Zalthiel

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Information

Player: JVNemesis

Zalthiel Profile.png

Character Full Name: Zalthiel Nightwhisper

Character In-Game Name: Zalthiel

Nickname(s): "Evil witch", "Bitch", "the ugly one (use with extreme caution)"

Association(s): None

Race: Night Elf

Class: Death Knight

Age: 498 years alive, 2 dead.

Sex: Female

Hair: Greenish white

Eyes: Glowing blue

Weight: 237 lbs.

Height: 6' 7”

Alignment: Neutral Evil

Appearance

Dark, heavy plate with a cowled cloak and loose skirt, with slits running up and down the sides for ease of motion.

Other: A faint smell of rot and decay surrounds her. Her body is heavily disfigured and decayed, so she invariably wears clothing and armor that covers her entire form. Her ghoul, Eyestealer, is never far from her side. He wears several strands of dried eyes taken from Zalthiel's kills threaded into necklaces.

Skills/Abilities

Zalthiel is a death knight, with all the power and abilities that comes with such a title. Pain has no meaning to her, with very few exceptions. She is extremely skilled in the manipulation and channeling of the runic magic now available to her, able to create foul plagues and ravaging curses, choke the life from her foes, conjure withering blasts of unholy energy and summon gales of icy power. Her necromantic abilities are also elevated; Eyestealer is fueled by additional power, and Zalthiel has little issue with creating and controlling larger numbers of undead. As her magical abilities have grown, however, her swordsmanship has been a bit neglected. An acceptable tradeoff, in Zalthiel's mind. The high concentration of unholy magicks in Zalthiel's body have, additionally, left her with an increased vulnerability to Light-based attacks, even among other undead.

Personality

Where she was once quiet, kind, and sympathetic, Zalthiel's personality has done an abrupt about-face since her death and resurrection. She is now cold and bitter, and has no respect for any of the living. Death Knights of all races begin on a good note with her, as “we are all kin in death.” Zalthiel utterly despises any sort of religion, particularly the followers of Elune. She will go out of her way to disrupt their activities, and take any opportunity to defile their shrines and blaspheme against their deities.

Zathiel has an odd, bordering on the disgusting, fascination with death, undeath, and disease. She is affectionate with her ghouls, which can be a rather disconcerting sight.

Zalthiel dislikes the mindlessness of the Scourge, but she does like the idea of slaughtering the living and raising them into undeath.

In combat, Zalthiel prefers to have Eyestealer begin the assault, while she evaluates the opponent's abilities. She will only engage personally if the powerful ghoul is not enough. The death knight uses unholy spells and plagues to cripple her foes and anti-magic zones to counter spellcasters before finishing an enemy off with either a final blast of dark magic or a thrust of her runeblade.

She always wears heavy armor and a cowled cloak to conceal her ravaged and scarred body.

History

Zalthiel was born into the Priesthood of Elune; her mother Tygrelle was a devout Priestess of the Moon, her sister followed her mother's path, and even her cousin Sagi was devoted to the priesthood. Zalthiel embraced the path Tygrelle pushed on her as best she could, following the trials and training all Priestesses must undergo. The first four and a half centuries of her life were quiet and uneventful, a tranquil existence in the forests of Ashenvale with her mother and family. There was no conflict, no violence to contend with in her half millennia of life.

All of that changed, however, with the coming of the orcs.

When the savage orcs, crazed with Mannoroth's blood, first entered Ashenvale and cut a swath of destruction through the once-peaceful forest, Zalthiel was devastated. To one who had never so much as considered the notion, the senseless slaughter and violence was unthinkable. Zalthiel and her sister fled to the deepest reaches of Hyjal while their mother assisted in the defense of their homeland.

Zalthiel moved between the injured and the dying brought to their refuge, mechanical in her healing. She continued this role until the battle for Mount Hyjal was concluded, and when she looked at her reflection after the battle, she barely recognized herself. The sheer number of dead and dying she had seen, the death and war, had imprinted on the elf, and it was not a good thing. For one who had never experienced the slightest facet of war before, to have it all thrust upon her at once was simply too much to bear unscathed.

Her faith had been badly shaken by the violence and destruction that had been visited upon her homeland. How could Elune, who had always watched out for the kaldorei, have allowed such a thing to happen? How could she have let the World Tree be destroyed?

Why had this happened?

Her mother disapproved of such thoughts, sternly chastising her daughter, but such scolding did nothing to reassure Zalthiel.

If anything, it drove her farther from Elune.

Over the course of the next few years, Zalthiel grew more and more distant from her family. They did not understand, did not want to understand, the feelings she kept inside. And so she struggled with her anguish and doubt alone.

Some time later, Zalthiel caught wind of a new movement, the Argent Dawn, from some of the Alliance visitors to kaldorei lands. These people were banding together to fight the darkness that had ravaged her homeland and theirs, that had estranged her from her family, and had so shaken her very world.

Zalthiel was no great warrior, far from it. Even her Elune-given powers had begun to wane. She would not be able to support their crusade well.

But she had to know, had to find out, if they could give her the answers she so desperately sought.

And so she left, leaving Ashenvale with a group of humans who offered to guide her to the Argent Dawn. She did not do so with her mother's blessing, however; she went to see the Priestess one last time before departing. Tygrelle dismissed her daughter, saying how her faith should have been strengthened by the fact that their race had survived at all, not weakened because they had not come through unscathed. Realizing her mother simply could not understand her doubts, Zalthiel fled.

Zalthiel was given a crash course in combating the Scourge upon arrival. Though she was passing fair at best in swordplay, her main strength was the (decidedly weakened) healing power she wielded. She was disheartened, however; none of the soldiers she had met so far could even begin to answer the questions she asked. They were all thirsty for revenge, for justice, to purge the undead from their lands. Did they not want to understand why this was even necessary in the first place?

Tragically, Zalthiel's questions would forever remain unanswered. On her first mission for the Argent Dawn, Zalthiel and her unit were ambushed by Scourge forces. Zalthiel was struck by a foul spell even as her allies retreated. Immobilized with the numbing cold, the night elf dropped, forced to watch helplessly as her ‘friends' fled, thinking her dead.

Though she would soon wish to be otherwise, Zalthiel was still very much alive when the Scourge necromancers took her. Her body was desecrated in unspeakable ways, mutilated almost beyond recognition. She was used as experimental flesh for torture techniques and to test the effectiveness of diseases and plagues in development. Sickness wracked her body; her skin peeled away in horrible long strips, she vomited foul black ichor, and her very blood seared in her veins. Her every moment was consumed by molten, unbearable agony, her spirit tethered to her body by the necromancers' dark magic. Unable to sleep, unable to die, Zalthiel could do nothing but watch and scream, horribly helpless, as the necromancers carried out their macabre work.

Through it all, Zalthiel prayed with all her soul to Elune, begging the Goddess to forgive her lack of devotion, to save her from this living nightmare. Surely the benevolent Goddess would not allow her child to suffer so?

But Zalthiel received no response, no sign of any kind, and her prayers turned to desperation, to begging and pleading.

And then they cut out her eyes.

By the time the necromantic spell keeping her alive lapsed, Zalthiel's thoughts had turned bitter and venomous. Betrayed, the former priestess's prayers had become the worst kind of blasphemy against Elune, and even as her life finally faded she cursed the Goddess and all who followed her.

Unfortunately, for her and others, Zalthiel's torment did not end there. When she was revived as a Death Knight in the Lich King's service by the necromancer's cruel joke, she was utterly unrecognizable, physically and mentally. No longer the pretty young priestess, shy and unsure, Zalthiel was now a powerful agent of the Scourge. Her body was hideously disfigured; there was not an inch of skin without a horrific scar, a grotesque burn, or some other kind of disgusting blemish. Her eyes, once so bright and full of life, were gone. The blue witchlights that remained now burned with a terrible coldness, the azure glow casting an eerie pallor over her shrouded face. Her voice echoed with the chilling flange of undeath, and her every word was full of malice and spite.

Zalthiel slaughtered untold numbers of innocents in the Lich King's name, taking sadistic pleasure in torturing any she could find in the same way she herself had died. She excelled in unholy magic, becoming a master in weaving the spells of undeath and refining the already-deadly plagues of the Scourge. She took a terrible glee in animating the corpses of slain family members, then forcing them to slaughter their horrified loved ones. She wielded the magicks of death and disease as easily as her runeblade, and sowed destruction and terror among the enemies of the Lich King.

Zalthiel raised her first kill, a terrified human without a shred of resistance in him, to be her ghoulish companion, whom she dubbed Eyestealer, after his habit of picking out the eyes of Zalthiel's victims and stringing them as macabre jewelry.

When she and the other Knights were finally freed from the Lich King's grasp and regained their free will, Zalthiel's first vengeful action was to track down Tygrelle, her mother, and the woman she felt was ultimately responsible for all of her suffering.

After weeks of searching, Zalthiel finally caught up with her mother on patrol in Ashenvale. She slew the Priestess's guards before the night elves knew she was there, utilizing her foul death magic to sap the life from their bodies.

There were no words exchanged as mother recognized daughter, only a sharp exhalation, and then a resigned sigh from Tygrelle, and a tight, eager smile from the shredded lips of the thing that had once been her daughter.

The battle was long and fierce, Tygrelle calling upon all of her divine powers, while Zalthiel summoned the unholy magic of death and disease. The righteous fury of Elune burned her wayward daughter terribly, but Zalthiel eventually proved the stronger.

As Tygrelle went down, her body ravaged with disease and Eyestealer's teeth buried in the throat of her nightsaber, Zalthiel knelt beside her. With a savage grin, Zalthiel cut the eyes from the head of her still-living but immobilized mother.

Then she placed the bloody orbs in the empty sockets of Eyestealer's head, so that her mother would forever be forced to watch the horrific deeds her daughter committed, even from beyond the grave.

With a merciful thrust of her runeblade, Zalthiel ended her mother's life.

Now she was well and truly free.

Zalthiel took her mother's bow as a trophy and left the clearing, Eyestealer at her side. Fear and doubt would never trouble her again.

Now, she would visit those horrors upon others.

In more recent times Zalthiel has assembled a cadre of fellow knights under her banner and made several rather powerful enemies. How her story will play out remains to be seen.

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