Ancient dragons. Dark lords. Eldritch divinities. When it comes to final boss level foes, the fantasy genre delivers above all others. Sure, thriller novels are filled with all sorts of despicables, but pit Hannibal Lector against The Witch King of Angmar? The cannibal doctor is going to end up stomped and chomped. Sadly for Lector and his ilk, a high capacity for evil doesn’t always equate being able to perform evil acts on a massive scale. But these fantasy villains? They have the motive and the means to destroy life as we know it. Here are 10 fantasy books with final boss level villains.
The Priory of The Orange Tree
The overarching villain of Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree series is so horrible, so destructive, so unthinkably evil that no one even bothered to name it. The Nameless One is an ancient dragon that is regarded as a god. Why? Probably because it crawled out of a volcano after being born in the center of the Earth. When your mother is magma and your dad is a violent volcanic eruption, you’ve got the makings of a truly final boss level nepobaby on your hands. Not saying that the Nameless One didn’t put in the work to get where it is career-wise, that is. Aside from turning cities to ash, it also created a horrible draconic plague that causes victims to catch fire on the inside. It might have had help from mom and dad, but that’s pure final boss level talent right there.
The Wheel of Time
The bad guy in The Wheel of Time of time isn’t your regular-degular final boss – he’s the blueprint of the archetype. Robert Jordan’s 14 part series takes place in a universe where history is cyclical, where key beings of good and evil are reincarnated throughout the ages. The captain of Team Evil is The Dark One – and while you may think he’s just your average dark lord, he’s actually so much worse. The Dark One is evil on a cosmic scale, a fundamental force of malice that exists outside of reality. A battle with him isn’t just a battle for the fate of the world – it’s a battle for the fate of time itself. This boss battle is Bloodborne level stakes, a square off against an eldritch entity from outside of existence – one that seeks to end the universe and remake it in his own twisted image.
The Malazan Book of The Fallen
While Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of The Fallen has multiple nuclear-grade threats throughout the series, arguably one of the strongest antagonists to appear is The Crippled God. As his name would suggest, he’s a literal divinity – but doesn’t belong in any pantheon of the Malanzan world. The Crippled God was summoned to Malazan‘s universe kicking and screaming by a group of mages who sought to use his power – you can guess how that turned out. A hostage in a reality that is not his own, The Crippled God vents his rage on… well, everything and everyone. He corrupts and manipulates mankind and lesser gods alike, and his presence in the universe is like a slow poison that could someday kill reality. With a little help from the undead armies that his followers unleash upon the world, he aims to hasten the decay.
His Dark Materials
When young Lyra Belacqua left the safety of Jordan College to discover the secrets of the universe, she didn’t think she would have to battle God in the process. In Phillip Pullman‘s His Dark Materials series, reality is ruled by a central divinity known as The Authority, who governs from his throne in the Kingdom of Heaven. While The Authority isn’t the final boss level foe that his reputation suggests, his brutal regent sure is. As Lyra vaults across the multiverse, she gets on the bad side of The Authority’s second in command – the angel Metatron. While the angel himself is formidable, his true power lies with what he commands: hosts of angelic warriors, world ruling churches, and a multiverse of beings loyal to Heaven’s laws.
The Poppy War
When The Poppy War protagonist Rin decided to let God into her life, she didn’t expect him to be such an ungodly force of destruction. While studying the long lost art of shamanism, Rin makes a covenant with an ancient power of destruction – a being of fire known as The Phoenix God. As a god of vengeance, The Phoenix God has only one commandment for its adherents: destroy. Corrupted by the god’s power, Rin commits an atrocities on a national scale – making her a final boss level threat in the process. Unlike some of the other foes on this list, The Phoenix God isn’t corporeal – it exists outside the physical realm. The only way to be rid of the Phoenix is to destroy one’s spiritual ties to it completely, which usually means destroying yourself in the process.
It
While the live action adaption of Stephen King’s It featured Bill Hader and friends facing down a giant shapeshifting spider monster, the novel version of the titular antagonist is so. much. worse. An alien intelligence nearly as old as the universe itself, It crash landed on Earth in the prehistoric past, and has been devouring people through centuries of recorded history. When young Bill Denborough engages in a psychic battles of will against the monster in the novel, he glimpses upon its true form: an incomprehensible mass of writing orange light that causes the viewer to go insane. While It is a Bloodborne level cosmic threat, It can thankfully be defeated by similar Bloodborne means – by ripping its guts out until it dies.
The Locked Tomb series
John Gaius, the Emperor Undying – that’s a name that deserves to be emblazoned above a boss health bar, Elden Ring style. As the God Emperor of the Nine Houses, Gaius is that guy. He leads an interstellar empire of necromancers, and is protected by an immortal legion of undead warriors. While he first appears as semi-benevolent ruler in Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth – the first of Locked Tomb series – his antagonistic influence grows as the story unfolds. He consumes planets worth of souls in order to sustain his existence, and as a result is chased across the stars by the twisted reincarnation of those he sacrificed. He’s not just a final boss, he designed the level.
Berserk
When you’re a former mercenary built like a linebacker with a Honda Civic sized sword, final boss level threats are something you face on the daily. Wandering warrior Guts can cut through demons without breaking a sweat, but dealing with the dark pantheon that rules his crapsack world is much more a challenge. Guts seeks the head of a former comrade in arms who betrayed him in order to attain godlike power – a man now known as Femto, the Falcon of Darkness. From the depths of the hellish astral realm, Femto sits as a member of the God Hand – five divine abominations that shape the laws of fate. How do you kill something that can’t be cut with a regular sword? Infuse your blade with spilled demon blood, allowing it to slice through incorporeal foes as well. Demon tested. Guts approved.
Kill Six Billion Demons
Allison Ruth was once a barista whose biggest concern was losing her virginity to her college boyfriend. After being dragged into an alien multiverse and granted godlike powers, she now has bigger fish to fry. Tom Parkinson Morgan’s Kill Six Billion Demons the story of a former business major’s quest to face down the seven evil warlords that rule reality – a concordance of dark divinities known as the Demiurges. While each of these cosmic kings are formidable, the red titan Jagganoth is arguably Allison’s biggest problem. He is the god of war incarnate, who seeks to end cyclical patterns of bloodshed by destroying existence utterly. Considering he has a sword that allows him to make 80,000 cuts at once, he might just be able to accomplish this impossible task.
The Broken Earth Trilogy
N.K. Jemison’s The Broken Earth trilogy is the story of a world at war with itself, one where climate disasters called Fifth Seasons threaten life at least once a century. As the series continues, it’s revealed that these elemental catastrophes are not random occurrences, but calculated acts of an intelligent global mind. After millennia of being exploited by civilization, Father Earth wakes up and begins waging a war of extinction against living things. He’s a conscious force of survival, a planetary self-preservation instinct. How do you defeat that? You don’t. You make nice, and you do it fast.
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