The Tenebris Coup

Leadup

As an infant, the future emperor Yevie Tenebris Purpumtum was taken in by then King Meter Matan after the death of his mother- the then Empress Tenebris- at the king’s hands. Meter Matan was tasked by several kingdoms in Escherin to destroy the parasitic Tenebri Empire that had been spreading across their lands in order to prove his peaceful intentions with the Elseworld. Despite being told to kill the infant prince as well, he could not bring himself to do as such, and instead put Yevie under the care of two of his personal knights- Odie Thomas and Kora Shigar, who raised the child. Yevie grew up in a manor close to the capital city of Robasa alongside the king’s eldest children, Finnigan and Sherriana Matan, and for all intents and purposes he was an ordinary if not aloof, awkward, and nervous young man. He was pursuing a study in medical sciences- specifically neuroscience, when he was onset by an unidentified seizure disorder characterized by epileptic visions and prophecies. The disorder was severe enough that it had worn down on the base of Yevie’s brain stem, causing fits of weakness and instability that required him to have constant supervision and often rendered him bedridden for extended periods of time.

When he approached adulthood, just before turning 17, Yevie was abducted from his manor. His abductors were part of a radical cult of worshipers of an otherworldly entity who believed Tenebris to be a messiah figure, and the ultimate prophet for their religion. This specific cult was thought to have been fully eradicated years earlier after attempting (and failing) to storm Robasa to assassinate the king and steal the young Prince Finnigan- who they had then believed then to be their messiah. However, a small band of survivors had regrouped and approached their religious texts again under new now unknown leadership. After deciding together that Finnigan could not be their prophet, they pointed their obsession towards the ill lord Tenebris, built false identities for themselves as medical attendants, and snuck into his manor where they spent several months engraining themselves into that community before setting fire to the manor and stealing the young lord away.

For months Tenebris was kept in a hidden facility in the Avalloc mountain range where he was pushed into a full bout of psychosis. His seizures went untreated, medical care was routinely denied, and he was forced into an ascetic lifestyle of denial in order to call about his prophecies. The cult believed and told Yevie that he was the avatar of their goddess - &. That he would call upon her and bring about an age of chaos and freedom to Escherin and, eventually, the entire Elseworlds. Under his and her guiding open eye, this chaos would remain undirected and uncontrolled, inevitably turning the universe into a utopia of unbridled freedom. All he had to do was follow his visions and kill anyone who tried to stop him, which at this point, were The Matans.

Meter Matan tried to medicate his powers away. He had known to an extent that Yevie was something special- that’s why Meter killed Yevie’s mother, his grandmother, and took away the warm nest he would have grown up in alongside the power he would have wielded to bring this age about sooner. Meter was an agent “against freedom, against chaos”, and he had to be killed.

Months later, the young lord was rescued, and Yevie was taken home to his rebuilt manor and new assistants. His old community was destroyed, different-- and he much the same. His prophecies became more frequent and reportedly boiled into full active waking visions where he saw, overlaid atop each other and interacting around him, iterations of past lives- not just of himself but of others, of Escherin. He saw how they tied together, how things could be the same and different and how strange time and space and everything in between was. He took these visions, along with the constant buzzing in his head that the cult left for him, and followed them.

Yevie’s strange behavior did not go unnoticed. While prior he was a nervous pacifist, never outgoing or social, he now behaved erratically. His eye contact was excessive and constant, he stopped studying, he pulled himself out of isolation and often left the manor to search for specific somethings and someones he refused to elaborate on. He became outspoken, cruel, calculated, and charismatic- and the sudden drastic shift in personality and behavior caught the attention of Meter and his knights. They sent him to see a slew of medical practitioners who failed to identify the problem, chalking every change up to trauma and his disorder. While the kingdom and his guardians attempted to treat Yevie, he spent the majority of the next few months reticent and standoffish to anyone who tried to “help” him. In his mind they were against him, helping him would treat the disorder which he needed. Tenebris grew increasingly antagonistic towards the king Matan until, seemingly out of nowhere, he began his coup.

The Coup

In 1299, months after turning 17, the young Tenebris staged a violent coup of the Matan Kingdom- who were wildly unprepared. Using his visions, charisma, promises, magic, and uncanny knowledge of seemingly everyone he interacted with, Yevie managed to gather a mass of supporters for his cause; at the core of which lay the survivors of the cult. Over the course of a year he violently raided city after city, starting in The Underglass, where his manor was, and moving upwards across each city in The Kingdom of Metrianda. The battles were bloody and ultimately swift- with the Tenebris Group wiping out all forces sent to counteract them. Not all battles were fought literally, though- while certainly skilled with military stratagem Yevie ultimately showed his best work in infiltration and espionage. As often as he’d send in spies and informants into Matan camps and cities he would also very often infiltrate himself, spending most of his time sowing discord and turning people to his side.

By 1320, Tenebris and his supporters had fully overthrown the Matan Kingdom of Metrianda. He gathered his forces and stormed Robasa, slowly working their way up the tower and into the castle built around it. They laid waste to the city and killed hundreds of Metriandans, eventually breaking past the final barrier and, after one final battle, taking the king, his children, the queen, and his remaining knights. In the days following Tenebris brought supporters and knights up to the castle entrance and executed them in large groups on live television (a terror tactic he would use often). On the final day he executed the near entirety of the Matan family- excluding the eldest two Matan children, whom the Tenebri claimed to have died during the raid on Robasa. This day marked the end of the coup, the Matan Kingdom, and the start of Yevie’s new government; the Council of Dragons.

While functionally still the Tenebris Empire from centuries prior, Yevie stole and used the name of a credible organization that already existed within Escherin (now Metrianda) in order to garner a bit of favor and trust that he did not have with the Escherians he would spend the next century annihilating. By the year 2000 Escherin no longer existed. Everything was Metrianda. All old gods were killed and consumed by the dragon chancellor, the mortal-run factions of Escherin were destroyed or in hiding, and Yevie ultimately betrayed the cult that put him in power by excommunicating them from the religion and killing them en masse.