Seretha ibnat Rezhe

Biographical information

Birthplace Amol-Kalit
Born Died Age 67 years
Home Traveling in caravan
Sexuality Pronouns

Physical description

Race Abtati
Sub-Race Gender Female
Height Mass Hair color Black, thick, mostly straight
Eye color Yellow
Skin color Dark bronze

Political information

Affiliation(s) Occupation Hawker of undead tools, magic item import/export
Clan(s) Caste Domain Masters Apprentices Alias(es)

Out-of-character information

Writer Sereth
Created on Avatar Original art

Seretha was born in 305 to a family of merchants and storytellers. Her mother was a brilliant negotiator and her father one of the most creative and awe-inspiring of storytellers of his generation. She took more after her mother but did receive her father's magical gift, though not to anywhere near the same level. An abtati born in Amol-Kalit and exceedingly familiar with its dangers, Seretha spends as little time there as she can, being fully aware that every visit risks ending her life earlier than she would like.

She often contracts with caravans to accompany them, usually as a guard for extra pay though barring the availability of such a position she will join them as a guide or fellow merchant. Since she can use portal stones herself and imbue enough magic into simple items to make for a key, she moves around a lot and has seen much more of the world than most of her kin and even most peasants in general.

Despite attempting to avoid the desert whenever possible, she is commonly contracted on caravans working the triangle of Annuakat, Elbion, and Vel Anir.

Her preference is to be able to sell her wares without drama or prejudice, but is fully aware that in her line of work this may not often be possible. It could be said that it is her mission in life to improve people's opinions of necromancers but in truth it's her mission to improve people's opinions of her as a necromancer, and her type of necromancy. She harbors a desire to settle down someplace with like-minded people but does not believe it's a realistic want.

Seretha is tall for an abtati, which is to say that she remains shorter than most elves born to forest or sea. Her hair is near-black, and blessed to be straight and easily managed, a rarity amongst her people. Her skin is a medium or dark bronze color depending on the strength of the sun and how long she stays in it.

Her clothing is most often utilitarian with internal pockets, muted (though varied) colors, and as open to the air as possible when the winds aren't blowing sharp sands like razors into the skin. She also keeps a cloak and face wrap for full coverage in the case of just such a storm while in Amol-Kalit. This cloak does service her during other bouts of inclement whether, but she typically leaves it off unless truly, desperately in need of it. In colder environs, she takes the attitude that a little bit of suffering is how you acclimate yourself to your environment, and so will dress warmer only to prevent harm and not just for comfort's sake.

She is particularly fond of jewelry, often wearing several necklaces and chokers, many of them made from the bones of animals or favorite but lost undead tools. Rings are also often found on her fingers and toes, and earrings dangling from the lobes of her long, dagger-like ears.

With well over six decades of experience, much of which in the harsh environment of Amol-Kalit and the rest spent trading in and around Vel Anir, Seretha has developed a reasonably wide repertoire of skills.

Growing up in the sands of Amol-Kalit, Seretha learned from the time she could sit upright in a saddle how to ride and fight from horse- and camelback. While she can shoot a bow relatively well at slow speeds, she is much more capable with the spear. Whether thrusting or throwing, she can hold her own when raiders or brigands strike. Her skill at riding has also aided her to fleeing when it turned out that a potential client or their neighbors were far more hostile to necromancy than she had expected.

On foot, she is a sufficient fighter, but is better off offering support from a mid or back line. She attempts to avoid single combat if at all possible, but can be a dangerous presence if pressed to do so.

Seretha is a skilled necromancer, largely focused on the creation of undead (or "tools" as she unaffectionately refers to them) without any real spark of life - mere automatons of flesh and bone. She is exceptional in her capacity to generate these quickly and to pre-program their capabilities to her exacting specifications, but by the same token she is utterly incapable of communing with souls.

While many necromancers can commune with the souls of the departed or departing, she has never had that skill despite spending many of her early years trying to nurture it. She can, however, look into the spirit plane and see the tethers like ropes of blue fire coming off of a body which lead - as far as she can ascertain - to their souls, but to her spectral sight they simply taper off into nothingness. When a life is about to be extinguished, she can see the tether narrow razor-thin, and at that time she can if looking into the spirit plane cut the tether with an obsidian blade, prematurely separating their soul. The remaining life becomes a small but powerful infusion of energy which she typically directs into a bone charm. She considers this a form of merciful euthanasia, and will employ it whenever possible to the dying if there is surely no other recourse or if it is better that they are not saved by a healer.

Despite her inability to see the soul at the end of the line, if she attempts to interact with the tethers while they are still strong and well-connected, there are other interactions that can occur. If she attempts to hold the tether tightly in her grip and squeeze it, she can inflict pain and distress upon the subject as they feel their life seeming to drain away; this is a temporary effect as it is merely making the tether appear to thin out - once she releases it or can no longer see it, it returns to normal. She can also briefly give someone a death-like experience by holding her hand in the path of the line; like fire, it disconnects briefly as it interacts with her hand, and then goes around it as quickly as it was interrupted.

While it is unclear if she simply has no ability for spirit communing at all or if she has a mental block in the way of learning how, she now has no interest in discovering the answer or resolving it. She considers herself to be "broken" in this respect, and has accepted that as the way of things. It is likely that her lesser capacity for empathy is tied to this in some fashion, though she has yet to determine that for certain.

She does not attempt to tether any souls or fragments thereof to her creations, nor to make them in any way more than simple automatons. The lingering aspects of personality that can sometimes inhabit undead are stripped away when she creates hers. Her tools are typically capable of singular or limited tasks, and while technically she could make them more complex than that, she has found that selling more simple creatures is much easier than safely finding a buyer for a complicated construct (at least, one that wouldn't want humanoid zombies for nefarious purposes).

The most common remains used in sold goods are those of birds, in which she imbues a single variable command to fly to a set location and back, with a stop in between: enough of instruction to work as a flying messenger that is harder to shoot down and can fly nearly any distance without stopping.

The rules that her creations follow do vary as necessary, but the most common framework is that the length of their unlife is given a specific amount of time, typically between six and twelve months depending on when she believes she might be able to return to provide maintenance. This is typically powered by her own energy for small creations which will remain near her or when in dire need, but for most things she sells, she ties the unlife either to a "battery" of stored living energy, or to a life itself. In the latter case, this is often something long-lived and which is unlikely to randomly die such as a tree. The unlife of her creation has deleterious effects on the life of the living thing it is tied to, and this can become very apparent over enough time. As such, she does not typically tie a creation to the life of a living person or animal.

Commands for her tools can typically be spoken to them by their owners, but Seretha sets in bone their allowed actions on a broader level. If one were to buy a messenger bird, for example, one could not order it to attack someone because in its very being is inscribed the simple allowance of travel between two points, and carrying letters with it for delivery to another person. Likewise, one could not get her to create an army for them even if she fulfills the quantity of requested creations, as she would have to allow them the abilities to handle formation fighting or indeed potentially fighting at all, neither of which are services she intends to offer.

Abtati are known primarily for two magics: earthshaping, and illusions. Seretha could never change the earth, and never was good at impressive illusions or fantastical creatures like those the best abtati storytellers and military strategists use, but she can certainly make people see a skeletal horse as flesh or a carrier pigeon zombie as still quick.

She can do this with human bodies as well, but it is far easier when she can predict the kinds of movements they will make. A living human besides herself would stretch her too near her limits, and she's smart enough not to make the attempt.

She cannot conjure illusions without a basic physical structure similar to what she is masking, however, and so lacks the ability to conjure creatures out of nothingness like Abtati storytellers and ambushers regularly do.

The storage of life energy is a science which Seretha had to teach herself, having been entirely unfamiliar with the concept before it dawned on her that it would be far easier to be able to give her creations a steady but very finite amount of power. These capacitors are made wholly from bone and are inscribed with minor spells to prevent tampering and to only release their energy slowly. They are much like magic charms, but there is no innate benefit to being in possession of one, unlike medallions of protection or warding and other such trinkets. With how Seretha constructs these, they act to effectively shackle a creation to small actions and to a discrete unlifespan.

They can be recharged, and she has yet to figure out how to fully prevent others from recharging them if they come across and recognize them energy stores, so she always hard-codes a period of time into them at which point they destroy themselves if she does not change the timing before they enact their final instruction.

While these may take many forms, she most often uses the claws of animals, and as such as many pieces of jewelry made of them. Her preference for claws comes from the ease with which they can be inserted into fleshy remains.

Since she can and does regularly create these stores of magic, she also creates portal stone keys by imbuing enough magic to use the stones and defining the charm's release of energy to only occur when in contact with a portal stone. While this is not precisely how keys generally work, it suffices for her purposes and for those who buy such tokens from her.

A necessary skill for abtati and caravaneers alike, Seretha is capable of safely foraging, hunting, and keeping safe from the elements. She has a good sense of both direction and distance, and can guess travel times with very good accuracy. In the worst of conditions, Seretha can keep a group more or less alive and safe via mundane means.

She was not, however, gifted with the ability for water divination, as the same part of nature that might allow for that also allows for corpse divination, and she received capacity for the latter exclusively.

It was not common when she was a child for female abtati who were not part of the elite to learn how to read or do figures. However, driven by her mother's profession and her desire to become a successful merchant herself, she took every lesson on reading and math that she could and taught herself the rest. She does not, however, find joy in reading and one is unlikely to ever see her with her nose in a book unless it serves a practical purpose in the near term.

Despite this, however, one may see her writing a lot. She has had dozens of journals which she has filled up, ripped out the most important pages of, and tossed into fires. A full journal is of little further use than as kindling. Those saved pages vary greatly in content but most revolve around her craft and her future plans.

To an abtati, life is hard and easily lost; perhaps, even, life is cheap. This is how Seretha grew up, believing in inevitable pain and loss. However, that does not mean it was a joyless upbringing or even a pessimistic outlook on the world. Life may be harsh and cut short, so it was always important to celebrate everything worth celebrating. This, too, was imbued in Seretha during her desert childhood.

The welcoming nature of abtati to guests was, however, lost on her. While she will follow the laws and refrain from harming a guest when expected to do so, it is not because of an understanding of why she must. She feels no compelling reason to harm others but is simply apathetic to it. In her mind, her own safety and prosperity is above anyone else's who is not in her family. The explanation that harming a guest would harm the family's prosperity also doesn't track for her, however.

By nature of her skill with necromancy, and perhaps informed somewhat by the character of Amol-Kalit, she does not view the remains of the deceased with any great reverence. To her, a body is a vessel and nothing more, and if a soul was ever attached to it, upon death it has been severed and with that severance went any value beyond the body being more than a tool. If anything, a person is just their soul, and their soul could inhabit any other vessel and use that as a vehicle to affect the physical world.

Why then, she would ask, does it matter what happens to an empty vessel? There is nothing in remains to venerate except for the sake of wallowing in one's own selfish attachment to the person that was once there, which means that the only purpose of remains is for another individual to make use of them as they will. Hunters eat the deer that they fell, vultures pick at the corpse desiccating in the desert sun, and bones return to the earth to fed those crawling things which call it home; so too does (and should) a necromancer like Seretha create unlife to serve the living.

Despite her skill at arms and use for spare corpses, Seretha has no love of killing and would much rather avoid it. For one, she can never guarantee that she herself would come out of an engagement alive, but additionally a dead man makes for a poor customer. Seretha is first and foremost running a business. The income from working as a caravan guard and guide is of little import in the grander scheme of things; being a guard often yields materials for her business and the caravan takes her to myriad locales most of which she can drum up some kind of business selling her tools. She knows, however, that she has to put forward a much more living- and paranoid-friendly foot in many of these places, and does not generally keep the bigger and more controversial tools (that is, made from former humans, elves, etc.) pre-made, and rather comes to those who seem in need and attempts to gauge their response before broaching the subject. Otherwise, though, she is open about her signature merchandise, notably the messenger bird.

Seretha is not quick to form attachments, and is often mistaken for not being capable of forming them at all. Her worldview is different enough from most people that they often see her as lacking in empathy, warmth, and care for others. While this may in some ways be true, it is not the entire truth. She still loves her family, particularly her parents, and does care for those who seem to care for her. Her willingness to use their bodies once their souls depart is not affect by this and she doesn't understand why anyone would think it should. From a more romantic standpoint, while Seretha has had previous companions, she has never grown to love them or even particularly value them as partners. It is, perhaps, the vessel that she is drawn to rather than the soul inhabiting it, which prevents her from forming lasting emotional attachment. She is not often cruel or uncaring, but can easily hurt those around her without thinking about it.

Her sense of humor is not absent, however many don't fully appreciate it either taking her jokes the wrong way or not understanding them at all. Sometimes the only way one knows that she is joking is because she does always laugh at anything she says which she thinks was witty.

Seretha's affinity for necromancy revealed itself at an early age, much to the initial chagrin of her parents. While Abtati did not have the same level of fear and mistrust of those who deal with the undead as the Templars or other such groups, they did know that it was a risk for her to be open about it, especially as a child who could not protect herself. When she was seen playing with a risen desert hare, many thought it strange that the hare didn't run but did not notice anything otherwise amiss. Her father called for her to join them at their cooking fire that evening and she returned with the zombie hare in tow, noticeably missing its eyes and a large chunk of its side, the bones plainly visible.

With their shock and fear in turn frightening Seretha, she lost control over the hare and it attempted to escape as it reverted back to a hare's base instincts while having little ability to sense its surroundings. It ran into the fire and caught quickly, and proceeded to run through the camp as a small ground fireball and out into the dunes where it perished once it left her sight line.

Her family convinced her of the importance of not practicing her newfound ability in public, and her father did his best to show her how to handle magic properly as a general teacher. He was very gifted with illusions and was a patient tutor, nurturing her ability to better control her creations while also teaching her basic illusionist skills, mostly in hope that she would become good enough at the latter that she would become bored with and forget about her innate connection to necromancy.

As part of attempting to train her away from using necromancy, they also focused heavily on martial skills, namely horseback riding for combat with spear and shield, as well as archery and throwing spears. Her skill with a bow never got better than average, but the accuracy of her javelins became one of the best in her tribe even while riding at speed. While she lacked the same amount of power many of the others could put into their spears, she made up for it by being reliably capable of landing hits in vulnerable areas of her targets. Her family also did their best to exhaust her with training in wrestling, sprinting, stealth, and survivalism skills even outside of the their normal desert environs.

Unfortunately for the tribe's wishes to prevent her necromancy from maturing, the stealth and survival lessons gave her plenty of time to devise elaborate solutions to problems using undead animals, which she started referring to as her "tools." During water divination lessons, she never properly learned how to accomplish their objectives, but instead found on separate occasions wild carrion, offerings from the previous night's hunting party, and four-day-old ambush site where one of the victims had been left to die from his injuries in the sun and hadn't yet fully expired.

By the time Seretha was twenty, still socially a child to her people, it became clear that she was never going to lose interest in working with the dead but she was old enough to know how much of a risk openly practicing her art could be. Together with her father, she developed a system to hide her creations with basic illusions to make them appear as though they were still alive. At first, these illusions would only work if she stayed close to them and didn't forget about keeping the illusion going, but under the increasingly strict and arduous training given to her by her family's illusionists, she became able to tie an illusion to an external energy source, most typically plants, small animals, or magic-laden materials. It was at this time that she convinced her mother to deal more in magic items, and having already spent years aiding her mother's business, became reasonably skilled with identifying how much power was held in items, what they could do, and whether or not the power was tappable for external use. Her first method of using a magic charm to provide lasting energy to an illusion was using minor charms and tokens which themselves barely sipped at the magic contained within them, and used them not to exhaustion so they could still be sold to less discriminating customers.

Desperate to find ways to cut her costs and increase profits on actual trade, though, she tried many methods to either link various magic sources together or to put power back into those she'd used later without exhausting herself. Her continuous method of practicing a "power-in, power-out" approach worked to increase her tolerance for larger feats of magic without risking her health. One of her preferred things to do was to raise an undead horse for herself and cast an illusion to make it appear normal. It would still be very still, but could easily pass as the living thing to most people, while also allowing her to not have to worry about it tiring beneath her or being easily killed out from under her. To keep both the illusion and the horse functioning, she developed her own tokens which were geared specifically toward holding magic and releasing it in small doses to keep up her spells. These tokens she could create and recharge with relatively minimal effort, often creating stores of them by using whatever leftover power she had at the end of the day and sinking most of it into them. She also learned that her physical prowess seemed to play a direct role in her capacity for magic, and so instituted a strict exercise regimen for herself which would aid in her overall ability to create tools and illusions.

Upon reaching her thirtieth birthday, a milestone among her tribe roughly analogous to when human children start being considered independent enough to potentially marry, she began to hire herself out as a mercenary, mostly guarding caravans between Annuakat and Elbion. Early on, she avoided Vel Anir as it was considerably more dangerous than even Amol-Kalit for anyone nonhuman, and combined with her necromantic skills, it was a risk larger than she was willing to make even if the pay from working full circuits of the desert was far better.

When Seretha was thirty-six, she started using the portal stones that were known at the time, which allowed her to both expand her general knowledge of the world as well as the types of magic items she could trade in. She also spent much of the next few years selling keys, especially to those who couldn't normally afford them or were allowed access due to local laws.

Her consistent trade of smaller artifacts between continents yielded her more wealth than she ever thought she would see, but as quickly as she earned it, she spent it on more artifacts and charms, better equipment, entertainment, and on gifts for her family. They still were not supportive of all of her methods, but did understand and were happy to see that for the most part her business did not rely on necromancy.

When she was forty-nine, she became pregnant and decided to keep it, pausing her travels and business to return to her family in the latter third of her pregnancy. She did not know who the father was, not even what race she expected the child to be, which was upsetting for her parents but eventually they came to terms with it. She spent a year with them, giving birth to her full-Abtati daughter Ayda (Ayda ibnat Seretha) one month in to her return and remaining with them for most of the first year of Ayda's life. After that, she left her daughter in the care of her parents, as was common amongst Abtati, and resumed her previous life, seemingly as though nothing had happened. She did not see her daughter more than a handful of times for the next four years, but did come back to her family for Ayda's fifth birthday and remained with them for several more months on and off as she took minor jobs guiding travelers and caravans. She kept to that pattern again when she left, rarely returning until Ayda's tenth birthday.

She was sixty-one when she returned again unexpectedly, pregnant again and again with no knowledge or care for who the father was. This time she had a half-human son she named Rasim, though with no idea of the father's name and with her tribe's reluctance to honor a human stranger who had never once been a guest of theirs, Rasim was not given a patrilineal epithet which would have normally occurred. Instead, he was given his mother's name which was very much not common amongst Seretha's kin. While Rasim ibn Seretha is his official name, it is not respected by most of her tribe. After a year, she left Rasim in the care of Ayda, who was only twelve at the time and so much of the work of caring for him fell again on her parents and the tribal creche.