Lamius

## Overview

Lamius is a Shackleborn tiefling ranger who transformed due to a deal with a chain devil. She has lived many years largely in self exile, in order to hide her metamorphosed appearance from her loved ones and to control her bloodlust, but has decided to give up her isolated life after being trapped in the Cursfold for a year.

Lamius began the campaign exceedingly tall, muscular, and androgynous. She has intensely white skin and large black horns, and wears leather armor. Her face has symmetrically carved scars which she inflicted upon herself, and she has numerous facial piercings. As the campaign has progressed, she has become emaciated, aged over 20 years, grown a third eye, gained two new limbs, and lost all of her hair and horns, also gaining numerous other scars from combat and being a general dumbass.

## **Backstory**

Lamius was born into a merchant family. Her mother died in childbirth, and her father never remarried, leaving him to raise her. She spent much of her childhood either wandering through the city in which they lived, or spending time with her father on his merchant vessels. When she was 15, her father left on a journey which he never explained, but which he said would last for several years, and promised that he would return in his daughter’s greatest moment of need. However, while her father was gone, Lamius became the victim of a cruel prank from Praettswican, Moon of Jesters and Scalds, who trapped her inside of a horror story for three whole years. By the time she emerged, broken and permanently changed, she knew that, if her father had returned, he would hardly recognize her, and decided to start a new life.

She found a job at a tavern and somewhere to stay. It did not take too long for her, however, to meet Kira, a traveling bard, and the two fell madly in love. When Kira was killed in a fight, Lamius was devastated. She saved the corpse of her lover and mourned over her body for two days, not eating or sleeping, before deciding to find some way to resurrect her. Necromancers were sparse, but she discovered that a chain devil was behind whatever had killed Kira, and decided to try to make a deal to resurrect her love. When she found the devil, she promised him her own life in return for Kira’s. The devil resurrected Kira and turned Lamius into a shackleborn tiefling, instilling her with uncontrollable bloodlust.

As her transformation began, Lamius chose to exile herself so that Kira could never see what she had done and what she was becoming. She fled to the outskirts of civilization, spending her time attempting to control her bloodlust, and only returning into the city once a year to gather supplies, wearing a heavy hooded cloak to hide her horns and now-scarred face. After five years of this isolation, on her annual supply trip, she encountered two powerful warriors, accidentally interrupting their duel. One of them banished her to the Cursfold, the Otherworld realm of Dalahothimbane, Moon of curses, martial pursuits, and dragons. She was trapped here for a whole year before escaping, wandering aimlessly and endlessly the entire time.

After emerging from the Cursfold with a newfound and intense hatred of all things god-related, Lamius chose to leave her nomadic exile. She has no particular aims, but her year spent in the Otherworld left her with a sense of impending doom and terrible things to come, and she feels obligated to find the source of this inexplicable dread.

## Time with the party

### Initial Months

Upon leaving exile, Lamius joined a party of adventurers. Unfortunately, as the group traveled together, killing several enemies, the control she had developed over her bloodlust faltered. After seeing the forest sorcerer Kehl killed and beheaded, she found it increasingly difficult to maintain her composure. It did not take long for her to fully give in to her urges to torture and maim. When the party was fighting off Duergar raiders at the monastery they were hired to protect, she finally snapped and, unable to contain herself any longer, brutally tortured one of their enemies, cutting his fingers off, skinning him alive, and burning him to the point of death before decapitating him and taking his severed head with the aims of turning his skull into a goblet. She completely turned coat after this, attempting to kill St. Eligius, who the party was asked to save, and attempting to burn the monastery to the ground.

### After the Monastery and Betrayal of the Party

During their time at the monster, the party encountered two demigods, who did battle in front of them. One was killed, and the adventurers were nearly drowned by a tsunami of blood. Lamius was driven temporarily mad. She experienced hellish visions of voices beckoning her and a world wrapped in chains, and spent three days after their ordeal rubbing invisible blood stains from her hands, peeling most of the flesh from her palms in the process. After healing her wounds, Lamius went on a bender in an attempt to forget the horrors of what she witnessed. She left to help the party on a new mission which quickly went south, leading to her imprisonment with Vellig and Americk. Soon after being released, however, the party was confronted by a wizard offering the choice to join a cult of the forest sorcerer Kehl, which was attempting to resurrect a dead god. With the promise of new power to help in her quest to destroy the gods that wronged her, Lamius agreed to turn against the rest of the party.

In the ensuing battle, Lamius immediately decided to attack Vellig, who she saw as the greatest threat to her goals. She cast a web of chains around him, but Vellig managed to evade their effects before turning to attack her. Sonata's attempt to burn the entire party alive delayed their fighting temporarily, but it did not take long before Lamius again attacked Vellig with The Hand of the Chain Lord. Her blade barely harmed him, and in return Vellig viciously attacked her with his hammer, partially crushing her skull and leaving her incapacitated. Thankfully Tulles ordered two cultists to stabilize her, and she survived the battle despite her wounds.

### Pact with the Kytons and Blightburn Mutation

After the party managed to make it out of the collapsed hall, Lamius was cured alongside her injured cohorts. She was declared a Huscarl with the rest of the party, and declared a truce with Vellig in spite of their past conflicts. The group divvied out the belongings of the now-dead Sonata, and soon after left to procure the whip which Lamius had ordered four days prior from a leather working shop. While holding the specially-made spiked whip, she cut her finger, and the blood which trickled down the leather revealed a riddle. Vellig and Lamius quickly solved it, and upon doing so a bright light appeared and a new door opened in the wall of the shop. Three bizarrely mutilated figures stepped from the light, and addressed Lamius. The lead figure revealed that she had finally managed to summon them by solving the riddle, and that she had been completely overtaken by her obsessions. He told her that she was a prototype made for the moon child Beadúdema with the aim of using her to reawaken an ancient god. The devil told her many thrilling things awaited her if she fulfilled her role, and she was suddenly overcome with a new sensation as the whip transformed into a spiked chain and the voice of her old lover Kira spoke to her, beckoning Lamius to join her. Lamius felt chains wrap around the deepest parts of her soul, and something inside of her began to transform.

Lamius agreed to a pact with the cenobites, promising to share their hellish puzzles (one of which materialized in her traveler's pack) with others with the eventual aim of becoming a fiend herself and joining Kira in the Kyton plane. After the cenobites disappeared, Aurea smote both Lamius and Tulles (who had also agreed to a more minor pact with the fiends), in an attempt to knock some sense into them. This did not work.

Soon the voice of Kira grew stronger in Lamius’s mind, as the spiked chain weapon which she was given buried itself deep in her arm, attuning to her and binding to her soul in an excruciatingly painful process. A new, glinting black pair of eyes grew in Lamius’s chest, and she felt her new powers develop further. The party was given a new mission to determine the source of what appeared to be a replicating project creating new mutant tribespeople in the forest. Collectively the group took a rest of one week, allowing their new member Elliott to research this, and Tulles to dig deeper in his eldritch tomes. Lamius, Aurea, and Ardith partook in pit-fighting once again. Lamius was heavily rewarded after one of her horns fell off mid-fight and she beat her opponent half to death with it. However, throughout this period, a vial of Blightburn which she had taken from Sonata’s pack took its effects on her, mutating her body into something practically unrecognizable. As she wasted away, she developed even more new abilities, including echolocation, blindsight, and fire immunity. These abilities came with a price, and her body quickly felt its horrific effects as she began aging incredibly rapidly and her bones, body, and mind weakened permanently. Within several days of this poisoning taking hold, she gave the vial to a random civilian, who later died a horrific death at the hands of radiation sickness.

### The Cloning Facility

Once their downtime was over, the party set off in the direction of the forest once again. They encountered a Yuan-ti who they convinced to join them on their mission. Shortly afterwards they discovered a pit which Ardith explored initially, describing several tribespeople in a cave who became aggressive towards her. The party descended one by one, with Tulles going first in an attempt to negotiate. Almost immediately, however, two of these tribespeople were vaporized by turrets which emerged from the opening, as the walls began speaking to the party. Elliott and Tulles quickly disarmed the turrets, while Lamius attacked and incapacitated one of the tribespeople. Tulles grabbed the other mutant and attempted to interrogate him, getting the necessary information out of him before Lamius walked over and beheaded him by garroting with her spiked chain. Kira’s voice encouraged her excitedly, and she felt the chains wrap even tighter around her soul. Tulles prevented her from murdering the second, incapacitated tribesman, who was dragged away by Aurea while they argued.

The party entered the opening in the wall, descending in an elevator into a dungeon. As they were carried into this chamber, Lamius felt an overwhelming sensation of hatred and bloodlust wash over her, and the voice of Kira became louder and more intense. All of her hair fell out and her eyes turned a glowing yellow as her evil deeds carried her closer and closer to fiendishness. The party emerged into the dungeon below, but the voice in her head was unrelenting, and she was overtaken with rage, with her judgement and decision making blurred by the urge to kill. The party quickly found Vellig, who had arrived before them, in the first chamber. Within moments, a drop of strange mercurial liquid fell into his eye, seeming to have no effect which Lamius could notice at the moment. The group were spoken to by the voice in the walls, proclaiming itself to be something which Lamius did not care to listen to, and together they went into the first chamber of the dungeon. Inside her head, her cenobite lover encouraged her to lick the metal sphere in the center of the room. Lamius did this, and proceeded to immediately grow a third eye as her body weakened even more from radiation damage. She shrugged it off. Not long after, Lamius and the rest of the party noticed that Vellig’s body was wasting and transforming before their very eyes. As the barbarian morphed into someone completely different, Lamius, getting bad vibes from this new guy, hit him twice with her whip just because she didn’t like him. The party was quickly introduced to this newcomer, Kenny, after Tulles attempted to read his mind and experienced the overwhelming volume of souls stored inside of him. Kira also thought he was shifty, and continued to whisper to Lamius about this.

Eventually, Lamius put on one of the mysterious yellow suits in the room and walked into the next chamber with Aurea. She spent most of the time insulting the voice in the walls and waving her oath sword profanely in its general direction. The party finally came up with a solution to the puzzle in the first chamber, and they all made their way into the next area. Together the group worked to disarm several traps and attempt to uncover the answer to this new challenge (which, once again, Lamius didn’t especially care about). It took unsurprisingly little time for Kira and her to agree that Kenny didn’t respect her, and she proceeded to attack him for a third time with her whip, incapacitating him.

Immediately after this, one of the covered figures in the room moved to attack Lamius and the rest of the party. Simultaneously, an ARGOS robot awoke, to Lamius’s mild confusion and incredible indifference. Aurea moved in front of Lamius to protect her. The party initiated combat with the covered figure, quickly uncovering it and realizing that it was one of the test subjects from the tubes in the horrific lab they were trapped in. At the same time, the Yuan-ti turned to attack Tulles (who had made the dumb decision to show it his vial of blood taken from its sacred goddess). They defeated the test subject, although Tulles was incapacitated by the snake. Aurea managed to kill the abomination, and Tulles took its head as a battle trophy. They continued to try and solve the puzzle, reading a list of the test subjects. Lamius disabled another trap using one of her mutations and Tulles and Americk woke the Marikon test subject inside up after psychically interrogating him. After releasing him from the testing tube, Lamius cast charm person on him and spoke to him using Kenny as a translator. The Marikon was confused and terrified, giving them little helpful information. Tulles and Lamius conversed, and the party decided on what they thought the answer to the puzzle was. Unfortunately, because they’re idiots, it was wrong. The voice in the walls said they would have to fight for the reward they would have gained otherwise, and two orb-like (and incredibly unqualified-looking) surgery robots entered the room. Lamius immediately attacked one of them, and it retaliated, slicing a gruesome smile into her face and injecting her with nanites, poisoning her blood. The party continued to fight these “surgery” robots (which had definitely not attended medical school), until Elliott and Aurea were able to totally disable them, exposing a mass of neurons and disgusting fleshy tissue inside.

After this, the party decided to take a rest before heading into the next dungeon. In this time, Ardith and Lamius agreed to desecrate the corpse of the Yuan-ti for body parts. Lamius successfully skinned the snake-man, and they attempted to gut him for organs, but failed, although Ardith managed to extract several of his ribs for future use. Kenny, upon waking up and seeing this, fainted at the disgusting bloody mess which had been made of the corpse. The Marikon also came to after being paralyzed with utter terror, saw this, and fell unconscious. As Ardith and Lamius played around in the squishy insides of the body, Lamius once again felt her soul deepen in its descent into fiendishness. As the party awoke they prepared to head into the next room, which they found to be a hellish scene filled with the destroyed and still-alive bodies of several tribespeople. Several of them fell into temporary insanity upon seeing this. Ardith began uncontrollably devouring the corpse of the Yuan-ti, and Lamius began hallucinating. Now seeing the unconscious Marikon as Vellig, she moved to brutally murder him, but was stopped and grappled by Aurea. Uncontrollably bloodthirsty and hearing the voice of Kira egging her on still, she attacked Aurea with her chain whip and attempted to break free. Elliott held his crossbow to her head, threatening to kill her if she continued. However, she did not stop struggling. Assaulted from multiple fronts, she was eventually knocked unconscious by Aurea, Elliott, and Kenny’s combined efforts.

After regaining consciousness, Lamius sulked in the corner for a good while, until the party was ushered into a new chamber by the voice which had led them this far. The AI told them they would gain rewards for their survival, and offered each party member the cybernetic implants of their choice. Lamius chose to replace one of her arms with a mechanical implant, and also gained two new mechanical arms attached to her sides. The other party members, aside from Tulles and Aurea, also took various implants, with Elliott remaining in the chamber to be totally surgically altered while the others entered the final room of the cloning facility. Before leaving, Lamius asked the AI if she could keep the arm which she had had removed, and took it with her as a souvenir.

The final room was filled with an overgrowth of strange plants, test tubes full of clones in various stages of development, and, of course, their old enemy, Kehl, alongside a druid who they took to be the woman running the cloning project. The party quickly realized that the clones in the tubes were all of Kehl himself, ranging from children to nearly-fully grown. Aurea donned her mask, Lamius withdrew her chain, and the party began to advance on the druid and the transformed and powerful Kehl. Together they descended upon the forest sorcerer, although Lamius quickly discovered that her whip did little against the giant monstrosity of root and bone, and turned instead to the druid, who began to release some of the more developed clones. The rest of the party weakened Kehl, and Americk’s Wall of Fire managed to burn the monster to ash. As he crumbled to the ground, Lamius decapitated the druid. At this point Elliott rejoined them. They then turned to the escaped Kehl clones, one of which they quickly killed, the other of which began to escape by crawling up into the strange tunnel in the side of the chamber. Aurea and Elliott both attempted to attack the clone, and succeeded in downing it and causing it to fall deep to the bottom of the pit. Lamius dropped the head of the druid down onto it to make sure it was dead, and Aurea flew to the bottom and punched it to make sure it was properly murdered. After this, Ardith, Aurea, and Lamius proceeded to break the rest of the cloning tubes and murder all of the other clones of Kehl, much to the horror of Tulles, who wanted the party to show mercy to the youngest clones. Lamius made a point of slaughtering these children, taking the youngest of them and eviscerating it in front of Tulles, before feasting on its flesh with Ardith, the party wendigo. She also allowed Ardith to eat her severed arm, and together the two had a feast of flesh in the chamber while the party took a rest. With this pure brutality, however, Lamius felt the merging of her soul with Kira’s quicken, and she felt her body and mind change even more. The Kyton doctrine itself began to become clear to her, and she became suddenly aware of the thoughts of those around her, and the purpose of the beings in control of her soul. The chains wrapped more and more around not only her skin, but her fundamental being, and she felt whatever humanity she had left slip away even further.

### Return to Winebald's Hall

The party then left the cloning facility, returning to the forest and traveling back to Winebald’s court in order to tell him of their success in shutting down the operation and finally killing Kehl. Initially, Winebald did not recognize Lamius, as the changes to her body had made her almost an entirely different person. Formerly a fierce, imposing, muscular warrior, the only resemblance to what she had once been lay in the stumps of her broken horns and the Huscarl sword at her side. Emaciated, hairless, aged 20 years, scarred beyond recognition, and with two new limbs and three eyes, she was an entirely different person. Indeed, the changes to her mind had affected her on an even more profound level, and she was now no longer the Lamius that had joined the party. After being given their reward, as well as a magical buckler used to detect the presence of aberrations, the party then went their separate ways. Tulles researched ways to remove Vellig’s soul from Kenny’s mind, although each magic practitioner he spoke to told him this was highly rare and nigh impossible. One of his cultists of Bishop, however, told him of a spell scroll used to summon and bind a Yithian, an ancient race known for their mind transferral magic and control over time and space. Lamius and several others joined Tulles to watch the transfer take place, and sure enough the warlock succeeded in binding this eldritch being. Not only did the Yithian help to place Vellig’s soul inside the body of a raven, but he also spoke to Lamius of the Kyton realm, and showed Tulles knowledge from his past.

After this, Lamius stayed in the libraries of the cult of Bishop for two weeks in order to research the doctrine and nature of the Kytons in order to get closer and closer to fulfilling the terms of her pact and joining Kira in their realm. She also began to develop a strange craving, and was driven night after night to kill. She spent many of her evenings stalking the streets and the surrounding area, catching and devouring the flesh of animals such as rats, feral dogs and cats, and foxes.

During her time researching in the archives of the cult, she accidentally tore one of the pages of a particularly ancient tome. The cultists, enraged, went to Tulles, who told Lamius that she had to atone for her mistake. She agreed to the punishment, and was taken into a chamber of the cult’s temple, where she was placed in the center of a circle surrounded by the cultists. Tulles opened his eldritch grimoire, casting a spell upon her which would force her to witness horrific visions. The stress of this sudden blast triggered her own series of hallucinations of the Kyton realm, and the two melded into disturbing visions of Kira melting and collapsing into a pile of broken bones and dissolved flesh as she begged her for help. Lamius witnessed this in abject horror, screaming and sobbing in the center of the room, and incapable of doing anything to stop it. After the hallucinations passed, the cultists and Tulles left her in the darkness of the empty chamber, broken and collapsed on the ground in a heap. It was at this point that her soul finally gave way completely. Her mind, vulnerable from what she had just witnessed, was taken entirely by the fiendish taint within her, and her soul’s fusion to that of Kira’s was complete. She rose, newly empowered, and left the temple. Her mind, however, was still haunted by the visions which she had experienced, and she immediately left to drink, spending the entire next week too drunk to stand in the hopes of forgetting some of what she had witnessed. Her blackouts were plagued by nightmares, however, and it took days for her to recover from the horrors of what Tulles had cast upon her.

At the end of this third week, she rejoined the party, now even worse off than before, and having picked up a new habit of half-scampering on her six limbs rather than walking upright. They rejoined in the city, and watched the procession of King Raedwald, whose feast was being held in Winebald’s mead hall that night. At the front was the son of the king, and carried in a casket was the corpse of the king himself, which several party members felt a presence emanating from, including Lamius, who attempted to use her telepathic abilities on the body. She ignored this, deciding to go join the feast and attempt to peddle the cursed puzzle box which the Kytons had given her. Tulles, however, became paranoid, as he is wont to do, and decided that there was some conspiracy surrounding this dead king. He began searching for ways to find information on this. Meanwhile, Aurea took Lamius aside and told her of information she had uncovered on the Kytons to which the tiefling was bound, warning her that they were her sworn enemies, and any attempts to fulfill their wishes or perform evil acts in their name would result in a fight. Lamius, slightly terrified but not enough to stop her shenanigans, scampered into the mead hall, searching for a victim on whom she could bestow her demonic puzzle. She entered the athletic games taking place in the festivities, with the promise that whoever could beat her would win the puzzle box. She easily downed the first fighter she encountered in a best-of-three wrestling match, in spite of her apparent physical weakness. She then took on a man by the name of Nothelm the Tower, a jolly Goliath who she put up a very good fight against, but was defeated by. He took the puzzle box from her, excited by what he believed to simply be an interesting artifact. Unfortunately for Lamius (and fortunately for Nothelm), Aurea had witnessed this exchange taking place, and pursued the tiefling, who cast invisibility and attempted to sneak away unsuccessfully. Aurea caught her by the proverbial scruff, grappling her and forcing her to tell her exactly what she had done. Aurea then challenged Nothelm for the box, winning the wrestling match and taking it from him, before returning it to Lamius. Not wanting to make a scene, Lamius agreed not to sneak hellish torture devices into the hands of random civilians, and begged Aurea not to fight her in the mead hall. Aurea agreed, and Lamius scuttled off to find somewhere to sulk. Stumbling across the mead cellar, she encountered Tulles, whose paranoia and objective idiocy had gotten the better of him, as he attempted to force two guards to give him information on his insane conspiracy about Raedwald, alongside Ardith who was confusedly going along with his plan. She watched his mad ramblings moments before the spymistress Aethelswift emerged from the shadows. A mad scuffle began, and Lamius, seeking a cheap thrill, frightened the spymistress by using her new powers to transform her face into that of a random dead loved one, and then used her chain to grapple the woman. She remained locked in this grapple until Tulles, seeing something which the others could not, ordered her to release Aethelswift before sprinting out of the hall as he rambled insanely. Lamius released the chain, but not before licking Aethelswift’s face and staring at her with her glassy, horror-filled yellow eyes. She then left the cellar to rejoin the party, where she spent the rest of the night staring creepily at Aurea and Aethelswift from across the room.