Long before there was an arena, before Doug or Gerald, and before the Arbiter or his betrayal, the Grandmaster was a warrior. Skypiercer is the three-part prequel that tells how Elusia, a princess smuggled out of The Void as a child, came home to kill the uncle who murdered her father and took her throne. It is the only time the show has ever left the Void. It answers a surprising number of big questions: where the Grandmaster’s title comes from, how Vythorn became the Arbiter, why the Deathmatches celebrate death, and what is really inside Gerald. It also has a giant killed by a sword up the butt, a skeleton that names its own murderer, and a goblin bard with an electric guitar.
Background
Three hundred years before the story begins, screams ran through The Dread Fortress: the Golden King was dead. Elusia’s father, Faucius Golden Shield, had been assassinated by his brother Agdrel, who went on to rule as The Shadow King. Mercenaries burst into the young princess’s chambers and were cut down by the Knights of Chaos. She grabbed the obsidian dagger her father had given her, which had once been her grandfather’s. The orc knight Sir Boros told her this was “the king’s plan” and led her to the Ceremonial Chamber.
There she drank a bowl of thick golden liquid. Then the knights slit their own throats. They stayed on their feet until every last drop of their blood had spilled, and that blood opened a portal beneath her. She landed in Cor’thun, a realm far outside the Void, and grew up there. Agdrel’s reign lasted the three hundred years she was gone.
The Story
Part 1: The Siege of Cor’thun
Skypiercer Part 1 opened with Cor’thun under siege. Cor’thun is a city of white stone, columns, aqueducts and fountains. A black hole dominates its sky, and the light streaking into it gives the city an eternal sunset. That day, trebuchet fireballs were falling and horns warned that the Eastern Gate was under attack. Atalantos led his soldiers through the streets. Kaja raised skeletons in the market square. Elusia flew overhead.
Through the broken gate came the Cursed Juggernaut, a silent giant twelve or thirteen feet tall. It wore a metal raven mask, carried a scythe, and healed its own wounds. It killed one of its own soldiers just to claim the fight for itself. Kaja shifted into her terrifying form of dread, which she described as taking “the void of space… a vacuum,” compressing it, and yanking out the threads until it became “something hungry and empty.” The Juggernaut didn’t even react.
An arrow aimed at the Juggernaut bounced off its mask and killed a random enemy soldier. When Elusia climbed a statue for high ground, it headbutted the statue to rubble. Kaja raised five fallen soldiers as zombies, picking “the ones that either look really hot or they’re like super strong looking.” The Acolytes watching named two of them Kevin and Enderdan. Atalantos bled to wreathe two of the zombies, Elusia and himself in crackling red lightning. Elusia then put a lightning arrow squarely into the Juggernaut’s butt (“Give him a shocker”). It clenched, snapped off the shaft, and kept coming.
It hurled a festering stone spear at Kaja, “donkey punched” Atalantos to the ground, and charged through anything in its way. One charge hit Kaja so hard she bled thick purple blood. Elusia climbed a thirty-foot building and rang its bell to lure the monster in. It smashed the building and flattened the zombies. Atalantos used his blood magic to raise Kevin one last time for a final swing, telling him, “You had the heart of a Corthunian.” When the scythe bit into Atalantos, he threw down his shield and spear, drew his greatsword, and roared, “Tonight, we dine in hell!” Kaja then accidentally blasted him in the back through the smoke.
The end was undignified. Elusia dove from the rooftop with both short swords into the Juggernaut’s shoulder blades. Then, from between its legs, she drove a sword up through its butt, pushing the earlier lightning arrow in with it. The Juggernaut pulled off its helmet to reveal a distorted, bruised face. It fell face-first onto the tip of Atalantos’s spear. Victory bells rang and the Champions of Honor shouted “FOR ORDER!” Kaja sat on the corpse sipping from a travel mug.
Afterwards Kaja admitted something to her friends: she dies “all the time” and comes back, thanks to “a special relationship” with a force “beyond our comprehension.” To prove it, she had Elusia shoot her through the heart.
At the palace, Emperor Thornos heard the tale. He recalled that Elusia had arrived “some 300 years ago” in the days of his ancestor, Empress Juntikar, who taught her the sword (“And the bow,” Elusia added). Thornos named all three Generals of the Champions of Honor and sealed Elusia’s blood oath by cutting her neck.
The feast that followed was gloriously messy. Elusia sipped from Kaja’s goblet and pulled back, embarrassed. Kaja turned the cup and drank from the same spot. Elusia claimed the wine tasted of almonds, and from then on it did. The hall muttered that she was drunk again. A drunk soldier named Lucien, wearing his gloves on the wrong hands, tried to sign Atalantos’s chest in gravy and fell asleep in his hand. Guests placed bets on what disaster Lucien would cause next, and Atalantos drafted him into his brigade. The politician Glotun offered favors, then revealed he wanted the emperor’s ear so he could divert the southern aqueduct for Plintos. The trio turned him down.
Then Vythorn stepped out of a portal. He told Elusia that her father had been killed by her uncle Agdrel, the Shadow King, and asked her to come back to the Void. She agreed, and Kaja and Atalantos agreed to come with her. They would leave in three days. Thornos had listened to all of it leaning on his sword, eating popcorn.
Part 2: Loose Ends and the Shadowlands
Skypiercer Part 2 began with goodbyes. Atalantos settled his troops and asked a soldier to keep an eye on Lucien, whom he had found passed out in a tavern. Kaja explained that her associates were mostly dead, so her loose ends tied themselves. She did steal two books from the library: a steamy romance and a book on the arcane arts. The city was apparently too honorable to employ a librarian.
Elusia meditated in the tomb of the emperors and empresses, where the dead lie on stone slabs under layers of candle wax. She remembered Juntikar knocking her flat with a tower shield and teaching her to stand her ground, because otherwise the people she protected would be left vulnerable. She knew she had outlived everyone she had known here. Atalantos told her that worthiness wasn’t a mystery: “Simply just do. Be the best that you can be today.” He had started out as “just a simple gladiator.”
Their last mission in Cor’thun was the aqueduct, and they went straight for “the head of the snake.” The Plintos estate was absurd. Its marble was cast an inch deep in gold, with a full-time crew to keep re-gilding it. Diamonds and rubies were left out for commoners to steal. The many wives and children each had their own “mansion within the mansion.” Elusia pocketed a pouch of diamonds, and Kaja warned her that history can haunt objects. Plintos’s chambers held plans for a private water park with slides and a tidal pool. They also held Plintos himself, a skeleton in sleepwear with a golden dagger in its ribs. Kaja animated the bones, and they wrote two words: “My wife.”
The house artisan said his orders came from the eldest son, Throm. In the confrontation that followed, Kaja disguised herself as a half-rotted Plintos and stabbed the dagger into herself. Throm blurted, “You died six years ago.” When he attacked, Elusia pinned him to the marble with an arrow through his heel. He explained his motive: “My stupid father wanted to give all of the, all of it away. All of it to the people.” His mother broke down and confessed she had stabbed her husband on Throm’s orders. Thea, a teenage daughter, stepped forward to lead the house. Elusia gave House Plintos to her and charged her to bring its wealth to the people. Kaja killed Throm with his father’s dagger, and the servants cleaned up without asking questions.
Vythorn mixed his own blood into a thick golden liquid and opened the portal. The three landed in a dead forest in The Shadowlands. On the horizon stood the Dread Fortress, an orc-skull rock with a broken tusk and blazing eyes, ringed in lava and visible whichever way they turned. Overhead, chaos storms, the source of magic in the Void, raged out of control. “This is a land of shadows,” Vythorn told them, “where fears become real.”
The crossing had drained Vythorn, so he couldn’t fight. On the way to the resistance at Atheranon, the group had to cross a chasm on old rope bridges. Shadow tendrils grabbed Atalantos’s ankle. Whispering shadow creatures stunned Elusia and briefly forced Kaja to choke her. They learned that only light breaks these creatures. Then a tendril yanked Elusia’s ankle mid-shot, and her arrow landed in Vythorn’s chest. He spent the rest of the journey bleeding with it still in him.
Next a Nightwalker climbed out of the chasm, an “eater of life” whose very presence drained the living. Atalantos summed it up: “This thing will fuck your entire world.” They ran, Elusia holding Kaja’s hand so that Kaja’s resistance to death shielded her (“I feel embraced”). When its sweeping hand flattened the forest, Elusia flung Kaja ahead of the blow. “Don’t let go of my hand.” “I won’t.” A line of mages slammed their staves into the ground and raised a wall of light that destroyed the creature.
Their leader was Craven Eldonbridge, a gray-and-black leonin. He drew on Vythorn, “the right hand of the Shadow King,” until Vythorn introduced “the savior of the Void… Elusia, daughter of the Golden King,” and Craven knelt. The plan was simple. The fortress couldn’t be taken from outside, but Vythorn could come and go. Craven’s army would be the distraction while Vythorn took the three inside.
A chest bearing Faucius’s insignia, smuggled out of the fortress, held gifts. Atalantos received Defender, the golden longsword of Elusia’s grandfather and father. Kaja received Life Stealer, Agdrel’s own staff of twisted black wood (“It is dangerous and it speaks things”). Elusia received the Oathbringer, her mother’s golden bow, and bound it with her blood in an oath to defeat the Shadow King.
Weeks of preparation followed. Atalantos trained about five hundred troops and learned all their names. Kaja taught the mages and quietly seeded a following around “the Great Dread.” Elusia wrote letters and decrees, and people poured in from Prexmarin and undiscovered lands until Atheranon was a city a mile across. The episode ended with a figure shrouded in shadow, sitting on her father’s throne.
Part 3: The One Who Pierces the Sky
In Skypiercer Part 3 (finale), an army now thousands strong waited on a cliff above the lava fields. A black storm crackled over the fortress. Elusia asked her friends how they could face death so calmly. “From blood comes life,” Kaja said. “It is not the end… It is simply a path.” Atalantos agreed: “There is no shame in death. In fact, there should be celebration.”
Before the battle, Kaja had a stone heart crafted, deep onyx with crackling blue veins, “for a spell later.” Elusia put on black-and-gold armor that felt like “wearing somebody else’s clothes.” From the air she told the army: “No princess has come back to save you, but it is an empress… your warrior queen.” Craven led the charge, and shadow servants poured from the skull’s mouth.
Vythorn brought the three into the Ceremonial Chamber. The Knights of Chaos who had died for Elusia still stood there as petrified statues: Sir Eros, Sir Rickson and Sir Boros. Agdrel kept them as trophies. Elusia kissed Boros’s feet and begged her friends never to make that sacrifice. When Vythorn vanished to clear the path, she voiced her doubts: he had always served her uncle, and “the most vulnerable time would be when we’re switching power.”
The Dragon Knights came at them through the walls. These were masked dragonborn with blades of pure shadow, once Agdrel’s loyal horde from back when he was “just Agdrel the Shadow, a great warrior.” The three fought back-to-back. Kaja got down on the floor in her best silk dress to help check for traps: “If I’m going to die here, I’m going to look good doing it.” Atalantos bear-hugged one of the knights out of the shadows and branded another with the symbol of Cor’thun. They passed through Elusia’s empty childhood home. She remembered gold decorations, goblins carrying trays, and a banquet hall with a night-sky ceiling, now ruined. A troop of Dragon Knights then surrounded them: “My king awaits your presence.”
Elusia kicked the throne room doors off their hinges while a goblin bard played them in on an electric guitar. Agdrel sat slumped on Faucius’s refashioned throne, old, frail and white-haired, with Vythorn at his right hand. “I was more of a father to you than he was,” he said. “I raised you.” He sneered at Faucius as a coward “hiding behind his golden shield in battle,” who never would have won the Chaos Wars without him. Elusia refused him: “I have no daughter of yours.” Agdrel threw off his cloak, which became two shadow blades, and grew strong again by draining the life of one of his own acolytes.
Then he turned on Vythorn: “you weasel, you treacherous snake. I’m almost proud of you. It would be you to usurp me.” Shadows skewered and bound Vythorn, and Agdrel redirected his own wounds into him. Atalantos drew Defender: “Today, I fight as the sword of the Empress.” Kaja sprouted skeletal dragon wings. Elusia set the red carpet ablaze, because light weakens shadow, and shot Vythorn free. Atalantos killed Agdrel’s remaining acolytes so he could no longer feed on them. Agdrel dragged Elusia into the fire and stabbed her down, but Kaja, in her death form, brought her back: “It’s not your time.” “My angel.” “Today, I belong to you.”
Elusia hurled the Plintos diamonds into the firelight so no corner was left in shadow. “Mother guide me.” Atalantos impaled Agdrel and himself on the same spear so the king couldn’t escape. “Shoot him, shoot me if you have to, but he dies here and now.” Her arrow struck. Then she dropped the bow and stabbed an arrow into Agdrel’s eye and face again and again, until the Shadow King was dead. Only afterwards did she realize she had killed the last of her family.
Vythorn reversed time on Atalantos to partly undo the spear wound. The strain turned his black wings glowing white. “Sorry, I failed you, Empress.” Kaja and Elusia kissed.
Aftermath
Vythorn said the armies would surrender now. He sank Agdrel’s body into the floor and moved the throne outside. Elusia addressed her people: “The time of darkness is over… honor shall be our currency… death is never where our story ends.” She named Vythorn “the arbiter of all things,” and he crowned her with a black crown as the chaos storms parted:
The Arbiter: “This is the one who pierces the sky! I present to you, Your Grandmaster, Elusia Skypiercer!”
She knighted Kaja and Atalantos as her new Knights of Chaos (“for you are family to me now”) and asked the crowd to become her acolytes. They knelt and chanted. Some ripped their shirts off, and a few soldiers who hadn’t heard the war was over kept stabbing shadow servants. Then the Grandmaster called for “a day of remembrance,” a place “to prove our worth”:
Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: “Arbiter… We shall have a deathmatch.”
The Arbiter transported everyone to the arena for the very first Deathmatch.
Sometime later, deep in his laboratory in the Dread Fortress, the Arbiter stood over Agdrel’s body. “There’s so much knowledge within you,” he said. “Someday you will die. But not until I’ve learned everything. That I might serve the Grandmaster and the people of the Void.” He ripped out Agdrel’s soul and wrote it as a name, AGDREL. He rearranged the letters into GERALD and bound the soul into a box. That was the birth of Gerald, the Box of Chaos. The prequel’s opening lines had already hinted where this leads: this was the time “before the Arbiter or his betrayal.”