Annan Lyre is one of the Fimirach, long ago hatched to the mighty Meargh Wizard-Queen Mana Myr in the twilight of her power. Her ancient, unceasing wars against Drogurkh, Draconith, and Lammasuan had doomed her children-army, and her desperate experiments to replenish that army left her bereft of future young, save for a single egg from which Lyre emerged.
Lyre’s egg had been sorcerously invested, and he possessed the cunning and talent that would have marked him as a leader of their kind, had his mother’s malfeasance of magic not shattered her mind as well. Instead, Mana Myr smothered him upon birth in a savage, torturous embrace that remained unbroken for an Age. She ceased all movement and activity save stroking and crooning at her last living child, and so Lyre grew misshapen and atrophied, experiencing the world vicariously through the Meargh’s maddened mutterings until, for reasons unknown, she steadily transformed into a limbless pit of teeth that now gnatters dark secrets and is never satiated.
Freed, Annan Lyre began his second life, training motor skills and muscles for the first time, experiencing a world other than his mother with his own senses. He remained hidden, not trusting yet his own strength. In the once-mighty tower that had become flooded and ruined about them, he discovered worm-eaten scrolls and discarded armories, all familiar from the stories he had absorbed, and practiced with the baleglyph weapons of siblings he knew all the names of. In hunting prey for himself and his mother’s voracious appetites, he put his self-taught skills to the test until he felt ready to embark upon what his mother’s teachings and the scrolls told him was expected of him: a death-quest to find a new Wizard-Queen or die in the attempt.
As his explorations brought him further afield, the Fimirach learned two truths. First, his mother’s maw followed him when he left the fen, appearing in the night or ahead in his journeys. The tether between them would not be broken with distance. Second, misshapen creatures, reminding him of himself as he had been before, had come and seemed to worship his mother and took upon themselves to help in the unending task of feeding her. They also seemed to be prodigious eaters themselves, necessitating constant migration. On them, Lyre decided to exercise that final untested skill of his birthright on them, taming and training these ‘gorgers’ into a fighting retinue to accompany him on his quest for other Fimir in a realm they appear completely absent from.
