Lanys T’Vyl & Bloody Kithicor

Born on the Moon of Blood

Her story begins on Innoruuk’s holiest night, the Moon of Blood, which comes once every twenty-seven months. On it every follower of the Prince of Hate must murder a good being, and dark elf nobles choose a commoner to mate with and then sacrifice. In Sionachie Heartsinger’s telling, Innoruuk “spawned an evil creature on the land” who grew in strength and hatred and rallied the dark elves to her banner, guarded by her mentor, Laarthik K’Shin. Her name was Lanys T’Vyl. Her creed survives in Pomp and Circumstance: “Your power is your own. Give it not to anyone, and you shall hold all… Know thy enemy and slay him.”

The council at Highkeep

Across Antonica both sides prepared for war, quartermasters scrambling and anyone who could carry a weapon carrying one. At Highkeep, Lord Tephys of the Feir’Dal and Carson McCabe stared at each other “with long faces over the council table,” as Bloody Kithicor: The Council opens. Tephys had sent word to Felwithe asking for help the moment he heard of the Teir’Dal plans, and no reply had come.

The march

The Teir’Dal were confident. They had Innoruuk’s blessing, and his own daughter led them with Laarthik at her side. Their goal was High Keep: take it, cut Qeynos off from Freeport, and strangle the races of light. On a cold, rainy morning the dark elf army began to march, and before it was done that force nearly destroyed both Rivervale and High Keep.

Where did Lanys go?

When it was over, Lanys was gone. The Teir’Dal king and queen sent the priest Vizier D’Kalz to learn why. At the skeleton stone in Nektulos Forest he summoned the spirit of Laarthik K’Shin, an elder shadowknight, who explained that his invocation at a mysterious stone had opened a portal to the Plane of Hate. Innoruuk had snatched Lanys through it to save her, and Tunare had used the same opening to banish her physical form from Norrath.

To bring her back they needed the gnome necromancer Falrazim Zaftamor, who had shifted his spirit into a drake to cheat his failing body, only to find he could no longer cast necromancy, and had spent three hundred years running errands for Meldrath in hope of being changed back. He agreed to help on one condition: that they find him a new host too.

Goddess, or dead?

What became of her depends on who tells it. In one account Innoruuk raised her after Kithicor to demigod status as the Lady of Envy, perhaps the youngest of Norrath’s deities, and a dark elf Cult of Envy keeps a temple fortress for her in the Rathe Mountains. In another, given flatly by an EverQuest II developer in 2010, she “was slain after the Battle of Bloody Kithicor” and remains dead, her essence imprisoned in the Plane Sphere of Envy, as the Shadowknight epic tells.

Her cult keeps trying

Her followers never stopped trying, and the papers never stopped laughing. Tinker’s News reported that the Primordial Malice, attempting to resurrect “their dead-as-a-doornail sweetheart,” botched it and unleashed chaos in the Mountains of Rathe, and Da Swamp News blamed “da followers of da corpse formerly knowed as Lanys T Vyl.” Later years took her forces more seriously. A 2005 Report from the Wilds said the port of Firiona Vie had fallen to the forces of Lanys T’Vyl six months earlier, and in 2014 her cultists were found allied with the returning Combine in Combine Dredge.