Brodie Asturias
0green-eyes0
You know, after reading the part about the UE being inhuman, I remembered a myth where a giant dragon attacked some group of gods because they killed her husband. The reason for being a UE could also be about revenge. Though that would make it harder to explain the 'keeping power' thing. Unless they were trying to take revenge on a group other than the one they took over, using the subjugated group to get revenge (attack) the UE's true enemy group.
... you could also just make the UE insane. Don't know how well that would work though.
I dunno. Going down the insane route seems like a little bit of a cop-out. (And also, having spent 9 months in a psychiatric hospital myself, I'm actually more likely to make an insane character my protagonist!)
Revenge. That's an idea, but I can't really see why he would be seeking it, to be honest. So far what I've got is my UE did not/could not/wasn't allowed to go to the Holy Lands with all the rest of his kind, his kind normally being sort of localised nature deities. Perhaps he was not allowed to go to the Holy Lands because he had an impure heart, so he had to remain in the mortal lands. And then his angry feelings over being left behind festered and he decided to take over the mortal realm and make it his own sort of holy land. I don't know. Does that sound feasible?
Others of his kind stayed behind too, electively, and they are fulfilling their purpose as local nature deities. But they won't be drawn into his war. They're above war.
Revenge is good. But honestly if you have a storyline/plot/main good guy character developed well enough, I'm thinking you could derive a purpose from that.
Every story has to have a character with a goal. What is your main character's (or even just a side character, someone the main character has to stand up for) goal? What exactly does this guy do to get in the way of this goal? Don't make it something like an elf child was chasing a ball and the guy took the ball to be an a**hole.
To suggest a few things:
One of the elves or someone from one of the races is forced to go on a task to save a loved one. Very cheesy and overused I know. Of course, when this bad guy comes down from the north, winter is continuously on his curtails, a curse previously given him by a deity for just glancing at (or trying to woo) his goddess girlfriend/crush. To make it better, the deity that cursed him is his younger brother. Ooohhhhhh!!!
OR this UE is not just coming down south to get away from the cold. He's trying to get to something that was once covered by ice, but because the world is warming up a little from some sudden bursting underwater volcanoes that make the water poisonous to drink or use (which starts the heroes on their investigative journey). This lost item would give him control or the ability to force aforementioned goddess crush to fall in love with him and allow him to keep her in his world (something of a repeat of the myth of Hates and Persephone). This drastically changes the seasons to a point where it's threatening the lives of all the other races so a bunch of them band together to try to fix the problem. YAY!!! (Just personally, I'd like to see them lose for once and have every last one of them die just to shake it up a little. No one ever writes about what would happen if the good guys lost and how life would be for those who remained.)
OR ...actually it's pretty late so I'm running this plot pretty thin in my head.
Anyway, good luck with that.