Erix

Once upon a time Erix was a grifter in a time and place not altogether dissimilar to what you or I might recognize as LA in the 1980s.  He made his living on the boardwalks, scamming tourists out of their money and entertained himself by seducing every pretty young thing who wandered into his sight.  Handsome, clever, ruthless and charming as he was, Erix found this an easy enough life, but he was never satisfied.  He wanted more of everything:  food, sex, adventure, consequence.  Money and power were never things he craved on their own, but they of course helped him get more of the things he did.  Though he rarely went hungry, money and power on the scale that would afford him the life he wanted, largely eluded him.  That was until Erix discovered magic.  

Though the world he lived in had little enough magic in it, and few enough opportunities to learn, Erix found that he was a prodigy.  Able to create charms, potions and talismans, Erix soon found himself creating entirely new criminal enterprises based solely around things that he alone could provide.  Still it wasn't enough.  The more he learned of magic, and the secret shape of the world the more he learned how limited his place in it was.  This proved intolerable to him.  The thought that there were entire worlds whose pleasures he would never taste tormented Erix day and night, and he resolved to break through the barriers between worlds.  The path to such knowledge, particularly in a world where magic is scarce, is long and bloody, but ultimately Erix's determination bore him through.  

What he found on the other side of the barrier was not what he expected.  He had attracted the attention of the outer gods; terrible beings of incalculable power and cosmic indifference.  In the chaos beyond all shaped reality, they seized hold of him and made him their living instrument.  He was unmade and reformed but still he remained Erix.  Brands of eldritch power were forced under his skin, a process which caused unimaginable pain and lasted eons of nonlinear time, but which also granted him vast magical power and the ability to move between time, space and reality as easily as a mortal man moves between the rooms of a house.  He was set to the task of maintaining the proper flow of magical energies throughout the multiverse, as well as maintaining the balance between chaos and order.  Usually, this consists of culling excess magical elements from worlds where they were never meant to exist.  Often it entails duties which beggar description in any purely mundane language.

Though he was given a monumental set of responsibilities he never asked for or wanted, Erix found it difficult to complain.  The ease with which he now traveled the multiverse, and the vast power he now possessed, made it easy to take more of what he wanted from worlds he'd previously only dreamed of, and others still undreamt of.  In the course of his many journeys, he met Gail.  Another being like himself.  The two were so alike in their wantonness and ambition that they immediately fell into a convoluted dance of mutual manipulation and deception peppered with raw animal lust and heated bitter rivalry.  This was the natural reaction of two deeply twisted beings to feeling love for the first time.  Eventually the pair were able to work their way through it and so began the halcyon days which lasted nearly a millennium.  They collected the queens and high priestesses of mighty empires the way lesser beings might collect finches or gerbils.  They conquered an entire world together and set themselves up as god-emperors just for a lark.  It was a love that left its searing thumbprint on all of reality and changed the shape of it for eons to come.

Sadly though, nothing can last forever, save for the lives of the secret named.  In time, Erix's old obsession resurfaced.  He became convinced that the only way to be truly free, was to transcend all known laws of reality altogether, and have the shaping of the multiverse to his own.  Gail saw little point in hastening the arrival of what must have been the ultimate form of ennui.  After all, in the course of eternity, everything becomes dull.  Having supreme transcendent power could only make every possibility redundant.  Eventually, this rift caused the pair to drift apart.

Erix abandoned his duties as a multiversal Warrant, seeking a way to bring the whole of reality under his control.  In this mad hyperquixotic quest, he enlisted others of his kind, eluding the ancient outer gods and their agents at every turn.  After a harrowing gambit which shook the multiverse to its core, Erix at last attained omnipotence.  Immediately, he realized that he hadn't wanted that much power after all.  He'd merely wanted to know that had he wanted it, he could not be denied.  In the end, he settled on setting the multiverse back the way it was just before he'd abandoned his post with a few notable exceptions.  He alone remembers the events that he erased, and he left himself with a few interesting abilities not shared by other Warrants.

Presently, he's back at his post, and appreciates it a good deal more now that he knows he isn't bound to it if he doesn't want to be.  He focuses on his favorite diversions, food, intrigue and women of all sorts.  The last of these he prefers to shrink and keep as pets.  He has quite a collection from all around the multiverse.  

Gail is Gail Garm, who belongs to the incomparable Discordia