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Cxaxa Qherephis, the Cold Smile, was an infamous queen in the Sundered Age who lived around 4,400 BC[1].

Overview[]

The Demon-Queen of a nameless kingdom, Cxaxa Qherephis is one of the earliest mages whose names modern willworkers know. Her reputation lasted long after her death, and later Empty Yuga mages in the Great Cults that gave rise to the Diamond spoke about her in the way scholars in the Pentacle Yuga spoke of Merlin, Imhotep, and Gadeiros. Through these secondhand legends, a picture emerges of a tribeswoman who Awakened as a Mastigos and carved a queendom out of the Maghreb, turning her nomadic people into a bandit army that worshipped her as a goddess, and enforced her rule with spells and summoned Pandemonic demons.

Over her reign, Qherephis became more and more extreme and her Ruin fortress developed into a Pandemonic Verge. Her army enslaved whole tribes and dragged them to the shifting labyrinth of the mad queen, fuel for the mass human sacrifices needed to gather enough Mana to feed her legion of demons. Cxaxa herself sacrificed parts of her own body, replacing them with Supernal prosthetics her demons granted as boons. She ate her own heart and gained a glass one filled with a million flies. She tore out her eyes and gained stone ones that saw weakness. Whether it was the attempt to become a Supernal being piecemeal, the mass murder, or simply living for decades inside a Verge, Cxaxa paid the price for her obsessions; she became Enraptured and her fortress twisted even more under the influence of her Tulpa, killing or driving away her followers. Finally, alone and trapped in a maze of her own broken Wisdom, she committed suicide.

Some say that before she died, she found a way to ensure her reincarnation[2]. She placed part of herself in her descendants, confident that one day, her direct female-line descendant who would have an Awakened soul. Led by dreams and visions, this one-third reincarnation of the Cold Smile would seek out the her other remains - the Eyes of Salt and the Heart Full of Flies.

For more information on Cxaxa Querephis, please see Dave Brookshaw's actual plays, the Broken Diamond and the Soul Cage.

References[]

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