Ralzamon

First appearance: S2E2 — Prize Fight — Asena v Ralzamon · watch it on YouTube

Ralzamon, Master of the Unknown, is a long-dead psychic mastermind from the world of Yord and the sworn nemesis of Asena. He is half jungle explorer and half megalomaniac, with a body made of ectoplasm. He opened Season 2 by losing a Deathmatch in the kitchen of the Dread Fortress. The Arbiter then quietly scooped him up as his general, turned him into a psychic spy against the Grandmaster’s loyalists, and finally sent him into the Battle for the Crown, where he died for good. Few champions have been killed, revived, fused, split apart, dropped down a pit and killed again quite so thoroughly.

Story

Prize Fight

Ralzamon came through the Arbiter’s portal in S2E2 — Prize Fight — Asena v Ralzamon, played by TrmntdByGnomes. He floated above the molten rock with one hand pointed at Asena and denounced her: “Her energy does not belong in this world! It corrupts everywhere that it goes! If I could not banish it from my own world, then I will snuff it out in this one!” When asked about his tombstone, he refused to have “Ralzy Poo” carved on it. Ralzamon, he explained, “isn’t even my real name,” and he wondered what “my poor dead mother” would think. He also found marble “a little gross.”

The arena was the Dread Fortress kitchen, and Ralzamon took the high ground on the second-floor balcony. A blue vial from the chaos table sharpened his power. Asena then karate-chopped a jar of milk to the floor as a threat, which revealed a weakness: “I’m lactose intolerant.” He reminded her that they had done battle “like, five times” and that he haunted her nightmares, and he levitated over the room while the mounted trophies glowed around him. Asena punched him so hard in the jaw that teeth went flying. He answered with fire-and-brimstone rebukes (“Rebuke that shit”), rode out her draconic terror by calling on “the crystal heart in which my consciousness normally resides when not imprisoned in this fleshy apparatus,” and locked her inside a mental prison full of ninjas, void slimes and his own mocking face.

Then came his slyest trick. While hobbling toward the Box of Chaos, he reached out telepathically to the aliens whose saucer hovered over the kitchen. He put on a flawless alien voice and offered them Asena as a “specimen” for collection. The aliens decided he was one of their own and gave him a healing potion, then a second one out of pity (“You seem thirsty. Here you go”). Along the way he shook off the wisps of mist clinging to him from Asena’s punches, which, the Grandmaster pointed out, just made it look like he had farted. The plan backfired when the aliens sent Asena back with snakes for arms. She broke free of the prison, hopped over the wall clock he had pulled down to block her, and booped him to death with snake bites.

As he lay dying, he delivered a prophecy: “You will bring doom! Doom upon the world that you call home! You are the harbinger of elder evil.” His last words promised a return: “Death is but a door, time is but a window. I’ll be back.” The Grandmaster lifted his head and honoured him as part of the Fortress itself. She then told the Arbiter to tend to the champion, and he did, in his own way. He threw the body down the kitchen well, jumped in after it, and revived Ralzamon on the way down: “I think I could use a general for the days to come… We have much to plan for.”

Fate of the Faithful

In the Coriander Society crossover, the story picks up from the other side. Asena and John Carmichael were about to finish Ralzamon off in Yord when a gateway tore open behind his psychic shade. A hand reached through, and a voice said “I still have need of you,” before dragging him into the Void. The heroes leapt in after him. By the time they landed, Ralzamon had already been serving the Arbiter as his general for weeks, perhaps months. In Part 1 he appeared only as an invisible, crushing presence that dug into every mind for its flaws. Asena felt something familiar, “except stronger, more powerful than ever.” Lyrus of the Faithful identified him as “Ralzamon, General of the Arbiter.” He also remembered the kitchen fight fondly, recalling that Ralzamon “had a distinct lack of tolerance for milk.”

In Part 2, a shared vision showed how he had been remade. The Arbiter stood beside a resurrected Josiah Parsons, glowing blue with psychic radiance. He pulled through Ralzamon’s spirit, “fresh from your battle” and on the verge of annihilation, and slammed the two together. The blast cracked the icy throne room from floor to throne. The Arbiter promised that once the Grandmaster was gone, Ralzamon’s desires would be his desires. He also warned that failure would mean destruction “in every time. In every plane… cell by cell by cell.” Ralzamon clenched a fist: “There is no reason for failure. We are master of the unknown. There will be no secrets for the Arbiter.” Projecting from a hidden crystal nest in the Zul’quian jungles, his mind spread across the Void “like a candle in a vast shrine.” This explained why the Children of the Void always seemed to know the Faithful’s moves. At the end of the vision he turned and looked straight at John and Asena, with recognition and hatred on his face, but also despair.

In Part 3, he hunted Kenny, the Faithful’s spy, by scanning for his brainwaves. He took over Ganyu Sinmal mid-duel to hurl a mind crush at Lyrus. At the same moment he tried to fry Circe’s brain “for disloyalty,” and John shielded her. Circe defected to the heroes and dismissed her old boss as “middle management.” In Part 4, Lawrence Booker Green worked out a theory that Ralzamon was two echoes of one man. One was the version the Arbiter kept after the Deathmatch loss. The other was plucked from Yord at the moment of death. Lawrence tracked him to a floating keep in the Shadowlands. On the approach, Asena glimpsed Josiah Parsons at the gate, and a voice said: “He cannot know… If he does not know, he can take no vengeance.”

The showdown came in Part 5. Ralzamon rose from beneath the keep inside a giant spectral visage and battered the heroes’ minds. He disguised himself as someone John once loved, and tried to push his own wounds into Asena’s mind, which she flatly rejected. John hurled Asena at him, and she cursed him “directly in the face, right in the teeth.” One of John’s attacks tore away the Yord echo, leaving only the man who had fought Asena in the kitchen. Held above the pit, he became, for a moment, simply Josiah Parsons, the man from her family’s old expedition photograph. “Asena, enough,” he said. “If you kill me, he’ll look for you.” He begged to “die alone and leave it out of his sight.” Asena let go. As he fell, his expedition khakis turned back into the hood, robes and green cloak of a warrior of the Arbiter. The torn collar Asena kept, which ended up inside Slakura, became the anchor Lawrence used to send the heroes home to Yord. Ralzamon’s psychic grip had also been holding something chained beneath the keep, and with him gone it began to wake. John believed Ralzamon might go on working against the Arbiter in secret to protect Yord.

He survived the fall. Defeated, he stood before the Arbiter, who sneered: “once again, you were defeated by her.” Ralzamon protested, “She was not alone. This was no duel of honor.” The Arbiter waved it away. He said he could kill Ralzamon, but that it would be “like stomping on an ant,” and that the next phase of his plan had begun.

Battle for the Crown

Ralzamon returned as the Arbiter’s general for the opening round of the coup in S2E18 · Battle for the Crown Round 1, played by CastersnCastles. His assistant for the day was Glub Glub, who called him “Razzle Dazzle.” The opponents were Toddleheim and Veronica. He announced that “the forbidden power of the lower bracket” had been unleashed. The stakes were higher than ever: this was war, and every death would be permanent.

The frozen fortress turned him into a cow almost at once. He tiptoed along an icy ledge like a “beautiful little ballerina” and politely gored Veronica’s badger form with a natural 20, which only freed her to fight as a bladesinger again. Then he fell 25 feet into a tower, mooing in slow motion (“Don’t leave any cow pies in my fortress, thank you,” the Grandmaster warned). Back in his own body, he paralysed Veronica so Glub Glub could pummel her. Next he levitated away from a newly transformed werewolf Toddleheim on the minds of the fortress’s long dead, cackling as he went. Meanwhile, Veronica’s horn brought five berserkers down off the mountain, and two of them went after him. He blasted the werewolf, kept calling Veronica “Victoria,” and finally dropped Toddleheim with a critical blast to the face.

Out of tricks, he summoned the power for one last spell and chanted “It’s not Victoria. It’s not Victoria” before firing his final psychic lance. Veronica shrugged off half of it. Her fiery orb set his cloak ablaze, and a berserker’s crit brought him to his knees beside the dying dwarf. “Sucks, don’t it?” said Toddleheim. Ralzamon chose to leave his team’s last chances to Glub Glub, and died burning. His final whisper went to the foe lying beside him:

“Not more than pawns in their game. And not more shall we ever be.”

His ghost rose from the body and drifted over the snow until the battle ended. The Grandmaster raised his remains on an iceberg alongside the victors, so that all who had fought would be recognised. The Arbiter offered no such kindness. He said Ralzamon had “commanded with a presence, a staggering presence, up until… he died like an idiot,” while insisting he had been “only one move away from ending the whole fight.”

Personality and Abilities

Ralzamon is pure theatre: a wretched, ectoplasmic figure in a mash-up of jungle-explorer kit and madman’s finery. Later he wore hooded robes and a green cloak with golden clasps. By the Battle for the Crown his skin was blue, his collar absurdly high and his hair finely clipped. As Veronica was told when she asked what he looked like, “Being made of meat is not his normal state of being… He’s used to being a much more ethereal, astral entity.” He speaks almost entirely in grandiose proclamations. He also complains about “incursive anachronisms” that “corrupt the plot,” and asks Asena whether she even goes to “the story meetings.” Beneath the bluster are a genuine fear of death (“I don’t want to die”) and, in the end, a tired awareness of being a pawn.

His powers are all in the mind. He levitates, punishes attackers with psychic fire, cages enemies in mental prisons, holds them paralysed, and lances them with psychic power from his forehead. Above all, he finds “the cracks in your armor” and presses on them. As the Arbiter’s general, his reach stretched across the Void, and he could seize control of other bodies. His talisman pact with the Zul’quian jungles steadies him against fear, and an unholy talisman shielded him from the hail in the frozen fortress. He is also lactose intolerant, which Asena never let him forget.

Relationships

• Asena: His nemesis across worlds. He believes she is a corrupting harbinger of doom; she calls him “Ralzypoo” and beat him in the kitchen and again in the Shadowlands.
• The Arbiter: His master, who revived him in the well, fused him with his Yord echo, and finally dismissed him as an ant not worth stomping.
• John Carmichael: Asena’s partner in the hunt, who called him “the stupidest smart guy I think I’ve ever met” and tore away his Yord echo.
• The Grandmaster: Honoured him after both of his deaths, even as he served the coup against her.
• Glub Glub: His assistant for the Battle for the Crown, who nicknamed him “Razzle Dazzle” and shed a tear when he died.
• Veronica: The bee farmer he kept calling “Victoria,” whose flames helped finish him.
• Toddleheim: The werewolf wizard he dropped with a critical blast, and the last face he spoke to.
• Circe: A former subordinate he tried to kill for disloyalty, who promptly switched sides.
• Lyrus: The Faithful leader whose mind he attacked, and who still rated the kitchen fight among the greatest ever fought in the Dread Fortress kitchen.

Memorable Quotes

• “Ralzamon isn’t even my real name. Why would I put a false iteration of my assumed name on my tombstone? What would my mother, my poor dead mother think of that?” (S2E2 — Prize Fight)
• “Hail and welcome to our world. The specimen that you requested is ready for collection, immobilized through psychic means. Stand by for absorption.” (S2E2 — Prize Fight)
• “Death is but a door, time is but a window. I’ll be back.” (S2E2 — Prize Fight)
• “Do not trust in otherworldly magic, for it seeks only to corrupt your universe and eat it from the inside out.” (S2E2 — Prize Fight, Dried Blood)
• “There is no reason for failure. We are master of the unknown. There will be no secrets for the Arbiter.” (Fate of the Faithful Part 2)
• “It will not be the first time I was deprived of a body, and it will not be the last.” (Battle for the Crown Round 1)

Appearances

• S2E18 · Battle for the Crown Round 1 · Team Grandmaster (Toddleheim & Veronica) v Team Arbiter (Ralzamon & …
• 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)
• S2E2 — Prize Fight — Asena v Ralzamon