Ashmoniel Augmirina's page

About Ashmoniel Augmirina

It’d seemed so natural, at first. My research had led me through ancient elvish libraries, and gnomish ones too. I’d spoken with sylphs and communed with celestials, all to no avail. All because I felt, at the waning of my teenage decades, the cold eye of death beginning to turn my way. But the heat that came with summoned devils… that brought the promise of warmth. Of life truly everlasting.
Such a pity the knowledge I needed was lost, burned in the Mitran purges that drove Asmodeus’s worshippers from Talingarde. A mere eight or so decades ago. Had I but the foresight as a younger woman, I could’ve visited those libraries freely - rather than digging through the embers and scraps, tombs and scrolls saved in the vault of decadent noble families too foolish or shortsighted to realise what they held.

Still, at least such company maintained the comforts to which an elvish mage becomes accustomed - at a certain expense. The risks of a little light slave-trading seemed so small, further reduced by judicious enchantments, when one daily risked the wrath of Talingarde’s divine advengers for ‘consorting with the dark powers’, when Sir Balin of Karfeld himself sought one’s body for the fires…

Yet it was the mere city guard who caught me, and the headsman who’ll claim my scalp, and slippers for his wife, and the few hundred years I’d expected to have… lost, wasted… Brandescar Prison is inescapable.

Ash’s crime of slave-trading was to serve as the interface between the decadent noble ‘buyer’ and the foreign slave-trader, whilst studying their secret libraries and stashes of Asmodian material for the secret to eternal life. She has links with (but sees herself as socially above) the black-market underground, and closer ties to decadent noble families, who she looks down upon for their shortsightedness and lack of academic drive and rigour.

It having been made clear to her that leniency would only involve a slightly less-traumatic death, she’s avoided naming the particular noble family she was working for, both out of honour and because she’s no desire to burn for the more serious crime of ‘consorting with dark powers’, though that family’s influence over the justice system might also have something to do with it. The foreign slave-traders she was working with were long gone before the net closed around her, and the few hirelings she’d bothered with - the task, after all, should’ve posed no great difficulty for an elven mage - were streetwise enough to scarper before her capture. Once again, both loyalty - and the lack of value the small-fry possess to the guard - prevented her from turning evidence against them. Not that it would’ve done much good in Talingarde’s harsh-but-fair justice system. She’s guilty as sin, after all...