Post by Uathach Blackmantle on Jan 15, 2006 2:24:04 GMT -5
HISTORY:
Wraith's history isn't a pleasant one.
"Hashkar 108" It begins in the year Wraith and her twin sister, Xune, were born somewhere in the Outlands [location unknown]. But she has no recollection of the next three years of her life, having spent them in the Gatehouse Orphanage.
"Hashkar 111, Day 31" [Age: 3] Wraith was adopted from the Gatehouse by the only parents she ever knew; Yrinna, a reckless Sensate, and Drake, a cold-hearted Mercykiller. Her birth mother, a nameless mortal, died in childbirth three years ago, and her father’s identity [other than his race, Cambion, and name "X'atru Blackmantle"] largely remains a mystery to her, even today [22 years later].
Yrinna mother was a brash and youthful, hedonistic Sensate who had a taste for danger and "slumming"; though her recklessness was her undoing.
"Hashkar 116" [Age: 8] One of Yrinna's sensory experiences in the Lower Ward with a Cambion [and his buddies] left the reckless woman sickly and near death. She never quite recovered: in fact, over the next eight years she just got worse, literally dying before her adopted daughter's eyes as the slow insidious cancer consumed her alive. It was only natural that the confused and helpless child would gradually develop a morbid fascination with death and dying.
As time passed, Wraith began to despise the Sensates and the Mercykillers. In her eyes, the Mercykillers were callous and cruel, incapable of sympathy, and the Sensates... well, they were all reckless hedonists. After all, if her mother hadn't been such a leatherhead to begin with, she wouldn’t be dying slowly before her eyes...
Her callous father, however, didn't abandon her or her dying mother: though Yrinna was brash and young, undeserving of his sympathy, she was still a victim of crime, and the criminals had to be brought to justice. [Whether or not the criminals were found and punished died with him when he passed away a year ago.]
"Hashkar 119" [Age: 11] Yrinna's sickness progressed to the point where she could no longer care for Wraith while her husband, Drake, was away on duty for extensive periods of time. So he raised the child on his own [or left her in the care of friends when duty called him away from home], and sought to shape and mould her as he saw fit.
But it didn't quite work out the way he wanted it to. Wraith had a kind heart and soul. She only wanted to help others - there was so much suffering and unfairness in Sigil.
"Hashkar 119-122" [Age 11-14] It was over the next 3 years that Wraith learned the basics of Knowledge/Nature and Healing for this purpose, and tried to care for her ailing mother.
She didn't quite have the stomach for what her father demanded of her.
But Drake was a harsh and cruel taskmaster. He abused Wraith, almost on a daily basis when he discovered her desire to pursue another philosophy and profession. [He may've even flogged her a few times. The nature of her scars she keeps a closely guarded secret, though some seem like they were caused by a whip guided by a brutal hand].
"Hashkar 119-124" [Age 11-16] As Yrinna's wasting disease progressed at an alarming rate, so did Wraith’s morbid fixation with death.
In time, the disturbed teenager became certain that nothing in life was permanent, or worthy of any meaning.
After all, what kind of life was she living as she watched her mother die before her eyes, and her domineering father beat her nearly on a daily basis for being weak and useless to him?
Wraith had always instinctively known that this life was one of suffering and hardship, but she never understood why it should be that way. [This knoweledge only became clearer to her when she began her studies in Necromancy.]
All around her she saw splendor in one half of Sigil, and yet to contrast, there existed poverty, squalor and madness in the Hive.
Life made no sense to her, so she began to doubt the meaning of her own existence, often sinking into a dark melancholy, as she pondered the truth and the meaning of it all. Colours seemed dull and muted. Her clothes felt rough against her skin. Food and wine tasted like ash in her mouth. Even her sorrowful music couldn't quite ease the turmoil of her tormented soul.
But rather than sinking into the madness and despondency of the Bleak Cabal, or becoming a herald of inevitable decay as a Doomguard, she found herself drawn invariably by the siren song of Death. She saw that oblivion was a soothing release from the pain and suffering of "mortality".
"Hashkar 121-123" [Age 13-15] In her early teens Wraith began to spend less and less time at home with her brutal father and wasting mother [she was sick of watching her mother die, and she was sick of her father abusing her], instead banging around the Great Bazaar and a few busy taverns, or wandering around the Cage to pass the time, sleeping out of flop-houses, and studying magecraft in secret; where she learned the ways/forms of White Necromancy from a reclusive tutor and his other student somewhere in the Clerk's Ward.
It was during this time that she studied death in all its gruesome forms, delving deeper into any ancient text on death/dying and the anatomy that she could find, hoping to find some meaning to existence, or at least some solace to ease the grief of her mother's slow inevitable decay.
The particulars of how she acquired the jink to pay for her private studies [which her father didn't support] Wraith generally keeps to herself.
"Hashkar 123" [Age 15] Wraith was seduced by a Fated who knew her adopted father. To add insult to injury, he paid her afterwards, and so this act lead to her working as a courtesan [typically in the Lower Ward, where she lived] over the next year or so, to help pay for her education, and her dying mother's medicines.
"Haskar 123, Day 71" On the way home after a long night, Wraith found a faded flier for employment at the Weary Spirit Infirmary. Being the idealistic sort who only wanted to help others in need, she gladly answered the call for surgical aides, and was employed by Ridnir Tetch the next day [to take the place of a human aide who died that week]. She remained there for 2 years, where she learned about Anatomy [later her skills developed by rote in the Mortuary's Embalming Chambers]. But his cruelty and seeming lack of empathy for the suffering of his patients drove her away. At first she despised him, but now she only pities him.
"Hashkar 124, Day 203" [Age 16] The Truth of existence is finally revealed to Wraith this day, in the early hours of morning, just before dawn. Yrinna passes away in her sleep. Wraith wakes up after a long, restless night to find her mother's wasted, lifeless shell. Since her father's friends no longer came around to care for her, or the incapacitated mother, Wraith was left to fend for herself, so she carted the remains to the Mortuary herself.
She'd seen the tall grim building before, often noting the wary bashers skittering fearfully away from the wrought iron gates, but this was the first time she ever saw the Mortuary up close.
Standing outside the gates, amidst the shanties and the chaotic squalor of the Hive [such a different world from the comfort and security of her home], with the long line of Dustmen and Collectors, everything suddenly became much clearer to her. Watching all of those bodies being carted through the gates, into the grim black building, enlightenment finally dawned on her. A flood of emotions she didn't know she had burst forth in a rush of tears and hysterical laughter that resulted in more than one odd stare. But she didn't care; She felt as though she'd finally come home.
She never turned back, and sought membership with the Dustmen that day. She felt a strange sense of completion and tranquillity amongst others like herself, and often fled from her home and her cruel father, to sit within the shadows of the giant mausoleum, and pay her respects to Death with her sad voice and haunting music.
"Haskar 125, Day 191" [Age 17] Wraith finally leaves the Weary Spirit Infirmary. Tetch's cruelty sickened her, and drove her away.
Over the years, as Wraith spent more and more time in the Mortuary, she began to take notice of the general influx of deaders, even paying particular attention to the entries within the receiving logs.
"Hashkar 128, Day 22" [Age 20] One such entry in the receiving logs caught her eye, labelled simply as: Cause of death; Tiefling child. Wraith knew at once that this must’ve been her real mother, and that she was adopted. At that point she developed a fixation with finding her father, and discovering her roots.
In the end, despite her father's brutality, Wraith learned a few things from the aging Mercykiller veteran: never fear the inevitable and stay true to what you believe in.
"Hashkar 129, Day 12" [Age 21] Drake was returned home by close friends after suffering a fatal injury while on a tour of duty in Curst. Wraith felt compelled to help him, tried to ease his suffering with her home-brewed medicines, but he didn't want her mercy or her aid. He was an old man, and he'd been expecting his end for sometime. He did, however, leave his modest estate in her name, since he had no heir of his own, when he passed away a few days later.
"Hashkar 129, Day 40" Wraith was sifting through her father's personal effects, when she stumbled across a half-burned crumbling journal stuffed carelessly into a stack of execution reports and confessions detailing in brief an arrest warrant for her blood father, a cambion named X'atru Blackmantle.
"Hashkar 129-130" [Current Date. Age 22] The last year since Drake's death has been rather hectic and traumatic [the last 3 months especially].
She took in an orphaned half-elf boy from the Hive, [whose parents were caught in a gang war, and killed before the Harmonium could break up the fight] and adopted him as her own. She was nearby when the fight happened [but far away enough not to get caught in the fighting] and took the child to a safe place before he was killed, or whisked away to the Gatehouse by the Bleakers. Since then she has given him a room to live in her house [on the edge of the Lady's Ward and Lower Ward, a few blocks away from the Armory], because she figured it was better than letting him fend for himself amidst the squalor of the slums.
It might not've been the most cheerful place in the Cage, but at least it was comfortable and relatively safe.
But, since she couldn't care for the child all the time [she still had her regular duties in the Mortuary to attend to], she hired a nursemaid to do this for her in her absence.
"Hashkal 130" [3 months ago] Wraith returned to her home late one night, only to discover Takers repossessing her house and all of her father's belongings. It seemed he had an outstanding debt to the Fated which he left behind after his death, and unless she could recover the 4,000 owed, on the spot, she'd lose the house. To compound problems, her son had disappeared, as had the nursemaid she hired to care for him.
She never found her son. [Even the next day, after passing out from exhaustion in the empty house and being woken up at Peak, when she remembered about Aerin's rope ladder beneath the window.] And since then she's been sleeping out of flophouses in the Hive Ward, and only performing her Mortuary tasks by rote in a numb, lifeless torpor.
"Hashkal 130" [2 and 1/2 months ago] Wraith was up late in the Mortuary one night, when a Zombie worker brought in the mutilated corpse of the nursemaid who cared for her son, Aerin. She performed a thorough autopsy, discovering that the murder was ritualistic in nature, and wrote a thorough report [5 sheets of papyrus long], before checking the receiving logs and the library downstairs. There she learned that a cult dedicated to worship of the Abyssal Lord, Graz'zt, would perform similar ritualistic mutilations p[bloodletting over a 12 hour period, followed by disembowelment and burning of the entrails] in his name.
She filed the report with the Harmonium and the Guvners, keeping the original necropsy report [after a Guvner scribe documented and filed a copy].
To this day, Uathach still sleeps out of flophouses, and taverns, and on occassion the Mortuary when she's too tired to walk far. To help pass the time, and keep her hope alive, she's taken to helping out in one of the Hive Ward's soup kitchens, Allesha's Pantry...
Wraith's history isn't a pleasant one.
"Hashkar 108" It begins in the year Wraith and her twin sister, Xune, were born somewhere in the Outlands [location unknown]. But she has no recollection of the next three years of her life, having spent them in the Gatehouse Orphanage.
"Hashkar 111, Day 31" [Age: 3] Wraith was adopted from the Gatehouse by the only parents she ever knew; Yrinna, a reckless Sensate, and Drake, a cold-hearted Mercykiller. Her birth mother, a nameless mortal, died in childbirth three years ago, and her father’s identity [other than his race, Cambion, and name "X'atru Blackmantle"] largely remains a mystery to her, even today [22 years later].
Yrinna mother was a brash and youthful, hedonistic Sensate who had a taste for danger and "slumming"; though her recklessness was her undoing.
"Hashkar 116" [Age: 8] One of Yrinna's sensory experiences in the Lower Ward with a Cambion [and his buddies] left the reckless woman sickly and near death. She never quite recovered: in fact, over the next eight years she just got worse, literally dying before her adopted daughter's eyes as the slow insidious cancer consumed her alive. It was only natural that the confused and helpless child would gradually develop a morbid fascination with death and dying.
As time passed, Wraith began to despise the Sensates and the Mercykillers. In her eyes, the Mercykillers were callous and cruel, incapable of sympathy, and the Sensates... well, they were all reckless hedonists. After all, if her mother hadn't been such a leatherhead to begin with, she wouldn’t be dying slowly before her eyes...
Her callous father, however, didn't abandon her or her dying mother: though Yrinna was brash and young, undeserving of his sympathy, she was still a victim of crime, and the criminals had to be brought to justice. [Whether or not the criminals were found and punished died with him when he passed away a year ago.]
"Hashkar 119" [Age: 11] Yrinna's sickness progressed to the point where she could no longer care for Wraith while her husband, Drake, was away on duty for extensive periods of time. So he raised the child on his own [or left her in the care of friends when duty called him away from home], and sought to shape and mould her as he saw fit.
But it didn't quite work out the way he wanted it to. Wraith had a kind heart and soul. She only wanted to help others - there was so much suffering and unfairness in Sigil.
"Hashkar 119-122" [Age 11-14] It was over the next 3 years that Wraith learned the basics of Knowledge/Nature and Healing for this purpose, and tried to care for her ailing mother.
She didn't quite have the stomach for what her father demanded of her.
But Drake was a harsh and cruel taskmaster. He abused Wraith, almost on a daily basis when he discovered her desire to pursue another philosophy and profession. [He may've even flogged her a few times. The nature of her scars she keeps a closely guarded secret, though some seem like they were caused by a whip guided by a brutal hand].
"Hashkar 119-124" [Age 11-16] As Yrinna's wasting disease progressed at an alarming rate, so did Wraith’s morbid fixation with death.
In time, the disturbed teenager became certain that nothing in life was permanent, or worthy of any meaning.
After all, what kind of life was she living as she watched her mother die before her eyes, and her domineering father beat her nearly on a daily basis for being weak and useless to him?
Wraith had always instinctively known that this life was one of suffering and hardship, but she never understood why it should be that way. [This knoweledge only became clearer to her when she began her studies in Necromancy.]
All around her she saw splendor in one half of Sigil, and yet to contrast, there existed poverty, squalor and madness in the Hive.
Life made no sense to her, so she began to doubt the meaning of her own existence, often sinking into a dark melancholy, as she pondered the truth and the meaning of it all. Colours seemed dull and muted. Her clothes felt rough against her skin. Food and wine tasted like ash in her mouth. Even her sorrowful music couldn't quite ease the turmoil of her tormented soul.
But rather than sinking into the madness and despondency of the Bleak Cabal, or becoming a herald of inevitable decay as a Doomguard, she found herself drawn invariably by the siren song of Death. She saw that oblivion was a soothing release from the pain and suffering of "mortality".
"Hashkar 121-123" [Age 13-15] In her early teens Wraith began to spend less and less time at home with her brutal father and wasting mother [she was sick of watching her mother die, and she was sick of her father abusing her], instead banging around the Great Bazaar and a few busy taverns, or wandering around the Cage to pass the time, sleeping out of flop-houses, and studying magecraft in secret; where she learned the ways/forms of White Necromancy from a reclusive tutor and his other student somewhere in the Clerk's Ward.
It was during this time that she studied death in all its gruesome forms, delving deeper into any ancient text on death/dying and the anatomy that she could find, hoping to find some meaning to existence, or at least some solace to ease the grief of her mother's slow inevitable decay.
The particulars of how she acquired the jink to pay for her private studies [which her father didn't support] Wraith generally keeps to herself.
"Hashkar 123" [Age 15] Wraith was seduced by a Fated who knew her adopted father. To add insult to injury, he paid her afterwards, and so this act lead to her working as a courtesan [typically in the Lower Ward, where she lived] over the next year or so, to help pay for her education, and her dying mother's medicines.
"Haskar 123, Day 71" On the way home after a long night, Wraith found a faded flier for employment at the Weary Spirit Infirmary. Being the idealistic sort who only wanted to help others in need, she gladly answered the call for surgical aides, and was employed by Ridnir Tetch the next day [to take the place of a human aide who died that week]. She remained there for 2 years, where she learned about Anatomy [later her skills developed by rote in the Mortuary's Embalming Chambers]. But his cruelty and seeming lack of empathy for the suffering of his patients drove her away. At first she despised him, but now she only pities him.
"Hashkar 124, Day 203" [Age 16] The Truth of existence is finally revealed to Wraith this day, in the early hours of morning, just before dawn. Yrinna passes away in her sleep. Wraith wakes up after a long, restless night to find her mother's wasted, lifeless shell. Since her father's friends no longer came around to care for her, or the incapacitated mother, Wraith was left to fend for herself, so she carted the remains to the Mortuary herself.
She'd seen the tall grim building before, often noting the wary bashers skittering fearfully away from the wrought iron gates, but this was the first time she ever saw the Mortuary up close.
Standing outside the gates, amidst the shanties and the chaotic squalor of the Hive [such a different world from the comfort and security of her home], with the long line of Dustmen and Collectors, everything suddenly became much clearer to her. Watching all of those bodies being carted through the gates, into the grim black building, enlightenment finally dawned on her. A flood of emotions she didn't know she had burst forth in a rush of tears and hysterical laughter that resulted in more than one odd stare. But she didn't care; She felt as though she'd finally come home.
She never turned back, and sought membership with the Dustmen that day. She felt a strange sense of completion and tranquillity amongst others like herself, and often fled from her home and her cruel father, to sit within the shadows of the giant mausoleum, and pay her respects to Death with her sad voice and haunting music.
"Haskar 125, Day 191" [Age 17] Wraith finally leaves the Weary Spirit Infirmary. Tetch's cruelty sickened her, and drove her away.
Over the years, as Wraith spent more and more time in the Mortuary, she began to take notice of the general influx of deaders, even paying particular attention to the entries within the receiving logs.
"Hashkar 128, Day 22" [Age 20] One such entry in the receiving logs caught her eye, labelled simply as: Cause of death; Tiefling child. Wraith knew at once that this must’ve been her real mother, and that she was adopted. At that point she developed a fixation with finding her father, and discovering her roots.
In the end, despite her father's brutality, Wraith learned a few things from the aging Mercykiller veteran: never fear the inevitable and stay true to what you believe in.
"Hashkar 129, Day 12" [Age 21] Drake was returned home by close friends after suffering a fatal injury while on a tour of duty in Curst. Wraith felt compelled to help him, tried to ease his suffering with her home-brewed medicines, but he didn't want her mercy or her aid. He was an old man, and he'd been expecting his end for sometime. He did, however, leave his modest estate in her name, since he had no heir of his own, when he passed away a few days later.
"Hashkar 129, Day 40" Wraith was sifting through her father's personal effects, when she stumbled across a half-burned crumbling journal stuffed carelessly into a stack of execution reports and confessions detailing in brief an arrest warrant for her blood father, a cambion named X'atru Blackmantle.
"Hashkar 129-130" [Current Date. Age 22] The last year since Drake's death has been rather hectic and traumatic [the last 3 months especially].
She took in an orphaned half-elf boy from the Hive, [whose parents were caught in a gang war, and killed before the Harmonium could break up the fight] and adopted him as her own. She was nearby when the fight happened [but far away enough not to get caught in the fighting] and took the child to a safe place before he was killed, or whisked away to the Gatehouse by the Bleakers. Since then she has given him a room to live in her house [on the edge of the Lady's Ward and Lower Ward, a few blocks away from the Armory], because she figured it was better than letting him fend for himself amidst the squalor of the slums.
It might not've been the most cheerful place in the Cage, but at least it was comfortable and relatively safe.
But, since she couldn't care for the child all the time [she still had her regular duties in the Mortuary to attend to], she hired a nursemaid to do this for her in her absence.
"Hashkal 130" [3 months ago] Wraith returned to her home late one night, only to discover Takers repossessing her house and all of her father's belongings. It seemed he had an outstanding debt to the Fated which he left behind after his death, and unless she could recover the 4,000 owed, on the spot, she'd lose the house. To compound problems, her son had disappeared, as had the nursemaid she hired to care for him.
She never found her son. [Even the next day, after passing out from exhaustion in the empty house and being woken up at Peak, when she remembered about Aerin's rope ladder beneath the window.] And since then she's been sleeping out of flophouses in the Hive Ward, and only performing her Mortuary tasks by rote in a numb, lifeless torpor.
"Hashkal 130" [2 and 1/2 months ago] Wraith was up late in the Mortuary one night, when a Zombie worker brought in the mutilated corpse of the nursemaid who cared for her son, Aerin. She performed a thorough autopsy, discovering that the murder was ritualistic in nature, and wrote a thorough report [5 sheets of papyrus long], before checking the receiving logs and the library downstairs. There she learned that a cult dedicated to worship of the Abyssal Lord, Graz'zt, would perform similar ritualistic mutilations p[bloodletting over a 12 hour period, followed by disembowelment and burning of the entrails] in his name.
She filed the report with the Harmonium and the Guvners, keeping the original necropsy report [after a Guvner scribe documented and filed a copy].
To this day, Uathach still sleeps out of flophouses, and taverns, and on occassion the Mortuary when she's too tired to walk far. To help pass the time, and keep her hope alive, she's taken to helping out in one of the Hive Ward's soup kitchens, Allesha's Pantry...