Velanna Sycorax

Velanna's earliest memories begin in the Kristofferson orphanage, where she was raised alongside five other children who would eventually become legendary figures across Xeres. Among them was Xaneborr Shadowbane, the massive half-giant who would become her closest companion and most complicated relationship. Even as a child, Velanna displayed remarkable talent with both bow and innate magical abilities, though her drow heritage made her an outsider even among the other orphans. She learned early to rely on her intelligence and skill rather than social connections, developing a sharp tongue and sharper aim to defend herself from those who viewed her dark elven blood with suspicion. The six orphans formed an unlikely family bound not by blood but by shared hardship, and when they turned sixteen, they set out together to seek their fortune and purpose in a world that had given them nothing but each other.

At eighteen years old, Velanna and her companions discovered they had been marked by the Heavens themselves as Chosen, individuals granted accelerated power and positioned to shape the fate of Xeres through their actions. This revelation came with both blessing and burden, as they found themselves thrust into conflicts far beyond normal mortal concerns, facing threats that required extraordinary power to overcome. Velanna embraced her destiny with characteristic determination, viewing her Chosen status not as divine gift but as validation that her skills and intelligence had earned recognition from forces beyond mortal comprehension. She specialized in combining her natural drow affinity for shadow magic with devastating precision archery, developing techniques that allowed her to eliminate threats from impossible distances while remaining completely undetected. Her tactical brilliance complemented Xaneborr's raw combat prowess perfectly, and together they led their group through increasingly dangerous adventures that would forge legends across the continent.

When the group reached 22 years of age, they made a fateful decision to explore a mysterious Mystic Realm that promised great rewards for those brave enough to venture within. What they discovered was a nightmare dimension where time had no meaning and death could not claim anyone unless they fell in honorable combat. The realm was controlled by Prace, an impossibly powerful vampire lord whose mastery of reality manipulation and temporal magic had created this pocket dimension as his personal hunting ground and prison. Shortly after entering, Velanna was cornered by Prace himself, who saw in her both a worthy opponent and potential successor. He turned her into a vampire against her will, condemning her to an immortal existence that she would come to despise, particularly as she watched what vampirism did to lesser minds over the centuries. The six Heaven's Chosen found themselves trapped in this realm for what subjectively felt like thirty thousand years, forced to fight, survive, and maintain their sanity while the realm's magic prevented their permanent deaths. During this impossible stretch of time, Velanna refined her combat abilities to levels of mastery that no mortal could achieve through normal training, turning every possible technique and strategy into muscle memory developed across millennia of constant practice.

Throughout the thirty thousand years trapped in the timeless realm, Velanna found herself gravitating toward Xaneborr more than any of the other Chosen, despite their vastly different personalities and approaches to survival. She consistently took his side in disputes, defended his decisions even when they seemed questionable, and found herself seeking his presence during the rare moments of peace their situation allowed. There was an undeniable tension between them that grew over the millennia, a connection that went beyond simple companionship or tactical partnership. Yet neither of them ever acted on these feelings, perhaps understanding that the extreme circumstances of their imprisonment made genuine emotional connection impossible to trust, or perhaps simply too damaged by the endless years of violence to risk vulnerability. By the time they escaped the realm, they had learned to carefully ignore the tension that had built between them, burying it beneath layers of professional respect and battlefield camaraderie. The unspoken possibility of what might have been still haunts their interactions when they meet, a ghost of potential intimacy that neither acknowledges but both remember.

Eventually, the Mystic Realm seemed to erode from within, collapsing Prace's temporal prison and finally escaping back into normal reality. They discovered to their shock that while thirty thousand subjective years had passed for them within the realm, six thousand actual years had elapsed in Xeres during their imprisonment. The world they returned to was completely transformed, with civilizations they had known reduced to archaeological curiosities and new powers having risen to dominance. While Xaneborr eventually chose to involve himself with mortal affairs by joining the Chromatic Council, Velanna found herself unable to care about the petty political maneuvering of beings who would live and die in what felt like an eyeblink to her. Instead, she dedicated herself to hunting Prace, the vampire lord who had cursed her with immortality and stolen thirty millennia of her existence. This proved nearly impossible, as Prace had developed the ability to slip between realms and realities, making him almost impossible to track or trap. Yet Velanna persists in her hunt, viewing it as both vengeance and responsibility, determined to prevent him from creating another timeless prison and condemning others to the fate she endured.

Having accumulated vast wealth and magical artifacts over her extended existence, Velanna solved the problem of permanent residence by acquiring a cosmic sack enchanted to hold objects far beyond its apparent size. Within this magical storage, she keeps an entire estate, a sprawling mansion that would rival anything owned by the wealthiest mortal nobility. The estate is staffed entirely by undead servants and magical automatons, creatures that require no payment, hold no judgment about her vampiric nature, and execute her commands with perfect precision. When she arrives in a location, she simply retrieves the mansion from her cosmic sack and places it wherever she pleases, creating an instant fortress of gothic elegance complete with libraries, laboratories, training grounds, and every luxury her refined tastes demand. The undead servants maintain the grounds with meticulous care, the automatons provide security that would challenge even powerful adventurers, and the entire structure serves as both home and statement of power. To enter Velanna's estate uninvited is to court death, but to be welcomed as a guest is to experience hospitality that combines ancient drow sophistication with Victorian elegance and the resources of someone who has had millennia to perfect every detail.

Recently, Velanna attended a masquerade ball thrown by Nultero, one of the Chromatic Council members, more out of boredom than genuine interest in mortal social functions. It was there, amid the swirling dancers and elaborate masks, that she first saw Arties Geodegazer. The moment their eyes met across the ballroom, Velanna felt something she had not experienced in centuries: genuine, inexplicable attraction combined with a haunting sense of familiarity she could not place. Throughout the evening, she found herself unable to look away from this particular drow woman, fascinated by her presence in ways that defied logical explanation. Since that night, Velanna has been plagued by fragment memories and fever dreams of passionate intimacy with another drow woman whose face she cannot quite see, moments of connection and desire that feel simultaneously like memories and impossibilities. She suspects these fragments might be memories of Arties, though she cannot explain how or why she would have such memories of someone she has only just met. This mystery compels her in ways that hunting Prace or accumulating power never could, driving her to seek opportunities to be near Arties and unravel the truth behind these haunting sensations of connection to someone who should be a complete stranger.

Velanna's own brother, the trickster Jerosa Jing, took Arties and the rest of the current Heaven's Chosen hostage and forced them to play a horrid game of chance with real-life consequences. He demanded a game: a heavily modified Deck of Many Things, three cards each, and then round after round of his own invented rules that forced them to pass cards, trade, draw more, surrender what they held, accept what they did not want. He was not playing to win something specific. He was playing because he found it funny, because watching people scramble and bargain and panic was its own reward. He had probably done this many times before. Velanna had spent thirty thousand years in a realm where death was impossible and suffering was infinite. She had developed, across all of those years, a very particular skill: the ability to look at a situation with no good exits and find the one thing that could still be controlled. She looked at the board. She looked at her companions. She looked at the cards. She gave herself all the bad ones. Methodically, deliberately, using every exchange and pass and draw that Jing's shifting rules made available, she routed the damage through herself. Arties and her friends were restored. The cost landed entirely on Velanna, which was what she had been working toward since the first round.

The bad things began to unfold on her one by one as the deck delivered its verdicts. She did not run. She did not appeal. She waited, which she was very good at, having practiced it for millennia. She waited until Jing came close enough. He was laughing, because this was the part he enjoyed: watching the consequences arrive. He leaned in. Through gritted, bloody teeth, she said: "Final Act." She took her brother to hell with her. The people she saved were restored whole. Jing did not come back.

She had spent thirty thousand years surviving things that should have broken her, and six thousand years after that doing something she had told herself was vengeance but was probably, underneath, a search for purpose. She found purpose in the end. Not the way she expected it to come. She found it in a game rigged by a trickster god, in a hand of cursed cards, in the decision to put herself where the damage was going to land so that other people did not have to... a tactic she had learned from a new friend. The ravens that surrounded her have not dispersed. Those who knew her have reported seeing them in places she used to favor, circling without urgency, perching in the specific still way she had. Whether this is mourning, memory, or something else entirely is a question that has not been answered and may not need to be.

Arties and her companions miss her. They have not said this in a single conversation because it is not the kind of thing that fits into a single conversation. It is the kind of thing you carry, that shows up sideways in the quiet moments, that makes you glance at a doorway and notice the particular quality of an absence. They know that what she did was a choice. They know that she made it as completely as she made every other choice in her very long life. They are grateful. They are not sure that gratitude is the right word but they do not have a better one. She would probably find their inability to name it satisfying.

She had also, as always, made her arrangements. Velanna willed her Black Citadel to Sana, Arties's oldest daughter, and with it she entrusted Sana with a quest she would have given to almost no one else: to find the scattered pieces of Velanna's soul, so that one day she might be brought back from the dead. Then the waiting began. She was dead for a long time.

Wherever Jing had dragged the two of them to collect his debt, it was not a place built with an exit in mind. Velanna had accounted for every variable she could name in her final calculation, and "afterward" had not been one of them; the ledger closed, as far as she was concerned, the moment she said the words she had chosen. But Sana had taken her quest seriously. She and her sister Eden managed to find one piece of Velanna's soul, and they found it just in time: shortly afterward, Zechri's life-restoration machine activated and sent its wave through Haven, bringing back every one of Haven's dead. Velanna was included. The wave was not looking for her specifically, and it declined, with the same indifference to precedent she herself was famous for, to leave her behind. She would later describe the sensation, to the handful of people she describes anything to, as being interrupted mid-thought by a sound she had not heard in thirty thousand years: her own pulse, starting again without her permission.

That pulse was not a figure of speech. The wave did not return her as she had died; it restored her to her non-vampiric self, a living drow once more, with warm skin, a heartbeat, and lungs that burned with their first real breath in millennia. In doing so it quietly solved the greatest trouble of her very long life: the curse Prace had laid on her, which she had spent thousands of years trying to find a way past, was simply gone. A black cloud of ravens was already circling overhead, as though they had been waiting the entire time and were relieved to have something to do again.

She did not weep. She went into seclusion for several weeks, alone with her ravens, to take stock of who she was without the curse and without the death she had planned so carefully. When she finally emerged, she went to Arties and her family to thank them. She began, characteristically, with a single dry line (apparently dying properly requires more commitment than I possess), and what followed was not dry at all. Then she left Goodberry to go find her colleague, Lady Dana Oriville.

Above all else, Velanna remains committed to tracking down and destroying Prace, the impossibly powerful vampire lord who turned her into a vampire and trapped her along with her companions in a timeless realm for thirty thousand subjective years. This hunt has consumed much of her existence since escaping that prison, driving her to study dimensional magic, reality manipulation, and the theoretical frameworks that allow beings to slip between realms as Prace does with apparent ease. She knows he is more powerful than her, understands that facing him directly would likely result in her destruction or re-imprisonment, yet cannot abandon the pursuit that has defined her purpose for so long. Her goal is not simply revenge for what he did to her, but prevention of what he might do to others, stopping him from creating another timeless prison dimension where victims are forced to endure millennia of suffering while the outside world moves on without them. She seeks allies, information, and artifacts that might give her an advantage against an enemy who can literally step sideways out of reality when threatened, knowing that eventually she will find a way to corner him in a confrontation that will determine whether her centuries of hunting have any meaning.

The fragment memories and inexplicable attraction Velanna feels toward Arties Geodegazer represent a mystery that she finds more compelling than any puzzle she has encountered in centuries. She needs to understand why a woman she has only just met feels so familiar, why her dreams are filled with images of passionate intimacy with a drow woman whose face she cannot quite see, and whether these sensations represent genuine memories somehow displaced in time or something else entirely. Her approach to solving this mystery combines her natural intellectual curiosity with a very personal desire to understand her own feelings, something she has long suppressed in favor of cold rationality and tactical thinking. She is willing to assist Arties and her companions with their goals, viewing such cooperation as both investment in potential allies and opportunity to spend time near the source of her confusion. Whether these fragment memories prove to be echoes of another cycle, glimpses of a timeline that no longer exists, or simply her own desires manifesting as false recollections, she is determined to discover the truth and understand why, after thirty thousand years of emotional isolation, she suddenly finds herself caring about someone she should barely know.

Velanna's first errand in her second life is to find her colleague, Lady Dana Oriville of Mistholm, whose dimensional awareness made her one of Velanna's most valuable allies in the long hunt for Prace. For thousands of years, curing her vampirism was the goal Velanna kept returning to, the one she believed might prove impossible. Now that it has been solved for her, by a machine she did not build and a wave that was not looking for her, she has a great many things to reconsider, and Dana is the person she wants to reconsider them with. She did not linger in Goodberry once she had said her thanks.

After thirty thousand years focused primarily on survival and six thousand years dedicated to hunting Prace, Velanna has begun to recognize that vengeance and self-preservation, while compelling, do not constitute a meaningful existence even for an immortal being. She finds herself seeking something more, though she cannot clearly articulate what that might be. The fragment memories of Arties, the strange pull she feels toward this particular mortal adventure group, these sensations hint at possibilities she had long ago dismissed as irrelevant to her existence. Perhaps genuine connection is still possible after all the centuries of isolation. Perhaps there are causes worth fighting for beyond personal vendetta. Perhaps the companionship she once shared with the Heaven's Chosen could be found again with different people in different circumstances. She does not yet know what form this new purpose will take, but she recognizes that her current path, while sustainable, leads nowhere but endless repetition of the same patterns. For the first time in millennia, Velanna finds herself open to the possibility of change, willing to consider that her story might contain chapters beyond hunter and hunted, predator and prey, immortal observer of mortal folly.