LOTHEND ZENC

DESCRIPTION

Lothend Zenc’s description is documented by The Hegemony and the remnants of ancient statues that were erected in honour of her.

Standing at approximately 6ft 10, Lothend Zenc was a pale grey-skinned sodian with burning brass eyes, long black hair and gnarled, twisted, black horns. Like nearly all her kin, she was built with a powerful physique of muscle. Her skin was scarred from the weapons of battle and the lashings of whips. In her later years it is said she had filed her teeth to become sharp fangs.

Oft did she wear serrated starmetal half-plate armour with sharp spikes protruding from the back and arms. She always carried a starmetal greatsword and a belt of hand-axes around her waist. Below her waist was a red cloth depicting a clenched white gauntlet facing upwards – the symbol of her banner.

HISTORY

Starzenc Isle was originally owned as a colony by The Hegemony, a union of sodian tribes who to this day dream of conquest upon Vulcanys and dominion overseas. It’s not known how long Starzenc Isle was theirs, but it is known that the island was used as entertainment for their mysterious overlords and their minions. The Isle was governed by the Glot Tribe, who were a vassal tribe to the true upper echelons of Hegemony hierarchy.
It was a commercial centre for all manner of things, attracting merchants from The Hegemony as well as human pirates and warlords from across the seas. But it’s riches grew from two things. It’s vast Starmetal Deposits, and it’s streets of depravity – predominantly, bloodsports.

During this time, Lothend Zenc was born. She was born in a Starmetal mine owned by a small Lord subservient to Tribe Glot. The moment she was able to use a pickaxe or a hammer she was set to work, as was custom on Starzenc Isle – for The Hegemony is as greedy as it is sly.

But Lothend was a strange sodian. She grew up to an exceptional size at a young age, and had an unchecked fury that she would ventilate upon her peers. Already showing a talent for violence, she would occasional attract the ire of others around her, particularly the mine’s overseers, who would punish her for her behaviour. Yet still she persisted.

But in her adolescence, it is said that after slaying one of the mine’s overseers with her hammer, she was taken to the Mine’s Lord, who saw great potential in her to make him money. She was already a hulking mass of fury. Imagine what she could do with a sword in that hand instead of a hammer? Imagine the treasure she could make for them as a gladiator!

Eventually, Lothend found herself thrust into the fighting pits. At first it was other slaves who yearned for glory and freedom, like her. They were felled with ease.
Then it was feral beasts to see if she could control her rage against the untameable. She skewered them and ate them afterward.

The details are lost to history on her ascension in the fighting pits, but she appeased her Lord so much that he gifted her a great starmetal blade and starmetal armour that was designed for killing. He furthermore made her into a gladiator overseer – she would not only fight, but train others in his thrall to become champion slave-fighters and make him more riches.

WORLDS COLLIDE

For years, she was confined to gladiatorial arenas. Training, fighting, surviving, over and over again. If she or her trainees won, she would be rewarded with gifts or a moment of freedom. If her trainees lost, she would be given the lash. Her life was an endless cycle of survival under her owner.

The world she knew had nothing to offer. There were moments she wished to take her life, tired of this existence – after all, was this life she lived any different to being dead? At least the dead knew peace. And maybe more – maybe..freedom, happiness? But her perspective of the world changed when she met a new trainee purchased by her lord to become a gladiator. A human, called Reynard.

Reynard was the first human she had true contact with. She had seen other humans before, but Reynard was a slave gladiator, who had been captured by pirates and sold to The Hegemony.

He spoke Draconic because Reynard was said to have been a knight from Norcia – and had been able to speak the language as their family apparently had dealings with sodians, and was able to communicate with Lothend, and he spoke of strange things. He spoke of a world that had been denied to her. One of peace, one of fairness – a land of green fields and blue skies. It sounded like freedom. Real freedom. And she wanted it. Reynard intrigued her. Sometimes, she would spend hours talking to him, probing him for information about the world beyond Starzenc. His customs, his language, his traditions. Things like love, compassion, kinship. So foreign, yet so compelling. She wanted it. All she needed to do, was break free.

REBELLION

Lothend commanded both fear and awe among her underlings, a woman whose very presence silenced the boldest of voices. The arena became her domain in a single bloody night, as she struck down the overlords who dared to sit in judgment above her and shattered the spirits of rival combatants. Her victory was not merely one of strength; it was a spectacle of domination. With the arena hers, she turned her gaze to the mines, where she slaughtered the cruel overseers and won the loyalty of the oppressed miners. To them, she was the fist that shattered their chains. But behind her unyielding might was Reynard’s cunning—a sharp mind that plotted her moves and timed her strikes with precision. Against her better instincts, Lothend began to admire him.

Her rebellion grew like wildfire. The overlords fell beneath her blade, one by one, and the merchants were driven from the city, their treasures abandoned in the chaos. Lothend seized it all, proving to her followers that the overlords’ power crumbled without the compliance of the masses. Word of her exploits spread, and soon she was known across the land as The Breaker of Chains. Gladiators and thralls alike flocked to her Iron-Fist banner, inspired by her defiance. Her rebellion gave rise to others, and chaos engulfed the Isle of Starzenc like a storm.

At the heart of this uprising stood the fortress of Orc-Slakarabu, the so-called Palace of Joy. Here, Chieftain Carriksi, the overlord of the entire Isle, wallowed in decadent luxury amidst the spoils of his slaves’ toil. It was Reynard who devised the plan on how to storm the palace – having had experience with castle sieges from his time as a knight in feudal Norcia, but it was Lothend who led the charge with fire in her veins and steel in her hands. The siege was a masterstroke, and when the walls fell, she found Carriksi—a grotesque, overindulgent sodian, a creature of avarice and cowardice—fumbling for escape.

What transpired in that encounter is shrouded in mystery. Some say Lothend toyed with him before ending his wretched life; others claim she left him to a fate more terrible than death. What is unanimously chronicled is that she could be heard laughing. But when she emerged from the palace, wearing the crown of Chieftain Carriksi, her laughter echoed like thunder. Noble after noble fell beneath her sword as she indulged in a frenzy of bloodshed, taking pleasure in their screams – cackling hysterically like a madwoman as she did so. In that moment, her name was etched into legend. She became The Laughing Sword, a dark queen who claimed victory with steel and gleeful savagery.
Any other noble or minion of The Hegemony that she and her conquerers captured were made to become her entertainment. They would be pitted to fight each other, humiliate each other before being given to hungry beasts. She wanted them to feel what she and her allies had felt. She joy she and her fellow freed slaves got from watching their former tormentors kill one another only further cemented the twisted edge she would leave on her name for history to record.

With the Palace of Joy now hers, Lothend stood alongside Reynard, her closest ally and now her mate. For the first time in her life, she awoke not to the clang of battle but to the quiet promise of a new dawn. Starzenc Isle was theirs, and together, they ruled with an iron will tempered by dreams of a better future. As lovers and rulers, they vowed to explore the boundless riches of Dark Earth, their fates entwined from the fires of rebellion and forged in the freedom they had bled to win.

STARZENC REBORN AND UNCHANGED

With the Hegemony overlords overthrown or retreated to their homeland, the masses erupted in celebration—festivals of unbridled chaos that teetered on the edge of anarchy. Port cities swarmed with desperate throngs as people seized abandoned vessels, fleeing to the unknown outer world. This exodus should have included Lothend. She had fought for freedom, after all. Yet, even in victory, she remained. The people still looked to her as a leader, and no doubt The Hegemony would have their agents sprawling in the waters or amid the chaos to capture or kill her. She had won the Isle, and now she had to keep it; the mantle of rule weighed heavy on her shoulders.

But her burdens went far beyond governance. Reynard, her cunning ally and beloved mate, succumbed to an infection from a wound he had sustained during the siege of Orc-Slakarabu. It had been minor, but after a few months, an infection had grown and his condition deteriorated after a month. His death, a month after their triumph, left a void in her raging heart—and in her plans for the future. Compounding her sorrow, Lothend discovered she was with child. Months later, she gave birth to sodite twins: a boy she named Rakan and a girl named Salathen. Yet tragedy struck once more. Salathen died only months later, leaving Lothend with one heir and a cracking heart.

In the wake of these losses, Lothend took another mate: Tresk, a hulking, red brute of a sodian; a gladiator of feral strength and grim charisma. Tresk sired five children with her—three sons and two daughters. Their descendants, known as the Line of Zenc, now known as the Blades of Zenc, though much of their tale is forgotten. What is known is that their bloodline carried forward Lothend’s ferocity, domination and unrelenting ambition.

Having conquered Starzenc, Lothend now faced the harrowing task of ruling it. Without Reynard’s sharp mind to forge true peace, the cracks in her dominion began to show. The threat of retaliation from the Hegemony loomed ever closer, forcing her hand. Lothend, Tresk, and her fourteen most trusted allies formed a council – a dark mirror to The Hegemony – to reshape Starzenc Isle into an unyielding bastion of power. Together, they decreed a brutal doctrine: “The Strong Rule. The Weak Serve.”

No longer would Starzenc indulge in idle pleasures—there would be no galas, no dancers, no frivolity. When the doctrine was announced, the culling began. The population was purged of the weak and useless, leaving only the strongest rulers and the most loyal servants behind. The Isle’s blacksmiths forged ships from starmetal, and soon the island’s warriors prowled Vulcanys and beyond, initially raiding and enslaving to rebuild their ranks, but eventually, after some generations, the Isle would have little need to raid for slaves – they would begin making their own slave population through selective breeding and perfecting techniques to break the will of those who disobeyed. Starzenc became more than a land of metal and blood—it was a proving ground, a living arena where all were tested. Those who survived rose as warriors, commanders, or masters. Those who failed became slaves and fodder, stripped of free will. Within a generation, Starzenc Isle began to furnish it’s new trade for the world – the Starzenc Mercenaries. Warriors who were not merely hired for war – they were literally born for it. Starzenc Isle had learned nothing, and how could they? The people who fought with Lothend, and Lothend herself for that matter – all they’d known was the lash and the sword. The people of this land had known freedom for a moment, before blindingly placing the very same leash The Hegemony had made them wear, oh so many years ago.

Lothend’s ultimate fate, however, remains a mystery. She vanished around the age of twenty-eight it’s estimated, leaving no trace. Some whisper she was killed by assassins from The Hegemony, or scheming rivals. Others believe she boarded a ship in secret, sailing alone into the vast unknown in search of something beyond conquest, like she had yearned for with Reynard, her mate from Norcia. Her end remains unwritten, but her legend endures.

Starzenc has no gods, but Lothend is venerated as if she were one. Her legacy—etched in blood, forged in domination, and sharpened by brutality—still shapes the Isle today. It is a legacy of violence honed into art, a world where the strong rule and fight for the highest bidder, the weak serve, and the fires of the arenas burn eternally in her name.