Greymane/SorrowfulDreamers
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Sorrrowful Dreamer's Demise - Artifact ****
- Speed +2
- Accuracy +4
- Damage +9L
- Defense +3
History: Sorrowful Dreamer had been a legend among the Sidereal, as much as any can be, in the dark days before the Usurpation. In uncertainty of those days, Sorrowful Dreamer was the voice of a bleaker future than that already faced.
Before her Exaltation, she had been known as Lady of the Lily White Hands, a name in itself almost as feared and disliked among mortals as that she adopted after Exaltation would come to be among Sidereal. The Lady hailed from East, what would become the Scavenger Lands, a wanderer, a philosopher, a poet, and most of all, an executioner of unparalleled skill. She was a blighted sight on any town, the gray clad woman wandering out of the wild. A necessary evil, she gave death meaning and message – the message most often being a warning to those who would defy their betters.
It was during such a message that she Exalted, assailed even in her moment of glory, as she would be the rest of her life, by visions of the future. Terrible and clear, visions of catastrophe and plague beyond what Creation already struggled against. She could look out onto those grisly faces waiting for the death blow to fell her victim and see their flesh eaten away by illness or withered by time or stained in blood by the wounds that would one day cast them out of this world and into the next. Screaming in horror, the Lady fled into the wilderness to hide herself from the world until the ghastly images receded. Her fellow Sidereal reached her before that ever happened. They soothed her savage visions, calmed her overwhelming fear, and brought her into their fold. The Lady of Lily White Hands faded into obscurity and legend, while a new Sidereal who became known as Sorrowful Dreamer rose to infamy among the most secretive Exalted.
Sorrowful Dreamer was a Chosen of Saturn, the Maiden of Endings, and beyond any other before or since was she embraced by the Maiden’s realm. She was a woman of a dark and fragile nature, even before her Exaltation she was long plagued with nightmare visions of the future. As she further learned the art of reading and weaving fate the visions grew even stronger, her mind struggling not to break apart every time she looked into the future and saw only the horror and pain that could be awaiting. To some she seemed a cursed and others said she was a favored daughter. All were in awe of her abilities to read the patterns of the stars and weave the strands of fate. None wished anything to do with her.
With the power of her visions and the narrowness of their scope, she was seen as a tool of those above her, a useful but dangerous tool. Kept away from the world and approached only when uncertainty could lead to disaster, she sat like a blind prophet, her eyes covered to avoid seeing the shapes of death those who spoke to her would take and dispensed her grim visions of the future. Sorrowful Dreamer was even one of the visionaries brought together to peer into the future and see the fate of the Realm.
But the Sidereal had placed a lion in their midst and they knew it. Much as they worked to gentle her visions and keep her mind from shattering, alone in her darkness at night, Sorrowful Dreamer was alone with her terror. In her dreams, she saw a figure moving in darkness. In her dreams she heard the whispers, a thousand words at once, a thousand conversations at once, but all the same voice. In her slumber she could smell the scent of decay, of blood and urine and rot. Feel the chill of death cutting her skin like the winters wind. Always there, always just outside of her vision. Until one day, the whispers followed her from her dreams into the waking world, and it was finally too much for her to bear.
Sorrowful Dreamer left the home her brethren made for her in a storm of violence, slaughtering the slaves kept to watch her, following an unknown instinct and fleeing madly towards a dire stretch of decaying and blighted land; the Noss Fens. The Sidereal began to give chase, yet were turned back as the Contagion began to sweep the Realm and Sorrowful Dreamer pressed on, the whispers in her ears and the maddening dream-visions growing stronger as she went. She slaughtered anyone who came into her path, eating the flesh of the dead to survive, wrapping herself in soft-leather garments stitched from the skin of men. But soon the numbers of travelers she encountered thinned and the number of bloated and disease ridden corpses grew. While others fled in desperation, Sorrowful Dreamer stumbled into the very heart of the Contagion.
Her body and mind weakening with illness, she walked the line between life and death closer than she ever had before. Searching in her blinded weakness for the dark whispers that had so long lain just outside of her vision, she became so close to the edge of death that she was barely more than the walking dead herself.
And then she found the place she sought and the voice that had been a whisper became an indomitable shout.
The Mound of Forsaken Seeds loomed above her. It’s undead guardians let her pass, for in sight and scent and in very essence, she had become one of their own and aided by the forgettable nature of a Sidereal, nothing in her was suspect as living. The now shambling ruin that had once been Sorrowful Dreamer crawled through the massive manse. Her soft flesh was chewed upon by the poisonous spiders who wove their webs through the corridors, her feat torn and slashed by the bones that lined the floors. Yet the pain and fever no longer mattered to the Sidereal as she shoved through the last wall of webs and her gaze fell upon the great throne and in it, the Dowager of the Irreverent Vulgate in Unrent Veils.
The Dowager was surprised at the sight of the shattered Sidereal, unable even in her wisdom to determine what manner of creature this wretched being was.
“What are you?” the Dowager asked, curiosity staying her hand from destroying the crooked figure outright.
Sorrowful Dreamer began to scream. It was then the great mockery became apparent. It was not the voice. Powerful and commanding as the Dowager’s words were, her voice was not the whispers that plagued the Sidereal drams and her every waking moment. Nor, she suddenly realized, was this the place she was meant to end her journey, only a fraction of the many steps left till it’s end. Denied even the peace of mind that might have come from finding her long veiled tormentor, Sorrowful Dreamer tumbled to the stony ground and wept.
Annoyed beyond her curiosity now by the wretched thing, the Deathlord rose from her throne and snatched up the tiny woman. Though the Dowager so normally slaughtered all Celestial Exalted without hesitation, some inkling of another usefulness for this dreadful wretch slipped into her mind. Sorrowful Dreamers soul was torn from her body and her bones from her flesh. Cast into molten soulsteel, screaming as pain, a sensation she had long lost the ability to feel, seared into her Immortal soul. Whatever scraps of sanity that remained were blasted from Sorrowful Dreamer in the frozen heat of the forge as the Dowager cast her into a weapon for her champion minons.
The Dowager of the Irreverent Vulgate in Unrent Veils forged for day and night for months, blending her own blood and enchantments into the blade she forged. She crafted the handle from ebony wood wrapped in the skin-leather Sorrowful Dreamer once wore and used the Sidereal’s teeth as polished studs. The cross-guard from the shattered Sidereal’s bones, finger bones stretching upward like ghastly wings while an intricate white network of bone slivers formed a spider-web pattern up the oily black length of the blade, a mocking tribute to the last living beings Sorrowful Dreamer ever encountered. The tiny skull of a new-born monkey became the pommel, it’s hollowed eyes twisted into a glaring visage and set with onyx chips. And for the finishing touch, the Dowager plucked out Sorrowful Dreamers eyes and them hard as gems, setting one in the mouth of the tiny skull and the other set nestled in the center of the cross-guard.
Trapped eternally within the blade, Sorrowful Dreamer’s mad soul became a boon and a bane to every servant of the Dowager who carried it. No matter how powerful in battle, how stead fast and strong the champion, all living and dead alike were eventually consumed by the Sidereal’s madness. Grown weary of putting down her own servants yet hesitant to outright destroy the blade, the Dowager ‘gifted’ Sorrowful Dreamers Demise to the First and Forsaken Lion as a claimed companion piece to his own mighty weapon and smiling dusted her hands of it, letting him deal with the blade and the trouble it could cause. Since then, the mad-sword has passed from hand to hand, wielded by ghost and mortal and Death-Knight all alike, all irrevocably driven to a madness beyond and eventually slain. Yet the blade always seems to linger, none ever compelled to destroy the weapon, merely remove it from their presence.
And within her prison of steel and pain, Sorrowful Dreamer laughs and twists the strands of fate, preserving her wielders until she can pull them down to join her in her madness, forever seeking the owner of the voice who continues to plague her rotted mind.
Capabilities: Though she hates them with the blind hatred of a mad woman, Sorrowful Dreamer still lends a dubious aid to those who bare her. She manipulates fate within her prison, seeking to draw out the life of her barer until she can spread her insanity to them as well. She bends the strands of fate around the barer at all times, shifting him subtly outside of it, confusing the powers and senses of any Sidereal or astronomer seeking to track them. In combat, she twists it further to direct the battle in favor of her wielder. The target number for all attacks and parries becomes six, leaving many to be in awe of the swordsman skill or cursing his luck or, more often, merely a look of shock as the black blade cleaves through their flesh from a seemingly impossible blow.
More than this, she rides her senses along with theirs. The wielder can feel the flow of destiny around him as a battle begins, a sense that defies perception to any but another Sidereal. Within the first few moments of battle, the wielder knows where to move, where to strike, where to dance away even before the openings and the feints set into action. Guided by this new found ‘instinct,’ the user receives +6 on his initiative on the first turn of battle and defies any Charm employed against him that would grant first-strike, only the natural prowess of the foe.
Should the wielder lift the blade to his eye and peer through the web of bone fragments, they are granted a very different vision that one would find in most soulsteel weapons. The haunted visages that typically lay writhing the inky black metal are gone, replaced instead by a strangely disturbing likeness of a cloudless nights sky, stars or patterns and colors not found in any land stretched out endlessly. Should the area prove haunted and one stares longer, the stars begin to move. Any immaterial spirits who wander the area beyond the sight of the blade appear as misshapen nebulas of starlight in the sword-born-sky. The weapon can cut through these immaterial beings as if they were flesh and bone.
Longing for her own absolute demise, Sorrowful Dreamer has an unrelenting hunger to deliver unto others what is denied to her. As her wielder kills, be their foe living or dead, he can make an (Occult + Essence) roll against the being’s willpower. Success means absolute death as Sorrowful Dreamer reaches through the soulsteel and ravenously devours and destroys the spirit of the being.
In a more subtle fashion, Sorrowful Dreamer touches her mind to that of her wielder and opens for them her knowledge of the Occult and of the ancient world few were bound to have known. The character acts as if possessing Occult *** and Savant ** for as long as he holds the blade and at times is granted flashes of recognition of people, places, and First Age devices that Sorrowful Dreamer has come into contact with before.
Yet this shared wisdom is not without it’s price as well. As wise as the Sidereal is, she remains unrelentingly insane and by linking her spirit to that of the wielder, that insanity can spread to them as well. She shares not only her wisdom, but the haunted dreams that lead to her insanity, giving the character the equivalent of the Nightmares flaw. Daily, he must engage himself in a test of willpower to resist committing any homicidal or sadistic acts at the silent urging of the blade. In the presence of either a Sidereal or Abyssal, this test of willpower must be made again, though the difficulty increases (Difficulty Rating 2) or else be overwhelmed by a homicidal rage and leap to destroy the Exalted being. While Sorrowful Dreamers hatred for the Abyssal’s who serve the Deathlords responsible for her imprisonment is understandable, the blind rage that comes at the sight of a Sidereal is pure madness, her recognition of one of her own kind striking too deep through her tattered mind and reminding her what she once was. It’s an image to painful to bare.
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