King Shard Dancer's Den

Hi! Extremely new here and immensely enjoying myself. Fair warning, Lioden thinks I’m eternally online for some reason which is hilarious but no, I’m not always on. Just mostly always on. Lol. If you send me a message or try to ping me in chat or something and I don’t respond, it’s not that I’m ignoring you, it’s that I’m not actually online whatever Lioden thinks

If you want to check out my storage account which doubles as a tiny primal pride with lore of their own, feel free!

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Welcome to the Nile Kingdom, a vast territory that encompasses the great Nile River from end to end. From the great mountains from which the Nile starts to the marshlands it empties into, here dwells a pride who answers to one lion and one lion only: he who wears the Bone Crown.

This kingdom doesn’t have a traditional passing of the torch from king to heir; if one wants the Bone Crown, they must fight for it - literally. Every full moon, anyone in the pride, male or female, has the right to challenge the current King of the Nile for the crown in a rite known as the Dance of Bones. If they succeed in besting them, then the throne is theirs. If they fail…they die. For the Dance of Bones is a duel to the death.

Even as the wearer of the Bone Crown rules absolute, there are ancient taboos to which even they are bound:

1) To eat the flesh of another lion is forbidden and punishable by exile
2) Incest is among the blackest of sins and must be answered with death, for parents and cubs alike. It is better to mercy kill such cubs than to let them grow up suffering for the decisions of their parents
3) No lion is to break the sacred truce of the Crossroads. To do so is to invite the wrath of the ancestors upon both pride and kingdom
4) To refuse to acknowledge another’s identity is to refuse to acknowledge your own. Such lions are relegated to objects and referred to as “it” until they’ve proved they’ve gotten their heads out of their rear

Such are the forbidden acts passed down from the days of the first king.

Inbred lions (not parent/child or sibling/sibling mating which is the kingdom’s definition of incest but whose parents were still too closely related) are tagged with a black heart in their footnote. These lions are strictly forbidden to breed lest they poison the kingdom’s gene pool. There’s nothing otherwise wrong with them, they’re free to take on other roles and jobs in the kingdom and even fall in love, they just aren’t allowed cubs. It’s for the best.

Should a litter be born inbred despite all precautions, they are given the same execution as cubs born of incest. Unless something about the cub(s) really, really stands out, their fate is sealed. If the inbred lion in question comes to the kingdom as an adolescent or adult, however, that’s a different story. They’ve already grown up, after all. It wouldn’t be a mercy kill then, it would be murder.

Recently, the Nile Kingdom has embraced the worship of the Egyptian pantheon; a group of near-forgotten gods on the brink of disappearing. The reason for this is simple: one nasty July in King Shard Dancer’s reign, Apophis broke out of his seal and made an attempt to devour the sun and plunge all creation into chaos. If it weren’t for the current King of the Nile joining his strength with Anubis, he would have done just that. Since then, the kingdom has vowed to honor them, bolstering their strength with their faith. That will not allow the gods who saved them so to wither away as memory fades. They will not.

Since then, every year the serpent attempts to rise, and every year the bearer of the Bone Crown joins his strength with the gods and beats him back. So long as there are lions to remember, the god of chaos will forever be denied the sun.

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Nile Kingdom Important Ranks

Paw of the King (2nd in command): Dawncatcher
Healer:
Seer: Omenstars
Hunt Lead (highest level lioness when the previous hunt lead dies): Stardust

King Dynasty

Pride Dynasty

Achievements

Showcase