Being the GM should exempt you from character sheets or smth.

Mostly done, just gonna fill in the history a bit when I feel like writing a book.

[hider=Terilu]

[center][h2][color=Goldenrod]Terilu[/color][/h2][/center]
[center][color=Goldenrod]Ascendent of the Third Caste and Called by the Reaching Hand, in Form of Baítudatu-Thumilie, of New Dawnlit[/color][/center]

[color=goldenrod]Race, Age, Time in the Caravan:[/color]
Eratie, Nineteen, Two Weeks in the Caravan.

[hider=Eratie]

The Eratie are considered a beastrace: humanoid creatures that bear some of the features of animals, or else (depending on who you ask) animals that speak and walk on two legs. For Eratie, the animal they take after is undeniably the bat. They have all the expected features: chiropteran faces ending in a snout, with dark eyes for seeing at night, black and light fur covering their bodies, and huge ears for picking up on echolocation. And, of course, there's that huge set of huge leathery wings sprouting from their shoulders- hard to miss that one.

At least, that's the [i]stereotypical[/i] Eratie. The way an Eratie looks varies much depending not upon their genetics, but upon the mystical energies in the air when they are born. An Eratie may or may not be born with wings; they may or may not have fur; their faces may resemble that of a common fruit bat, or may be more that of an ugly Natalidae. It varies by the stars that are overhead, and by the poorly understood Powers that swirl around them when first they come into this world. Even the time of day plays a role: Eratie born at the stroke midnight often have tiefling-esque horns. They call these variations in their bodies their "Forms," and as they are a people who categorize everything, they of course have a name for each. The most common form is the one they call "Baítudatu-Thumilie," and that is the stereotypical one described above.

Most of the world population of Eratie exists in the land of Tureiamú, which is considered their homeland: it is a small peninsula that stretches out somewhere south of the lands of the Old Marshes and Trist, almost approaching towards the coastal kingdom of Ordos. But, historically, the Eratie who live there have had little traffick or trade with the humans, who they consider a brutish and dangerous bunch, and their culture shows this. Over thousands of years living in the same places and rarely varying their way of life, the Eratie-Tureiamú have been built into a complex, strict culture that prioritizes tradition and orderly behavior. Their caste system is enforced, and unquestioned. Their houses and clans are maintained by blood and by ritual. The lives of those who are born under Tureiamú's sun are set out both by the station of their birth and by their astrological signs. Even the shoes that an Eratie puts on in the morning may as well have been pre-planned according to three thousand years of tradition. Who is there to argue with it?

Each Eratie is meant to behave after their own kind, after all, following their destiny as their Form, Calling and House would dictate it, and this is the only way. Those who break from their destinies are shamed or outcasts. They have walked the Unsteady Path, that winding road which leads to decay, and cannot be made clean again.
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[color=goldenrod]Appearance:[/color]

Terilu is a rather common kind of bat, and this has always irked him. He wishes that he had the horns of the Detiastu-Tiatietu Form, something all dark and imposing to frighten the bigger races. But, alas, he does not. He is in every way what the human imagines when he thinks of an Eratie: something small, maybe three or four feet tall, with a cute fruit bat's face. His fur's all black except for a ring of brown around his shoulders, worn just like you'd wear a scarf.

His eyes are young, and full of burning potential.

[color=goldenrod]History:[/color]

[hider=WIP (just notes, really)]

Staring at the skull-like face, shrunken down to nothing by this ugly, blind plague, the young child was struck with something. He was too young and not bright enough to articulate just what he was feeling, but suddenly he was aware that this is how all life ends. That this is what will eventually happen to the rest of his mothers, and his fathers, and his friends, and then to him. They will all one day be like the body laying on the table.

Tears rolled down his face. They thought he was crying for Mother Deatta. He wasn't.

It was the very next morning he declared to everyone in the nest, with the confidence that only children have of the future, that he was going to become a powerful necromancer. This, he said, was his chosen path. The nests' elders did not much question this. Necromancy was indeed an artform by the ancient laws of their people, and the child had certainly seen enough death in his life that it was no great mystery why his mind should be on this track. They assented. The lad was to be trained in the ways of undeath. They began promptly to search for proper tutors and dig up the proper spellscrolls for his study.

But the plague was not any more idle. Six months later, he lost another mother. This one, Mother Terria, was his birth-giver: the very one he came from. When the messenger boy came sprinting through the narrow, long little halls of the nest to tell him that she'd died, he began to shout and scream. He isn't even sure if the shout was one of grief or anger. He could not distinguish which emotion this was. It was simply wrong: wrong for another one, and [i]this[/i] one, of all, to be taken from him. He cursed and he spit, something that would've gotten him in real trouble if the wrong adult overheard. (The messenger boy, in sympathy, swore himself to silence.) He declared aloud to a room of fellow mourners, when he was taken to see her body, that he'd see her rise again. By the necromantic power that he was going to learn. Nobody took it seriously- he hadn't even been trained yet- but the uncomfortable silence that followed was real enough.

It was later that afternoon when he found out that his birth father was having the corpse cremated. There would be no resurrecting her.

Little Terilu was heartbroken, and confused. He thought this move a random, mean injustice to him, and to his mother. Only later his father sat him down and explained. There's no real bringing someone back from the dead, he told him. The dead rise when a necromancer tells them to, yes, but it's not the whole person. It's either just the body, hollow and rotting, or just the soul, ethereal and tormented. Either way, there is no having Mother Terria back, whole and healthy and herself. That time has now passed.

It nearly killed young Terilu's desire to become a necromancer, hearing that. But changing course is extraordinarily hard in the uncompromising Eratie culture. Already his name has been marked down as a future necromancer. Already, here come the tutors assigned to teach him this sacred art, and here are the relatives bringing gifts of dried bones for their favorite youngling to practice on. The many mothers and fathers of Terilu's nest forbid him from changing course. It would be embarrassing for the family. So he continued.

His first tutor in the art of necromancy was an old, crumbled bat named Master Earídu. He looked as much like a dead body as the ones he brought back, young Terilu joked to his friends. It was funny, because resurrecting the dead seems to be the one thing the ancient necromancer was unable to teach. Terilu has many blurry memories of long hours wasted listening to Master Earídu talk about the theory and philosophies behind necromancy. There was much he had to say about the symbolic meaning of a person who is kept both alive and dead, and why this is important to their culture. When he didn't feel like talking (that was rare, but did- occasionally- happen), he'd sentence Terilu to many long nights of drawing out body charts and complicated diagrams of rituals. He'd review the drawings, mark where Terilu had made a mistake, and send him back to rework the entire thing. 

But only rarely would he let the young pupil put any of this into practice. Perhaps it was because of the Master's failing health: he was nearing sixty, an incredible age for an Eratie, and seemed to have no more energy for real spellcraft. The grave was drawing near to him. During a particularly dry lecture on the nature of arcane energies, he once lamented aloud that he wished he had learned more when he'd been Terilu's age. Then, maybe, he could've ascended into something like lichdom, and kept himself alive for centuries more, as some few of the greatest Eratie necromancers indeed have.

Terilu whined to him that he wouldn't achieve lichdom either- or anything else- if he wasn't shown some real magic soon, but the master would not hear of it. When he predictably died of old age some five years later, Terilu felt more annoyed about it than anything else. This dotting academic had wasted his entire education! In a fit of irritation, he snuck into the Mausoleum with a necromantic spellbook snuck under his arm, and found where they had buried the master. 

He probably would have failed if, ironically, it weren't for the excellent theory and form he'd learned from all those lessons. Dragging out the man's casket with both hands, he cast the most powerful Resurrection Spell he could find on Earídu's own corpse. And it rose to life as his slave. Laughing with genuine delight, he made Earidu's body dance and juggle for him. It was the first thing he'd ever brought to life bigger than a rabbit! It was the eve of his 13th birthday.

And that is, of course, the age of adulthood for Eratie.

He decided now that the Art of Necromancy really was the path for him. If, for no other reason, so that he could escape the fate of so many others in his young life: so that he could use this dark power to stop himself from dying. He wouldn't allow himself to just be another funeral. But he had also decided that his homeland was not the place to learn. The necromancers here were all like Earídu: academic scholars concerned with getting their names on books, not with achieving real things. He is utterly repulsed by them.

So it was that he had many tearful goodbyes with his family and friends. The now adult bat was going to venture out into the "Wilder World," as Eratie called the savage universe outside their safe little peninsula of culture and knowledge. His mothers were convinced he would get himself killed. There, they warned him, necromancy was hated as an evil and black art, and any who discovered what he was would murder him. But no, he reassured them: he would follow the rumors of wicked necromancers in distant lands until he came upon one himself, and there he would beg to be their apprentice. He would learn all they had to teach. If he came back, it would not be in a casket, but as a lord of the dead. Powerful, wise, and ascendent.

It took three years of hard, long travelling and searching, but he did find his teacher. She was an elven woman, Aryyna. Oh, he loved her. She was the opposite of the old bat. The image of a classic necromancer, complete with an undead army and plans to conquer the world. Sensing the presence of her many undead servants from afar off, he had tracked her to her hideout in an abandoned watchtower mounted just at the mouth of a bloody and forsaken old battlefield. Many wars were fought in that land in ages long past and, cleverly, she was raising the corpses that had fallen in battle to build an army of her very own. She was preparing herself for an all-out invasion against the local villages- there was some petty grievance that she had against them; Terilu didn't care what it was. When she saw that he was ready to serve her no matter the cost, Arynna gladly took him under her wing. It helped that he proved to be rather magically gifted. He learned from her how to raise skeletons and ghouls to follow one into battle, and how to seek wisdom from the spirits of those long gone. In time, he was the lieutenant of her dark forces. Just her, him, and a few hundred sword-wielding corpses.

He stayed with her for several more years. It was, he would have to say, the most valuable time of his life. There is nothing like being shown the tricks of the trade by a true expert. He never came close to her power, but she assisted him where he was lacking. She helped him create an undead slave to bathe him every morning and clothe him every night. She had the ghouls bring him wine on a platter. She showed him how one communicates with the undead telepathically, only thinking and having your will accomplished. He could soon sit on the balcony of the tower and watch the dead go out to war at his unspoken command, raiding the villages by night until the powerless peasants were forced to offer tribute. He and her took the very best of their goods: their wines and fabrics, clothes and foodstuffs, their gold and oil. He felt like a warlord.

He could have continued in this way. Being the second-in-command. He could have kept on until they conquered a small kingdom's worth, gladly, even though the occasional bloodshed made him chafe. He did not know he could be a killer- but then, it wasn't [i]him[/i] doing the killing, he told himself. And the villagers were only hurt if they fought back. Nobody made them fight back, he told himself. And so he would have continued. But, alas.  

Fart noise. (I'll be back to finish later.)

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[color=goldenrod]Personality:[/color]

Bubbly. Humorous. Outgoing, bright and immature.

Were these the words you were expecting?

It has seemed strange to many of those who have known Terilu that he seems so... unbothered. So completely unbothered. He does not have the spirit you would expect of a necromancer. There is no edge to him. Or if there is, it's so deep inside that one can rarely find it. He flies down to you with a smile, ready to jest and talk about nothing at all. For him, conversation is a great pleasure in and of itself.

He does tend to show that more aristocratic side of himself: he takes most everything for granted, and gently assumes the service of those around him. The kind who will get the room to laugh with a joke, and then make you the butt of his next joke, and never consider that it could have hurt you. If you held a grudge about it, he'd be genuinely shocked. He's just a rich, laughing boy.

But you wouldn't think that he practices a school of magic as stereotypically dark as he does. That's probably because, in Terilu's mind, it isn't dark. The other necromancers that Terilu previously studied under were all of a kind: brooding, crushed, and weighted down with hate. Of the world, of their victims, of- at least a little- themselves. But there is no such guilt on Terilu's conscience. He sees his form of necromancy as being perfectly fine, after all, and he's still quite young and energetic, so he maintains something of the charisma of a puppy dog even while he may blackly defile the rotting bodies of the dead. Why should they care, anyway? They're dead already.

Perhaps due to his dark nature, he also has an unfortunate love of puns.

[color=goldenrod]Motivation:[/color]
Impatient from a lack of progress under his many tutors, and believing there is no more he can learn from the lectures of old men, Terilu has turned to the Caravan. He does not imagine there is anyone in such a place who can teach him necromancy- but then, he has learned all the theory that he can stomach. The young bat now seeks to gain experience. To put his knowledge into practice, and to hone his power by using it. To do that, he reasons, one must live.

[color=goldenrod]Skills, Strengths and Weaknesses, and Tools:[/color]

[b]Strengths:[/b]
	
	[i]Bat Traits[/i]: As a winged, bat-esque creature, Terilu can fly, has excellent vision in the dark, and- when vision proves not enough- uses echolocation. The echolocation is too high for human hearing, but another Eratie (or anything else with above-average hearing) can pick up on it, making for a kind of secret signal. Eratie talk in ultrasonic sounds when they don't want the lesser races overhearing them.
	
	[i]Necromancy[/i]: This one is obvious. Terilu can raise the dead, and bend them to his own will. He can sense and communicate with any undead, even if they aren't his, and he can take command of the weaker-willed ones. He knows how to reach beyond the veil, tampering and communicating with the souls of those who have left their mortal coils, to various ends. If he's pulled into a fight, he can rip and tear at his enemies' soul, torturing it with dark magic. He can even try to pull a soul wholly away from a person's body, capturing their disembodied spirit as his servant and living their body a husk.

	[i]Eru-atie Method:[/i] This is where the specific kind of necromancy that Terilu practices comes into play. He has a connection to the forces of undeath that lets him sometimes act as if he were already a corpse himself: he can stop breathing for a while when he needs to, and survive things that should kill a living creature because, in a sense, he is [i]not[/i] fully a living creature anymore. He's partially on his path to lichdom. As a rule of thumb: if an undead could do it, Terilu might be able to as well.

[b]Weaknesses:[/b]
	
	[i]Bat Traits[/i]: It's not all good being a bat. He's half-blind during the day, when his nocturnal eyes can't adjust to the sunlight. But most people would've guessed that much. No, the real disadvantage is actually his body type. He's made for flying, but getting a humanoid form off the ground is no easy feat. An Eratie is therefore incredibly small and light. He's only 3 and a half feet tall, his bones are hollow, his whole form is designed to be as weightless as it can possibly be. It's shocking how little he weighs: coming in at only 35 pounds on the scale. He's therefore weaker than a human child, and if any strong man so much as shoves him, he'd go flying. Literally!
	
	[i]Prejudiced[/i]: In spite of his studies under a bright elf and a willful human, and though he has made the acquaintance of many races through his journeys across the Wilder World, Terilu has always found them all to be very simple compared to the shining order and complexity of his own people. Anything non-Eratie is a bit of a barbarian in his mind. They're too often unlettered, backwards, and ignorant of deeper truths. He's (pleasantly) surprised when a human can read.
	
	[i]Dark Connections[/i]: Terilu counts his brand of necromancy as, if not [i]ethical[/i], at least Not So Bad. He avoids torturing souls and tries to avoid harming innocents. Nonetheless, he touches on many dark magics and things that very much are bad, and it's impossible to escape the consequences of messing with these forces. He's been tainted by it. Magics meant to drive out evil creatures, demons and undead and the like, bother him more than they rightfully should. He is a little beacon for evil things. There are abominations from beyond the veil who know his name.

[b]Tools:[/b]
	Aside from basic survival, living and cooking supplies, Terilu has a special collection of prizes given to him by his family, before the outset of his journey. Most of them are a little magic, to be sure, but the real benefit is that they keep him from forgetting his true home, and his true purpose.

	[i]Mother Terria's Ring[/i]: A silver ring he stole out of his natural mother's urn after her passing. He fished it right out of her ashes. It has a slight bit of magic to it that helps out in the tougher moments of spellcasting, but Terilu mostly keeps it out of sentiment.

	[i]Mother Haula's Earring[/i]: Ear piercing has a significance in Eratie culture. The ring you wear is a way of marking yourself. The earring Mother Haula gave him is a hollow silver circle that hangs from Terilu's left ear on a short, golden chain. This is, to those who understand the meaning of such things, the mark of a necromancer. He has a bad habit of tugging at it when he's nervous.

	[i]Father Siámie's Staff[/i]: Once a walking staff that eased his birth father's hurting joints, Terilu has carved and enchanted this family heirloom into a conduit for magical powers. Unlike the ring, when he wields it, he's truly more powerful.

	[i]Grandmother Hal'teura's Recipe Scroll[/i]: Look, no self-respecting Eratie is going on a long journey without a taste of his grandmother's fruit pie. You might say this one isn't magic, but Terilu would ask you to try saying that after you've tasted some.

[hider=Optional: Extra Details]
[center][color=Goldenrod]What They Most Want:[/color]
To escape the cycle. To Reach Beyond.

[color=Goldenrod]If They Had a DnD Alignment, It Would Be:[/color]
Lawful Evil

[color=Goldenrod]Three Likes:[/color]
Poetry, fun, and necromancy.

[color=Goldenrod]Three Dislikes:[/color]
Disorder, aging, ignorance.

[color=Goldenrod]Do They Follow Their Heart or Their Mind?:[/color]
Mind.

[color=Goldenrod]Worst Fear:[/color]
Sinking down into the same kind of base, meaningless life that most others beings already live. Becoming caught up in the degrading cycle of animal instincts and desires, until he grows old and unachieved.

[color=Goldenrod]Favorite Color:[/color]
[color=goldenrod]The color of dawn and dusk.[/color]

[color=Goldenrod]Most Like The Animal:[/color]
Bat. Not only because of his appearance, but because of his nocturnal habits, his love of moonlit flight and his hunting at night.

[color=Goldenrod]Favorite Time of Day:[/color]
Deep dawn, when the stars are fading out from the sky, and the first rays of sunlight crowning over the horizon.

[color=Goldenrod]How They Dress:[/color]

[/center]Clothing among the Eratie is rather complex, dictated highly by class, sex and age, not to mention the natural limiting factors of one's Form, and it's shameful to deviate from the traditional style of dress.

For one such as Terilu, expected clothing is an all-leather robe that flows long in the back, down to the ankles, but is cut short in the front, revealing trousers and black shoes. There's a high, stiff leather collar to the robe, giving the ensemble an official if slightly dramatic air. There are slits for ones wings.

Through the last two years of travelling, Terilu has refused to give up this manner of dress. He left home with several outfits of this kind, and has learned to mend them when they are damaged so that he can keep on rotating through them even as he travels through hot summers and freezing winters. It's become a point of pride that he still dresses like a proper Ascendent of the Third Caste. Even if, by now, the robes are both torn and beaten down by the weather, and his shoes worn as old rat's skin.

[center]
[color=Goldenrod]Favorite Season:[/color]
Winter. He likes the feel of flying through cold air. And besides, Winter is the season of death for many lesser creatures, so he can gather up his forms to work with. There is something very apropos about a necromancer descending on black wings out of a cold winter morn, harvesting up a body from the chilled earth. The ice keeps the corpses fresh.

[color=Goldenrod]What Gods/Spirits/Whatevers They Worship (If Any):[/color]
The 8th Person and the Diviner in Silver

[hider=The 8th Person of Ad'itie]
WIP

[/hider]

[hider=Diviner in Silver]

The Diviner is the monarch and the unchallenged ruler of Tureiamú, who sits upon the Half-Lit Throne administering law and delivering wisdom. It has been said that lives are changed by the words the Diviner utters; that to hear a single sentence spoken from the mouth of the High Priest-King is to hear truth itself. But this great wisdom is not only his own. Its been known for some centuries now that the spirit of Ad'itie rests upon the Diviner. A part of Ad'itie's godly might is both with him and within him, the essence of the Goddess Herself residing inside the breast of the Eratie's king. It is believed by the faithful that the Diviner is the Lawgiver of Ad'itie: the living, breathing bridge between herself and her worshippers. Her champion.

Not all accepted this revelation, when it was first handed down by the Priests of Twilight. They said that it was blasphemy to make a mortal king into a vessel for a goddess. How could he be worthy? They were quickly rooted out as heretics, and their gruesome deaths are now used as tales to scare the disobedient.

It is now accepted by all Eratie that the Diviner is divine. He is an object of worship, second only to Ad'itie Herself.

For the lower classes, this is enough. Those of the Base and the Transcendent castes are left to worship the Divine as the living vessel of their goddess by performing rituals to him when they wake, honoring his name at celebrations and at feast-days, and sanctifying their animal sacrifices to him before they offer them up to Ad'itie proper.

Those of the Asce- HAHA WIP
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