[hider=The Forbidden Archivist]
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[color=firebrick][u][b]Name[/b][/u][/color]	
Ishtar Astarte Resheph

[color=firebrick][u][b]Titles[/b][/u][/color]	
Keeper of the Forbidden Archives, The Blighted Recordkeeper, The Cursed Doomsayer

[color=firebrick][u][b]Age[/b][/u][/color]	
49

[color=firebrick][u][b]Race[/b][/u][/color]	
Human (Wight)

[color=firebrick][u][b]Training[/b][/u][/color]	
Ishtar has no official training, but she spent a great deal of time around other necromancers and cultists. Thusly, she has quite a bit of insight into their darker arts.

[color=firebrick][u][b]Equipment[/b][/u][/color]	
[indent][color=firebrick]🟒[b]Carapace Gauntlets |[/b][/color] Ishtar carries no weapons as she sparsely has the physical strength to wield one. When she finds herself unguarded in her human form, this custom-made pair of gauntlets she procured in her time working with a cult of undeath are the best she has. They appear as a number of interlocking steel plates connected to form a pair of gauntlets that sit far up onto her forearms. What may seem out of place is the fingertips of her gauntlets, as they are curved into razor-tipped claws. Ishtar opts for these over any other weapon because they are specially made not to shatter or fall off if she eschews her human form.

[color=firebrick]🟒[b]Canopic Jar of Heart |[/b][/color] Being the last of Ishtar’s canopic jars in her possession, she guards it with her life. Her jar of heart governs the free flowing of her circulatory system despite her heartless form. It is no more than a foot tall, and doesn’t provide too much trouble to carry around. The clay jar depicts an ornately adorned human starting to succumb to the bony form of an undead Lich.

[color=firebrick]🟒[b]Stolen Page of Forbidden Lore |[/b][/color] Ishtar has a lot more planned than she likes to give away. When told to fetch a book for the court wizard, she managed to carefully harvest a page from [i]On the Nature of the Dead and the Risen, Volume IV: Liches, Wights, and other Immortals in the Darkness; By Lacerus Golgathya[/i]. Surprisingly, the nature of the page has nothing to do with Wights like herself...[/indent]


[color=firebrick][u][b]Spell Skills[/b][/u][/color]
[indent][color=firebrick]🟒[b]Necrotic Ritualist |[/b][/color] Ishtar is an adept purveyor of necromantic magics. These skills have been afforded to her through careful research of innumerable occult grimoires and ancient books. While most of her spell-like abilities revolve around vile rituals and complex feats of spellcasting, they most commonly manifest in two ways. The first of which is her ability to drain life from living entities. This lifedrinking manifests as tethers of dark energy stemming from her palms. This spell is how Ishtar sustains herself as a wight, but it also perpetuates her Curse of the Blighted. The second notable feat of necromancy revolves around suspended reanimation of dead entities. While Ishtar has found herself able to conjure up massive surges of lifeforce to drive into these creatures, her distance from her canopic jars and weakened form leave her abilities in a fledgling state. As it stands, Ishtar is almost entirely cut off from her reanimation abilities, leaving her only able to bring diminutive creatures such as insects alive for any prolonged periods of time.

[color=firebrick]🟒[b]Doomsayer’s Dark Speech |[/b][/color] Having so great a capacity for knowledge of the world’s Eldritch inner workings leaves the mind scarred in palpable ways. To perpetuate her research, Ishtar has deciphered the linguistics used by ancient necromancers and other vile dark artists known as Dark Speech. Dark Speech sounds guttural and inhuman in its syllabic incantations, and merely hearing the words seems to twist at the souls of all living creatures— inciting panic and violence as simple seeds in the back of the mind. While these effects appear as scarcely more than discomforting thoughts in humans, small minded beings such as insects and other vermin of the world often heed the words of Dark Speech as they are whispered into their heads. With her extensive knowledge of Dark Speech, Ishtar finds herself able to worm commands into and understand the communication of vermin creatures, though larger entities may choose to disobey. She often wields this power to command insectile creatures or other small pestilential animals at her will.

[color=firebrick]🟒[b]Twisted Form |[/b][/color] As Ishtar drifted further from humanity, her abilities as a Wight fluxed rapidly. Despite her concealed human appearance when fully energized, she has the ability to twist her body back into the aberrant form she finds herself trapped in. When morphing back into her wight form, Ishtar’s limbs elongate, her spine bends in its place, her face takes on a misshapen cast, and she moves with a cunning swiftness. While she may be particularly susceptible to physical strikes, wights are able to move with great agility and remain as excellent casters focusing mainly on voracious offense. Because Ishtar’s abilities are tied to her canopic jars, her twisted form is strongest when she is in close proximity to greater amounts of her canopic idols. While further away from her remaining jars, her abilities are inhibited to an even greater degree.[/indent]

[color=firebrick][u][b]Other Skills[/b][/u][/color]
[indent][color=firebrick]🟒[b]Dark Lore Archivist |[/b][/color] Due to her time in captivity aside innumerable undead cultists alongside her work as the Forbidden Archivist, Ishtar has amassed an astounding hold on knowledge of the world’s dark lore. Her knowledge of topics concerning the dark arts and other vile facets of life are nearly unmatched. When it comes to uncovering secrets or encountering devilish riddles, Ishtar is an exemplar of the art.[/indent]

[color=firebrick][u][b]Weaknesses[/b][/u][/color]
[indent][color=firebrick]🟒[b]Doomdreamer’s Vile Lore |[/b][/color] To maintain forbidden lore in the capacity and extent that Ishtar does takes a toll on the mind. With her brain so constantly immersed in the dark lore of the world, Ishtar is consequently plagued by vile nightmares almost every time she opts to rest. In sleep, Ishtar is constantly haunted by phantasms of her greatest fears. Because of this, her life is wrought with insomnia and and a certain incurable fatigue. Ishtar is almost never at her peak alertness or physical condition. The hallucinatory images that visit her in dreams only cause her mind to drift further from reality as the days pass.

[color=firebrick]🟒[b]Withering Lifedrinker |[/b][/color] Ishtar’s extended lifespan has come with as many banes as it has boons. Originally, Ishtar used her necromantic arts to artificially sustain herself from bodily atrophy caused by disease. Her fixes will always be temporary, however, and Ishtar is feeling the effects of such mortal flesh. Her body is weak, and it grows weaker with every day. Due to her extensive overuse of her arts, Ishtar’s body would be unable to sustain itself naturally without the support of her necromantic rituals. As such, necrosis and atrophy have to be combated in Ishtar’s daily life. Her body crumbles easier, her bones break with less force, and she becomes exhausted more quickly.

[color=firebrick]🟒[b]Curse of the Blighted |[/b][/color] The radiance of the vile nature emanating from Ishtar stems from her corrupt magic. She’s become so tainted by her arts that her very touch blights the world around her. Ishtar finds herself unable to touch living or ripe plant matter without it withering into a crumbling shell of life.

[color=firebrick]🟒[b]Preternatural Inversion |[/b][/color] Coinciding in part with her Curse of the Blighted, Ishtar finds her horrifying presence extending beyond plant life. She finds that most natural entities and the fauna of the world to be very perturbed by her presence. Animals almost always regard Ishtar with fear or hostility. She finds it very difficult to interact with commonly kept animals. On the converse side of things, this strange curse seems to work in another way. Vermin-like creatures such as parasites and pests seem to regard her with an eerie curiosity. She will often find herself constantly pestered by ominous swarms of insects.

[color=firebrick]🟒[b]Witch’s Superstitions |[/b][/color] As a byproduct of being raised around so many strange cultures involving the more darker arts of magic, Ishtar has picked up innumerable superstitions carried by the cultists around her. To the common man, it would seem that Ishtar just hinders herself with a number of inane taboos. In strange circumstances, Ishtar will often be found performing unnecessary rituals and rites to keep herself at peace.

[color=firebrick]🟒[b]Canopic Imprisonment |[/b][/color] Because of the nature of Ishtar’s tainted body and soul, her necrotic magic sustains her life through the Canopic Rite of Animation. This, while providing the benefit of sustaining life, also ties her sustained life to five canopic jars that carry her isolated and preserved organs: the jars of Lungs, Stomach, Liver, Intestines, and Heart— each carved to depict the shape of a different animal avatar. When one of these jars is smashed, Ishtar loses a great deal of her physical and magical abilities. Should all the jars be smashed, Ishtar’s body would stop working and she would crumble due to the rapid aging effects of her long but staved-off life.[/indent]


[color=firebrick][u][b]Affiliation[/b][/u][/color]
[indent][color=firebrick]🟒[/color]Exiled Fugitive in the Order of the Radiant Sun and its offshoots
[color=firebrick]🟒[/color]Blighted Recordkeeper of the Grand Kingdom of Kron Nesis[/indent]

[color=firebrick][u][b]Personality[/b][/u][/color]
Despite her youthful appearance, Ishtar comes off as a shattered soul that has seen too much. There is malice in her gaze and contempt in every word she speaks. Despite this, she is by no means a violent soul. While standoffish, Ishtar combats her opponents first with her vast knowledge before ever resorting to lash out physically at an adversary. In such endeavors, Ishtar may come off as slightly arrogant and conceited. This doesn’t change her overarching mentality however, for deep inside Ishtar truly wishes to protect the world from the dark secrets she’s plagued her brain with. This leaves her with quite the loner mentality, but Ishtar is not opposed to working with others should she respect their intellect or abilities. 

Even beyond that, there is still some noticeable softness to Ishtar’s heart no matter how deeply she buries it. This comes alive in the presence of some of her habits. When one enters her workspace, they would notice a number of plants dotted around, all of them wilted or dying due to her Curse of the Blighted. Nonetheless, Ishtar secretly wishes she could cultivate life as easily as she could before she chose to cultivate undeath. When it comes to the fauna of the forest that react to her with ominous rage, Ishtar still tries to befriend the animals around her. She’s taken to doing this through masking the scent of death on her person with a number of concocted perfumes, though none succeed in great degrees.


[color=firebrick][u][b]History[/b][/u][/color]
On a date long lost to history, a young girl was born in the fragmented Eamonvale to a stalwart warrior and his bride. They called her Inanna Astarte Resheph, but that was not a name she would bear for many more years. She grew up well taken care of by her two parents as they adhered strictly to religious dogmas of the distant temples of the Archclericy. Because of this, Inanna’s parents were rather strict in sheltering her during her upbringing. This caused the young girl to be very curious about the facets of the world from which she was kept. Perhaps things would have been vastly different for her had Inanna been able to maintain that happy family life, but as a swathe of pestilential vermin overtook the city and local fields, food grew sparse and the food that was available was often plagued with disease.

Inanna’s mother was among the first victims of the plague that struck across Eamonvale. To deal with death so young was not easy for the young girl, and her father’s warrior mentality did not do much to assist her. Inanna chose to shut herself away, severely disconnecting from the people around her. As much as she wanted to stay locked away in her room, though, Inanna found her solitude maddening. When her father was so often lost in his own work, Inanna often took to the village’s library where she could bury herself in books. It was at this local library where she befriended a librarian who would notice her plight and offer suggestions for books of fantastic tales. It was one particular genre that Inanna found herself drawn to as she sifted through massive catalogues: stories of battling lords of undeath.

It wasn’t as much the heroes of her stories that captivated Inanna’s interest as much as the cultists of the undead. Her nascent mind was mesmerized by the concept of escaping death. Inanna could only imagine what she could have done to save her mother if she had the power of her profane role models. That wishful thinking morphed into something much more profound and urgent when Inanna found that she had caught an atrophying plague herself. She poured herself into her studies, seeking out only books that could clue her in further on the secrets of necromancy. Things came to a head when Inanna began to piece together a simple necromantic concept called lifedrinking, which acts as a form of staving off death and necrosis by consuming the life force of other prepared through various means. The implications of such a dangerous tradition were entirely lost on Inanna in her pursuit to escape the fate of her mother. 

This first casting of necromantic magic was infantile, but it succeeded nonetheless due to Inanna’s careful research and vastly expansive amount of sourcebooks. To feed herself in such a spell, Inanna was required to drain lifeforce from a living animal. This task was easy enough with a few grazing fields in close proximity to her residence in Eamonvale, and for the next few weeks, Inanna managed to combat her atrophying body’s symptoms. Such careless spellcasting didn’t go without notice much longer than that, however. For it wasn’t only Inanna that whispered of dark arts in Eamonvale’s night air.

The night appeared quiet, but Eamonvale was anything but as a procession of sickened cultists in their twisted forms paraded through the streets. Most citizens locked themselves away in the homes, and that seemed to do the trick. Any guardsmen that went out to face them met the same fate as his brothers that went before. The cultists were not there to take over the town or raze it to the ground, though. They toiled up to only a number of houses, calmly forcing their ways inside and taking a small number of inhabitants as slaves. All of the captured townspeople had one thing in common: they were vile figures known only as evil among the populace. Inanna may have thought she was safe locked away with her father, but as the procession smashed the door open, she saw visions of doom for the first time. It was revealed that a number of Eamonvale residents had given a list of vile people to the cultists as a form of tribute as to allow the good people to survive. What Inanna soon learned was that she had made the list. The librarian she had so often found helpful had been clued in to the dark musings of the young girl. Inanna sought to fight back with her father at her side, but as she was clasped in the bony hands of her captors, her father looked to her only with a longing gaze of despair. He now knew of her toilings and he had no intention of forgiving her.

With no hope left, Inanna is taken towards the center of Telduria to a camp on a desolate stretch of land somewhere between the Coven of Barrows and Morazuin. Hidden away was an encampment of cultists subordinate to the liches of the Coven of Barrows, many of whom were undead themselves. It was there that Inanna had in spirit died, born again under the name Ishtar in servitude to the worshippers of undeath. While a number of her duties were more physical in nature, Ishtar was by no means strong enough to accomplish much. It wasn’t long before she found herself lucky enough to act as a keeper of all the stolen books coveted by the cult. In her work, she spent hours sorting through them and maintaining the upkeep of the makeshift library as her superiors scoured the texts in hopes of finding relevant ancient knowledge to further practice their art. It was at this post that Ishtar was first really acquainted with the breadth of everything necromancy had to offer.

Finally realizing the power of the knowledge at her fingertips, Ishtar felt a duty to protect the secrets that ‘her’ library acquired in hopes that she could bring what she had learned back to the Archclericy should she ever be able to escape and flee to the temples— a wishful hope that she never gave up on in her time at the cultist escarpment. Her good-natured motivations did, however, dwindle over the years as Ishtar opted to start using the necromantic arts she studied freely to give her the necessary abilities to endure the years of servitude.

Ishtar spent innumerable years at the escarpment, aging very little in her time there due to her growing necromantic prowess. As she originally expected, an inevitable surge of troops in allegiance to the Order of the Radiant Sun tore through the encampment like gale force winds. In this instance, Ishtar felt a fear she hadn’t felt since her time in Eamonvale. In a decisive moment of deception, Ishtar surrendered herself to the Order acting as if she had been an innocent captive the whole time she was there. It was this bluff that allowed her to be rescued and taken back to Valon. With her manipulative wit, Ishtar offered that since she had been in such close proximity to the vile arts entombed in the forbidden grimoires of the cult that she could assist the Order of the Radiant Sun in protecting further minds from being tainted by such knowledge by acting as a keeper of their Forbidden Archives. Although things didn’t start so glamorously, it wasn’t more than a handful of years before Ishtar went from a simple recordkeeper to the title of Forbidden Archivist. In her cunning trickery, she had found herself just the position she needed to propagate her studies to an extreme degree. She was exactly where she wanted to be: protecting and studying the eldritch knowledge hidden in ancient books of dark lore.

Things weren’t all so perfect in Ishtar’s life, though. She had become so reliant on her vile magics to keep herself upright, that her own upkeep had become more and more difficult to hide from her superiors in the order. Her body deteriorated in greater degrees as she began to look more like the twisted undead she had once forsaken. In a cowardly effort to maintain her position as Forbidden Archivist, Ishtar locked herself away in the archives, forbidding entry to most, and even then visitors were only accepted on sparse occasions due to a number of off-the-cuff excuses. Her body was failing and atrophying away, and she knew only one way to stave off the inevitable. Ishtar chose to seek out a powerful ritual called the Canopic Rite of Animation— a decision that she would never be able to reverse. Throwing caution to the wind, Ishtar locked herself in the archives, viscerally extracting a number of her organs and preserving them magically in enchanted canopic jars. Doing so allowed her body to function as though the organs were present as long as she sustained herself on lifeforce drained from living beings. These canopic jars had to be kept whole, for if they were broken, her body would slowly fail. While most of her jars were kept scattered about and hidden in the Forbidden Archives, she always kept her Jar of Heart in close proximity.

It was at this point that Ishtar became acutely aware that she was becoming something less than human. Necromantic lore according to the Canopic Rite of Animation would have referred to her as a ‘Wight’: a creature tainted so greatly by vile magic that she now almost fully sustained herself on her dark arts. Her body, when not sufficiently energized via necromantic draining, would warp beyond human recognition, echoing a twisted reflection of what she once was. Her limbs would elongate unevenly, her spine would stoop and bend, and she would move as a monster bounding about in agile voracity. Realizing what she had done, Ishtar gave herself the ultimatum that the dark lore she surrounded herself with had to be protected at all costs lest others find themselves in her position. She gave notice that the Forbidden Archives would remain sealed for a number of years, but suspicions in other administrative portions of the Order grew far to great to disregard Ishtar’s actions. 

In an act of complete subordination, a paladin of the Order disregarded the orders of his superiors and raided the archives to press Ishtar for answers. The confrontation that followed did not end well for either party. As the paladin stumbled from the archives having been wounded a number of times, he charged down the temple’s corridors for help. In his battle, he did manage to shatter one of Ishtar’s canopic jars, thusly wounding her greatly when he uncovered her secrets. Ishtar knew she had to flee.

When the paladin returned to the archives with reinforcements, it was discovered that the doors to the archives were sealed behind a massive tumorous gate of flesh and pestilence, growing back as the Order’s men slashed at it as if fighting to protect the archives. This was the result of a massive ritual spell prepared by Ishtar in a last resort to protect her canopic jars and the lore of the archives. After the completion of such a powerful necrotic ritual, Ishtar knew she was drained and had no chance to fight back against the whole of the Order of the Radiant Sun. She fled the Archclericy altogether heading for The Grand Kingdom of Kron Nesis to disguise herself as a simple human mage. She found herself offering to work for the court wizard, hoping to one day strategize to retake the archives before the seal is broken and her canopic jars are shattered. As selfish as her motivations may have seemed, the twisted creature recognized in her final moments in the archives the dangers in her art. Now seeking to protect others from its vile grip, she finds herself consumed with the perpetual protection of ancient secrets from the populace, though her laymen’s position doesn’t offer much as it stands. In the end, Ishtar is simply grateful she was able to cut deals with the court mage in Kron-Nesis. Her particular knowledge had value to him, but Ishtar is kept under a close watch as the court mage did well to detect her true nature despite her facade.
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