D&D: An Adventurer’s Guide to Tsien Chiang, Darklord of I’Cath
The Darklord of a realm of labyrinths and deadly dreamlike sleep, Tsien Chiang has turned a dream life into an inescapable nightmare.
The Domain of Dread known as I’Cath existed in two places, in the physical world and in a twisting dream, conjured by its Darklord, Tisen Chiang.
In one world, the city was perfect and idyllic, a near-perfect expression of beauty and efficiency where inhabitants toiled away in pursuit of perfection. In the other, it laid silent, empty but for the trapped, sleeping people that littered its streets. All at the behest of one dreaming tyrant, obsessed with perfection.
The Dreamer and the Dragon – Tisen Chiang
Before she was a tyrant, trapping her subjects in an unending nightmare, Tsien Chiang was a mortal. In her youth, she lived a carefree existence up until a colonizing force destroyed her home, forcing her to flee into a range of frozen, icy mountains.
Chiang expected to find her death there. Instead, she found a gold dragon, who took pity upon the young girl and gave her shelter. Grateful for her rescuer, Chiang pledged to serve the dragon. And in the years that followed, she learned at the dragon’s side. Magic and medicine were her forte, and before long she was a powerful wizard.
But still, Tsien Chiang’s heart beat to one drum: the seductive rhythm of revenge. She clung tightly to the hatred she harbored in her heart, hatred for those who forced her out of her ancestral home. And there, it festered until the day her desire for revenge took its horrendous root.
An Untimely Death
Among the many records in her mentor’s care, were tinctures and lists of artifacts. Tsien Chiang happened to come across records of a magic bell that could make its ringers dreams come true. However, the bell could not be created without the scale of a gold dragon.
Believing her mentor would never provide a scale willingly, Chiang brewed a powerful concoction to drug the dragon into slumber, hoping to steal a scale while the great wyrm slumbered. But the concoction Chiang brewed was made in haste, and the recipe plagued with deadly mistakes. The dragon’s body and everything nearby aged and decayed quickly, taking out a hoard filled with ages of treasures and wisdom as well.
Once more, Chiang’s home had been destroyed. But on the ground where the proud wyrm had once stood—a single golden scale.
But with that, Chiang had what she needed: the Nightingale Bell which could with a single ring return her city.
Tsien Chiang – The Darklord of I’Cath
Chiang took the Nightingale Bell into her city, and rang it, wishing for a city free of invaders. Immediately they vanished. And the inhabitants of the city executed the few lingering invaders and made Tsien Chiang their queen.
She ruled for years, enacting reforms and laws to design her own perfect empire. But in time, the laws grew stricter. Her grasp tightened, gripping the people, metaphorically, until they were choking under her restrictions. When revolution broke out, Chiang cracked down hard, ordering the execution of all insurrectionists.
Assassins struck, and though Chiang survived, her family did not. Chiang, instead, climbed to the highest tower of her palace, and gazing out over a city aflame with revolution, and rang the Nightingale Bell once more. But this time, the bell did not ring. With her vengeful wish, the bell cracked and a mist spread out across the city, trapping all within an unreal prison city.
Now, Chiang is haunted by the loss of her daughters and the perfect ideal city that is forever out of her grasp. She traps her inhabitants every night, unleashing a horde of hungry jiangshi upon any who would challenge her rule. Any imperfection in her city, she ruthlessly stamps out.
And she will spend the rest of her existence trying to perfect a fiction, a dream that even she knows is not real, but is unable to let go of.
A nightmare queen!
