Appearance

Pandora is a solitary but powerful goddess who always appears to mortals as a winter hardened Ice Elf. She wears armour of frozen steel that exposes much of her near naked form. Upon her pale blue flesh, up to her shorn scalp, are a combination of tattoos and scars, forming a living tapestry of pain and suffering. Her eyes are frozen, pupil-less orbs of icy blue. If she wields a weapon, it is always an old battered spear, covered in a hardened layer of enchanted ice. This spear, called Secondborn, is almost as old as the goddess herself and is said to be fashioned from the bones of the Silver Firstborn she killed, millennia ago.

Tenets

Five things a Pandora follower should do:

1. Demand control of yourself and others, whether that be by standing at the front or manipulating from behind.

2. Pain and suffering remove weakness and grant knowledge through perseverance and strength. Teach this to the worthy.

3. Hardship is a blessing. There is little to gain in taking the path most travelled. The most difficult path will reap the greatest suffering. Seek it.

4. Study the body and mind. Understand their functions and limitations. Employ that knowledge in your control over others.

5. Fear not violence but recognise that subjugating a mind to do your will is often a more effective means to achieve the same end.

Five things a Pandora follower should not do:

1. Limit your infliction of pain to solely the physical. Scar the mind and spirit as well. True misery is divine and should be indivisible from pleasure.

2. Grant mercy if you can learn from their pain.

3. Give anything freely which was not earned. Charity is a missed lesson in hardship.

4. Allow the Firstborn to usurp control or authority. Work towards disrupting their machinations through manipulation or violence.

5. Become complacent, for complacency breeds comfort and weakness. Once you have achieved your goals, tear them down and begin anew.

Celestial Heaven: The Glacial Authority

The Celestial Heaven of Pandora is a stark, grim and unforgiving icy wasteland. There are no great cities to be found here, no raucous parties or thrilling adventures to be had. Instead, there is just rock, ice, and snow as far as the eye can see. The only gatherings even approaching civilization can be found in the many caves that dot the forbidden mountains and cavernous valleys of Pandora’s Heaven, where her faithful do occasionally come together in small numbers to enjoy the pleasures and trials that the Mistress of Pain affords them.

The worship of Pandora can be roughly divided into two coherent philosophies regarding pain and its purpose, and those who follow her can usually either be said to be sadists or masochists. Given that while both camps of followers are her loyal worshipers, they have a very different relationship with her holy sacrament, and thus a singular afterlife for all would hardly be suitable. For this reason, she affords either group its own eternal reward.

To the sadists, she offers an endless and bountiful buffet of victims upon whom they might slake their grim thirsts. Said to be taken from all other corners of creation, these poor wretches are left bound and broken but unable to die thanks to the magic inherent in Pandora’s Realm. Their lot is simply to suffer whatever sick and depraved tortures their new masters can devise for all time. Some of the particularly cruel Spirits will pretend to allow a Spirit to escape, only to recapture them and increase the pain of their tortures twice over.

To those more dedicated to the endurance of pain as a means of self-improvement and control, the Mistress of Pain awards a different sort of Heaven than the one enjoyed by her merciless sadists. Before them opens up a vast arctic valley populated with a diverse array of Angelic opponents they may choose to go and face so that they might test their might. The celestial snow leopards, in particular, are quite difficult to defeat, as they are nearly invisible, terribly strong, and fiercely intelligent.

When a Spirit finally feels that it has either enjoyed the limits of inflicting pain or that they have truly reached the limits of its own strength and mastered themselves, the next phase of their afterlife begins. They set aside their labours or pleasures and are drawn to a vast arctic tundra populated exclusively by other Spirits frozen within large shards of ice. There Pandora and her Angels encase the newcomers in their own frozen shells. Inside the ice, there is no sensation, no thought, just pure stasis. The only true escape from pain. Such a rest is but a temporary state, however, and eventually, their icy shell disappears, leaving the now mentally and physically recharged Spirit to begin their suffering anew.

Realms Within the Glacial Authority

• The Caverns of Reflection

When a Spirit arrives in Pandora’s domain, it is brought before the Caverns of Reflection so that Pandora might learn the true measure of their being and test the limits of their resolve. Roughly hewn into the side of a vast mountain peak, the walls of the ice tunnels inside show the Spirit traversing them visions of all the pain they suffered and all the trials they endured in their days as a mortal. Clever spirits will take note of these visions, for these reminders may be of crucial importance for what comes next.

Called “The Testaments of Agony,” these series of trials take place in various caverns that can be reached from the tunnel of visions. Numbering nine hundred and twenty-seven, each of these trials was designed to inflict the most pain imaginable, to truly test what the Spirit learned while they were mortal. Although many spirits have come close, no being Pandora has ever managed to complete them all. Thus, none but she knows what rewards await those that are able to complete it. Only she has seen what lies beyond.

Thankfully, completion is not required. She accepts that most mortals have their limit, and once that is reached, they are allowed to resign their efforts and continue to her Heaven proper. By taking their leave, a Spirit is admitting that they have not yet suffered enough, that there is still some measure of strength that they have yet to obtain, which is, in and of itself, the entire point of the whole exercise. They may return at any time, although it will only be when the Spirit chooses to do so of their own free will. Pandora does not force any of her Faithful to try again. While no Spirit has ever completed all the trials, no spirit has ever quit either.

• Winter’s Might

Pandora’s Heaven is not wholly contained within the Celestial Plane, but rather a portion of it bleeds out into the northern reaches of Jormunger on the Material Plane. It is incredibly rare for a Celestial to directly rule over a portion of the Material Plane while having a part of their Celestial Realm so easily accessible. While her seat of power within the Glacial Authority still exists in the Celestial Plane, and thus she is not bound to Arthos, her ability to walk within her material-bound tundra is watched carefully by the other Gods. Though it was found that the now dead God of Domination, Ga’more, did not truly bind himself to Arthos due to his corpse being usurped by the fallen Dragon Ta-Ba-Ret instead of willingly tying his essence to the Material Plane, this served as a reminder to all Celestials that Pandora strays far closer than most.

To reach her Realm one would simply walk north through an ever-increasingly hostile, barren wasteland, accompanied by only ice and snow that has never seen a summer. And if the antagonistic landscape was not enough to stop them, the Crissen’Thalan scouts that serve the Goddess of Pain take a rather dim view of unwanted guests. Roughly a kilometre or so outside the city, the intruders that they run down are lifted up and chained onto tall iron poles that line the ice road that leads into the fortress, where they are left to die. The icy breath of Pandora is brutal and unrelenting, and most die screaming or wailing in agony.

At the end of the Wailing Road lies Winter’s Might, a vast fortress city formed from solid ice. Here Pandora rules atop a throne said to be made from the polished skull of the now-dead Silver Dragon Daedalon, where she gathers and trains the mightiest Ice Elven army that the world has ever seen. All those who serve her here do so with one end goal in mind. To avenge her defeat at the claws of the White Dragon Zsiera by ending the Firstborn once and for all.

Winter’s Might is far more than a mere military encampment, although that is its primary purpose. The Spirits that train here risk obliteration at the claws of a great and terrible scaled beast, and such a fate is dire enough to even shake the resolve of those who have spent a lifetime of suffering attempting to master it. Thus, Pandora allows and even encourages, the most debauched celebrations to ever grace the Celestial Plane as a way to both reward and relax her strongest of Spirits. Decadent food and drink are literally limitless, strewn about wildly on furniture crafted from the flesh and bone of still-living slaves. Entire chambers one could march a legion through are filled with people in all states of bodily congress, and for those not satisfied by mere sex, the torture tools are but an arm’s length away.