Sylarys Steelfang

**Sylarys Steelfang** is the sister of Archmage Raydin Steelfang, Sargon Steelfang and Wishmaster Gideon Steelfang. Sylarys is the child of Sorin and Alyssa Steelfang. She is also the one who created the Gems of Daedric Force. Sylarys is the aunt of Siris, Isis, Horus and Annalyse Steelfang along with Raydin's less prominent children. Sylarys is also the mother of Aurilius Wolfbrood and the wife of Tavion.

## Birth and Childhood

Sylarys was not born like most children - when she was conceived, her mother fled to Coldharbour to make sure she was perfectly safe from all outside influence.

Sylarys was born slightly after her twin brother Raydin, gifted with the warped strain of vampirism that her father and mother possessed. She was taken away from her mother the moment she was born by Molag Bal, who wanted to use her for a certain purpose, if Raydin proved uncontrollable. Sylarys was essentially a back up plan.

Raydin did indeed prove himself to have an unbreakable will and would not bend to Molag. Molag therefore used Sylarys as his greatest weapon ever, feeding her powers to give her parity with her brother and also the knowledge on how to use the powers. This would allow her to fulfil Molag's one true mission, which was to become the only god in the Aurbis.

When the transfer of Knowledge over the 18 years she spent on Coldharbor was over, Sylarys was returned to Mundus under Molag Bal's command. She harvested many, many souls to give her the required power levels to complete her mission.

## First appearance on Mundus

Sylarys first walked Mundus at roughly the same time her brother was set free, with the main intentions of honing her powers and gathering souls. At this time, under Molag Bal's orders, Sylarys consumed soul after soul to increase her powers. She did not really perform many actions and did not participate in the battle against Tarrov.

As a result, almost nobody acknowledged her existence and Sylarys was able to increase her power levels hidden from view.

## After the empowering

Sylarys devoured nearly 100,000 souls in the 15 years after Tarrov was defeated, trading many of them with the Ideal Masters for power and knowledge and giving some to Molag Bal. The most powerful souls were absorbed into her own soul and formed a gestalt around it, granting Sylarys with ever increasing powers. However, to devour so many souls, Sylarys greatly weakened herself as the souls took time to form into her powers.

At her weakest point, Sylarys battled the werewolf Tavion, nearly powerless. She turned him into a vampire after their blood mixed accidentally in the heat of battle, causing Tavion to become a vampire from the rare Steelfang strain. Tavion managed to defeat Sylarys, though, after his turning and empowerment, due to how weak she was during the battle, and he escaped.

After her defeat, Sylarys finally combined her souls into one and gained a massive boost in power. She gained a new ability to capture massive numbers of souls. She first used the powers on Dragon's Bridge, as a test. This was when she duelled the Khajit Qa'Do and defeated him, turning him into a vampire as torment, cutting his links to the gods Akatosh, Azura and Hircine, forcing him to flee.

Sylarys then proceeded to the Thrassian reef to absorb the souls of the Sload, which were a powerful race of necromancers. This would have allowed Sylarys to extend the dimensions of her soul veils and thus capture more souls to feed her powers even more. When she flew above the Thrassian reef, she met Tavion again, except that he was now a powerful magus after tutoring from the Shadow Watch. The two had an intimate encounter, but due to their failure to control their powers, they destroyed the Thrassian reef, which was devoid of life by that time due to the Soul Veil.

Sylarys was later involved in bringing back Whiterun and she was the one who warped the sword of the Darkling commander to allow the Shadow Watch access to their dimension. She was persuaded to do so in exchange for the opportunity to absorb Darkling souls, which she failed to do as Raydin forced the Darkness out of the Aurbis. Sylarys therefore returned empty handed from the darkling dimension.

Sylarys eventually soul veiled the Kamal, driving them extinct and absorbing all their powers. Molag Bal then returned her to Coldharbour after she failed to use her soul veil on the Summerset Isles due to intervention from Tavion. Sylarys was fed with soul shriven and her links to the Ideal Masters were corrupted to pull the souls in the Soul Cairn into her. The Ideal Master were powerless to stop this, as Sylarys was beyond their power at this point.

Molag started to directly control Sylarys. He used Sylarys to kill and absorb the powers of all seventeen daedric princes, then assaulted Mundus with a world engulfing soul veil. Sylarys was finally defeated by the Shadow Watch, Qa'do and Vorwith combining their powers. After she was freed from Molag Bal's control, she took Tavion to lands unknown. Sylarys created a new barrier that permanently sundered Oblivion from Mundus, massively reducing daedric involvement. She also created the nine Gems of Daedric Force from her own power, thus depowering herself. She then left Tamriel with Tavion for an unknown land.

Sylarys had a romantic involvement with the Vampiric Shadow Watch member Tavion ever since their encounter above the Thrassian reef. She does love him, although not on the scale that Tavion loves her. She cried when Molag Bal used her powers to injure Tavion. They eventually married, one of their children being Aurilius Wolfbrood.

Sylarys later taught the sorceress Virlomi how to use the soul gem. She attended Raydin's marriage later on, completely free of her former darkness, as a sane person.

## Personality and Appearance

Unlike her good natured brother Raydin, Sylarys displays a clear enjoyment for the torture and murder of her foes. Sylarys is first presented as nearly emotionless and extremely cruel, happily claiming the lives of innocents and always taunting her foes. She turned Qa'Do purely because she knew he would hate it. Sylarys also gloats whenever she successfully kills someone. Sylarys, however, seems to begrudge the fact that Molag Bal controls her directly, but she does not have the will to cast off the mental link.

After Tavion's romantic advances, Sylarys herself displayed that she still retained the ability to feel and empathize with others, although not on the scale of a normal person. She displayed clear sorrow when Molag Bal forced her to attack Tavion and when she realized all the lives she were taking served only to further Molag's goals. Sylarys herself is shown to be capable of acting selflessly, such as the fact that she did not complain after bringing back Whiterun, but simply accepted it.

Sylarys seemed to have regained her sanity after Molag Bal's grip on her soul was broken. She is in fact happy that she depowered herself. Sylarys' personality after the depowering was much less sadistic and cruel than her original personality, being more outgoing, positive and helpful. She also smiles quite frequently and is generally a pleasant person.

Appearance wise, it is hard to describe Sylarys in clear terms. She is said to have beauty which would shame even Dibella. Her hair is extremly long and purely white. Sylarys herself possesses flawless skin that is fairer than a nord maiden and she has a pair of bright blue eyes that have slit pupils (which were crimson when Molag Bal corrupted her). Sylarys stands at approximately 5 feet and 7 inches tall. Her figure is completely flawless.

## Powers and Abilities

Like her brother Raydin, Sylarys possesses extreme strength, speed and durability, although not as much strength as her brother, partially attributable to her feminine nature, but more accurately ascribed to her reliance on magic and her lack of appreciable amounts of physical training in Coldharbor, where knowledge was fed to her directly. Sylarys is nonetheless a capable unarmed and armed fighter, having extreme reflexes and dexterity, utilizing a combination of mortal martial arts from every sapient race in combat. She is known to have mastery over unarmed combat with her shadow talons, sword fighting and whip combat.

Sylarys, like her brother, is capable of flight and heals quickly from wounds. She has no deficits in daylight combat. Her regeneration is unaffected by the sun. As a vampire, Sylarys is unaffected by toxins and sicknesses, but she lacks a resistance against frost or a weakness to fire.

Unlike Raydin, Sylarys does not have a physical weapon. Instead, her armour and weapons are all formed from shadows and dark energies. Sylarys mostly manifests the shadows as whips that can reach up to 666 meters long. These whips can slice whole buildings apart. Sylarys can also manifest shadows as swords, bows and arrows, warhammers, shields and anything physical. She can also directly project shadows as energy to hurt and kill people, on scales that can wipe out cities. Sylarys in theory can also project light, but if she could, she does not show it.

Sylarys is also a talented pyromancer, an ability inherited from her mother. She can even turn any magical assault against her into flame and redirect it back at her attackers. Pyrokinesis is often used by Sylarys when she does not want to cause precision destruction. Sylarys can increase the temperature of her flames so much, they appear black, as the lights they emit goes into the far ultraviolet range of the spectrum and thus become invisible to the mortal eye.

Sylarys can kill a person simply by locking eyes with them. It is similar to Raydin's fear vision, except a lot more potent and destructive to a mind, causing so much fear in a victim that their hearts stop, they get paralysed and their brains go into epilepsy. Sylarys herself is also an extremely powerful mind mage and she is capable of mind controlling entire civilisations with her mental magic, although she cannot block Molag Bal's link to her mind. Her mental powers can be blocked by Raydin, but she can also block Raydin's mental powers.

Sylarys most dreaded skill of all is perhaps her Soul Veil. It manifests as a black miasma. Anything which can be soul trapped, upon entering the Soul Veil, will die instantly and their soul will feed Sylarys and her powers. Sylarys grows more powerful with every soul she claims and her soul manipulating powers also work on daedric animi. Sylarys is also capable of tearing out souls manually. She can use souls as tools for necromancy, as projectiles or to refill her own vitality as well. As Sylarys' power grows, so does the size of her Soul Veils.

Sylarys seems to show some reality warping powers as well. She used her reality warping, revealed as complete control over the entire Aurbis, to recreate Mundus and return it to the pre daedric invasion stage after Molag Bal was exorcised from her, a feat even daedric princes are incapable of performing. Sylarys has many latent magical abilities that she does not use. Sylarys, at the height of her powers, managed to hold off Raydin, Vorwith, Qa'Do and the Shadow Watch's combined power. Sylarys was able to generate magicka faster than Louis Cyphre could devour it and she defied his silence spells, known to be able to silence anything (although that could be ascribed the the fact that Louis was not at full power).

After she split her powers among the nine Gems of Daedric Force, Sylarys lost all her abilities, except her superior strength, control over life forces and fear vision, which are genetic powers and not acquired through magical training and practice. She still retains the knowledge to use her powers, though.

Sylarys further possesses a special ability, which she can activate by saying the phrase *"let me free these souls from their eternal torment"*. This gives Sylarys the power to create artificial souls, allowing her to revive a massive undead army for her use. She can also use this power to repair damaged souls. Furthermore, Sylarys can use these souls for enchanting or recharging artifacts.

Sylarys' ocular powers allow her to summon and bind spirits directly from the Dreamsleeve to do her bidding. She can control the entire Dreamsleeve when in her ocular power mode, allowing her to selectively reincarnate people as well.

## Trivia

* Sylarys has very poor control over her powers, except for her shadow magic.
* Sylarys wears no apparel at all. All the clothes and armour that she seems to wear are all constructs of dark energy. If she is surprised enough, her clothes and weaponry will all disspate.
* Sylarys has crimson daedric tattoos on her entire back. She has an oht on her forehead that is normally invisible, but becomes visible when she uses her powers.
* When Molag Bal speaks through Sylarys, she speaks with his voice.
* Sylarys, like Raydin, can manifest a three pairs of black wings. Her's burn with crimson flames instead. She actually has white wings in her real form.
* Contrary to popular belief, Sylarys hates Molag Bal.
* Sylarys was able to hold on to her powers for a short time even after creating the Gems of Daedric Force.
* In Sylarys' first fight with Tavion, she was totally unclothed.
* Sylarys cannot be affected by the Gems of Daedric Force, as they are parts of her.
* Even though Sylarys is usually depicted with a sword of sorts, she never used a sword in the whole *The New Kingdoms* canon, except a pair of swords made of pure shadow, when she fought in the climatic battle against her brother and his allies.

## Alternate Art

Sylarys Steelfang, wielding a sword and her dark matter whip.Sylarys drawn in new, anime style