Asphodel
Stats[edit]
Caste: Zenith +2 (+4) = +6 Special Ability: Performance +2 (+4) = +6 Past: Sijan Mortician/Speaker for the Dead +2 (+2) = +4 Motivation: Put the Neverborn out of their Misery +2 Virtue: Temperance +2 Flaw: Shadow-lander Techniques (5): Spirit Detecting Glance +2 Monkey Leap Melee Exc Awareness Exc ??? 10 bonus points: 2 for Zenith 1 for Past 2 for Performance 3 for Panoply -- an "appropriated" soulsteel scout-suit (+2 Athletics, +2 Armor), Pierce-the-Sky (orichalcum Halberd +2) 2 for Melee
Still working on the techniques. Might switch Performance to be +4 instead of +6, and Past to be +6 instead of +4. Considering possibly jiggering around some points, perhaps upping motivation or temperance but not drastic changes.
Appearance - has that look of having been born and grown up in a Shadow land; sunken eyes, sallow complexion, slightly malnourished. An air of patience, as of the grave. Would be overlooked except for the black smooth oily surface of the combat suit she wears (not unlike Commander Shepherd's armor). All those impressions are dropped as soon as she begins a ceremony or orating - she is filled with passion and life, voice carrying far beyond what her frame would suggest. Hair is a pale thin white, as of bleached ash-wood.
Backstory[edit]
Raised to tend to the Dead in the city of Sijan, she had learned all the rites, in multiple languages. Had stood the long watch of sunset-to-sunset, in honor and guarding. Tended the ivory spires and the ebony caskets, the intricately carved memory-scrolls of white and black jade, and velum accounts of payment. She had even bled herself ritually, to give the newly dead the most ephemeral grave good, maiden's blood. More than once she had been attacked by the crazed and confused newly dead, saved only by the morticians' guards.
And when the Lover's armies marched on Sijan's walls, she stood with the living and the dead of the city. When the sculpted ghosts of the Lover would woo away the defenders, she led the litanies of duty. When the dead stood against the horrors that the living could not, she led the prayers to strengthen their dead. And when the walls were breached, she volunteered to carry one of the soul-breaker orbs into the breech. The Lover's necromancies undid the old sorceries in the orb, rotted the metaphysical connections necessary to its fission, and she was left with an inert sphere of blue jade in the midst of the leering enemy. She threw it and screamed the cries of Sijan, and as the orb fell lifeless in the gore, the Sun blazed through her, destroying those who stood against her.
But though the enemy was thrown into confusion and routed this time, all of Sijan knew the Lover would be back. And all knew that she must go, although she broke down and wept inconsolably when they shut the gates behind her.
She has wandered far, looking for how she may help her people and realms of the Dead; the Unconquered Sun has shown her what used to be, and that all Sijan stands for is wrong - and yet what else is there for them? What promise is Lethe, when the rest of Creation is wretched and full of despair?
