[ Myrioi ] [ Aura | Avenger | Epariti | Demiourgoi ]
Avenger Myrioi
The Silver Sisters; the Arcadian Avengers; the Arcadian Valkyrie (inaccurately)
The myrioi are organized into three sacred legions, each one assigned to protect a particular aspect of Arcadian culture. While other celestials might serve particular powers directly, avengers serve law itself. They answer to the collective legal codes of Arcadia—and you’d better believe they know all the laws of their plane inside and out. This makes them incredibly reliable (some would say predictable) allies and occasionally frustrating to work with, since you can’t appeal to divine authority to change their minds. Avengers ensure that treaties and covenants between the Peaceable Kingdoms are enacted honourably, they enforce the will of the courts, and its punishments, and they they protect the innocent petitioners of the plane.
The Avengers are stationed primarily in Arcadia’s military heartland, the layer of Buxenus. When they are not being called upon for righteous missions, the sisters dwell in convent-barracks where they spend their days honing their battle tactics, choreographing new combat skills, and praying. Their chosen deities are powers of society, order, warfare or protection, like Saint Cuthbert, Astjeret, Astraea, Iomedae and Aengrist.
The Silver Sisters in Combat
The avenger myrioi excel in hand-to-hand combat, and their melee skills are well-practised. They move in formation, provide flanking and cover for one another, and take advantage of any tactical opening that’s left unguarded. They typically fight with two silver swords, and opponents should be warned, if an avenger scores two hits in one round they can automatically rend their victims with a third attack. While myrioi generally eschew ranged weapons, they’re able to fly and will descend in a tactical formation with their sisters, swords-first.
Avengers are mindful and merciful towards their sisters, able to quickly patch up each others’ wounds in combat with battle medicine training. Woe betide an opponent who strikes down an avenger, for this causes her sisters to fly into a frenzy, where their righteous wrath causes their Strikes to become more deadly.
Finally, these myrioi are able to bend the rules of fortune in their favour, spending a Focus point to automatically take 10 on a melee attack roll or saving throw. Avengers have one Focus point, which can be regained after 10 minutes of mediative prayer, so long as a fellow sister myrioi (of any type) joins her.
The Delicate Balance of Harmony
Ah now cutter, you’ve hit on one of the most politically charged situations in all the Upper Planes—the relationship between the myrioi avengers and the Harmonium faction, on their shared stamping grounds of Buxenus. Here’s the dark of things—the avengers are actually the reason Buxenus hasn’t slipped over into Mechanus. By staying focused on laws that serve good rather than just order, they are trying to keep Arcadia from losing its heart. It’s a dance more delicate than a courtesan’s waltz in the Lady’s Ward, only much more dangerous when a berk steps on the wrong set of toes.
Now don’t get me wrong—on the surface, the Hardheads and the silver sisters should be natural allies. They both claim to believe in the power of law to serve good, both see order as the foundation of justice, and both call Arcadia home. The Hardheads even established their training camps right there in Buxenus, with what appeared to be tacit celestial approval.
But this is where the wrinkles start—these days the avengers maintain what you might call “professional courtesy” with the Harmonium, while keeping them at two sword’s length. When a Harmonium patrol marches through a silver convents of the avengers, there are formal salutes, proper acknowledgments of rank, and all the ceremonial respect usually due between military forces. But watch closely, and you’ll notice the avengers never invite the Hardheads to their tactical planning sessions, and Harmonium officers find themselves politely but firmly redirected away from certain areas of Buxenus.
The relationship still works because both sides need each other—the Harmonium provides the numbers and mortal perspective that the avengers sometimes lack, while the silver sisters provide the celestial authority and pure dedication to lawful good that continues to legitimise Harmonium operations on Arcadia. It’s a marriage of convenience, but one where both parties sleep with one eye open.
The Unspoken Truth About Nemausus
Now here’s where things get really dark, cutter. The loss of Nemausus, Arcadia’s third layer, to Mechanus isn’t just a planar catastrophe—it’s one of the multiverse’s biggest cover-ups. Chant goes the Harmonium’s re-education camps pushed the entire layer so far toward pure law that it lost all connection to morality, and the whole thing just… drifted away into the Clockwork Nirvana.
The Arcadian avengers know. By all the powers that be, they know exactly what happened. These bashers can sniff out the alignment of a sparrow at fifty paces—you think they missed an entire layer going rogue? The question ain’t whether they know, it’s what they’re doing about it.
Here’s what most berks don’t get: the avengers aren’t complicit in the Harmonium’s methods, but they are complicit in the cover-up. Apparently the demiourgoi made a cold, calculated decision that exposing the truth would cause more harm than keeping it buried.
Think about it from their perfectly logical perspective, blood. If word got out that mortal faction members could make an entire layer of a celestial plane drift into pure law, every slaad in the multiverse would come crashing into Arcadia. The plane would become a battleground, the Harmonium would have to be expelled in disgrace, and all the genuine good work being done on both remaining layers would collapse.
So the myrioi play a dangerous game—they’ve quietly restricted Harmonium access to certain areas of Buxenus, they’ve increased their own patrols around the training camps, and they’ve begun what they call “ethical observation” of all Harmonium facilities. But officially? The fate of the third layer of Arcadia is still classified information, and the avengers ensure that travel between the layers of Arcadia through the gates is restricted to only those travellers that have the right kind of approval.
The Price of Perfect Order
The real tragedy, cutter, is watching these perfect beings wrestle with imperfect choices. I’ve seen avengers standing guard outside Harmonium re-education facilities, their silver faces masks of barely-concealed anguish. They know what’s happening inside probably contradicts everything they believe about how law should serve good, but they also know that destabilizing the Harmonium could lead to even greater chaos and suffering. But doubt is not supposed to be an emotion in their repertoire.
Some of the younger avengers have started asking uncomfortable questions about whether their definition of “greater good” has become corrupted. A few have even been quietly reassigned to duties on Abellio after expressing concerns too vocally. The demiourgoi remind them that sometimes protecting good requires tolerating lesser evils, but you can imagine how the doubt is circling around the edges of their perfect certainty.
Walking a Moral Tightrope
The current arrangement works like this: the Harmonium continues to operate their training facilities on Buxenus, but under increasingly strict myrioi oversight. The avengers conduct “routine inspections” that are really anything but routine, they’ve placed celestial observers in key positions, and they’ve made it clear that any further planar drift will result in immediate expulsion.
Meanwhile, both groups maintain the public fiction that Nemaussus is simply “temporarily inaccessible” rather than permanently lost. The Harmonium gets to save face and continue their operations, the myrioi get to prevent a multiverse-spanning war, and everyone pretends that everything is perfectly fine in the Peaceable Kingdoms, just as it always has been.
But here’s the dark of it—this arrangement is as stable as a house of cards in a windstorm. The moment someone with real power discovers the truth about Nemausus, or the moment the Harmonium’s dubious methods cause further planar drift, this whole delicate balance is going to collapse. And when it does, the avengers will have to choose between their loyalty to law and their dedication to good—a choice that might finally break their perfect unity.
Until then, they march in formation, maintain their cordial relations with the Hardheads, and pray to whatever powers they serve that they can find a solution before the multiverse discovers just how badly they’ve all screwed up. It’s enough to make even a celestial lose sleep—if they actually needed any.
Canonical Sources: Monster Manual V [3e] p8-9 (as Arcadian Avenger).
Other Sources: Jon Winter-Holt. Canonwatch: These creatures are based on the Arcadian Avengers from 3e (such a lame name!) so I have reimagined them as the myrioi who reside on Buxenus. Historically, the myrioi were a group of warriors from real-world Arcadia who were formed to defend the federation of ancient Greek city states from invaders. Thanks Margarita for pointing the avengers out to me!