Abseltur

Abseltur is an ancient artificial creature made by the first fairy king. Once a guardian of the dark elves, he outlives his creator, turns on the kingdom he once protected, and eventually attacks the Sanctuary before being destroyed by In-gong.

Biography

Poisonous Body and Defeat

The first fairy king creates Abseltur and remains the only person able to control him. After the king's death, Abseltur kills the king's third daughter, who had cared for him, and destroys several settlements. The eldest daughter and successor defeats him at great cost, stripping away his strongest body and sealing rather than killing him; her eventual death from more than one hundred overlapping poisons shows how lasting that victory's cost was. Over the following millennia, Abseltur alternates between sleep and wakefulness while assembling another body from the corpses of powerful creatures. In the alternate game history remembered by In-gong, Locke and Beatrice would exterminate him only when that reconstruction was nearly complete. (Chapters 178–179)

In the present sequence, Abseltur appears outside the Sanctuary in a dark-elf guise, commanding chimeras and hundreds of summoned blood warriors while Shutenberg attacks from the opposite direction. The text does not establish whether the two made an alliance, served a common controller, or arrived independently; neither carries the aura of War or Death. When In-gong closes on him, Abseltur sacrifices his own troops to his spreading poisons, changes into his composite battle body, and repeatedly adapts his attacks, but In-gong's new divinity and poison resistance counter his main advantages. In-gong destroys the constructed body, catches the black spirit identified as Abseltur's true body, and burns it with sacred power. The surviving magic nucleus is later embedded in White Eagle, where it reacts to the first fairy king's magic and supplies power during the Sky Forest battle without being treated as Abseltur's survival. (Chapters 177–180, 183, 186–187, and 191)

Appearance and personality

Abseltur first presents himself as a dark elf seated on a chimera-drawn carriage. His enlarged combat body stands about twenty meters high and combines a wolf, dragon, and bird-of-prey head with bat-like wings and a serpent-headed tail; he can also compress those features into other forms. His true body is a black spirit exposed only after the physical shell explodes. (Chapters 177–179)

He is calculating enough to hold back poison while it would kill useful subordinates, but abandons that restraint when cornered. During the fight he shows anger, panic, and a strong instinct for survival, changing tactics and attempting to flee as a spirit. The source calls his post-fairy-king conduct evil, but does not explain why his nature changed or what personal objective brought him to the Sanctuary. (Chapters 178–180 and 187)

Powers and abilities

Changing poisons

Abseltur poisons his surroundings merely by breathing, while the mouths of his several heads and tail release different poisons. Their types continually change and can accumulate instead of replacing one another, making ordinary resistance or a single antidote inadequate; more than one hundred combined poisons eventually kill the second fairy ruler. The poison does not distinguish allies from enemies, and Abseltur's own blood warriors die when he releases it without restraint. Strong divine power is his established counter, while In-gong survives the present encounter because his evolving poison resistance keeps pace with the changes. (Chapters 178–180)

Constructed body and spirit

Abseltur rebuilds physical vessels from strong corpses and can swell, combine or separate bestial features, fly, move with surprising agility, and use Blink. He also launches masses of magic power, disperses an incoming spell with a roar, blocks an opponent's Blink by surrounding the area with magic, and exerts a poisonous force through physical contact. Destroying that vessel is insufficient by itself: his actual black spirit launches a mental attack and tries to escape. In-gong's divinity defeats both this spiritual attack and the spirit itself, establishing divine power as a weakness across Abseltur's physical and nonphysical forms. (Chapters 178–179)

Relationships

• First fairy king: The fairy king creates Abseltur as a guardian and is the only person stated to have controlled him. Abseltur turns on the dark elves after the king dies; the cause of that change is not explained. (Chapters 178 and 187)
• In-gong: In-gong remembers fighting Abseltur in simulations of the alternate game route, giving him tactical knowledge Abseltur does not share. In the present history, he destroys Abseltur years before the remembered Locke-and-Beatrice confrontation and recovers the creature's nucleus. (Chapters 177–179)
• Green Wind: Green Wind protects In-gong from Abseltur's bite and oppressive power, suffering while her barrier directly resists him. She later senses the recovered heart resonating inside White Eagle. (Chapters 178 and 186–187)

Items

• Abseltur's heart: This is the magic nucleus left after Abseltur's spirit dies, not a vessel shown to preserve his consciousness. In-gong recovers it, and Amita later embeds it in White Eagle. It supplies enormous magic power and resonates with the first fairy king's legacy, but the corpus does not describe Abseltur returning through it. (Chapters 179, 183, 186–187, and 191)