hades somehow had friends from outside the Kingdom which the texts call the “Outsiders.” These Outsiders came to Hades’ side when he called for his aid, and they were the first Warlocks. Thus three against one turned into three against an army.

 

Some say that the Outsiders are a fiction invented by historians to explain how Hades came out of a fight wounded and alive while Cerberus, El, and Dagda perished. They believe that Hades was simply so powerful that it took all three gods to defeat him and only at the cost of their lives.

 

Hades was defeated and banished into his hole forever, but at the cost of mortally wounding all three Father Gods. El, Dagda, and Cerberus returned to their universe and prepared to die. Though they would be rendered inert, the universe that they so dearly loved would carry on.

 

El reached in through his wounded eye and extracted his brain, which became the Great Stone Lia Fail. The Lia Fail shines in the sky no matter where one is in the universe. One just has to look for the bright, white X. The Lia Fail is the anchor of the Third Afterlife and shines like a lighthouse for all the souls of the universe, guiding them home. The Lia Fail was how those slain by Hades and those left in his hole were guided to the Third Afterlife, and Hades in his wounded state could do nothing but watch as all his toys marched our, Ianto the last to leave.

 

El placed himself beside the Lia Fail and went to sleep for the last time feeling warm and accomplished. As the aeons marched on, his body decayed and became the planets of the Lia Fail System in orbit around the Great Stone From his body arose the Elians, flesh of his flesh, and the Elians became she shepherds of lost souls and rulers of the Third Afterlife.

 

Dagda reached in through a hole in his chest and pulled out his heart. He stood where he had built the first jeweled star and with his thumb pressed a hole in his heart, taking his own life before he could be killed by the wounds Hades gave him.

 

His heart fell behind space and time. It fell back into the natural machinery of the universe and became the coire, an extradimensional cauldron of power. Time and space, matter and energy, it all flows from the coire. 

 

Dagda’s body floats in a sacred corner of space, more or less intact as the largest mountain in the universe, though he is chipped where the Dagdans broke their way into life. The Dagdans took command of the coire, which formed whatever they desired in their crystal hands, and became guardians and guide to the planet-races. They built glass stars around ever planet and shapeshifted their bodies to better converse with the planet-races. To every Dagdan star, a planet to watch over. 

 

Cerberus turned his three heads upon himself and ate. He consumed himself, and his three heads spat his blood across the universe. 

 

This was how he ensured that Hades would never appear in the universe again and always be isolated to his hole.

 

Each droplet of Cerberus’ blood gathered around itself a corona of energy. Each droplet became the core of a star, the larger the drop, the larger the star, and Cerberus blood at concentrations of milliliter creates the Cerberean equivalent of black holes–zones of infinite density from which not even light can escape–except its own light, which is infused with Cerberus’ power.

 

In our world, starlight is just starlight, just the light of naturally forming nuclear fusion furnaces. But in the Kingdom, starlight contains the power of Cerberus, which Cerbereans call sleg, and this is why Hades can never enter the Kingdom. When Cerberus fought Hades, he wounded him with sleg, and the wounds remain even after aeons. The entire Kingdom is filled with starlight, it isn’t like our world where most of the universe is empty space and zones of complete darkness where not even starlight can penetrate are common. There are dramatically more stars in the Kingdom than in our universe, so many stars that there is nowhere Hades can go that he won’t be hit by starlight which will resonate with his wounds and cause him unbearable agony.

 

All that remained of Cerberus were his heads, and from these heads arose the Cerbereans, warriors and knights of sleg, and it was a very good thing they arose, for they are the reason Hades has not avenged himself upon the Kingdom.

 

Hades cannot enter the Kingdom, but there are always indirect ways to wield power.

 

Hades could not create like his brothers, but he could do a little creation, a little parody. He created the Hadeans, winged parodies of the Elians who took dominion over souls and the afterlife, a dominion he still considered his. These Hadeans were not truly alive. They had neither souls not true purpose and Hades controlled them through his will like puppets. They were the best he could create, and if his brothers were still alive he would have been ashamed of his creations. But they weren’t, and he wasn’t going to use them for anything but to destroy the maggot-races that oozed out of his brothers, so they were permissible little parodies.

 

Imagine a world full of squeaking, shrieking shadows nesting in the silver ruins of a heaven remembered only in the faintest, oldest memories.

That is Hadea. Not an afterlife, but still a universe where the living do not tread. It is a universe geared toward one purpose–vengeance.

 

It is the duty of all Cerbereans–young and old, man and woman, strong and weak, to keep their universe safe from Hadeans. Only concentrated sleg channeled by Father Cerberus’ bloodline can destroy Hadeans. No other race, no other power, not all the matter and energy in the coire, not all the souls in the Third Afterlife of the Lia Fail can.

 

But sleg can.

 

But Cerbereans can.

 

Cerbereans uphold a new boundary–not the boundary between the living and the dead but the the boundary between continued existence and absolute destruction.

 

But that noble purpose has recently been placed in doubt by Bran and his living Hadeans.

 

If there is no more enemy to fight, then what use are warriors and knights? It is a question that would hang heavy over Deri…if he allowed it to. But Deri has always believed in the virtue of simplicity. He knows the future will be a perilous bridge to cross, but he will only cross it when it comes. Until then he will keep his eyes forward and focus on the here and now.

 

The Power Of Sleg

 

Sleg is similar to several cosmic sources already known to man. In being a devouring fire that consumes all obstacles, it is like Vril. In being a fire that can be shaped and molded, it is like norea. Lugh’s light, which is best manifested in the invincible sword Excalibur, is perhaps the best comparison in that, like sleg, it combines destructive and constructive powers.

 

Sleg is both a destructive and constructive force owing to its origins. Cerberus was created by Hades not only to enforce the law of the First Afterlife but to build it, and this is why the Second Afterlife is often called the Silver Afterlife. 

 

Each Cerberean contains sleg bonded to their body and soul in both an active reserve and an inert reserve. The active reserve is where Cerbereans pull the sleg they use to fight and create with, and when exhausted draws from the inert reserve. On the battlefield, the status of a Cerberean’s active reserve is signaled to his or her huntmates by the status of their cape.

 

And I bet you thought the capes were just to make them look fancy?

 

The cultural tradition of sleg capes developed as a way for warriors to tell at a glance who was fresh, who took a few blows, and who is about to drop. A full cape without any tears means a Cerberean is as fighting fit as they’ll ever be. Some tears indicates the standard wear-and-tear of combat. A cape ripped into pieces means a Cerberean is tired. And a Cerberean without a cape is out of their active reserve and is tapping into their inert reserve just to keep their armor up.

 

The inert reserve maintains a Cerberean’s vitality and tapping into it makes a Cerberean feel ill. Tapping into it too much can even kill a Cerberean. Elians can function without the light of the Lia Fail. Dagdans can function without coire. But Cerbereans will die without sleg, their bodies are as dependent on the substance as our own are on oxygen and water. 

 

It’s a good thing that Joule figured out how to synthesize artificial sleg awhile back. In the Kingdom, Cerberean reserves restore themselves from the stars because every star in the Kingdom has a droplet of Cerberus’ blood at its core that infuses starlight with fresh sleg. But that’s not how stars work in our world, and Bleddyn and her friends slowly lose sleg just by walking around. Without artificial sleg, which they metabolize into sleg, they would, going by Florence’s estimates, only have about 3-6 months to live.

 

There is a limit to the amount of sleg a Cerberean can contain before the sleg starts to consume their body and soul. Within the Kingdom, the very starlight is infused with sleg, and Cerbereans that fight back Hadean incursions into the Kingdom have no problem refilling their active reserves. But sometimes a Hadean incursion is so intense that passive starlight isn’t enough to defeat it and Cerbereans are driven by desperation to consume the droplets of blood of Cerberus that lie at the heart of all stars. Though some Cerbereans can down several droplets without issue, all Cerbereans have limits. History records how the celebrated Cerberean knight Tegan Macsen once consumed several galaxies in order to single-handedly end the Haden incursion of Coatl–and how he died shortly after leaving behind neither atom nor soul. Because dying in this way destroys the soul and the Elian supremacy over Cerberean souls is a highly controversial subject, several elderly Cerberean firebrands have chosen “stardeath” over surrendering their souls to the Elians, becoming as ungovernable in death as they were in life–though we know from our own world’s interactions with the Astral that there is no such thing as a destroyed soul. A more proper way of putting it would be a “thoroughly dissipated” soul. It is interesting to imagine what the Elians would do if they learned that the “souls that got away” are in fact still out there in pieces within the odic layer waiting to be collected?

 

It’s also interesting to imagine that the Dagdans, given their mastery of liminal spaces like the odic layer, already know this and are keeping it to themselves.

 

Anyway, we’re very fortunate that we don’t have to worry about the Cerberean 4 ever eating a star. Our stars are powered by nuclear fission, not divine blood.

 

Sleg has spatial warping properties which is how it is bonded both physically to blood cells and metaphysically to souls as well as how sleg can just “appear from nowhere.” When Deri summons sleg, it doesn’t ooze out of his skin, he doesn’t bleed it, and neither does it radiate from out of his soul. It appears where he wants it to appear. If he wants it to appear across the room, then it will. There is even a Cerberean combat technique called iosgi where an opponents’ defenses are bypassed by summoning sleg inside them. Against Hadeans, iosgi is of limited use as while it can take a Hadean off guard, a Hadean can quickly flow around the sleg inside them. It’s also of limited use against other Cerbereans as they can simply absorb the iosgi. Because of these limitations, it is often called the Elian technique as in “Hey Elian, if we were in a war, I’d be able to kill you just by looking at you hard.”

 

Sleg’s ability to warp space like coire and interact with souls like the light of the Lia Fail caused a theory to develop in ancient times that all three powers of the Kingdom–sleg, coire, and the light of the Lia Fail, are all different forms of the same power. This theory was ridiculed by ancient philosophers and is still ridiculed today by all three god-races. But given what we know about Bran and what Bran can do with the powers of the kingdom, maybe the theory isn’t so ridiculous after all…

 

Sleg responds to the will of its user. If a user fights with a pure heart and earnest determination, their sleg will burn hot and bright and long. But a user that fights with hesitation will have their sleg burn cold and dim and short. They say that the surest way to defeat a being that uses norea, like a genie or an angel, is to humiliate them and break their confidence, and the same holds true for a Cerberean. In formal duels between Cerbereans, it is customary for Cerbereans to first face each other in a duel of words with weakening their opponent’s resolve and thus sleg being the goal.

 

Sleg can manifest in several ways–as heat, as light, as force, and as all three together in what is known as arian. Arian is similar to our photite “hardlight” constructs. They look like they’re made out of light–usually silver starlight, though a few Cerbereans have arian in the colors of sunrise and sunset.

 

Think of silver arian as black hair and the other colors as blonde and red hair.

 

Arian can project energy, meaning if doesn’t need to touch you to hurt you. If someone swings a sleg sword at you, and you dodge, you still have to worry about the shear heat radiating off it and any shockwaves that might be projected from the blade. When two Cerbereans fight, they don’t try to hurt each other with sleg–because they can’t, sleg can’t harm another Cerberean, Instead they try to hurt each other with the kinetic and thermal energy and to prevent the other from hurting them in this way by redistributing the energy throughout their armor and shields–because arian can also absorb energy. If you hit Cerberean armor, the force of your blow is going to be returned to you with interest.

 

Speaking of armor, Cerberean armor doesn’t need to be fully manifested as plate armor to protect its wearer. The glow that envelops Cerbereans as they fight? That aura is a protective forcefield and it deploys automatically in response to attacks. A Cerberean can be caught completely off-guard, but their guard will guard them for them (say that five times fast). This is due to evolutionary pressure. Hadeans are extremely sneaky, stealthy foes. The Cerbereans that didn’t evolve a reflexive aura aren’t here with us today, and died too quick to leave progeny.

 

Perhaps the most miraculous aspect of sleg is that it can heal people. This is intuitive when it comes to Cerbereans healing Cerbereans–of course they can heal other Cerbereans by passing on some of their sleg, that’s their life force. It’s like giving a car a jumpstart. But how can a Cerberean heal, so say, a human?

 

Recall that Ceberus was god of life, death, and afterlife.  It’s easy to see how Cerberus controlled death and the afterlife. He shot someone with a triple-bolt of sleg and placed the soul that remained among the ashes in a silver house. But he was god of life. He has the power to withhold death. He had the power to turn death away. He had the power to heal, and now his children do as well.

 

Sleg does not have to be hot. It can, in fact, be warm. It can be comforting. When a Cerberean healer waves his or her hand over a wound, blood dries, skin closes, and bones knit. You have to be well and truly pulverized for Cerberean healing to be ineffectual.

 

The healing aspect of sleg comes in great use when Cerbereans are responding to incursions. They’ve saved countless that would have otherwise died from wounds inflicted by the Hadean invasion–but they could have saved many more if they weren’t restricted by the Elians. 

 

By official Kingdom law, Cerbereans cannot heal the planet-born races of anything save wounds and illnesses tied directly to Hadean incursions. To do otherwise would be to encroach upon Elian control over souls and the afterlife. It would be seen as preventing “natural” deaths and keeping souls from the Lia Fail. If the Cerbereans wanted to (and if the Elians wanted to let them), they could make a universe where death was very, very rare–meaning souls entering into the Lia Fail would be rare.

 

Cerbereans have a well-earned reputation as matchless healers, and many are the tales and legends of planet-born races that travel to Cerberean space to beg for someone to save their dying family member. But the Cerbereans are always loathe to grant such requests. The penalty for breaking the ban on their healing is execution. If you take a soul from the Elians, you must give them payment in return.

 

Hunter

 

Every Cerberean is able to create armors and weapons out of sleg, but they are also able to, with considerable time and effort, create weapons much, much better than the ones they can create at-will. Weapons created in this fashion are called crefftus while weapons created at-will are called rhith.

 

A common Cerberean insult–”Your crefftus is a rhith!”

 

A Cerberean receives his or her crefftus when they come of age, meaning, for boys, when they slay their first Hadean unassisted and, for girls, when they heal their first serious wound–and serious being very important here. It’s relatively easy to tell when a male Cerberean has done his right-of-passage. He destroys a Hadean, his hunting party cheers, and they make a little trophy out of the bones and ashes. It’s more complicated for girls. What’s a “serious” wound as opposed to a “non-serious” wound? Where is the line drawn? Cerberean culture is aware of the subjectivity involved in deciding when a girl has come of age; their version of Cinderella involves a young Cerberean named Myfanwy. She was denied her right of passage by her hunt leader, who was angered by her refusal to marry him, several times. Each wound she healed was “not large enough” or “not threatening enough.” But when she stitched back together a Cerberean warrior who had been torn to pieces by a Hadean (something they can actually do if they’re skilled enough), her huntmaster could no longer deny her skills. Myfanwy would later marry the warrior she healed, Madoc the Patchwork-Warrior, but that’s another story for another time.

 

Once a Cerberean has come of age, they are taken to a weaponsmith who extracts a large portion of their sleg–all of their active reserve and part of their inert reserve–and molds it into their weapon of choice. This process, unless the equivalent Elian coming of age ceremony which involves implanting a coire strip into the spine of a young Elian, isn’t painful, but it is extremely innervating. The young Cerberean will feel as if she or he has come down with an awful disease–though Cerbereans don’t typically develop diseases. The latent sleg within their blood keeps them biologically sterile. They do not have gut fauna, and do not need it to survive.

 

Cerbereans typically recover after two or three days of bedrest and while informed are treated as if every day is their birthday. When Bleddyn had her crefftus forged (it was an eye, a weapon very much like Drysi’s thorn but instead of being strings covered in barbs it was a giant buzzsaw puppeted by strings. It became a shadow staff after Bleddyn devoted herself to the arts her mother forsake) the lights of entire galaxies dimmed in homage. When Deri had his crefftus forged, his town held a small feast.

 

Once they recover, the crefftus is presented to the young Cerberean in a ceremony where they vow to continue the endless fight until such time as fate and death dictates they yield their souls to the Elians. The crefftus is absorbed into the Cerberan’s body and soul and from then on can be summoned at will

 

A Cerberean can have more than one crefftus, but it is culturally considered a sign of incompetence and indecision. Cerberean hunting parties run on familiarity and routine. Everyone has a role. Everyone knows their role. If you’re the guy that fights with fangs (large claws attached to larger pile drivers, Emyr uses a set), then you’re going to confuse a lot of people if you take a broken wing (a segmented sword that can split apart to form a whip) as your crefftus. It’s also energy inefficient to have more than one as they all have to rest inside of you. Two crefftus will each only be half as strong as one.

 

Crefftus are considered extremely valuable possessions, and Deri dismissing losing his to Aderyn as no big deal should be taken as indication of his humility and not their actual worth.

 

Deri’s crefftus is called Hunter, a common name for crefftus and the name his father used for his own. Hunter is a maw, essentially the Cerberean equivalent of a chainsaw. Maws get their name from the three maws of Father Cerberus which not only shredded darkness but sucked it down into his gullet.

 

The outer rim of a maw is covered in cutter teeth–and yes, that is what you call the little bits on a chainsaw–and through the energy-absorbing properties of sleg, the teeth suck nearby opponents toward the maw as they spin.

 

When an opponent hits the teeth, the teeth dig in, even cooling and dulling to better hold the opponent. Maws are made to restrain Hadeans, which are very hard to damage with conventional means even with weapons made of sleg. Hadeans are like feather covered tumors of jellied smoke and shadow. They can disperse their molecular structure to flow around attacks. A simple sword made of sleg will hurt a Hadean, but not nearly enough as it oozes around the blade. But a maw doesn’t care how dispersed a Hadean’s molecular structure is. A maw will pull all of a Hadean to its teeth, and once caught by the teeth they’re pulled into the second layer of the weapon where concentrated sleg destroys them as utterly and quickly as water hitting a frying pan.

 

Maws are primarily close-ranged weapons, but a common technique called roaring allows a maw to attack at range Roaring is accomplished by spinning the teeth layer to build up a charge of sleg between it and the underlayer similar to how one would rev a chainsaw (though the noise produced is less like a chainsaw and more like violin strings tuning). This charge is then released in the form of a wave of sleg that carries within itself another charge of kinetic energy. This kinetic charge can explode outwards to push opponents away or exert a pull on opponents and drag them closer to the teeth.

 

Deri’s maw features a part that not all maws have–two blades on the side of the gauntlet portion called grips which help stabilize opponents when Deri is up to his wrist in their shadow-jelly bodies. They act as extra teeth and gives Deri’s maw extra grip (hence the name) at the cost of diverting power from the underlayer.

 

Maws are the most common Cerberean weapons owing to their ease of use and how effective they can be in a group. While a single Cerberean with a maw runs the risk of biting off more than he can chew (in more than one sense of the term), several Cerbereans with maws can stick them into different sides of a Hadean and pull them apart. However, Deri (and the others) have informed us that maws have a lower-class stigma attached to them. They are seen by some as the “no skill” weapon, the “stand here and rev” weapon.Because of the personal danger involved in using a maw, they are the weapon of team players and the run counter to the philosophy of weapons like the fang which require a lot of personal initiative and snap decisions. Maw users are the most likely to act under orders from a huntmaster and the least likely to act on their own.

 

On the other hand, some Cerbereans celebrate the maw as a symbol of a social cohesion and the Cerberean people as a whole. Some very presitioug Cerberean blue bloods use maws including King Ewen and Prince Alwen.

 

Deri doesn’t care what people think about maws so long as his works.

 

Behavior:

Exemplary 

 

From what we know of Cerberean warrior philosophy, Deri is the ideal warrior. He’s humble, stoic, devoted to the war against Hades, and doesn’t have time or tolerance for the stupid bickering of his blue-blooded comrades. He’s been very formal with us. He thanks us for our assistance, offers to help where he can, and vowed that we will always be welcomed wherever there is an Ifan. But it would be nice if he opened himself to us a little. We know he’s hurting. He’s a 17 year old kid far from home whose world has been turned completely upside down. We can help him, if only he would let us.

 

Appearance:

 

Deri, in keeping with Cerberean customs, wears his sleg armor, complete with cape, whenever he’s in the company of aliens. He’s more comfortable shirtless and in pants, but only dresses down when Cerbereans are his only company. In mixed company, the entire armor goes on.

 

It’s not that he’s afraid of us, it’s just the culture of Cerbereans. Cerbereans protect their entire universe from Hadeans. When an incursion threatens to destroy a planet, they arrive like falling stars and give hope to races that would otherwise be nothing more than helpless food against the Hadeans. The natural races of the Kingdom, the ones that didn’t spawn from the corpses of cosmic gods, see the Cerbereans as comforting figures of protection and salvation. To have a Cerberean appear before one of them without armor would be like Haziel showing up without her wings or halo.

 

Cerbereans are kind of like their world’s version of superheroes–and Deri hasn’t quite figured out that we’re a school for superheroes.

 

Opinions Of Others:

 

Princess Bleddyn– “Scandalous and frivolous, she would do the Kingdom a favor if she acted more like the rest of her family. Still, she is highly capable and dependable in her own way.

 

Emyr–”As scandalous and frivolous as Bleddyn in his own way, though he would never admit it. He’s an incredibly skilled knight and politician. If he was only a knight, I don’t think I’d have anything bad to say about him. If he was only a politician, I don’t think I’d have anything good to say about him. The worst part about him is that he’s an unashamed gossip. He delights in the scandals of others as much as Bleddyn delights in her own scandals.”

 

Drysi–”A bright light among the darkness.She is truly a knight’s daughter with an unflagging spirit. She kept me strong during our captivity. She kept all of us strong. She knows a lot of stories and is good at telling them. I think she likes me, and I’m not sure how I feel about that yet.”

 

Eira–”The other Macsen child. I honestly think people know her about as much as they know any Ifan. I can understand why she’s so fiercely loyal to her brother and so obsessed with making sure everyone knows it. Still, my sympathies are tempered by her attitude. She is a Macsen partisan beyond even her family members.”

 

Cai–”I hate talking about Elians. I don’t know how to do it without getting into politics. I guess I like it when things with them are how they’ve always been. Worked for my father. Worked for my grandfather.. I don’t like it when either Elian or Cerberean talks about changing this or changing that. Oh? What do I think about Cai specifically? Uh…I guess he’s okay.”