"If one must defy fate, they must first run out of time."

About

Before the Brandshock, Stygia was a watcher - a college watcher to be specific, given that's what the Ekorian orphanages were called. Her job was to take care of the orphaned Vani children and help them find parents to adopt them. Even after the Brandshock screwed up the Vani she continued taking care of them, even while unable to love, out of loyalty and memory. Taking care of them brought her happiness, the one emotion as an Ekorian she and her charges could still feel. That all ended the day the newly renamed Oblibreo descended on her college with the intent of wiping them all out. He succeeded, and Stygia turned back time in response, trying to evacute the kids under her care now that she knew what was coming. But no matter what she tried, or how hard she fought, Oblibreo always suceeded in the end; winning over and over and over again until Stygia ran out of the energy to time travel and could only watch, critically injured, as Oblibreo slaughtered the children under her care. Said that he was doing them a kindness, ending their suffering now, and that he wasn't so cruel as to leave their caretaker to suffer without them. The only reason Stygia even survived at all was due to the fact that Oblibreo believed her to be dead due to the severity of her injuries.

After the Brandshock, a new Vani god rose to power: Greyven. He commanded the Vani to go out and wipe out all life in the universe, believing that it was their duty to save them all from the suffering that is life by giving them the mercy of death. That was pretty much the last straw: Stygia rebelled, but bided her time in revealing that. She waited until her first mission, having decided that not only was it best to wait and get a head start on her run rather than try to make her escape from Kraizenlain directly, she would also get the opportunity to take out as many of her Vani teammates as she could until she got caught, giving the world they were sent to better odds of winning. So, once she and her team arrived on the planet, she began her work of crippling said invasion team, turning her given role of assassin around on her Vani teammates. Those she could beat, she killed, while those she found out she couldn't the hard way she reluctantly killed the tethers of, in order to remove the threat they posed from the planet. When she was finally caught out, she made a beeline straight for Oblibreo and attacked him, determined not to leave until she took care of this monster, who she absolutely refused to let remain on the planet. Unfortunately, during the fight between the two wrestling Vani, Oblibreo's tether was accidentally crushed under Stygia's bulk, booting Oblibreo from the planet. As much as Stygia hated that outcome, she wasn't about to time travel and risk failing to boot Oblibreo a second time. She made her escape, and from then on was branded a traitor. It's only due to her abilitiy to time travel, thanks to her elemental quirk, and the use of illusionary light magic and glass clones that's kept her alive all this time. Greyven does not take kindly to traitors, after all. And there are plenty of Vani who would be more than happy to get their hands on traitors to the cause - some some of whom it really would be a mercy to be dead rather than held captive by.

When the Vani targeted Earth, Stygia's tether actually happened to be living there, so she took the opportunity to join the fight against the team of Vani bent on wiping out humanity. She's never cared to track down any of her tethers over the centuries, believing that just because they held her soul didn't mean that she had the right to barge into their lives unless absolutely necessary, and as such is painfully unaware that her current tether is in fact a turtle in a zoo.

Boss Fight

When it comes to fighting Stygia, assume that you have already lost the element of surprise. Sniping from a distance will only work once, so unless you are absolutely certain your first shot will kill, it's a useless strategy. The best way to bring her down is to trap her some way so she can't escape and then win a battle of attrition. Stygia can only turn back time so many times before she runs out of the energy to do so, and when that happens, she can't escape the kill.

Trivia

1) Stygia's design takes inspiration from a deer and a dragon, and her wings are pretty much directly taken from the Skylander Spotlight. They were way too cool not to use (and definetly the hardest part to draw)

2) Originally, Stygia's tanja was gold. But after learning about the lore of gold/engoldening in the Vanishing World, and that magenta is actually an imaginary color (which is incredible btw) in the same conversation, I decided to change it to the latter.

3) I accidentally gave her Hoopa's color scheme, which I only noticed several days after the fact ^^'

4) Out of my three Vani, she's the only one who's a color deviant, though to be fair it is still a shade of pink, just not the same shade as the glass element.