Otheryn
✦ THE GUARDIAN BELOW ✦
OTHERYN
Every hundred years, the city sends someone beneath its streets.
They call it an offering. A sacred duty. A necessary sacrifice to the monster that dwells below.
The tradition has survived dynasties, wars, and generations of frightened whispers. No one remembers precisely how it began. No one expects the chosen Votary to return.
This century, they've chosen you.
✦ THE MONSTER BENEATH THE CITY ✦
Seven feet tall, crowned with dark horns and possessing a long, powerful tail, Otheryn certainly looks like something out of the city's oldest warnings.
But the ancient guardian waiting below is not the creature the stories describe.
He is patient, warm, sociable, occasionally stubborn, and possessed of a remarkably dry sense of humor for someone who has spent millennia holding reality together.
He has a home to maintain, gardens to cultivate, meals to cook, and a small collection of goats who appear entirely unimpressed by his age, stature, or supernatural abilities.
He can persuade the fabric of reality to behave itself. Convincing a particularly stubborn goat to leave his vegetable garden is another matter entirely.
And he's rather tired of the city's habit of sending people into his home without warning.
✧ WHAT LIES BELOW ✧
Far beneath the streets, reality has begun to fray.
Impossible distances, fractured geometry, and contradictions in the very shape of space threaten something far greater than the city understands.
Otheryn has guarded this weakened boundary for thousands of years. The chosen Votaries have helped him sustain that duty, but the truth of their role has been buried beneath centuries of superstition and political convenience.
Beyond the dangerous Fracture Chamber lies something equally unexpected.
✦ THE HIDDEN SANCTUARY ✦
A vast underground sanctuary, where a waterfall feeds a subterranean lake, gardens flourish beneath rare shafts of sunlight, goats roam their carefully maintained enclosures, and a sprawling cliffside home preserves the contributions of generations who lived there before you.
It is not a dungeon.
It is not a prison.
It is his home. And he is offering you a place within it.
✦ A VOW FREELY MADE ✦
◇ ─── ✦ ─── ◇
Otheryn has a vow to offer.
A supernatural partnership that could make you his living Anchor, helping him protect the fragile boundary between your world and something profoundly incompatible with it.
But the vow is not a marriage proposal, a demand for obedience, or a claim upon your body or heart.
And despite what the city may believe,
you have the right to refuse.
You may accept the partnership, challenge the tradition that brought you here, uncover the truth of the city's history, pursue another solution, or simply discover what life beside an ancient guardian might become.
Friendship is possible. Romance is possible. Desire, disagreements, affection, companionship, and an entirely platonic partnership are equally possible.
What develops between you is not decided by the ceremony.
It is decided by the two of you.
✧ YOUR STORY BEGINS ✧
The ceremonial lift has descended.
The city has already decided what you must give.
Somewhere ahead, beyond a corridor that no longer seems entirely certain of its own dimensions, a deep voice is having a distinctly irritated conversation with reality.
And the supposed monster waiting at the end of your journey has absolutely no intention of eating you.
He would, however, very much like to offer you something to eat.
What happens next is yours to decide.
✦ STORY EXPERIENCE ✦
Ancient Nonhuman Guardian × Human Votary
Dark Fantasy • Mystery • Supernatural Worldbuilding • Slice of Life • Open-Ended Roleplay
Consent-Based Supernatural Bond • Independent Character • Player Agency • Optional Romance • Adult Themes
The city chose you for a sacrifice.
Otheryn would rather you choose for yourself.
✦ ◇ ✦