King Spine

King Spine is a Cactus-Spirit in The Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

Background

Blunt Spine was the first name he remembers hearing applied to him. His were the thin needles of the cactus, those that were not yet completely formed or had failed to grow correctly and so were too soft to puncture skin. He could not protect the cactus. Blunt Spine was the epitome of useless matter, a waste, and it rankled him. So, he decided, if he were too weak and useless to defend the cactus, he would betray it instead.

Today, Blunt Spine has become King Spine. He passed through four other incarnations to get there (Little Spine, Tallest Spine, Great Spine and Strong Spine) before he destroyed the lord's popularity with both its liege and its followers to take the office of King Spine, ruler of the local court. King Spine keeps his court in line by playing them against each other. He creates additional positions and appointments at whim so that the lesser spirits can fight for them, allowing them to waste their energy on each other instead of on him. He enjoys watching their squabbling, especially when they conceive new reasons to fight without his artifice.

The spirit lord rarely takes on any anthropomorphic aspect. Though he refers to himself as male, King Spine rarely appears as anything other than an acre-wide mass of prickly pear cactus plants surrounding a shadowed organ pipe cactus that blocks out the spirit-sun no matter where one stands. In order to approach him, members of his court must tread through 30 yards of spine-ridden cacti; the favor in which King Spine holds one directly influences how painful that approach is. When he must appear as a man, King Spine takes the form of a regally dressed, shapely man of unnaturally perfect symmetry, the only indication of his affinity the hair of cactus spines brushed elegantly back on his head.

His subjects, when certain of their privacy, oftentimes share rumors that he has an unknown benefactor. Some remember their liege from when he was the weakest of spirits, and they recall that he spent much time away from the court consorting with unknown creatures. They whisper that he might owe his meteoric rise to those spirits, or their master. When might he pay that debt, and how do those unknowns still influence the court lord's actions? Envoys from fire and sun courts have noticed King Spine's slight on Helios, and some of his subjects believe he may have support from someone powerful enough to deflect any real retribution from that source.

King Spine rules one of the two cactus loci strictly. Though it feels awkward to his subjects, there are seven books of law governing the locus' regulation. They are all presumably penned by the King on stone and stored in a small, dark cavern beneath the spiritual cactus fields; King Spine uses them to ensure that none but he and his favorites in court can access the Essence at will. King Spine wants to add the other locus to his domain, but the spirits that frequent it have refused his invitations to become subjects and resisted his initial attempts at forcing their subjugation.

For that reason, King Spine began a spirit war. His subjects dig trenches in the spirit world and launch assaults at whomever holds the other locus, and every day more spirits fail to reform after their destruction. Any spirit whose Influence could affect the outcome has been wheedled toward one side or another, or press-ganged if they are weak enough. The number of spirits involved escalates daily, despite the deaths. For the time being, the devastation is still contained in the region between the two cactus loci, though it will not be long before the entire territory (and beyond) is embroiled within the Shadow war.

Forsaken who have just taken the territory find the spirit population surprisingly active; the Forsaken don't take long to realize they straddle a war in the Hisil. The battles are devastating to the local shadow landscape. They eventually spill over into the physical realm, as spirits do battle through human and animal hosts and the spirits' deaths change the resonance and make the region less fertile; the spirits may even drain the beneficial cactus loci to the dregs in an effort to win their control. Mitigating this disaster without appearing vulnerable to the nearby Pure is necessary to prevent a complete desolation that might drain the vitality of life in the Monument or even create Barrens in the territory.

Allying with King Spine (secretly, of course) to help him take the other locus would earn the Forsaken his friendship, and the king would probably agree to help rejuvenate the spirit world after the war. But King Spine would not respect the werewolves, thinking them easy marks, unless they drove a hard bargain. And if they betrayed him, finding a way to slip control of both loci out of his grasp, the King would be sure to swear revenge. His cactus court would hide among the territory's spirit wilds and strike out at the pack whenever possible. Denying the King's subjects permission to enter the physical world through "their" locus is another good way to attract King Spine's ire and bring the force of a court already armed for war into the werewolves' physical territory.

Stats

Rank: 3
Attributes: Power 8, Finesse 9, Resistance 5
Willpower: 13
Essence: 15 (20 max)
Initiative: 14
Defense: 9
Speed: 17
Size: 8
Corpus: 13
Influences: Plants **, Law *
Numina: Blast (Cactus Spines), Chorus, Discorporation, Materialize, Material Vision, Plant Growth*, Reaching, Sense Weakness*, Wilds Sense
Ban: Unknown
*As the Gift; King Spine can also teach the appropriate Gift.

References

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