Apocryphal NPCs: Umbrals, Chosen of Nebiru
Saras Natala / Star Eating Leopardess
Eldest daughter of the patrician House Saras, Natala is very nearly everything her parents could have hoped for in a child. Elegant, brilliant, and filial, the only way she could have excelled more is if she had been chosen by the dragons. Talented enough to stand at the top of her class in her secondary school, an institution normally dominated by un-exalted dynasts, she continues to impress her classmates and elders alike with her subtle wit and charm. After so many years of this excellence, it has become commonplace for those around her to simply expect it from Natala, holding her to increasingly impossible standards; she has risen too high for the fall to be anything less than catastrophic. Day after day, it wore the young woman down, until one day, something in her snapped, and a shard of long dead Nebiru nestled in her heart.
On the surface, Natala still appears to be the prodigy she was before. Her scholastic performance remains exemplary, her wardrobe and hair flawless, her circle of admirers and friends as fawning as ever. When night falls however, after Natala goes to sleep, someone else wakes up in her place; Star Eating Leopardess, underground pit fighter, cat burglar, sometime-vigilante, and inveterate ne'er-do-well. Her face is the same as Natala's, but her visage is adorned in shocking makeup and a panoply of foreign jewelry, her hair is an ever changing mane, dyed raven black by Umbral essence. In terms of character, the two could not be more different, Leopardess coarse and uncouth as Natala is refined and elegant. The young Umbral is a midnight whirlwind of chaos and charisma, bane of the city's black-helms and idol of its disaffected youth. Natala wakes from these nocturnal excursions refreshed and ready for a new day, never entirely willing to admit to herself that the events of the last night were anything but a dream.
Ustas the Penitent / The Black Petrel
Once, there was a man named Ustas the Black Petrel, pirate prince of the Cracked Claw Isles, his name accursed by every honest sailor on the sea. For thirty years he preyed upon the shipping lanes of the West, stealing money and lives in service to his own avarice and cruelty. But in time, his razor cunning dulled, his bones grew weary with age, and his treacherous crew, who had learned well from him the art of betrayal, marooned him on a spit of land in the middle of the ocean. He would have died there on that godless isle, had not Humble Palm, exalted devotee of the Sisterhood of Pearls, found him. The saintly Dragonblood rescued him, dressed his wounds and nursed him back to health. When he tried to steal her ship, she disarmed him with nothing more than kind words and a disappointed gaze. Ashamed, the Black Petrel died and Ustas the Penitent, convert of the Sisterhood of Pearls, breathed his first.
That might have been the end of it, Ustas might have lived the rest of his days in quiet peace and contrite penance, running supplies with Humble Palm between the Isle of Fevers and the greater West, had not an Azurite freebooter sunk the pair's vessel while they were en route. Cast adrift for the second time in his life, something within Ustas refused to drown, and he hauled an unconscious Palm and himself ashore with tendrils of Umbral shadow. The two now attempt to make their way back to the Isle of Fevers, island hopping as they can and avoiding the perils of an increasingly tumultuous West. The pair make a strange duo, a sage-like young woman with hair like palm fronds and a grizzled former reaver who appears twice her age. Ustas feels the Black Petrel within him still, gorged on Exalted power and screaming for him to let it out. It tempts him with promises of retribution and vengeance upon Azure, upon his treacherous crew, upon the thousand injustices he and Palm witness on their journey, sometimes he gives in and the surf runs red with the blood and gore of his foes. He has confided in Palm the nature of his affliction, and she does her best to restrain his worst impulses, but the younger Exalt struggles to understand the essence fever of an Exalt so unlike a Dragonblooded.
Pontiff Yraneus, Hierophant of the Unknown God
In the far expanse of the east, atop the plateau metropolis of Ganth, lies the Temple of the Unknown God. A towering edifice, it is almost a little city unto itself, its terraces and geometric domes large enough to house thousands. Within the sprawling complex, a hereditary order of monks vacillates between ascetic self-denial and sacred debauchery before the altars of alien spirits. A curse-bringing shadow crawls along the ground to guard against the unwelcome. From time to time, edicts from the cloistered palace ring through the city, heralded by the peal of soulsteel bells, and the people of Ganth and the lowlands below dutifully obey. Centuries ago, the ruler of this domain was once but a lowly scribe, enslaved by the hereditary tyrants of the plateau city. Now, he is the God-King of Ganth, and he rules from a palace built atop his former masters' bones. All in his shadow pay him homage, and long indeed is the shadow of this holy madman; Pontiff Yraneus, Hierophant of the Unknown God.
Visitors to the city give conflicting tales of the Pontiff. Some say he is an urbane and generous philosopher king, loath to hurt even a beetle in his gardens. Others say he is a cruel and monstrous demigod of darkness, his temple a citadel of excess and torment in equal measure. In truth, Yraneus is both, for the creed he espouses, the Invisible Fold, is one of dualism, contradiction, and cycles of sin and absolution. It is his doctrine that all beings have within them both Light and Dark, and that holiness is found in maintaining a proper balance between the two. All of his acts, cruel and kind, restrained and debauched, are illustrative of the Invisible Fold's ethos; that one must respond to Light with Light, and to Dark with Dark. Penance must follow Indulgence, and Indulgence must follow Penance. According to Yraneus, only by proper action, and through the completion of mystical rituals, can the faithful bring The Unknown God closer to the world, and in His invisible light, achieve salvation. Every night, the elder Umbral scours the night skies with arcane orreries and magical lenses, searching for the occlusion in the firmament that is the Unknown God's form, hoping to divine more revelations from its effect on the stars.
