Anathema, Goddess of Reflections, is humanoid, 188 centimeters tall and 96 kilograms on a good day. Her skin is blue-gray, covered in circuitboard-like luminescent blue tattoos, and metallic in composition over standard organic flesh and organs. Her eyes resemble targets, with two rings of brightly glowing cyan around a black band and a bullseye pupil. Her hair is black with metallic silver streaks and seemingly never worn in exactly the same style twice. She has a modest bust but hips suitably wide to give birth to an entire realm. She doesn't have a fixed set of attire, instead garbing herself in mortal-worked fabrics as suits her mood. She has a particular preference for tight bodices, loose swishy skirts, bare feet and shoulders, and long flowing sleeves -- a look best achieved with a shoulderless furisode.

Anna is hyperintelligent, curious with an endless wellspring of questions on the nature of reality, cautious and even a bit fearful, and despite a general tendency to overthink she an alarming history of failing to consider the consequences of her own actions to disastrous results. Her world is littered with scars in the fabric of reality from experiments gone wrong. She is a decent staff-fighter and occasionally enjoys the thrill of combat (when it's going in her favor, at least), but doesn't seek out conflict and prefers to resolve problems intellectually. She tends to give lighthearted nicknames to everyone she meets, having somehow transformed the respectable Theadeacus into Deekin and the dark and edgy Bezaleel into a range of goofy monikers ranging from Embezzlement to Earboi. In this respect and many others she gives off a childish, fun-loving vibe... and, like a child, her temper tantrums would be legendary if anyone had ever survived to tell of them.

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Her realm, Arthos, is a rainy world dominated by massive waterfalls, jagged rocky spires, vast canyons, and craggy fields. Constant abrasion carves natural prisms and mirrors from the world's abundant stone and crystal. What little light and heat that reaches the surface is absorbed by these structures; at night this energy is then radiated, transforming the barren rocky wastes into a dazzling sea of reflected prismatic rays and shimmering rainbows. Despite its visual beauty this is when Arthos is at its most mind-numbingly deadly; a glancing ray can easily blind, and the nearly-perpetual rainfall on the polished surfaces makes a slipping hazard for even the most stable creatures. These evolutionary pressures have forced animal life to either evolve heavy natural armor and slow deliberate movement, or to abandon the ground entirely by either flying or brachiating.

The rain washes organic material from these inhospitable rocky wastes into lowland regions, where it collects into cold bogs that support incredibly dense and ecologically-diverse jungles. Trees often intertwine for structural support, forming natural arching megastructures that can reach over a kilometer tall. Where branches intertwine basins can form, forming fish-bearing lakes that can be many meters off the ground. Plants have adapted to the cloudy environment with broad, red leaves, and signal potential pollinators with bio-luminescent patterns in hues of pink, green, and blue. Most life in Arthos is six-limbed, notably including numerous species of four-winged birds and six-legged tortoises. Due to a lack of large animal predators the ecological niche they would have occupied has been filled by the plants themselves through the use of snapping jaws or coiling vines, the corpses serving as both a macabre fertilizer and a warning to would-be predators.

Due to its unique astrophysical circumstances Arthosian seasons are incredibly complex. Forecasting involves taking into account Arthos' orbital movement around Atropos, Atropos' orbit around Demoli-Morto, the twin stars' relative positions to each other, and natural variations in the stars' output. However, as Arthos' primary heating comes from tidal forces its temperature tends to be fairly uniform regardless of latitude or season.

The native mortal species of Arthos are the Viese. They are small creatures with a relatively baseline humanoid body shape; their adult height is approximately thirty centimeters and weigh about a kilogram. They have blue-grey skin with iridescent, hexagonal scales on the shoulders, elbows, knees, feet, and nape of the neck. Their hair ranges from green to blue to purple. Their eyes and blood glow green, as to their dragonfly-like wings. They are naturally curious but fearful creatures; this fear is not due to innate cowardice but rather a respect for how small and delicate they are relative to the dangerous world they live in. They make up for their physical deficiencies with incredible intellects. Their close affinity to the world tree gives them a zen-like sense of direction; by following their instincts they will almost invariably arrive at the "correct" location (though not necessarily the desired one).

Arthos Astronomy Update:

Arthos is the second moon of Atropos, a gas giant orbiting the binary star system collectively known as the Eyes of Fear and Flame. Atropos is primarily purple with beige bands, and has few identifying features. The eye of Fear, Morto, is a white dwarf while the eye of Flame, Demoli, is a red giant. The other major moons of Atropos from innermost outwards are: Gino, a bright orange-and-green-splotched volcanic hellscape; Vol, a deep blue world with 95% of its surface covered with water oceans and bearing a nearly-pure oxygen atmosphere (but no life); and Lollip, a cold, gray, tidally-locked hunk of rock dominated by deep craters. Gino, Arthos, and Vol orbit Atropos in nearly perfect 1:2:4 resonance, while Lollip orbits at a highly eccentric thirty degree angle far from the others. Besides the major moons there are also over a dozen captured asteroids, some in unstable orbits. One of these small moons, Antiger, is an L5 trojan of Arthos. There are two known planets beside Atropos. Selvaros is a sun-blasted terrestrial planet orbiting dangerously close to the Eyes. Kokorone is another, smaller gas giant that nonetheless hosts its own fantastic moon network. A modest asteroid belt lies between Selvaros and Atropos.

Viese Biological and Cultural Update:

The chosen people of Arthos are quite unusual compared to many other mortal species. They are known for being in turn highly skittish and almost suicidally curious. They have an affinity for gems and magical items that rivals that of dragons, though unlike the legendary reptiles they have a tendency to share and trade rather than hoard. They are very social, finding both strength and collective intelligence in numbers. The byword of viese civilization is equality, both of people and ideas. Selfishness and close-mindedness, even towards other tribes and (sentient) species, are rarely viewed in a positive light. That said, during times of plenty some degree of trickery is expected in viese culture; "sharing" need not necessarily be done with prior consent, so long as something of equal value is given in trade. Viese have an unusual reproductive system. They do possess male and female genders, as many complex organisms do. Fertilization of the viese egg occurs in the female by the male. This, however, is where the similarities with other mortals end. The female does not gestate her young; instead, after one week of development, the egg is ejected from the female in the form of a large pollen grain. This grain is then, in turn, used to fertilize a flower. Over the span of about six months the co-opted plant will gestate the young viese inside a protective fruit. The new viese will eventually eat her way free of the fruit, emerging into the world as a viese nymph with non-functional wings. Once their wings grow to their full size and dry one week after "birth," the young viese is already fully capable of fending for herself. Due to short fertilization periods and the delegation of the gestational period, viese are theoretically capable of breeding incredibly quickly. A viese mother may pollinate over a hundred flowers in her lifetime. However, mothers rarely linger to protect their nascent children. The protein-rich womb-fruits are a vital foodstuff for the Arthosian ecosystem and attract many predators, few of which a viese is capable of warding off. Viese nymphs who have already freed themselves from their womb-fruit, on the other hand, are viciously defended and spirited off to safety by the mothers' family and friends. Viese nymphs whose wings have not yet dried are in serious danger of being eaten by a wide variety of terrestrial carnivores if not retrieved by their parents. Viese often take on some of the qualities and coloration of the plant that birthed them. Those born from rare, prestigious, or difficult plants often go on to become recognized figures in viese culture. This prestige often sees viese mothers traveling far from their tribe to seek out such plants, but in turn also leaves both mother and child vulnerable to predation. Many viese are eaten, either during or immediately after gestation. Those who survive can be expected to live a very long life; spans of 120 Taeltresin Standard Years are common. Females are three times more common than males, but lose fertility at about forty TSYs while men remain virile until death. Viese do not significantly weaken in old age; the cause of death during advanced years is believed to be due to over-saturation of the brain. Viese have eidetic memories and a highly developed intellect, yet only about 5% the brain mass of a typical mortal. Eventually logical and memory centers in the brain grow to overtake vital life-support functions, resulting in cardiopulmonary failure. Like almost all creatures in Arthos, viese are poisonous. In particular, viese produce a toxin that is lethal to large birds and some reptiles. They in turn produce antitoxins that allow them to safely eat many species of berries and small insects. The web of poisons and antitoxins in Arthos is complex and nuanced, studied by farmers and hunters alike.

Viese Cultural Update: Bioglass:

Tools, armor, and even buildings crafted from iron and steel are an advantage many normal-sized mortals take for granted. Many industrial processes required to produce usable quantities and qualities of metals have a certain minimum size requirement; even a simple bloomery (which can be made quite small) requires significant strength and labor to extract usable metal product. Because of these engineering and labor challenges, the tiny and physically weak viese are incredibly ill-suited to metalworking of any significant scale. What metalworking capacity they have tends to be reserved for ceremonial jewelry and decorative structural inlays, and most if not all of their metal tools rely heavily on so-called thunderbolt iron. Despite their incredible intellects, viese physical limitations conspired to see them using neolithic tools and materials even as their other scientific advances far outstripped their apparent industrial development. A variety of strong hardwoods grew in Arthos' jungles but with heavy labor so difficult extracting it often proved a bridge too far for the tiny viese. Such seemed an inevitability... until one day, the goddess the viese had been waiting for would arrive and change things forever by blessing them with the bioglass plant. While sprung into existence by Anathema's divine intent the bioglass plant itself is wholly mundane and responds well to skillful cultivation. It is a slow-growing vine with a natural tendency to coat the ground in thick, tangled sheets. With only a minimum of work it can be woven into sheets of a super-strong wicker-like material for construction purposes, but most bioglass focuses on prolonged artful sculpting of the plant into the desired final form in a process remarkably similar to bonsai. The hardiness of the bioglass plant is such that tools crafted in this way can be repaired with nothing other than soil, water, and sunlight. The bioglass plant has two distinct products that, while occasionally separated, are often worked in tandem. The leaves grow with a glassy, finely-grained, nearly diamond-hard structure and a bright green coloration. When damaged the outermost layer flakes away to reveal microscopically thin feather-edges between ten and fifty times sharper than even the highest quality steel can ever be. This is the "bioglass" for which the plant is named and is ideally suited for sharp tools, with multiple leaves laminated together to achieve the desired strength and thickness. Most of the plant consists of the stem material; woody and dark green in color, its strength compares favorably to the strongest of hardwoods. It is often used as a backing material to provide flexibility and impact resistance to sharp tools, but on its own also forms an excellent material for blunt implements. Despite its astonishing qualities, bioglass is very much a material ideally suited to the viese. Its outstanding hardness is ironically its downfall, rendering bioglass too shatter-prone and thus unfit as a material for the stresses required by more conventionally sized mortals. Nonetheless, the viese occasionally trade bioglass tool knives to other mortals which then migrate throughout the realms and are often well-regarded for being self-maintaining and impervious to rust.