Ebon

A gaunt female human with a skeletal frame standing at 6'2", her skin is pallid and mottled with spiderwebbed veins. She has wiry muscles and etched scars on her arms, with a keloid ridge bisecting her throat. Her left hand is a claw, three fingers fused from frostbite. She wears a frayed Overseer’s tabard with a faded crimson sigil and has jaundiced eyes with dilated pupils. A rusted iron key hangs from her belt, stained with dried blood.

Gritha craves control like a parched hound lapping at puddles—her orphanage is a meticulously cruel ecosystem where fear is currency. She despises weakness, even in herself: she once severed her own frostbitten toe with a chisel rather than show pain. Her sole loyalty is to the Black Crown’s coffers; she skims 20% of the orphanage’s “charity funds” to hoard in a lead-lined strongbox beneath her cot. Secretly, she fears irrelevance—if the Empire ever shuts the orphanage, she’ll be discarded like the wretches she whips. Her sexuality is transactional: she beds visiting magistrates to secure supply quotas, but derives pleasure only from their subservience. Quirks: she hums lullabies from her dead homeland (Kethra’s Dirge) while flogging children, and collects their shed milk teeth to string into a necklace.

Born Gritha ul-Vorath in the slums of Kethra’s Maw (1420), she was sold to the Obsidian Quarries at age 6 after her mother suffocated her infant brother to spare him from the Flesh Tithe. At 14, she slit an overseer’s throat with a shard of volcanic glass, earning her the throat scar—and a promotion to enforcer. The Black Crown noticed her efficiency during the Purge of Vralkath (1445), where she herded 200 orphans into a burning granary to “cull the surplus.” Appointed overseer of the orphanage in 1450, she turned it into a profit engine: children forge counterfeit coins by day, harvest blackmarket organs by night. She remembers the exact weight of her brother’s corpse (7.3 lbs, per the Tithe ledger) and the sulfur stench of the granary flames. Her left hand still cramps in cold weather, a phantom ache from the frostbite that killed her rival, Overseer Jarek, whose frozen corpse she fed to the quarry hounds.