Langley's Ark - Don't touch the firebombs

The Seven Rulers of the Underworld
The underworld is a fact. Everyone knows where you go when you die and everyone knows that the underworld is ruled by seven people that were once among the living but have now become a being unto themselves - immortal and extremely powerful.

Mihos, avatar of Vengeance (male, bright blue, green, and purple hair, black eyes)
Mihos has several forms in which he appears to people. As his chosen emblem is birds, he chooses either the form of a monstrous skeletal bird with green fire for eyes, a monstrous feathered bird with a sweeping tail and feathers of blue, green, and purple, or a emaciated human with very sharp features and a ponytail almost to his feet. Unlike most of the other rulers, Mihos also has a sense of humor. It is a mean sense of humor, but its there. Loves pissing Wrath off.
Avenges wrongs that will not or cannot be avenged by the person against whom the wrong was committed. He commonly deals with treachery and betrayal as those are some of the most frequent offenses that warrant vengeance.

Dnab, avatar of Wrath (female, light blond hair, blue eyes)
Stocky and doesn't really have a sense of humor. Wrath models her aspect after cats and doesn't like them. At all. She showed up in the underworld and sensing a cat hater, the felines of the underworld flocked to her side. Wearing a cat skin did nothing to deter them, as cats are smart enough to figure out when they're dead and therefore incapable of being killed again. Eventually she gave up trying to chase them off and accepted the inevitable. The cats are much happier for it. Wrath isn't. Might be why she doesn't really have a sense of humor. She also does not get along with Mihos.
Claims the souls of people who allow anger and hate to consume them. It doesn't matter how this is outwardly shown, it's just a matter of whether or not the person's souls is saturated with this emotion. If so, they belong to Dnab.

Leayrn, avatar of Suffering (male, medium white hair, gray eyes)
One of the more interesting avatars as far as appearance goes, Leayrn looks like a young boy with long hair tied into two low pigtails and woven with ribbon. His hair is pure white and he wears simple and baggy clothing. Could be mistaken for a girl if not for the fact that everyone knows the avatar of Suffering is a guy.
Has two purposes: to end a person's suffering if it going to be the cause of their death and to stop someone causing excess suffering. Leayrn's goal is to decrease the amount of suffering in the world.

Fastile, avatar of Deceit (female, long red hair, green eyes)
The prettiest of the avatars and rumored to be one of the most beautiful woman of her time when she was still part of the living world. Deceit has long red hair, green eyes, pale skin and a small scattering of freckles. She dresses like a princess of old and is soft-spoken and a good listener.
Sometimes known as a light in darkness, Fastile's domain is to break the web of lies a person has surrounded themselves with. This is usually done at the time of their death, whether premature by intervention of the avatar or of natural causes.

Malek, avatar of Grief (male, short black hair and beard, brown eyes)
A stocky and strong man, Malek tends to be very formal in his bearing and dress. He wears multiple layers of jackets and long tunics.
Very rarely interacts with the living world, just takes the souls of those that died in grieving or sorrow. His realm is usually where suicides wind up and he spends his time trying to help them find peace so that they may someday leave his domain. Another oddity of his role is that he also takes the souls that lack compassion, have no empathy to feel the grief or pain of another. This differs from Leayrn in that he takes those that cause pain by callous inaction while Suffering takes those that cause pain because they want to.

Enay, avatar of Indulgance (male, short brown hair, gray-blue eyes)
The only avatar that wears glasses (square-cut, thin-rimmed). He usually looks at people over the top of them and has the appearance of a distracted scholar. He wears baggy clothing and often has an unkempt appearance about him.
Lays claim on anyone that over-indulges in whatever pleasure/vice they may have. This does not mean that Enay believes in denying the self, rather that people should not indulge to the point of damaging themselves or others. In the former case Enay will often take a soul to prevent further damage while in the latter, the soul is taken in much the same reasons as the other avatars.

Cansin, the Souless Avatar (male, short sandy-brown hair, brown eyes)
Youngest of the avatars and appears to be just a bored teenager. He usually dresses in heavier clothing as when he was still among the living he was in a cold climate. The other avatars regard Cansin as a nuisance, an errand boy, or just another of the avatars depending on what he's up to. Cansin is rarely found in his own domain as he spends much of his time hanging around in the manor's of the other avatars. A good friend has described him as the gamer among the avatars - the one that shows up, crashes at your place, eats your food, and sits in front of the TV like another piece of furniture for hours on end.
Is almost never seen in the realm of the living. He has no real domain, only serves to govern the cases that don't really fit in with anyone else. The bizarre accidents, the truly evil, those that lack any form of human emotion, all fall under his governance. Cansin is rarely forced to act but when he does it is usually for something of the magnitude that goes into history textbooks.

The History of the Avatars
Avatars were not appointed, nor did they choose to become avatars. It just happened. For various reasons all seven managed to pass beyond the living world and into the underworld as rulers. All seven were ‘mancers of incredible ability – untrained – and so their ‘mancy manifested itself in such a way and at such a time that they were transformed into what they are now. Enay is of the opinion that there will be no more avatars simply because any ‘mancer that would equal their skill will be found and trained so that a ‘buildup’ that would result in the birth of an avatar could not occur. It is also a similar reason as to why all the avatars are human. High-elves train all ‘mancers, regardless of talent, elves cannot use ‘mancy, and skiridians aren’t as prone to lose control as humans are.
Leayrn is the oldest of the avatars. He was transformed as a child, too young to remember how. All he knows is that he continued his life as he would if he were living and wondered why he was ignored by everyone around him. Eventually he ran away from home and grew older and started to realize he was different somehow, that he didn’t seem to exist at the same level as everyone else. That’s when he returned home and found the grave marker over where his body lay. After that he wandered for many years before finding the second avatar, Mihos. His homeland is what is now Alannis.
Mihos was also killed, but as a young adult rather than a young child. His homeland was the outlaying islands that would eventually become Skiridi, in one of the few human settlements nearby. Mihos had voluntarily become a human sacrifice to his people’s gods because he, like all the others, believed that by dying on the altar of his god he would ascend to a higher existence. And he was right, but not in the way he anticipated. Obviously Mihos is very cynical about religious beliefs now because when he stood there looking at his dead body, the rejoicing people, and no gods in sight he had to take a very serious look at his faith and think things over again. Eventually Mihos met Leayrn and the two compared stories and decided to take up rulership of the underworld, as that was where all their power manifested from. And Mihos’s homeland? Eventually it was melted into slag when the volcanoes went nuts.
Dnab was the third avatar. She did not become an avatar by dying but became one in the process of defending herself from dying. She comes from a plains people that did a lot of trading with a people similar to Mihos’s. While en route to the meeting grounds her family was ambushed by a rival clan and Dnab lost control when her younger brother was killed. When she woke up all her attackers were dead and her family had left her there. She followed them and found them too terrified to even speak to her, only saying that she could not be their child for she had the mark of the underworld on her. So she left them and went there, meeting Mihos and Leayrn. Her homeland eventually became Stormrider territory.
Fastile and Malek were created at about the same time so it is difficult for the two to decide who is older. Fastile was a princess of a small nation that would eventually be swallowed up by an expanding Alannis centuries later. She became an avatar peacefully, gradually passing beyond the realm of death into a being of the underworld. Women were not trained in ‘mancy in her time and so her considerable power went unharnessed. Thankfully, due to her self-restraint, it didn’t release all at once but slowly and she never did anything to stop it. It was almost a conscious process, for each day she noticed that people paid less and less attention to her. When she was able to simply walk through walls she decided that she had definitely gone past being merely human and left the palace. No one even noticed her disappearance – she had simply passed from their memories.
Malek was from the same nation, a librarian in one of the first actual libraries. He became an avatar because his untrained talent simply released itself when he was sorting books. Put his hand on one that had been bound with ‘mancy and an explosion resulted. When the dust cleared the library was leveled, the books and people unhurt, but the building gone. Malek slunk away before anyone realized it was him and then realized that it was a moot point, for no one seemed to notice him anymore. He found Fastile shortly after and the two were found by Dnab and brought to the underworld.
Enay came from early Alannis, when the nation was just establishing itself under that name. He was part of a large family with a father who drank too much and was violent when he did so. Enay grew up and finally stood up to his father one night, protecting his siblings from him, and the two fought. Enay lost but swore he would drag his father’s soul in the underworld. And somehow, in his anger, he realized that he could, and did so. His mother became a widow and the family never saw Enay again, for he had brought himself into the underworld as well as his father’s soul where the other five avatars took him in as a ruler.
Cansin became an avatar out of stubbornness. His nation was one of the ones Alannis doesn’t bother to take over simply because it’s too far north and too barren to be of use. It still exists at the time of Langley’s Ark, much as it did while Cansin was part of the living world, although everyone he himself knew is dead. Cansin was one of the providers for a small coastal town and would go hunting during the winter. During one of his trips he encountered a bear and things went downhill from there. He should have died, but he refused to, and he was found a day later and brought back to the town. The other townspeople tried to treat his injuries but found them too severe and started to wonder why on earth Cansin hadn’t died already. The whole ordeal caught Learyn’s attention and when he arrived he recognized avatar potential in Cansin. The avatar urged Cansin to just give up and thus be transformed but Cansin, delirious from fever, refused. So Leayrn forcibly took Cansin’s soul from the body and made him an avatar that way.