Han'ya/Sorrow

Sorrow

Concept: Human Weapon
Motivation: Find her First Age tomb and retrieve something (she doesn't know what) important from within
Night Caste

Fluff

Sorrow was born a slave, purchased on her second day of life, and raised with her five sisters by a cartel of assassins as an experiment. From a young age, she was trained in the arts of murder with and by her sisters. They were never taught to read, write, or speak, and were never given names. Their entire education, indeed their entire life, for their education was their life, consisted of endless training in every technique known to her owners. She and her sisters never fought except as a group, and were never far from one another. Their owners often commented upon the eerie way they seemed to think, act, and react as one. Each one of them could take on ten armed men and kill every one with their bare hands, without getting a scratch. Fighting as a group, they once massacred two hundred soldiers in a single night. Their last assignment was to kill a sworn brotherhood of Dragon-Blooded. The first four members fell without much difficulty, but the last one managed to fire of a Death Of Obsidian Butterflies. At six lightly armored women. That's gonna hurt in the morning.

By some freakish miracle, Sorrow survived, albeit heavily wounded. The Dragon-Blood fled without checking to see if she was dead, which she very nearly was. Having just lost five people who were less like sisters and more like extensions of herself, she was not really inclined to make any effort to save herself.

Until, of course, she was Exalted.

Which provided her with enough of a physical and emotional boost to make it back to the rendezvous point, where she then collapsed. After a long convalescence, she left the cartel on a red carpet. A liquid red carpet. Her sisters' death had seriously unhinged her, to the point where she was a schizophrenic homocidal sadomasochist. With an Essence pool. Killing people, as brutally and messily as possible, gave her a feeling of reunion with her lost sisters, as did undergoing immense physical pain. Since she did not know how to speak, she was incapable of hearing voices in her head. Nevertheless, she was firmly convinced her sisters were still with her, sharing the confines of her skull in death as they had done in life.

She wandered the Scavenger Lands, acting without reason or motivation. More than once she walked into villages and killed every inhabitant before one of them so much as spoke a word of greeting. On an equal number of occasions, her actions were equally nonsensical. She once spent a year living on a rush mat in front of a graveyard, offering herself to anyone who passed by. On another occasion she knocked down every building in town with a red roof. Her actions were without pattern, dictated by something even less tangible than whimsy. The driving force behind her movement was the recurring dreams of her former lives, which were almost as insane as she was. One night she could be dreaming of running from her Dragon-Blooded murderers, the next she could be reliving the time she played dice with a waterfall elemental. The only recurring image was that of an immense ziggurat of gleaming white marble, in the middle of a deep jungle, the many slaves who labored on its construction, the treasures stored within, the mighty beings bound to the service of its occupant. It was from her dreams that she began to pick up fragments and scraps of Old Realm, the only language she understands, even in part. Her vocabulary is less than fifty words, with no understanding of grammar or conventions. When she had a dream, more often than not she moved. Eventually her movements led her to the South-East, as she looked for the marble ziggurat from her dreams. She, by force of personality and often force of arms, tagged along with treasure-hunting expeditions, looking for the ziggurat. She first met "Crocodile" Seph when the expedition he was leading attacked the expedition she was accompanying. They fought, and both were soon forced to begin expending Essence. The resulting display of power from the so-called Anathema strongly frightened the surviving members of their expeditions, who immediately ceased hostilities and set upon them. Dispatching their attackers without great difficulty, they agreed to a truce, and returned together. Having seen the way Sorrow acts towards most people, her Circlemates are unsure as to why she has not yet turned her psychosis on them except for a few instances where she was provoked. Sorrow herself does not waste any time trying to determine the 'why' of her actions, nor indeed is she capable of doing so, due to the unique nature of her mind. For the present time at least, her Circle is safe, and well-armed with their very own, only slightly used, human weapon.