It is a great effort for Eleytra to stand straight, such is the weight on her shoulders. But her back hurts not from the weight of her pack or old age. Her load is the spirits that follow and haunt her. There are dozens of them, all demanding that she right the wrongs of their lives, that they know how to best do any task, or endlessly giving their opinions on all that occurs.
In her teens she started a secret necromantic cult with some of her Yogmarths School of Magics classmates but she was the only one with spiritual talent. A few resurrected zombie rats later and she became fascinated in the magics on the border between life and death. After graduation Eleytra set out to find a proper teacher as she’d learnt all she could from the few torn pages her student cult had smuggled out of the library. Her journey across the Shadow Isles and up the Blackish River came to an end at the blunt end of a paladin’s warhammer. She’d talked her way into the employment of a swamp lord. In exchange for bolterting their army with the undead, she was granted access to the old temples, under which was a hidden laboratory of the Grand Lich Plok. She was unaware that the swamp lord’s war had caught the interest and opposition of the Order of the Dawn until a party of paladins burst into her treetop studio study. Her immediate surrender saved her life and she was brought before the Bright Council for judgement. They found her to be curious not evil but recognised that unchecked her thirst for knowledge would be dangerous to herself and others.
Her punishment would be community service: putting her natural spiritual talents to work calming rather than raising the dead. So now Eleytra travels Trasnverne seeking out ghosts, wraiths, phantoms, spectres and other lost souls to give them their final rest. Each case is unique and is often more involved than battle spells and banishment circles. These would just defeat the spirit and would not give them true rest. It is challenging work to bring each case to a peaceful conclusion. Most of the household ghosts need help with the classic unfinished business where Eleytra acts more as a therapist instead of a necromancer. The truly evil spirits sometimes require weeks of careful research and preparation. Such tasks have indeed fulfilled her curiosity and desire to grow in power.
However, she’s not been able to put to rest or if necessary dissipate all the lost souls she’s encountered.The best that Eleytra can do in these cases is to bind them to a book of souls. As her own soul is bound to the book, this pulls the spirits along with her, at least stopping it from causing anymore harm or distress to others. But now the spirit is following and haunting her. Eleytra is plagued not just by voices but also nightmares, bad luck and strangeness. Repeated sleepless nights and continuous misfortune is eroding her mental health. Last week she was so exhausted a minor spectre nearly decapitated her. What she fears most is one of the spirits possessing her. At best someone’s dead grandmother would return to them looking very different. At worst an entity of hate would gain access to her magical abilities and necromancer spells books.
Her sentence has now ended and Eleytra is heading back to the Sunrise Bastion to be formally discharged. She is also vehemently hoping that the Order of the Dawn will be able to rid her of this book and the spirits in it. Eleytra is becoming increasingly fretful and is so anxious about losing control she’s travelling alone, on foot and far away from the roads and settlements, lest her troubles become someone else’s.
Adventure Hooks –
- Eleytra is on the trail of a particularly nasty wraith in the Greentops forest. She needs it distracted and held in place whilst she writes out the binding circles.
- Whilst she can’t be too far for too long from the book, if you could look after it for two days whilst she rests, Eleytra would be very grateful.
- The spirits are getting more and more restless and Eleytra continues to weaken. Being alone is no longer an option and she needs an escort, particularly to deal with her partially possessed sleepwalking.
Image Credit – Moon Elf Necromancer by captdiable – CC-BY-NC-ND-3.0