The Moonlark is dead.
The Black Swan and the Council⏤if any of them are still alive⏤are in hiding.
Atop a throne of death and destruction sits Gisela Sencen, her son in chains at her side. The stories say her ex-husband's head now rests on a pike in...
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The Moonlark is dead.
The Black Swan and the Council⏤if any of them are still alive⏤are in hiding.
Atop a throne of death and destruction sits Gisela Sencen, her son in chains at her side. The stories say her ex-husband's head now rests on a pike in her palace, along with all the others. No one knows for sure, since no one's gone into the throne room and lived to tell the tale.
But rising from the ashes and the rubble comes a new team of survivors. A new threat to the Neverseen's regime. They want to live in a world without power.
In a Lost Cities where Empress Gisela Sencen controls who does and doesn't have abilities, there's a new class of nobility called the Elite. It's filled with ex-Neverseen members and anyone else who's pledged their loyalty to her. She weighs everyone as Worthy or Unworthy (typically, but not always, at birth or during childhood) and can give or take abilities as she chooses. The leaders of the other species were forced to sign treaties with her so as not to get on her bad side. She rules with an iron fist, although all things considered, she is not cruel to those who have not wronged her.
Exilium and Foxfire? Gone. There is only the School For Worthy and the School For Unworthy. Wealth is meaningless, talent and potential are everything. The Lost Cities are sealed off from any other species except for the gnomes, who toil day and night expanding the Lost Cities into the Forbidden ones⏤which is not to say they are not treated well. The same cannot be said for humans, who are driven out of their homes and, if they start to take up too much space, exterminated on a mass scale. But you mustn't speak up about it, or else you'll be labeled a human sympathizer, and you don't want that. Do you?
Some still believe in the old elven life. Some have moved on, and dream of something beyond it in the future. Still others are indifferent to the situation.
Another thing monumental has changed⏤Exile was abandoned entirely. Gisela and her regime oversee the prison, and she personally presides over the trials. Wealth has been redistributed entirely, and only nobility live in castles. Many live in apartments in working class cities, and those branded with the bright red title of Unworthy can only get the most mundane of jobs: manual labor, housekeeping, farmwork, clothes-making. Everyone else can choose what to do as long as they don't get into hot water with Gisela or her Elite.
The Talentless, the dirty-blooded, the traitors, the useless, the disabled and the sickly... all Unworthy in the new world. Gisela is breeding a perfect future for elvenkind, in which only the most excellent thrive. If a child has two Unworthy parents his or her ability is taken away by the chained prince, who watches everything helplessly, no life left in his eyes. Perhaps, in a twist or irony, he will one day be rescued by the very Unworthy who are the scum of his shoes.
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a kotlc alternate universe, in which the neverseen have won, but the story isn't over yet.
