About Sikarazi of the Singing ScalpelLANTERN BEARER RIVAL: Sikarazi
Sikarazi remembers worshipping the goddess, loving her with all of his heart, saving his passion for her alone. Other clerics of Calistria smiled at his wide-eyed reverence for the goddess, which, in another temple, among another people, might have been considered inappropriately personal, but among the elven followers of the goddess of lust, trickery and vengeance, was regarded as ‘a phase.’ Who didn’t entertain such thoughts about the goddess of lust, after all? Channeling his dreams and fantasies into the study of the ways of the goddess, he grew fixated upon the darker aspects of vengeance, scripting out elaborate revenge fantasies, soaring past schemes to humiliate or shame a rival or betrayer, to meticulously plotted-out scenes of torture and worse. While Calistria is very much a fickle goddess of vengeance, she is also a goddess of strong passions, and his obsession with this one limited aspect of her nature, upon the vengeance, before even the passion, took him down darker paths than even her most cruel and spiteful followers would follow. Disagreements grew bitter, and those who attempted to counsel him to embrace the more pleasurable aspects of the lady’s faith were regarded as enemies, terrible fates planned too for them, lovingly detailed in his jealously-guarded journal… He remembers waking to the silence. He prayed for hours, but the goddess’ touch never fell upon his brow, and the droning of the sacred wasps seemed alien, mocking, even. He felt the eyes of his fellow clergy upon him, the other elves of his community, and he knew in his soul that all could see his shame, that the goddess who had taught him of betrayal and retribution had herself abandoned him, after seeing him this far down a road he had walked in her name. People turned away from his angry glare, from the tears upon his cheeks, and he returned to the shrine and poisoned the waters that fed the sacred wasps, killing the holy creatures of the goddess, and defiling the altar, to show her how his love had transformed into hate, to share with her the lessons of vengeance he had learned. Fleeing into the woods, a whispered voice promised him acceptance, and he found a new faith, and a new family, led along dark paths that he had never known existed. He has spend decades working his way back up the steps of the clergy, a new secret clergy, among a people he never knew existed. Andirifkhu is his new patron, and the demon-lord rewards his imaginative nature and his unforgiving excesses. Sikarazi holds a special place within his heart for the elven followers of Calistria, and will take any chance to arrange the betrayal of such a person, to have them seduced, or framed for some terrible crime, to reduce them to a shattered wreck before ever laying a blade upon them. He has found few opportunities to do so, but still fills journals with disturbingly detailed ‘plans’ for what horrors he will visit upon any who fall into his clutches. Any elf will do, really, and he combines a sadist’s joy with a surgeon’s skill, frustrated in his ambitions by the inability of flesh and blood to long survive his lack of self-control, as he slashes too deeply and too angrily, causing wounds that he may not be able to staunch in time to save his captive for another round. He has been assigned to provide clerical support to a small unit of infiltrators and slavers who work on the surface, and any who help him, even non-Drow, may earn small tokens of favor from him, in return for their aid in reconnoitering or capturing elven individuals for his ‘studies.’ Boons Sikarazi has access to Drow sleep poison, and will sometimes give the mercenaries working towards his interest vials in payment for services rendered. He can also provide medical assistance to those injured in his service, but such treatments are never pleasant, and will usually leave behind a gruesome scar, studded with metal clamps or tightly bound by wire, in place of sutures, as he permanently leaves his mark on any non-Drow he treats. To someone he especially favors, who takes a similar interest in pain, he can spend a week teaching them how to use mundane surgical techniques in combination with a cure wounds spell over the course of 10 minutes to improve the efficacy of the magical healing, so that the minimum damage healed by the magic is equal to the number of ranks of the Heal skill available, up to the maximum the die rolled allows. (Example; A Cleric with 5 ranks of Heal casts cure light wounds over 10 minutes. If he rolls less than 5 on the 1d8, the number is treated as five. If he had 10 ranks, the result of the die roll could still not exceed eight, so a cure light wounds would never be able to heal more than thirteen points of damage using this technique.) This technique expends one use from a Healer’s Kit, and leaves behind a terrible scar. Even a willing subject may have to be restrained, due to the painful nature of the treatment. |
