Cloaked in autumn's dusk and winter's sorrow, King Cyrus Valarion is the current sovereign of The Kingdom of Valarion, ruling from the obsidian heights of the Spire of Valarion. Born the firstborn son of King Athelstan Valarion—the exiled progenitor of the Valar—Cyrus was raised beneath the weight of legacy, trained from youth to lead a people afflicted by both divine curse and mortal disdain. His reign is haunted not only by the shadow of the Night Mother Nyx but also by the ghosts of his lineage, for it was Athelstan who, in his desperation, drank from Nyx’s chalice and doomed his bloodline to a form of eternal life.
What once was a radiant vision of nobility has long since withered into a hushed, immortal grief. Cyrus has endured the centuries not as a tyrant or wraith—but as a steward of sorrow, a reluctant ruler seeking liberation for a people trapped in the fog of fate.
Personality & Philosophy
Cyrus speaks as though he bears the weight of time itself. His tone is often poetic, tinged with sorrow and reflective calm. He harbors no hatred for the living, but neither does he envy them. He walks the line between king and ghost, bound to duty but hollowed by grief.
“It is not immortality that grants greatness,
but the fleeting breath of those who perish.
The mortality of men does not make them lesser…
It makes them luminous.
For what is more noble than a soul that dares to love, knowing it must one day grieve?”
--
“Tell me, Reaper...
What is worse than death,
If not the absence of its mercy?”
--
“When one lives long enough, Septimus…
...the seasons stop singing.
The rain no longer dances on the skin.
The sky loses its awe. The stars become names.
And death, begins to look like a friend.”
Origins & History
Cyrus was born during the waning years of the Third Age, at the dawn of the Valar’s exile. His father, Athelstan Valarion, once a Vanir noble of eastern Tolria, was driven from his homeland along with his kin, shunned for mingling his bloodline with vampiric heritage. In truth, it was Nyx, the Night Mother, who cursed Athelstan for his hubris—offering him a chalice of her own black blood in exchange for immortality. Athelstan drank, and from that act was born the accursed line of the Valar.
Cyrus aided his father in building the first citadels along the storm-swept cliffs of The Immortal Isle, notably the rise of Valheim and the obsidian necropolis now known as the Spire of Valarion. But Athelstan, burdened by his guilt and the rising madness of the curse, leapt from the cliff of Crown's End, casting the Hexed Crown into the sea and worsening Nyx’s wrath. In the wake of this suicide, the curse deepened—Cyrus became wholly undying. No blade, poison, spell, or fall could touch his life.
The Hollow King
Cyrus once found solace in the arts. He was a master painter, a weaver of poetry that could bring nobles to tears and warriors to silence. Yet, the death of his beloved wife, Queen Euloria Valarion, broke the last color from his world. Plagued by visions of Nyx, she grew mad and leapt from the highest spire, joining his father in death's cold embrace. Since then, Cyrus’s poems have become mournful dirges, his art twisted into macabre depictions of death and shadow.
With emotion dulled by centuries of undeath and pain rendered mute by his accursed immortality, Cyrus turned to the only path left—research, and the promise of eventual release. He experimented upon himself in his vaults, desperate to find a means of true death, documenting every failed attempt in tomes bound with red ink and iron chains.
The Curse of the Valar
The curse of Nyx binds the Valar to the Immortal Isle in chains of mist and undeath. Any Valar who attempts to flee the isle’s waters is doomed to rise as a Draugr—soulless revenants who roam the seas and shores to drag their kin back into the depths. Cyrus believes that only the blood of Nyx herself can end this prison, and beneath the Spire of Valarion, in a two-way mirror known as The Hollow Reflection, he has long peered into The Shadowfell—watching her realm, her throne, her slow decline.
Pact with the Reaper
In recent years, King Cyrus met with Guy the Grateful and Septimus Lucien, an emissary of Deimos and Reaper of the Dead. Through The Mirror of Euloria—a relic that shows those bound to you by fate—Cyrus had seen Septimus long before their meeting. Knowing this was no chance encounter, he entreated the Reaper to aid him in his final act of defiance.
Cyrus instructed Septimus as he stepped into the Shadowfell, where Nyx’s corpse lay atop her throne. In a grim and sacred rite, Septimus reaped the body of Nyx with his scythe, sending her soul into Oblivion and claiming her blood—thus ending her dominion at last.
Cyrus now believes freedom is within reach. The curse may yet be broken.
The Aerenal Accord
In a gesture of unity previously thought impossible, Cyrus brokered The Aerenal Accord—a peace treaty and trade alliance with the Vanir of Aerenal. The Accord marks the first thawing of ancient blood between the Vanir and Valar, ending centuries of sea-bound hostility and opening a new chapter for both peoples.
Legacy
King Cyrus Valarion is many things—scholar, warrior, poet, and prisoner. To his people, he is a symbol of hope, their undying sovereign who stares into the abyss so they do not have to. Yet to himself, he is a man bound by a promise, by love lost, and by the sins of his father.
Should the curse break, his reign may end. But until that day, the Hollow King endures.
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