Harrowhark the Ninth

Reverend Daughter of Drearburh, Black Vestal of the House of the Sewn Tongue

Not Dead, Just Drawn That Way

"It's embarassing that it had to come to this. I don't care that you raise the dead. I care that you do it badly. Take your hand from your curvy dagger, you're humiliating yourself."

Short-cropped, dead-crow-coloured hair, a skull-painted face and black-daubed chin; a mask of makeup over features neither angular nor fleshy. Tall but not willowy, shrouded in the crinkly, long, feather-covered ornate half-robes of acolytes of the Raven Queen. Bone studs glittered at her ears, bracelets of the same around her wrists; glimpsed vaguely under the robe, a full human ribcage, silver-clasped around her long torso. Sensible gloves and boots and trousers, a holy book clasped around a waist on a black chain.

And a knife. A girl needs a knife.

Harrowhark, the Ninth (the origins of this title are obscure; it doesn't refer to both order or a specific rank within the novitiate) is a Cleric of the Raven Queen as much as she follows any specific god, although she knows the rites and rituals of most of the major gods and icons whose domains touch on death; she can even preform the Thanatoic Rite of Devouring, although the odds of her actually doing so seem... low.

Harrow hates the undead, necromancers, and basically anything that should be silent and unmoving inside a tomb but isn't. This is far from an unusual calling among clerics of all sorts, and she doesn't even stand out as unusually zealous or dedicated, either among cleristry as a whole or within her specific order; the Black Vestals of the House of the Sewn Tongue mostly specialize in "soft" approaches to dealing with the undead. Instead of wading in with maces surrounded by the holy, crackling light of Pelor they tend to carefully construct properly geomantically warded tombs and gravesites to ensure necromancers have nothing to work, while using their power to seize and destroy sources of necromantic lore and ritual.

She is clearly from Axis; Harrow's accent alone proves that to even the meanest barbarian of the hills. She's been formally educated in Santa Cora and a lot of other cloisters mostly involving abbeys located on isolated, windswept crags overlooking swamps full of the corpses of old battles. She's a mendicant sister and is not tied to any specific locale.

Harrow isn't an especially pleasant woman, but neither is she generally a burden to be around; she's knowledgeable within her field of endeavor, polite to her social betters, and condescends well to her social inferiors. She can be waspish when balked and doesn't have a lot of patience with the kind of ridiculous, convoluted nonsense the Empire's various overlapping magical and divine bureacracies usually create or enforce.

She goes through a lot of makeup.