Sahrye

Nightmare Sahrye Mahlored, Shield Warden

Sahrye Mahlored
Status	Active
Race	Gnome
Gender	Female
Guild	Necromancer
Instance	Prime

Sahrye Mahlored was born in a quiet gnomish settlement near Shard, where her sharp amber eyes and unsettling fascination with anatomy set her apart early. While other gnomes lost themselves in gears and alchemy, Sahrye studied bones, sinew, and the quiet machinery beneath the skin. Her relentless questions drove off nearly everyone—except Talia, a human girl who became her closest and only friend.

When Talia died suddenly, Sahrye sought explanations from priests, healers, and scholars. None offered more than hollow comforts and superstition. Refusing to accept ignorance as truth, she left home to chase answers across Elanthia.

Her journey took her from the morgue on Aesry Surlaenis’a, where she learned the cold precision of anatomical study, to the battlefield triages outside The Crossing, where she witnessed the body’s limits in real time. She even spent a season in the plague houses of Mer’Kresh, the floating city where disease and desperation provided grim lessons no formal teacher ever would.

Yet still—no answer to the question that haunted her: What truly happens the moment life slips away?

Everything changed one storm-lashed night in the forests near Therenborough. Exhausted and near death herself, Sahrye was found by a ragged gnome woman who pressed a polished obsidian square to her forehead. The stranger spoke of forbidden methods and ancient devices—necromantic knowledge capable of dissecting the line between life and death.

When Sahrye awoke, the woman had vanished, but the obsidian remained, fused to her skin and humming faintly.

This path led her to the Philosophers of the Knife, whose pursuit of the Great Work aligned perfectly with the truth she had chased since childhood. Sahrye embraced necromancy—not for dominion or cruelty, but for understanding. For the mechanism behind death. For the answer that might explain Talia’s disappearance from the world.

Now, she moves through Elanthia as a shadow among crowds, hiding in plain sight. Feared by society, shunned by gods, and hunted by the Hounds of Rutilor, Sahrye continues her research in secret. She is unwavering in her pursuit of the one truth she has never been granted:

The nature of death itself…

and whether it can be undone.

Sahrye’s Journal — “Entry Found Beneath the Cloak”

The ink here is cramped, precise, written by a steady and deliberate hand. Several pages appear to have been torn out.

Day… I’ve lost count. Forest dusk.

If this entry ends in blotched ink, it’s because my fingers are still trembling from the cold. Or perhaps from what she told me.

I do not know her name.

I doubt she had one to offer.

But she found me—half-conscious, half-starved, and entirely defeated—curled beneath a cedar like a wounded animal. I remember the crunch of her steps through needles, the clack of bone charms against her cloak. Thought she was a hallucination at first. Perhaps she was.

“Child,” she said, which irritated me. I have not been a child for a long time. “You claw at death without tools. No wonder it tears you apart.”

I tried to rise. Failed. She pressed something cold against my forehead:

A square of obsidian. Polished smooth.

And old. Older than she was. Older than me.

“You want to know why the body fails,” she murmured. “Why a heart stops. Why a friend doesn’t wake.”

Talia’s name clawed its way up my throat, but I couldn’t speak.

“The priests have no answers. The healers lack the imagination.” A dry chuckle. “But there are devices. Methods. Sorceries that cut deeper than steel or truth. You hunger for them. I can smell it.”

The obsidian burned—not hot, but cold, as though winter itself had found an anchor beneath my skin. I couldn’t move. Could barely breathe.

“You may yet be one of ours,” she whispered. “If you survive what comes next.”

And then she was gone.

No footprints. No broken branches. No sign she had ever existed.

But the obsidian?

It remains. Adhered to me as though it had always been there.

It hums at night.

It resonates when I think of Talia.

It… sings when I practice my dissections.

I am not fool enough to mistake this for blessing.

If anything, it is a summons.

The world cast me aside.

The ignorant pushed me away.

The fearful shunned me.

But perhaps—finally—something has whispered back.

I will follow this voice.

I will learn what lies beyond the veil.

I will not stop.

Not until I understand what took her from me.

Not until I can take it back.

— S. Mahlored