Central Fossa

Central Fossa was a unicorn of great magical skill. She gained rulership over a small domain in the south of the Isle of Yore, and became a lich after her biological death.

Life

Central Fossa was a powerful unicorn sorceress who used her abilities to destroy her enemies and declare herself the archmage and ruler of a small domain, including a town and surrounding farmland, near the Great Southern Bay in 2730. Once in power, she used magical life extension to successfully sustain herself for about two centuries.

Death and Undeath

When Central Fossa reached the end of the practical limits for her skill with magical life extension, she began aging poorly and as a result increasingly turned instead to imbuing parts of her soul into nonliving objects to escape the discomfort and inconvenience of physical deterioration.

By the time her body finally died, it was already more or less just a puppet, with all her real essence bound to a series of eight gold hoops. At this point, she flensed away her now useless flesh and discarded it, retaining only her skeleton for mobility. She fixed the gold hoops that her soul resided in to her skull, augmented and protected by a number of gems with supporting enchantments. This grim yet gaudy piece of work served as her phylactory from then on.

Lichdom

After becoming a lich, Central Fossa found it difficult to meet with most of her subjects in person to issue directives due to their horror at her skeletal form. Nonetheless, she retained tight control of the town and surrounding minor provinces she had ruled in life by skillfully manipulating a proxy council and a figurehead mayor. These officials were all elected, technically, but generally ran unopposed—often due to their rivals conveniently dying of mysterious diseases or freak accidents. Through this council, she was able to allocate and divert any funding and material support needed to continue whatever experiments and research she saw fit to pursue.

The ponies under her rule tried several times to break her hold and defy her decrees, but failed each time. In each case, her wrath was intense and her punitive retribution swift. The suffering she caused in these incidents was horrific. In one case, not a single pony under her dominion was spared from a weeks-long outbreak of agonizing shingles. Her heavy-hoofed methods earned her an appropriate epithet: "Terror of the South."

Interest in pregnant mares

Shortly after her undeath began, Central Fossa made the strange decree that henceforth all pregnant mares either living in or traveling through her domain must be sent to her for examination at some point before giving birth. In return for compliance, she would provide healing magic to cure any sick foals of the town who would have otherwise been beyond help. If she was defied, however, she would inflict painful lesions, seizures, and various other plagues and calamities on various victims (usually relatives of the defiant mare in question) with increasing severity until her demands were met.

Central Fossa claimed that these examinations were simply so she could ensure successful pregnancies, and indeed her domain had an unusual near perfect rate of healthy live births. But there was a dark side to the arrangement: Occasionally one of the mares sent to her would disappear along with her unborn child, never to be seen again. The ponies under her domination mostly tried to avoid talking about this uncomfortable fact. The lifesaving services she provided to desperate parents, combined with the otherwise relatively benign nature of her rule as long as her demands were met, had caused most of them to tacitly accept this Faustian bargain for generations, and her leveraging of collective guilt largely ensured collective complacency and silence.

Definitive final death

After about 500 years of rule, Central Fossa was finally destroyed in the year 3307 by Shining Facets and Diamond Hues, a pair of powerfully magical unicorns who were passing through her domain on their way to Sparkle City. When the ponies of the town discovered that Diamond Hues was pregnant, they accordingly attempted to bring her before Central Fossa for the required examination. Shining Facets and Diamond Hues sensed Central Fossa's sinister intentions, resisted, and overcame the lich. Many of the preservative enchantments were unraveled from her phylactory and her soul finally expelled in the struggle, resulting in its unrecoverable disintegration.