rip
High Priest
Gods will be dragged screaming from the ether
XP: 2025
Gender: 
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Kuvera is Ravana's half-brother, once maharajah of all rakshasas, now the self-proclaimed Rajah of Wealth.
Since the creation of the rakshasa race they had ruled themselves from the Waters of Creation in Acheron, wealthy and powerful beyond dreams, unassailable in their fortress-city of Lanka, a city created by the god Tvashtri himself at their commission . It was Visravas, a powerful and cunning Brahmin sage - Visravas son of Pulastya son, it was said, of Brahma himself - who hatched a plan to steal Lanka from the rakshasas, and steal the rakshasas as well from the caste that had ruled them for so many eons.
The mere rumor of Vishnu's coming was enough to disturb the rakshasas; they feared the great Preserver who had been the enemy of their plots and schemes since the dawn of time, and the dawn, noon, and dusk before that. The rakshasa warriors were soon at alert, but more was needed - Visravas needed to provide them with evidence. This he soon did: one day the rakshasas discovered a mace near the city gates, a mace recognizable as Vishnu's. The following day a rakshasi woman found a conch shell within the city itself, sending waves of terror throughout the populace. The day after that, a stylized wheel was discovered, carved to resemble the rays of the sun. The day after that, a lotus, and after that a jewel that shone like the sun itself. At that point the rakshasas evacuated Lanka en masse, and Visravas and his wife Idavida strove into the city unhindered. Visravas installed himself at the throne of the rakshasa maharaja and melded it to the considerable spiritual powers he posessed as a Brahmin sage descended from Brahma himself. When the rakshasas began to creep back, Visravas was unstoppable; the power of Lanka had become his own power, the soul of the rakshasa race and guardianship over the Waters of Creation had become one with his own soul, and the fiends were forced to bow to his will.
Visrava was mainly concerned with introducing the order, rituals, and discipline of the Vedas to the benighted heathens the rakshasas had become. He taught them the proper sacrifices and rites to honor the Vedic gods and divided their society into castes, the better that each rakshasa should know his or her place. He restructured their military and created the ministries which would rule over various aspects of rakshasa life from then on, and he taught them of reincarnation and the quest for transcendence beyond the wheel of karma.
Eventually, after ruling the rakshasas for millennia, Visrava stepped down from his throne, beginning a life of ascetic contemplation to prepare for his next life. His son Kuvera inherited the throne of Lanka.
Kuvera was a very different sort of ruler than his father had been. He had lived in Lanka among the rakshasas his entire life, and the power of the city had warped and changed him, made him both more and less than human. Where Visrava was primarily concerned with order, Kuvera was more interested in the wealth the rakshasas could provide. He sent his legions to the mortal world, where his father had not permitted them to go in centuries, to steal and raid and conquer the nations of humanity. He insisted all the wealth of the multiverse was his by right as lord of the rakshasas; sometimes he rode at the head of his armies in a flying chariot forged by Tvashtri, and beleagered mortals learned to think of Kuvera as the lord of all evil.
Meanwhile, the older rakshasa lords had not given up the hope of reclaiming their power. When Visrava ruled he had seemed incorruptable, but when he stepped down this seemed to them to be an act of weakness, a sign that even the seemingly immortal sage had at last grown old. They met in secret and discussed how they might exploit this.
A princess of their kind, a daughter of one of the ancient noble rakshasa families named Nikasha, was introduced to Visrava. Their meetings, at first, seemed coincidental and casual, and Visrava thought nothing of it. As time went by, Visrava began to see Nikasha more and more, and the exquisite spells and glamour she wrapped around herself began to affect even the puissant sage, who had forgotten the pleasures of a young woman long ago. When thoughts of Nikasha began to make it impossible for him to meditate, Visrava decided he must have her, if only to banish her from his mind. The two met in secret, and although Visrava did not at the time know it, many children were conceived.
This, of course, was the purpose the rakshasas had intended that Nikasha accomplish. It was necessary, they decided, to join the blood of Visrava, which the old sage had bonded irrevocably to Lanka itself, with their own blood, so that they could rule through the resulting half-breed offspring. The children of Visrava and Nikasha - Kumbhakara, Ravana, Vibhishana, Shurpanaka, Bibhishan, and Khara - six children, a whole litter of potential claimants to the throne, were raised by the rakshasas in secret, and when they had grown to adulthood the strongest of them, Ravana, led the rakshasas in a revolt against his half-brother the king, and Kuvera, Visrava, their supporters and confidantes, even the queen mother Idavida were driven from the city. Ravana was left the unquestioned master of the rakshasa race, and his own epic conquests had just begun.
Although Kuvera could not withstand the onslaughts of his half-brother, he was far from powerless without his throne. Blinded by greed and hubris as he was, he was the son of Visrava, clever and determined with divine power running through his veins, and he soon had a new kingdom, Alaka, among the highest mountains of the Gray Waste.
In Alaka, Kuvera attracted exiled rakshasas and other spirits and fiends, using slaves to mine the buried wealth of the Glooms and other planes too. Alaka soon became almost as wealthy as Lanka had been, if not more so. He is now king of the merchant rakshasas, and a lord of the Planar Trade Consortium. Besides the tremendous amount of precious minerals at his disposal, he buys and sells souls, and has many horse-headed oni servants who play sweet music in imitation of the minstrels of Swarga, where Indra rules. Many yugoloths are at his court at all times, particularly arcanaloths seeking to make deals with him on behalf of their tanar’ri and baatezu clients, though he will at times deal with both tanar’ri and baatezu directly. His palace contains that rarest of luxuries in the lower planes, a beautiful garden known as Chaitraratha that manages to remain green and lush in the middle of the Gray Waste. Kuvera is dwarfish in appearance - some associate him with the dwarven god Abbathor, even claiming they are the same entity (which is possible, though dwarves deny it). He is also represented as a pitch-black rakshasa covered in jewelry and sitting cross-legged on his throne or on a white lion.
Kuvera has many wives: Yakshi, Charvi, an asura woman of the danava tribe exiled to the Elemental Plane of Water, and Rambha, who Kuvera sent to seduce and spy on his half-brother Ravana in attempt to copy the trick the rakshasas had used to depose him. He has three sons; his daughter is Minakshi, who used illusions to cover her deformed appearance and eventually went to Acheron to found a kingdom of her own. Kuvera is also said to have five hundred children with the rakshasa lady Hariti, maharaji of plague; these children form the ruling caste of Alaka, ranking below his other children and his Prime Minister but above all other citizens. Kuvera’s prime minister is named Manibhadra, a grim old rakshasa sorcerer who made too many enemies among the rakshasas of Lanka to ever go back to them. He has two fearsome rakshasa bodyguards, a male and female who accompany him at all times.
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Rakshasa rajas (Read 23 times)