Lyrus

First appearance: S2E6 — FoTA - Sands of the Arena (Fate of the Arbiter, Part 2) · watch it on YouTube

Lyrus is the son of Orin. He is an enormous goliath werebear who fights with two black swords that cut holes in reality. After The Arbiter murdered his father, Lyrus gathered Orin’s old soldiers into a hidden resistance, the Faithful, to save the Grandmaster from her treacherous right hand. He is big, blunt, kind-hearted and convinced he is hilarious. He got Toddleheim, Locket and Flynry out of the Arbiter’s clutches, fought alongside two visitors from another universe, and was last seen diving into a mirror after a vision of his dead father.

Story

Sands of the Arena

Lyrus first appeared in S2E6 — FoTA - Sands of the Arena (Fate of the Arbiter, Part 2), arriving as a werebear in black plate. The Arbiter had thrown Toddleheim, Locket and Flynry into his own private arena, and Lyrus cut portals through time and space to get them out. He led them on a running fight through a city full of werewolves. When Locket fell into the void, he dove in headfirst after her, swords trailing. “I don’t know if this is gonna work!” he shouted. His first slash for an exit failed. On the second try he tore a portal open and they stumbled back onto solid stone.

The rescue left him so drained that a wild double swing missed its targets and sent part of the stone whipping off into another dimension. Flynry’s thoughts of that exhausted werebear, who “gave everything to rip a portal in thin air,” drove him into a blue-fire rage that exploded a werewolf’s skull into blood and matter. Lyrus’s reaction was simple: “who is this guy?” Once the werewolves were dead, Lyrus noticed Toddleheim’s fresh werewolf curse and gently talked him back into his old shape. “Calm now, friend. Easy. This is a dangerous time for you. Breathe.”

He took them to a blacksmith shop that served as a secret raid hideout and told them who he was: Orin’s son. He had heard the Arbiter confess to the murder with his own ears and had vowed to take his head “someday.” He asked whether his father died well. The trio agreed not to describe exactly how he died. Lyrus answered bitterly that Orin had died “fighting for a traitor. For a man that he considered like a father to him.” He then named his small band: “I guess you would call us the Faithful at this point. We have faith in the return of the Grandmaster to her ultimate power.” Afterward he changed back into his goliath form, chuckled that his father “wasn’t a fan of spending much time in his humanoid form either,” and introduced the newcomers to The Seer.

Fate of the Faithful, Part 1

In Coriander Society, Fate of the Faithful Part 1 (A Crossover), Lyrus charged into a brawl in the market of Prexmarin, the Hanging City. He had a ragtag militia behind him, and they were fighting thugs dressed up as the Grandmaster’s troops. Two strangers had landed in the middle of it: John Carmichael and Asena, who had followed their nemesis Ralzamon into The Void. Lyrus took the fight apart. His swords opened singularities inside enemies. He sent a brute’s maul and arm through a portal ten feet away, and he ordered a thug to take off armor that “doesn’t belong to you.” He also opened a portal for John to shoot through, then walked through a dying knight’s chest to appear behind another foe. Then he pushed both arms through a portal at his side so they came out behind Hathim, the Tiamat agent leading the impostors, and cut his head off, leaving it rolling across the courtyard.

At the end of a round, Ralzamon’s mind crashed down on the marketplace looking for weaknesses. It found Lyrus’s: the fear of not living up to his father’s legacy. His will held. After the fight, Lyrus introduced himself as “Lyrus, son of Orin, servant of the Grandmaster” and healed both strangers with a touch. When Asena remembered fighting in the Deathmatches, he bowed to her as a champion. He explained the Void to them, along with the ever-present Dread Fortress and the Arbiter’s coup. He told them how the Arbiter had once saved Orin as a child after his village burned, and later “murdered my father in cold blood.” He disapproved of looting the dead (“Maybe I’m just old-fashioned”), even as his own soldiers looted behind him.

He opened a portal to the Faithful’s headquarters. Asena nearly unraveled it by trying to widen it, and he explained that void magic is “almost a living being” and that “This is all I can muster.” He also recalled watching Ralzamon fight Asena in the Dread Fortress kitchen, where “He had a distinct lack of tolerance for milk.” On the way he warned the guests off Frank’s food, and at the base he introduced Baptiste as “not very good at anything but stabbing.” He explained that many of the Faithful were Orin’s old soldiers from The Eastern Outpost. They had deserted to serve the Grandmaster from the shadows, and many of them were now wanted for treason. When John offered to teach him shadow warfare, Lyrus admitted, “I am not a tactician. I, I am a soldier. This position was thrust upon me.”

Fate of the Faithful, Part 2

Coriander Society - Fate of the Faithful Part 2 (A Crossover) showed how Lyrus lived. He slept on his own warped drafting table, which was far too small for him. He ate Frank’s leather-and-pineapple stew “dead inside” and went back for seconds. John tattooed a Magic Missile rune on his palm as thanks (“my father would probably say this is cheating”). Lyrus refused a reading from the Seer until he was talked into it, and the result was grim: “You will fight. And you will fight again and again. Until you are amongst the sand.” He walked off. When Asena declared that Lyrus was not a great man, the Seer grinned: “Not yet.”

John gave him a huge Ogre Revolver. Lyrus promptly shot through a wall and winged someone on the other side. Over his hand-drawn maps, he told Asena that he had wanted to be a cartographer, but his strict father had made him a soldier. He showed her the Eastern Outpost, where Orin had guarded The Box of Chaos “for many years until his death,” and let her test her laser on his bare chest (“That’s pretty good. I’ve seen better”).

He went into Prexmarin with the heroes to find the missing spy Kenny. On the way he pretended to whistle with his hands in imaginary pockets, admitting he usually just kicks “down the door and portal in.” He knelt to sense a fiendish presence, and the void cracked through the cobblestones around his hand. He also showed off his homemade gauntlets and boots to Circe, the villain hunting them. When the Acolytes in chat offered the Glory of the Grandmaster duel, he pointed his swords at the armored titan Ganyu Sinmal: “How about we just do this, me and you.” He opened the duel by dropping an explosive barrel into the alley through a portal.

Fate of the Faithful, Part 3

In Coriander Society - Fate of The Faithful Part 3 — A Crossover, Ganyu Sinmal grabbed Lyrus, leapt into the sky, grew to a giant mid-air and power-bombed him into the street. Lyrus answered by pulling the void out of his own swords and into his body. His eyes went black, and black chaos flames poured off him. “I’m gonna rip you a new one!” he roared. Ralzamon seized control of the titan and kept it growing, while a monster chained beneath the city began to wake. Lyrus blinked straight into its furnace mouth and stabbed it through the soft palate into the brain. The body toppled into the abyss toward the waking monster, with Lyrus still inside.

Kenny saved him by diving on a rope and gluing himself to Lyrus’s boot. Lyrus’s escape plan was to blink out of the boot and leave Kenny dangling (“Don’t worry, I’ll be back”), then haul him up. When Kenny wanted to flee without the others, Lyrus refused: “That’s an order.” A tentacle flattened the building next to him, and he emerged from the dust saying, “Almost got me there.” He cut a portal to get Circe across, and the group escaped through a coin-flip waygate.

Back at base, he offered the defecting Circe “the opportunity for redemption, to stand by our sides, to serve the Grandmaster in her glory.” He would not let anyone chop off the glued boot: “You can’t chop the boot up, that was my father’s.” On the way up the Blood River of The Tumult, he claimed he couldn’t swim, then said he was kidding. He also insisted his chair-shrinking gag had been funny: “It was tiny, and then it wasn’t.” The titan blood made it hard for anyone not to sing, and Lyrus burst into “We’re no strangers to love.” The heroes swapped the silver ewer for the Seer’s replica, and then everyone was hit with visions of a bloody moon and murder. Lyrus was suddenly keen on leaving: “Okay, I’m ready to go now.”

Fate of the Faithful, Part 4

In Coriander Society — Fate of the Faithful Part 4 (A Crossover), the group planned how to send John and Asena home. Lyrus noted that the Arbiter “faked his own kidnapping once.” He also called him a bit of a gambler who might not honor his bets, and said he was “not really inclined to deal with him politely.” He recalled that the Faithful had once stormed the eastern stronghold to rescue the Arbiter, before anyone knew the truth. He also explained his heritage: “I’m actually a Goliath. Just happen to be a werebear as well.” Orin had been turned in the same attack the Arbiter saved him from, and Lyrus kept the bear form “in memory and honor.”

He warned them that The Shadowlands had been the realm of The Shadow King, stabbed both swords into the air and tore a blind portal there. He landed it on the first try (“Nailed it”). Inside, the Shadowlands showed him his father’s bones forming the whole fortress, and Orin impaled on the trees, nailed to the door and with his head on a spike on the battlement. He growled the vision away: “Get out of my head.” Circe made him giant so the party could walk across him over a broken bridge (“Careful, that tickles”). He then blinked past the inner gate and came face to face with the keep’s lord, a Draconic Death Knight. His bluff was that they’d been sent by the Arbiter “to check on the, you know, the thing about the thing.” It failed, and when John asked who he was talking to, he explained, “It’s just one of our coworkers.”

He hurled tiny John 125 feet across the keep and then fought the Death Knight in a duel no one else could join. The knight parried blow after blow. Then gold arrived from an Acolyte named Jack, and Lyrus spent it on extra strikes until the knight was dead. As the knight died, his soul flared up as a ball of green and black hellfire. Lyrus leapt fifty feet down onto a skeleton, and the orb hurled itself at him and exploded around him.

Fate of the Faithful, Part 5

In Coriander Society — Fate of the Faithful Part 5 (A Crossover), the blast dropped Lyrus, and Circe froze him in a block of ice to keep him alive. As he slipped away, he thought of the Arbiter and his father’s legacy, and refused to fail: “no, no, there’s more to do!” He burst out of the ice, healed himself and charged the defenders like a linebacker. He sliced a mecha’s plasma bolts in half in mid-air. He also downed a healing potion that Kenny had slipped him before the mission (“one second, I’m kind of thirsty”).

Then he sheathed his swords and switched to his thunder gauntlets, which happened to be exactly what the lightning-proofed mechas couldn’t handle. He blew out the back of one mecha with a single punch. When the Acolytes let him buy more blows with gold, he explained, “Easy, I’m rich… I’m loaded.” He confessed to Circe that he was scared of heights. He also tried the Ogre Revolver again, point-blank against the candle-headed Vargas, spattering wax and blood everywhere, and was so startled by the bang that he dropped both the gun and Vargas off a forty-foot wall (“I don’t like this”). His farewell to the keep was to warp the frozen Vargas right in front of the giant shadow creature that had risen from the pit.

Back at headquarters, he took the ewer to hand to the Seer: “I think the important thing is the Arbiter doesn’t have it.” John had quietly swapped it, so the one Lyrus got was the replica. He accepted the news that Ralzamon had been spared (“Well, the enemy of my enemy, I guess”). He admitted to “a little bit of a temper. I’m working on it,” and said the Faithful would keep pushing “in our fight to reach the Grandmaster.” He gave John 400 electrum and wished the travelers “maybe someday a happy retirement before you fall on the field of battle.” As they left, he started pulling off his armor and dropping it on the floor, because being a werebear in plate gets hot.

The Hall of Fates

Six months later, in S2E17 — Fate of the Arbiter - The Hall of Fates — Toddleheim, Locket and Flynry reach the Grandmaster, Toddleheim, Locket and Flynry found Lyrus still at headquarters. He was no longer in charge of strategy (“I’ve employed minds sharper than mine”) and missed the days when “you knocked on the door. And you said, I want to take your fucking castle.” The Grandmaster had not been seen outside the Dread Fortress in weeks, other than the occasional Deathmatch, and the Faithful’s messengers kept disappearing. Lyrus gave the trio the job of making an opening themselves, through old tunnels into the fortress sewers.

Kenny led them to the entrance, slid in first, and melted away in the toxic sewage below. Lyrus told the others, “Don’t let his death be in vain.” In the tunnels, Lyrus dropped one of his void swords into acid, which dulled the blade, while the rats he killed with the other folded into tiny black voids. He suspected “some sort of Rat King situation.” Against a walking heap of sewage he swore an oath of enmity: “Not today, shit monster!” It blasted him with its “shit cannon” anyway, leaving him coated in sludge.

At last they reached a long, empty corridor lined with towering mirrors. Lyrus named it: “The Hall of Fates. I didn’t think it was real.” In one mirror he saw the moments before his father’s death, with Orin rushing at the Arbiter. “I have to help!” he cried, and dove into the glass. The surface rippled once and went still. The mirrors were no portal but a living creature, and a deceptive one. The others vowed to make the Arbiter give their friend back.

Personality and Abilities

Lyrus is a white-furred werebear, normally nine or ten feet tall in grey and black plate armor worn over furs (“it gets cold places”). His true form is a bald, grey-skinned goliath about seven feet tall, with tiger-stripe tattoos. His people, the goliath werebears, are sometimes called voidbears. He stays in bear form nearly all the time to honor his father, though he admits it gets hot.

He talks like a man older than his own father. He uses folksy phrases like “I like the cut of your jib” and “two in the hand, one in the pantry,” rambles a little, and frowns on robbing the dead. He is a soldier who never wanted to command. He dreamed of being a cartographer, draws the Faithful’s maps himself, and tinkers with his own gear. He is rich, has a temper, is scared of heights, and is firmly convinced he is hilarious. His whole life is driven by his father’s legacy and his hatred of the man who killed Orin.

His signature weapons are two void swords that look like “a black chasm in space” and drink the light around them. A cut can open a singularity that swallows a foe, or a portal that sends a limb somewhere else. He can stab both blades into the air and rip a doorway across the Void, and he can slash quick portals to blink around a fight or to let allies attack through them. Returning somewhere is easier for him than jumping blind to a place he hasn’t seen. One blade can sever a creature’s astral cord. In desperate moments he can pull the void out of the swords into himself, his eyes turning black and black flame rising off him.

He also carries holy power. His blows can be charged with divine force or burn with green and black flame. He can heal with a touch, sense fiendish presences through cracks of void in the ground, bless and hasten allies, and shrug off punishing hits by standing his ground. He resists mental attack. His homemade kit includes teleporting boots, thunder gauntlets that send out concussive blasts, a Magic Missile rune on his palm from John, and the Ogre Revolver, which he does not like.

Relationships

• Orin: His father, a strict soldier who made him one too. Lyrus has spent everything since Orin’s death trying to live up to him.
• The Arbiter: His father’s murderer, and the target of Lyrus’s whole rebellion. He vowed to take the Arbiter’s head “someday.”
• The Grandmaster: He considers himself her servant “in a way” and is fighting to free her from the Arbiter’s influence.
• Toddleheim: He talked Toddleheim through his first werewolf shift and praised his magic as perhaps the grandest he had seen.
• Locket: He dove into the void to save her.
• Flynry: A fellow beast whose blue-fire rage was fueled by the sight of Lyrus’s exhausting rescue.
• John Carmichael: An ally who tattooed him, gave him a gun, rode on his shoulders and got hurled across a keep by him.
• Asena: A champion he bowed to, sparred with, carried on his leg and let into his head.
• Kenny: The Faithful’s spy, whom Lyrus gave orders to, rescued, and was rescued by.
• The Seer: The Faithful’s blind smith. Lyrus calls him “sharper than you think he is… like a sharp spoon.”
• Circe: An enemy turned uneasy ally, to whom he offered redemption.
• Baptiste, Frank, Lawrence Booker Green: Housemates at headquarters. Lyrus eats Frank’s cooking out of grim duty.
• Ganyu Sinmal: The titan Lyrus beat in single combat from inside its mouth.
• Ralzamon: The Arbiter’s general, a foe Lyrus fought beside John and Asena to bring down.

Memorable Quotes

“I guess you would call us the Faithful at this point. We have faith in the return of the Grandmaster to her ultimate power.” (S2E6 — FoTA - Sands of the Arena)

• “I am Lyrus, son of Orin, servant of the Grandmaster.” (Fate of the Faithful Part 1)
• “I am not a tactician. I, I am a soldier. This position was thrust upon me.” (Fate of the Faithful Part 1)
• “You can’t chop the boot up, that was my father’s.” (Fate of the Faithful Part 3)
• “Easy, I’m rich. I don’t know if you guys know this. I’m loaded.” (Fate of the Faithful Part 5)

“Not today, shit monster!” (S2E17 — The Hall of Fates)

Appearances

• S2E6 — FoTA - Sands of the Arena (Fate of the Arbiter, Part 2)
• S2E17 — Fate of the Arbiter - The Hall of Fates — Toddleheim, Locket and Flynry reach the Grandmaster
• Coriander Society, Fate of the Faithful Part 1 (A Crossover)
• Coriander Society - Fate of the Faithful Part 2 (A Crossover)
• Coriander Society - Fate of The Faithful Part 3 — A Crossover
• Coriander Society — Fate of the Faithful Part 4 (A Crossover)
• Coriander Society — Fate of the Faithful Part 5 (A Crossover)