Santarn. The true king of The Pit
Millions upon millions of years ago, when The Pit was first created. It was ruled over by a creature by the name of Tozan. In his millions of years of life, he had only two sons. The first born went by the name of Santarn. He was destined to be the king of The Pit. The younger brother, Taurani was a disappointment to his father. A soft weak boy, with not even the strength to stand above the princes. He was unremarkable, useless, no good to his father and he was treated as such.  Santarn was praised and worshiped for his power and strength. The crafty meek younger brother was despised for the mistake that he was.

Santarn was acknowledged as the crown Prince of Daemons, destined to take control of the Pit when the never ending war with the gods finally claimed his father. He waited eagerly and readily for his chance to take the control he deserved. However his brother was not to allow this, he felt he was too strong, too powerful, too good to play second string to his brute of a brother. A man with far less wisdom than he. And so he trained, he raised the rebellious elements in The Pit. The daemons who had been denied the things they deserved. They readied themselves, marshaled their forces, gathered their strength.

When their father died, it was time, time to kill, time to fight, time to die. The rebels raided the palace. The guards were slaughtered. The Princes destroyed and the new king. Santarn, was battered and broken. He fought like the king he was, ripping apart creature after creature. Burning and tearing and cutting. But one daemon cannot stand before a hundred. Santarn was stripped of his armor, his throat was slit and the fire that coated his body was doused. He was thrown from the palace, near to death.

Santarn however, didn’t die so easily. It took him a year to move at all and another to sustain it for any time. But after two years and six months, he made it to a road outside the palace grounds. As he stumbled down he was found by an old slave trader. The man grabbed the daemon, seeing the strength in it’s body, the power it possessed. He placed a collar around the creature and pulled it into the pens. It was there that Santarn was trained into a warrior once again, beaten back into full strength. Week after week the creature fought, challenging all takers and week after week, no matter what was thrown at him. The true king of hell survived, endured, lived and won. He couldn’t die yet, not before his brother. His slavery was to last a hundred thousand years and he would endure every one, by then he would be back to full strength, strong enough to destroy his brother.

Elsewhere, thousands upon thousands of years later and too far away for the daemon king to even comprehend, in a trash street of a bad neighborhood. A young creature by the name of Rolio received a vision. He had received them many times before. But this one was different. They were obscure, they were strange, this one wasn’t. He’d never seen so much white in his life, his golden fur and tanned skin stood out incredibly, like a light in a dark room. He looked behind him and saw, something. It couldn’t be a man, men didn’t have that many arms. Men didn’t have one tail like that. Men didn’t have poisonous barbs all over their skin. But then he couldn’t judge, he wasn’t exactly human either.

“Where am I?” he asked softly, brushing the blur from his eyes, “and more to the point, who on Iria are you?”
“No one on Iria,” the creature smiled. “No one on Iria at all,” he collapsed into the white couch, motioning for Rolio to do the same. Rolio obliged.
“Call me Spyder,” the creature spoke after a moment. “But, I didn’t bring you all the way here to chat about something as unimportant as my name. What you came here to be told is, the world is, over the course of the next few decades, going to end. The denizens of the Pit, the Etherial and Iria will war and every side will lose. Do you understand?”

Rolio’s eyes opened wide.
“Understand, yes, believe, no. You’re insane!” he shook his head. “There is no Pitt, there is no Etherial and Iria is nowhere near the verge of war!”
Spyder sighed. “This is going to be a lot less easy than I thought,” they disappeared for a second and reappeared, Rolio swore his eyes were about to pop out of his head!
“Angels,” he looked up in wonder. “Real angels!”
“This is the Etherial,” Spyder smiled. “Do you need to see The Pit? Or will you take my word for it?”
“I’ll take your word,” Rolio said meekly. He noticed the angels were angry that he was here and he didn’t want to be angering Daemons. “Can we go back to where we were now?”
Spyder smiled. “Very well,” he ruffled the boys hair and took him back to the white room.

“Okay,” Rolio breathed in and closed his eyes for a moment. “Well, assuming I believe you, what can I do about it?”
“You personally?” Spyder smiled and shook his head. “Nothing, nothing at all. But those you will gather to you. The group you are destined to create. They might succeed in preventing it.”
Rolio lifted an eyebrow.  “What group? You want me to make an army?”
“We have armies enough,” Spyder replied. “But the term will do for now.”
“How?” he was just a child by the standards of his people! How could he gather an army?
Spyder smiled and placed his hand on the young bear’s shoulder, retracting his barbs as to not stab the boy.  “I will give you the list, then I will show you to the first one, the rest, is up to you,” he handed Rolio a golden piece of material, which seemed strangely insubstantial in his hands. Some of the descriptions were straight forward enough. The thief was obvious, the animal, the dancers but some of them seemed almost impossible! He was supposed to find a king and a queen! Slavery no longer existed! The god slayer? A man who was meant to kill a god? And last and not least, how could one man be a prison?

“This is absurd,” he shook his head.
“Yes,” Spyder agreed. “But that is the case,” he placed his hand on Rolio’s back and reality shifted, they ended up in a pit, an arena. They saw a demon, a massive hulking figure in black armor, tearing apart another creature twice it’s size.
“That is Santarn,” Spyder explained.
“The butcher?” Rolio guessed, reasoning that of all the titles on the list, that was probably the most applicable.
“The king,” Spyder replied, lowering the two of them to the ground. They waited until the creature was dragged back to it’s cell before Spyder pushed Rolio forward. “Now you must convince him to join you.”
Rolio gulped and walked forward to the giant creature, managing to look distinguished and concerned, rather than terrified as he was. He tapped on the bars of Santarn’s cell with his claw, a high pitched ringing cutting through the din and attracting the attention of the daemon.
“What?” Santarn moved over to him, the collar he hadn’t been wearing in the arena glowed bright blue.
Rolio bit his lip, then spoke.
“You are Santarn?” he posed the statement as a question.
“Apparently,” the big thing replied. “You are?”
“Rolio,” the anthropomorph’s voice rang with more confidence than he was feeling.  “I want to recruit you.”
“Well,” Santarn  thought for a second. “How in the Pit are you planning to get me out of this cell. You’d kind of need to if you’re gonna do that. I mean it’s not as if you can just tear these bars open.”
Spyder did.
“Now we have something to talk about,” Santarn nodded. “So, what exactly do you need me to do?”
Rolio handed him the list. “We need to find all the people who fit these descriptions, it’s a prophecy of sorts.”
Santarn ran through the list of names, he nodded and raised a claw, slicing through one line. The words the king were struck through.
“You’ve found him,” the big daemon smiled, Rolio mistook it for a snarl at first. But then finally realized. Good, that was one.
“You wouldn’t happen to be married would you?” he asked. Santarn started to laugh after a moment, then looked down.
“The queen,” he smiled. “No, perhaps it’s  a title that will be bestowed, rather than one that already exists by rights,” he smiled. “So, who else have you got?”
“No one,” Rolio replied. “Just you and me, I don’t think even Spyder’s going to stay with us.”
“I have my own tasks to complete,” Spyder nodded. “But I will return later, now, Santarn, take Rolio’s hand.”
The two of them joined hands and reality shifted, then they were standing in Rolio’s bedroom, their hands clenched and Santarn holding the list.
“Quite a skill that freaky sonofabitch has,” the armoured creature smiled. “Now, you think you could get this beddammed collar off my neck?”
Rolio fiddled with the catch for a second. “The lock is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, it seems to be a combination lock, a key turned lock and  some sort of pressure catch all at once.”
“So you can’t do it?”
“Did I say that?” Rolio smiled. “I was just saying it may take a couple of hours, in the meantime do you know any of the other names on this list?”
“They’re titles not names, that makes it difficult. And some of these titles seem rare, or even downright impossible.”
“I know, I mean, how can one being be a prison?”
“A prison?” Santarn looked at the list. “Where does it say a prison?”
Rolio pointed to the third name. “The prison.”
Santarn nodded and looked grave. “I know who he is.”
“Then we can go find him!” Rolio’s eyes shined with excitement. “Do you think he’ll be willing to help us?”
Santarn nodded. “Sure, he will, it’s just his prisoners that might tear us apart from the inside out.”
Rolio tapped his claws together and sat in the corner.
“We’re going to need quite a plan then.”
"Or a new prophecy," Santarn replied.