Description
Sraephys stands just over seven feet tall, a towering figure of lean muscle,
his body shaped like a bow pulled tight. His wings, folded neatly against his
back, twitch now and then. His feathers are a searing, almost violent red,
deep crimson across his limbs, bright scarlet flashing at the joints and wing
crests, and blackened tips along his trailing plumes.
A mask of black feathers covers the region around his eyes. Along his arms
and legs, the feathers lengthen, sway, and shift with his movements like
wind-tossed flame, while his torso and face are covered in such fine, tight
down that they almost resemble bare skin until you're close enough to see the
grain.
His eyes are pure yellow, cold as staring into a storm's center. They glow
unnaturally against the black of his mask, unblinking and unreadable. A thin,
sharp beak juts just slightly from his face, understated but unmistakably
avian, a nod to an ancestry that survived war and fire.
From the back of his skull trails a crest of long, tapering feathers, like a
plume of molten glass, swaying softly even in still air.
Role
The Accident
Added Sat May 10 17:18:36 2025 at level 11:
Sraephys was an accident, the kind of accident that powerful men make when
they believe no one is watching. A High Lord of Ayr'trinil had taken a
momentary liking to his mother, a flicker of lust behind silk curtains, and
Sraephys was the result. He wasn't acknowledged, of course. Children like him
never were. He was a secret handled with the discretion of wealth: no
scandal, no public shame, just a swaddled mistake sent away with a bag of
coin and a name no one spoke aloud.
He ended up in Galadon, where the fog never quite lifted from the alleys and
the homes were packed too tight to breathe. His foster parents were neither
cruel nor kind. They did what they were paid to do, and they were paid well.
Coin came like clockwork, always anonymous, always precise, like someone
keeping a ledger from behind a curtain. The boy never asked. They never told.
In that home, silence was as valuable as food.
His childhood blurred together like an old account book, neat, quiet,
unmemorable. He did well in school, gravitated toward numbers, enjoyed the
way money obeyed rules that people never did. But behind the columns and
sums, something darker stirred. Necromancy caught his eye not for its
spectacle, but for its efficiency. Dead servants didn't ask questions. They
didn't forget commands. They didn't judge. They worked, without complaint,
without ambition, without betrayal.
To Sraephys, the dead were a better investment.
While he dabbled in necromancy, in the quiet hours of evening when the bank's
ledgers had been tallied and the doors locked, Sraephys built a more
conventional life by day. He became a banker, a coin-counter, a manager of
investments and debts, the kind of man whose handshake could secure a future
or damn it to ruin. It was there, behind thick vault doors and beneath the
gilded ceilings of Galadon's central bank, that he began to learn the true
anatomy of power.
He watched them come, lords with blood-stained rings, merchants with soft
voices and sharper smiles, peasants trembling with sweat-stained caps in
hand. No matter their birth or armor or station, they all leaned in the same
way across the polished desk when they needed money. The bank had no crown,
but it ruled all the same. It ruled because coin speaks loud, and silence
bought in gold stays buried longer than any grave. That was when he
understood: kings, cabals, councils, all of them depended on the lie of
stability.
All empires, he realized, were built on a lie. But not a crude one, not some
obvious deception shouted from balconies. No, it was always a clever lie,
wrapped in ceremony and scrollwork, enforced not with blades but with
contracts and coin. He began to admire the artistry of it.
The Seed
Added Sat May 10 17:19:27 2025 at level 11:
It was during this quiet climb through society's velvet-lined ribcage that
the letter came. Written in a graceful, perfumed hand, his mother's,
revealing herself like a ghost with perfect timing. She wrote of the High
Lord. Of why he had been born. Of what he was. Her words were not loving, but
they were clear. She had watched him, from afar, and now deemed him ready to
know. Sraephys read it once. Then again. The world tilted.
He left Galadon the next day, not in haste but with surgical precision. He
took nothing with him but what he had earned and what he had learned. He
didn't rage. He didn't cry. He watched. Observed. Studied.
In knowing his blood, he understood the difference in his mind, the sharpness
of it, the way he could see a lie before it was spoken. He wasn't just
clever. He was constructed. And now that he understood his design, he
intended to put it to use.
His father would see him now as an embarrassment. A smudge on a bloodline so
carefully curated it could be mistaken for a scripture. And perhaps his
father was right, Sraephys had not risen through noble titles or tournaments,
but through account books, whispered deals, and the quiet art of moving other
men's coin without lifting a single blade. He would not tarnish his father's
reputation, no. The man had never given him his name, and Sraephys would
never ask for it.
Still, curiosity is a persistent itch.
They met one time in a candlelit tavern nestled into the belly of the rising
city. His father didn't know who he was at first. But the resemblance hung
between them like smoke. The tilt of the beak. The measured way of speaking.
The silence that wrapped each sentence in invisible parentheses.
They talked for hours. Politics. Trade. The decay of courts. It was civil.
Intellectual. Almost warm. At the end, as if moved by some unspoken
recognition, his father reached into a weather-worn satchel and slid across
the table a small, leather-bound volume: The Doctrines of Lord Rillan.
No explanation. No apology. Just the weight of expectation in hardcover.
Sraephys read it by firelight over the next month. The words clung to his
bones, principles of structure, hierarchy, consequence. The god of the chisel
and the blueprint. Rillan did not ask for love. He asked for function. And
Sraephys realized: this was not a gift. It was a mirror.
The Future
Added Sat May 10 17:19:39 2025 at level 11:
He, too, was rigid. Calculating. A believer not in chaos, but in the beauty
of systems. Yet unlike his father, Sraephys had no illusions of permanence.
He'd seen the way wealth rotted at the core of power. He knew the ceilings of
palaces were painted to distract from the cracks in their foundations.
He would not be the son of a lord.
He would become a Magistrate, not simply to serve the law, but to wield it as
it was truly meant to be used: a tool of design, a cage for the unruly, a
weapon for the future. Justice would no longer be blind. It would wear his
face.
Forward
Added Sat May 17 10:28:33 2025 at level 41:
Sraephys remembered the message of Lord Rillan. Form a plan. Seize the
moment. It echoed not as suggestion, but as instruction, the kind that leaves
no room for delay, no tolerance for failure. He had obeyed.
It was the image of Rillan, his very existence that crystallized the vision.
The way even hardened killers like Rthar the Savage flinched in his shadow.
There was no sermon, no decree. Just presence. That was the model.
Sraephys would seek to become a Vindicator. Not to chase criminals. Not to
protect the streets. That was for those who mistook service for sacrifice.
No, he would embody the inevitability of law, its terrifying certainty. He
would not be feared because he killed. He would be feared because once his
name was invoked, the end had already been written.
With that fear would come leverage. With leverage, clout. With
clout, succession.
He would not petition for the Provost's seat. He would not campaign. He would
inherit it by making the idea of any other successor feel inadequate. The
Tribunal would need him because the law would come to depend on the image he
had built.
And so, in silence, he recited the tenets of Rillan like incantations, each
one a rung on the ladder:
Laws are in place to protect.
Banks are in place to protect your wealth.
Those in power shall be worshiped and obeyed.
Be the man of the people.
Control the narrative.
Divide to rule.
The first step was mastery. Of the role. Of magic. Of the spectacle. The
lawless had grown bold. That was a flaw in the system's reflection, and
Sraephys would correct it.
He did not do it for the people. He never had.
He did it for the shape of the world he intended to rule.
One black feather at a time.
PK Wins
May 14, 2025|Lv 35|Galadon|Eladoness vs 1: [35] Sraephys (100%, slash)
May 15, 2025|Lv 38|Galadon|Xellius vs 3: [51] Hildt (48%, slice), [38] Sraephys (13%), [49] Throndir (37%)
May 20, 2025|Lv 47|The North Road|Raulf vs 2: [51] Pionice (8%), [47] Sraephys (91%, poison)
May 20, 2025|Lv 47|Galadon|Rthar vs 1: [47] Sraephys (100%, poison)
May 20, 2025|Lv 47|The Spire of the Blood Tribunal|Raulf vs 2: [47] Sraephys (20%), [51] Aevylen (79%, slash)
May 21, 2025|Lv 47|The Ruins of Ostalagiah|Rthar vs 1: [47] Sraephys (100%, KB)