__________________QUICK STATSName Serish
Age 24
Gender Female
Species Human
Ethnicity Serenian
Height 5'9"
Occupation Spellsword apprentice
Residence Tirial (out wandering)
__________________IN-DEPTH STUFFPhysical DescriptionSerish suffered a brutal training regimen at the hands of her master, meant to forge her into a weapon to free her father and later enforce his will. To that end, her appearance is almost entirely functional: simple armor with little ornamentation, brown hair braided tight, lean muscle, almost no jewelry except a couple minor magical trinkets. The endless combat she faced under her master and since embarking to face her destiny has left her with numerous scars, a few of which split her nose and lips in several places.
Personality As someone who spent most of her young life being groomed for some great destiny without ever being told what that destiny is, then only learning what it was halfway through completing it, Serish is marked by a powerful uncertainty. She's still trying to figure out what she values and where she stands, now that she's realized she's been manipulated and steered since youth. For the first time in her life, she's in a position to choose for herself...and the choice she faces has consequences she's only beginning to come to understand. Such a weight is overwhelming to the point of exhaustion, leaving Serish with the prickliness and irritability of the perpetually sleep deprived. Compounding this is her demonic heritage. While she isn't ordinarily possessed of the same capriciousness as her lineage, her emotions run hot beneath the surface, and she reacts strongly to sudden stimuli, something that's led to the accidental destruction of many tankards and plates in many taverns.
Serish has a deep hatred of necromancers and dragons, as well as a general mistrust of and aversion to heavenly powers. Factions of each group have a vested interest in seeing her father remains imprisoned and have such tried to kill her repeatedly, regardless of how she felt about her destiny or even if she knew about it at all, a fact for which she resents them greatly. Having had to cut through too many orc clans and their goblin hangers-on for her liking has led her to regard orcs and goblins with an impatient contempt.
Magic/AbilitiesSerish is a skilled close combatant, trained to fight superior numbers with swords, knives, and staves, but her greatest power is the magic of her infernal bloodline. While it does not afford her true demonic magic, it does lend her magical ability beyond the level of her training. While this makes her a potent spellsword with what she has mastered, she can tap the magic even without discipline and focus, meaning much of it ebbs and surges with her emotions, with often grisly consequences when she's in a battle rage.
Xaraea also lends Serish some additional power in the form of demonic physical enhancements, such as claws, horns, a bladed prehensile tail, and preternatural strength and speed. Lethal as they are, Serish prefers to not use them not only because of the murderous reactions they provoke from onlookers, but also because of the strain they put on her body and the narcotic high she gets from them.
For all the power her demonic bloodline grants her, she also inherits their crippling weakness to divine magics. Consecrated weapons, objects, and shrines raise welts and burns through simple proximity, to say nothing of their agonizing touch. The magical abilities of dragons are equally dangerous, a vulnerability particular to the bloodline of Kar-Balramir, the root of his ancient animosity with dragonkind.
RelationshipsDemon Sovereign Kar-Balramir (father)
Isabel of Renne (mother)
Xaraea (bound demon companion)
Master Wizard Ephes Ealdan (master)
Necromancer Lord Ancin (nemesis)
HistorySerish was born out of wedlock to a militia captain and a wandering stranger. Life in the small travelers' town of Renne was never posh nor exciting, but the stranger was wealthy enough for them to live comfortably for a time. During her fifth year, Serish began showing signs of magical talent, which pleased the stranger greatly. He taught her what magic he knew, between frequent business trips, then introduced her to his associate, the master wizard Ephes, to continue her training. Ephes visited for lessons once a week over the course of several months, until the fateful day the stranger left, never to return. Out of honor for his fallen friend, Ephes offered the grieving Isabel Serish's complete education and training in Tirial. Unbeknownst to her or young Serish, however, Ephes's intentions were far from benevolent.
A thousand years ago, the dragon Ymunth sacrificed himself to imprison the Demon Sovereign Kar-Balramir and sever the ties Kar-Balramir's forces used to work their will upon the mortal world. The greater part of Kar-Balramir's essence was banished to a prison beyond time and the Demon Sovereign's form cast back into the pit from whence it had come. But the prison was not perfect, and a dread prophecy by Ymunth's apprentice warned that Kar-Balramir might one day be freed by his child not yet born. To this end, the sages who aided the great dragon stole away with all knowledge of the ritual and the prison, hiding it away in a temple far from mortal civilization to be buried forever, that Kar-Balramir's name be lost to the ages.
In the centuries since, the disciples of Ymunth saw their ranks swell, eventually growing too large for the orthodoxy of the dragon's teachings to be maintained. The practice of necromancy had always been a controversial topic amongst the disciples, but as their numbers grew, so did the divide between those in favor and those opposed until it eventually split them wholly in two, with the necromancers retreating after a bloody battle between the two sides. Those that remained, diminished and disheartened by the fighting and lacking an enemy against which to present a united front, splintered further, until all that remained were dozens of schools and cabals that agreed on little more than the common ancestry of their philosophies. With their unity also went record of their founder's sacrifice and all the labors that had been undertaken to ensure that sacrifice was not made in vain.
The imperfections in the prison wrought by Ymunth's sacrifice were enough for the most relentless demonlords to summon fragments of Kar-Balramir's remaining power and striked bargains with him. Ephes was one such demonlord. A member of one of the schools of magic descended from Ymunth's teachings, Ephes had heard the legends of Ymunth and Kar-Balramir and the prophecy that had been left in their wake. Working in secret, Ephes succeeded in contacting what remained of Kar-Balramir and pledged his allegiance, becoming one of the Demon Sovereign's agents in the mortal world, one of many tasked with recovering the knowledge to unmake the prison that sealed their master. The mysterious stranger that seduced Isabel was nothing more than a mortal puppet, possessed by Kar-Balramir for the sole purpose of siring a child to fulfill the prophecy and discarded once that purpose had been served.
And so began sixteen years of merciless apprenticeship to Ephes. Isolation, ascetism, enforced schedules, harsh lessons, harsher punishments for failure, manipulation, gaslighting, anything and everything Ephes could do to mold Serish into the hammer that would shatter her father's prison and crush any that dared stand against him. Under Ephes's tutelage, Serish would raid ruins, temples, and libraries, gathering artifacts and intelligence that would further her master's goal, until at last he discerned the resting place of the keystone, deep in the Moraki desert. With the prophesied hour close at hand, Ephes sent Serish out into the world one last time, to face her destiny.
In the city of Cerenis lived a wizard named Cebeus, with whom Ephes had studied decades earlier, a wizard who was as much as historian and archaeologist as he was a scholar of magic. It was his studies that led to the discovery of the temple built by the original disciples of Ymunth, though he had no idea what evil lay within. Ephes assigned Serish to aid Cebeus in his excavation of the temple, giving her secret instructions to retrieve a collection of artifacts Ephes believed to reside within. To ensure her loyalty however, and to ensure she didn't begin asking too many questions, Ephes bound to Serish the demon Xaraea, one of Kar-Balramir's lieutenants, then forcibly modified Serish's memory of the binding to make her believe Xaraea was a guardian spirit. Trusting that Xaraea had Serish's leash well in hand, Ephes bought Serish passage to Cerenis.
While the necromancers descended from Ymunth's teachings had no love for the wizards who had cast them out and continued to hunt them throughout the centuries, they did still honor their founder's sacrifice. Upon seeing the prophecy coming close to passing, the Necromancer Lord Ancin rallied his followers to action to end it, no matter the cost or opposition. To that end, on the night of Serish's arrival, Ancin's minions assaulted Cebeus's manor, hellbent on seizing all material related to the desert temple and leaving no witnesses to follow them. While their violence was thorough, it was not complete; amidst the chaos, Serish managed to gather a number of survivors -- soldiers, assistant wizards, researchers, laborers, and even Cebeus's apprentice Idrastea -- and lead a breakout that blunted the undead attack, reclaimed some key artifacts, and retook the ship Cebus had chartered to take them to the temple, though not before Cebeus himself perished under interrogation. With no time to mourn, Idrastea plotted the course for the Moraki desert, with Ancin hot on their heels.
What was supposed to be a long and deliberate excavation of the temple turned into a mad dash to prepare the temple to repel the next necromancer attack until additional reinforcements could be mustered to crush Ancin once and for all. However, in the months since Cebeus and Idrastea had last visited, the expedition team had awoken temple defenders, once left to sleep eternal, who immediately set themselves to repel all outsiders with implaccable resolve. The few troops Serish and Idrastea had managed to rally at Cebeus's manor were slowly whittled down by the prepared and numerically superior arcane warriors of old, until only Serish and Idrastea remained. Despite their haste, they were not fast enough to activate the warding spells left behind by those who had built the temple and Ancin was able to waltz right in unopposed. Serish and Idrastea fled deeper into the temple, but Cebeus had not been as unyielding in his training as Ephes had, and an inopportune moment's hesitation cost Idrastea dearly; she was cut off from Serish and promptly captured by Ancin.
At Xaraea's urging, Serish continued her push into the temple's depths to complete her master's task, needing little convincing to believe that Ancin would use the ancient knowledge and magics of the temple for nefarious purposes. The journey through the decrepit catacombs was gruelling and fraught with narrow brushes with death, but by virtue of Ephes's iron discipline, Serish survived and at last reached the sealed reading room where the sages laid all knowledge and tools of their deed to rot, at the feet of a full-sized statue of the dragon to whom it had once belonged. As she laid her hands upon the legendary implements of that ancient ritual, she was granted a revelation by her father, revealing himself, her heritage, and his command to destroy his prison and free him. Unfortunately for Kar-Balramir's dreams of freedom, Serish's efforts had once again only served to clear the path for Ancin, who impaled the demon's prophesied savior upon the great statue's tail and left her to die.
The next day, Serish dug herself out of the mass grave the necromancers had dumped her body in. As Serish's life drained from her flesh and her blood ran across the stones of the shrine, Xaraea had sunk her claws into Serish's soul and refused to let it go, cementing the binding that Ephes had laid upon them. With this new level of influence over her host, Xaraea mended Serish's broken body until she was strong enough to regain consciousness and slaughter her way through the last temple defenders and out into the wastes beyond.
In the months since, Serish has slowly wandered north, back towards civilization, following Ancin's trail with vengeance on her mind. Despite the obvious taint being a demonhost puts on her aura, she has turned down numerous offers to purge Xaraea from her soul, valuing the demon's counsel and companionship above the approval of those who would see her murdered for her lineage regardless. The journey has been slow, lacking even a horse to aid her travel, and needing frequent stops to find work, having been entirely financially dependent on Ephes her whole life.
__________________THREAD TRACKERCurrent ThreadsLike the Start of a JokeRaiding Party [M] | Sarang"I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING, BUT I'VE BEEN TAUGHT THAT IF I KEEP BLOWING STUFF UP, EVENTUALLY MY PROBLEMS WILL GO AWAY SO THAT'S WHAT I'M GOING WITH! THAT'S HOW DAD DID IT, THAT'S HOW AMERICA DOES IT, AND IT'S WORKED PRETTY WELL SO FAR!"
