Nyrissa

Nyrissa has not always been a power in the First World, but when she fell in love with Count Ranalc, one of the realm's Eldest, she challenged her place in the plane's hierarchy. The lovers inspired each other to increasing acts of audacity, and it wasn't long before Nyrissa began to think of herself as the newest of the Eldest and proclaimed this to any who would listen, beginning to build her own nation in the First World. Another of the Eldest, the Lantern King, saw opportunity for mayhem here. He spread his influence among his fellow demigods, and before long, several among the Eldest opposed Nyrissa's claim and took steps to challenge her. First, they sent a jabberwock to destroy her, but Nyrissa defeated it and used its blood to create lesser jabberwocks under her own control. Then they attempted to rally a thousand powerful fey against her, but Nyrissa convinced those fey to serve her instead in return for a place in her domain. Finally, the Eldest exiled Count Ranalc to the Shadow Plane for helping to cause the problem in the first place. Suddenly, Nyrissa found herself without an ally among the Eldest. Having expended much of her energy and resources to defeat the jabberwock and recruit the thousand, she knew that she had lost the war and surrendered, apologizing for her acts.

The Lantern King decided that Nyrissa's apology would suffice only for the jabberwock's death; for her other deeds, he demanded a further punishment- Nyrissa's capacity to love. Without love, the Lantern King argued to the other Eldest, Nyrissa would not be able to sway another of them to her side. However, if she could replace the "thousand fey breaths" she stole from the First World with a thousand stolen nations, they would accept her apology for her other actions and restore her capacity to love. Faced with no real option, Nyrissa agreed. She was allowed to keep her domain, now known as Thousandbreaths, but it was carved off to form its own demiplane to serve as a sort of prison. Her love was taken from her and transformed into the sword Briar, which was then entrusted to the Lantern King for safekeeping. He gifted Nyrissa with a chalice he called the Apology, an artifact capable of transforming Material Plane kingdoms she conquered into motes of sand. Once the Apology held a thousand motes of sand, those lands would be absorbed into the First World, Nyrissa would be forgiven, and love would be restored to her.

The matter settled, the Eldest quickly moved on with their own inscrutable agendas. Yet while they eventually forget about what they'd done to Nyrissa, the nymph herself did not. She grew more and more obsessed with her loss of love-or perhaps it was the loss of love that caused her to grow more violent and obsessed. In her early attempts to discover the location of Briar, she received the visions that would come to haunt her-that Briar would be returned to her, but only as an instrument of her own death.

Now she has but one kingdom left to claim: the new kingdom risen in the Stolen Lands. With the War of the River Kings over and one kingdom a victor, the time is right for the final grain to be added to the Apology. That this will destroy a significant region on Golarion is irrelevant to the loveless nymph; in her obsession, she fails to see that this act may be the very thing that drives her enemies from to slay her as in the vision.