The Strong

The Strong is an extinct race of Paxia that was created by the Goddess Segra, which feature prominently in her cult's creation story. They are a race with Grey Skin, purple eyes, and white hair. While it is said that the Strong have all died and vanished from Eldham and Rathnir due to Segra, it is believed by her worshippers that they still maintain some kind of consciousness after their mass murder, and their collective souls are the foundation upon which Rathnir and Eldham are built.
== Creation ==
According to the modern Segrists, the creation of the Strong traces back to the initial cosmic conflict between Segra and Deiodio in the age of Creation. Deiodio supposedly had created a weak and flimsy race of chalk-white people out of the wind, but in doing so, he created a whirlwind called the "Flaying Storm" that ripped these people apart and tortured them if they went outside. Segra took pity on these people, and created a pitch-black person who was much sturdier and resilient to the Flaying Storm. Segra ordered this person to go and breed with the weak people of Deiodio and make them more resilient, and then ordered them to murder all the remaining weak white people of Deiodio. The result from this parentage was the race of the Strong.
== Life in the Paxia Era ==
The Strong lived as any other native race, spread across Paxia and developing minor states of their own. The most prominent of these was the state of Tromauch, which had a culture that was highly influenced by the Elves to their south. The Strong of this state tended to wear large adornments and clothes with polished brass. But the culture and lifestyles of the Strong varied from place to place.
== Purging ==
In an event in the year 320 of the Paxia Period, the Strong were swiftly and completely annihilated from both worlds. It is maintained by the Segrists that this was due to the uprising of the leader of Tromauch, a Strong man named Jubal Il-Sul. He rebelled from the worship of Segra, and preached a different destiny to manifest other than the "Heroic Arena" which Segra prophesized at the beginning of creation. He spoke of the heretical views known as the Gnosis Segris, which has all beings trapped as a formation of an ever evolving machine that will eventually destroy itself and return all conscious beings to a blissful non-existence. It is said that on the day of a hurricane, Jubal Il-Sul had gathered his many followers on a beach and demanded that Segra show herself and bring the Machine to an end. Segra did appear and she paused the storm around them. For the entire night, they debated the nature of reality, and Jubal Il-Sul was insistent on the machine being a torturous h
oax maintained by her and her hidden cohorts. Angry with him and the people of her creation, she cursed every Strong in the world, and smote them where they stood. In a twisted form of irony, Segra kept all theirs souls alive and conscious, but without bodies or perception of real reality, and out of them she built the Scumoctacon.
== The Scumoctacon ==
The Scumoctacon is the foundation of Rathnir and Eldham, according to Segrists. It is described as an immortal being or a machine, and works similarly to how the Gnosis Segris was envisioned by Jubal Il-Sul, thus his religion became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Scumoctacon is the conglomeration of the thousands of annihilated souls of the Strong, each collectively conscious and experiencing a sort of dream-reality. However, despite Jubal Il-Sul's notion of non-existence being blissful, the souls of the Strong are forever tormented in their dreaming. This in turn means that Rathnir and Eldham are imagined realities by a Godhead created by Segra to torment her people, and that any control she wishes to exert over the two worlds is a direct punishment of how she wishes to treat the disembodied souls of the Strong.
Category:Races
Category:Traveler's Era