Dolsabel of Nisroch

[saklastin]

Dolsabel of Nisroch

"Suffering is a gift that purges the soul of its vanity and attaches it more firmly to the Eternal.”

Ancestry & Heritage / Human (Nidalese)

Class / Cleric

Deity / Zon-Kuthon

Alignment / Lawful Neutral


Gender / Female (She/Her)

Age / Early 20s

Homeland / Nidal, specifically Nisroch (wow!! what a shocker!)

Appearance / A sturdy young woman of average height, ghost-pale and grey-eyed. Her posture is absolutely terrible, and she’s got a bit of a weak chin. Her dark hair takes the form of a short, choppy pixie cut, at the mercy of its many cowlicks-- those who've grown out a buzz cut before might be able to surmise that she's doing just that. She looks perpetually tired and bears an unfriendly resting expression, and is covered in far too many scars for someone with so little combat experience. A dusting of freckles can be seen in between those scars. She seems to be down a few fingernails; two on her left hand, and one on her right. One of her eyes is apparently missing, and its eyelid has been stitched shut, a pattern of scars resembling the corona of a star eteched around it. In Absalom, she wears a truly unsubtle getup that looks like it hurts to wear. Connected to her by hooks and rings in her flesh, it wouldn't surprise most onlookers if that was the point. She's absolutely full of needles and other various piercings acquired as a product of her devotions.


Personality / Dolsabel is brusque, blunt, and to the point most of the time. She can be a wallflower outside of work, and she tries to be clipped and professional on missions with her Pathfinder colleagues. Still, she can sometimes demonstrate a dry, deadpan sense of humor, which comes to the surface even more around friends. She can often come off as foreboding or threatening, though it’s a bit hard to tell if this is unintentional or an air she puts on and cultivates. Those who know her well might gather that it’s a bit of both, and that it's both a defense mechanism in some ways and a part of her humor in others. Though many would assume based on her appearance and fervor for pain that she is driven only by unrestrained thrill-seeking, Dolsabel carries herself with the discipline and introspection of a monk, eschewing all mind-altering substances and favoring a simple life. Behind her iron wall of faith lies someone with a passion for creating, having made most of the clothes she wears herself and being responsible for most of her body modifications. Asking her about this is a surefire way to get her to open up.

Ideals / Pain is both inevitable, necessary, and a valuable tool for strengthening the soul and bringing it closer to the divine. Use it to achieve perfection in yourself, and encourage others to do the same. You joined the Pathfinder Society in the first place because you admired how its members put themselves through that again and again; let them learn how to revel in it. Become another force that helps them see it through.
Never abandon your oaths, and never let your debts go unpaid. This is the very foundation that your service to your deity is built on, even when it becomes unpleasant. Never let sentiment get in the way of what you need to do, for good or for ill. Maybe it will come to haunt you; everything you do will haunt you at this point in your life, for one reason or another. Accept that and let it pass. And above all, don’t let any of it triumph over you.

Bonds / A terrible guilt still consumes her, for everything that she has done in the past to become what she is. One day, she’ll have to come to terms with it, and it will be either the thing that throws her headfirst into evil, drives her out of her faith completely, or pushes her onto a mad path to transform that faith into something entirely new.

Flaws / Dolsabel is quite prone to defensive knee-jerk reactions, especially when she feels her morals-- and the morals of those involved in her upbringing-- are deservedly called into question. She is still at a point in her life where she justifies the bad things that have happened to her, because despite her professed commitment to finding fulfillment in suffering, she has a desperate need to believe that hers had meaning.
Still, deep down, she cannot bring herself to justify her worst actions. Though she’s very desensitized, and her empathy has been dulled by her experiences, she’s always been relatively lacking in the ruthlessness and sadism that fuels most Kuthites. The fact that she views this as a character flaw at all is incredibly telling of where she’s at in life.

(art by me!)

 

[saklastin]

Backstory / (CW for psychological torture, emotional abuse, and just generally a lot of self-gaslighting hoooly-)

Spoiler

Dolsabel was born in Nisroch to a pair of secret Desnans, with a name she no longer bears. The whole family were members of the Whispered Song, resisting the cruelty of their surroundings. Her father was a bard who played his music in secret, and her mother was a tailor, who’d become adept at stitching secret codes into fabric to serve their cause. They loved her deeply and desperately, as most Nidalese parents love their children. And as is common for Nidalese families, Dolsabel was their only child. She was known to be an anxious, tender-hearted girl who was terrified of most things and prone to nightmares. Her parents’ fear of what could happen to her— chiefly, being taken by the Silent Shroud, and being used against them on top of that— was contagious, and their response to that fear was to shelter her from the world.

Yet all of this came to an end when her uncle, specifically the younger brother of her father, made a confession that damned them all. Dolsabel was never sure if he’d deliberately sold them out or if it had been tortured out of him. Nevertheless, the incoherence of his voice and the look of hatred in his eyes, at the moment she realized what happened, was hard to ignore. It was late at night when her whole family was seized, and it woke her up from her sleep. She could barely process what was happening at the time until strange tests were being run on her by an agent of the Umbral Court. Her especially poor command of her body (which we in our world would call dyspraxia) was noticed by the Silent Shroud, and taken as a reason why she wasn’t worth their time and effort. Yet the Cathedral of Bones still had room for one more initiate. She first came there with a group of children, who were tested for impiety by its Joyful Things. Not all of them survived that test, but all that was detected in Dolsabel’s mind was fear of reprisal and a vague need to set things right-- both of which could easily be redirected with time.

In short, instead of being condemned with the rest of her family, Dolsabel was taken into the custody of the church and made to convert to worship of Zon-Kuthon. Unfortunately, this was not one of those situations where she managed to hang onto the guiding light of Desna despite all the evil around her. She took to Zon-Kuthon in earnest, unable to imagine a world not ruled by cruelty and fear the way her parents did. She came to believe that their efforts to fight for something better for her sake only made things worse. Her people’s fate had been sealed long ago, by the only god who ever lifted a finger to help them when it mattered. Desna historically could never be trusted to do the same. Life is pain, death is worse, and the only thing Dolsabel came to believe was left was leaning to master and revel in both.

She spent years being educated on the history of her nation, its many theological disputes, and the horrific rites of the Kuthite faith. She grew close to a fellow initiate called Noivos, with whom she commiserated about their shared situation despite their very different backgrounds. He was the disaffected second son of one of the old families of Nisroch, sent off to the temple because of his “fits and visions.” He knew well that this was simply a bout of political posturing on his parents’ part; after all, the only time he’d ever heard about those “fits and visions” was from them! He despised how they delighted in warping their home into a den of fear and misery, while being unable to take it themselves. The two of them grew in the faith together, but in very different directions. Dolsabel’s experiences made her value structure and stability, and while she lost much of her morality, she never truly ended up cruel or power-hungry. Noivos embraced that cruelty as a vent for his frustrations, and as a means to exert control over his situation, to the point where it made their instructors nervous.

On top of this, throughout her upbringing in the Cathedral of Bones, Dolsabel was subject to several symbolic losses of identity. She was made to cast out her old name in favor of her current one. Her head was routinely shaved by Inarduin, a longtime role model of hers, and the priest who most closely oversaw her conversion. She found this mortifying, considering that the others weren’t made to do the same, but she eventually picked up the slack and started doing it herself once she was old enough. Dolsabel spent every day trying to kill every trace of her child self to make her current life easier for her. Yet she was never completely successful-- especially since some part of her still wished she could be that girl again. She was only barely able to recognize her mother and father once the time came for their fears to come true, and for her to be used against them. The look in her father’s eyes will forever be burned into her brain. It was the same look of hatred she saw in her uncle’s eyes just before he sold their family out.

Some part of Dolsabel wonders, even still, if he knew what she was before she ever did.

Her time in Nidal came to an end when, one year, the divinatory death-wails of the person sacrificed in the Eternal Kiss were far more verbose and clear than usual, and Inarduin was tasked with transcribing them. Dolsabel isn’t sure what exactly he heard in them, but he told her that they called him to seek something mysterious and powerful at the heart of the Meraz Desert, in distant Casmaron. She also knows that while Inarduin saw them as a direct command from the Midnight Lord, the Over-Diocesan had a different interpretation. In her view, it was a prophecy, worth noting but just as unreliable as any other in the age that they lived in, and it did not call him to do anything, necessarily, the way he thought it did-- it just required that they keep an eye on any news coming out of that region. Unable to be swayed from his position in their dispute, he simply opted to take those he believed he could trust-- Dolsabel, Noivos, and another mentor of hers named Londe-- and leave to follow what he believed to be his ultimate calling.

The journey they took opened Dolsabel’s world up tremendously, and brought out a wanderlust in her that she didn’t know she had. Notably, she took so well to Chelaxian opera that she had to fiercely restrain herself from losing her composure at the first hint of music she could hear; she missed the sound of it far more than she realized, evidently. Yet it also went south very quickly, during their voyage from Westcrown to Absalom. A mutiny of cultists dedicated to some strange fiendish divinity took over the ship they traveled on, killing and sacrificing anyone who got in their way. Dolsabel was one such person. But just as she made peace with her death, she was rescued by a group of Pathfinders who painstakingly managed to wrest control of the ship and guide it to the harbor themselves without its captain. Dolsabel noticed, when the dust settled, that her siblings in the faith were gone-- but so were all the lifeboats. She had no way of knowing whether they had died or simply escaped without her, thinking she was dead. She struggled to swallow the additional possibility that they abandoned her to her fate.

And when Dolsabel found herself in Absalom, she found herself stranded, shaken, and alone. The Pathfinders who saved her made sure she knew that she had options, despite their misgivings about her. The Pathfinder Society could likely help her find the people she’d lost (particularly any factions interested in rooting out the cult she'd lost them to), and provided they deemed her trustworthy enough, she could potentially seek to join them as a means to get back on her feet. Due to her very Nidalese opinions about nosy adventurers, she was skeptical at first about working with them. But she valued her companions over her personal hang-ups, and though they treated her terribly, she neither recognized that for what it was nor felt justified in abandoning them for it. She accepted the help she was offered, staying longer in the City at the Center of the World than she ever expected to when she first set out. In the end, though, it all amounted to nothing. But the process stretched on long enough for her to fall in love with all the life and color that Absalom and its Pathfinders had to offer-- and to conclude that while Zon-Kuthon had never abandoned her, if she continued practicing her faith in a manner that felt “easy” to her, she would enter the realm of heresy and never again be welcome in Nidal’s orthodoxy. Dolsabel took this as a shortcoming that warranted exiling herself more indefinitely, until she (in her own warped view of things) could get her act together.

Wanting to stay in Absalom, and seeing many opportunities to to work the will of Zon-Kuthon within the Pathfinder Society, Dolsabel eventually did choose to join its efforts. Though she had long begun to believe that she had lost her compatriots for good, Dolsabel has taken the matter of searching for them into her own hands, and she has never for a second stopped working towards a reunion with them. Even if, truth be told, she never will be fully prepared for what will happen when that comes to pass-- just as they won't be prepared for who she'll be by the time it happens.