In the fetid depths of the Grimmere, where the waters run black and the trees twist into grotesque shapes beneath perpetual mist, there emerged a sitheri whose ambition would exceed the bounds of her reptilian nature and whose hunger for power would corrupt not only her physical form but the very essence of what she had been. Saress was born into the Okzimba-ma brood, a tribe known among the ten sitheri nations for their particular devotion to the darker aspects of their serpentine gods and their willingness to embrace sacrificial practices that even other sitheri found excessive. From her earliest moments, she exhibited the sleek blue and green scales that marked her as one of the brood's most promising daughters, her coloring vibrant and pure in a way that suggested both beauty and deadliness in equal measure.
The Okzimba-ma held territories in the deepest recesses of Death's Head Swamp, where the waters themselves seemed to resist the passage of light and where ancient powers slumbered beneath layers of mud and decay. It was here that young Saress learned the ways of her people, studying the brutal hierarchies that governed sitheri existence and observing with keen intelligence how the brood mother wielded absolute authority over warriors who could snap a human's spine with casual ease. Unlike other young females who accepted their place within the tribal structure with reptilian patience, Saress questioned everything. She watched as male warriors departed on their Hundred Scalps trials and noted which ones never returned. She observed the political maneuvering between different families within the brood and understood that power was not simply inherited but seized by those clever enough to recognize opportunity and ruthless enough to exploit it.
Her education in the traditional ways proved thorough if unremarkable. She learned to swim through the brackish waters with the sinuous grace natural to her kind, to hunt the creatures that made the swamp their home, and to understand the complex web of alliances and enmities that connected the Okzimba-ma to the other nine sitheri tribes. The ritual knowledge passed down through generations of brood mothers taught her the proper forms for sacrificial ceremonies, the seasonal observances that honored Sythraxis the First Mother and Morghen the Hunter, and the countless protocols that governed every aspect of sitheri social interaction. Yet even as she mastered these teachings, Saress found herself dissatisfied with the limitations they imposed. The matriarchal system that had sustained her people for millennia struck her as needlessly restrictive, a prison built from tradition and enforced through violence that kept even the most capable individuals bound within predetermined roles.
The turning point in her life came during her fifteenth year, when a traveling shaman from a distant brood visited the Okzimba-ma territories to participate in the Spring Emergence ceremonies. This wizened female brought with her knowledge of practices that existed at the fringes of acceptable sitheri spirituality, techniques for communicating with entities that dwelt neither in the ancestral realm nor among the recognized pantheon of serpentine deities. Saress, who had been selected to assist in the ceremonial preparations, listened with rapt attention as the shaman spoke of power that could be claimed rather than inherited, of secrets written in languages older than the sitheri themselves, and of transformations that could elevate an individual beyond the constraints of flesh and blood. The shaman's words planted seeds in fertile ground, and though the visiting female departed after the ceremonies concluded, Saress found herself unable to forget what she had learned.
In the years that followed, Saress began to pursue knowledge that lay outside the accepted bounds of sitheri tradition. She sought out rumors of ancient sites within the Grimmere where powers from ages past still lingered, places that even the territorial sitheri avoided due to old superstitions and half-remembered warnings. She bartered with traveling merchants and traders who passed through the edges of sitheri territory, acquiring texts written in languages she could barely decipher and learning of practices that other races had developed for manipulating the forces that governed reality. Her studies required absolute secrecy, for the brood mother would have viewed such pursuits as dangerous aberrations that threatened tribal unity and traditional authority. Saress became adept at concealing her true interests, presenting herself as a dutiful daughter of the brood while pursuing forbidden knowledge in hidden places where none would discover her activities.
The price of such knowledge began to manifest in subtle ways long before Saress fully understood what she had invited into her life. The witchcraft she practiced was not the nature magic of druids or the structured sorcery of scholarly mages, but something older and more primal, drawing upon entities that demanded payment for every secret they revealed. Her scales, once vibrant with blue and green brilliance, began to show patches of sickly gray that no amount of shedding could remove. Her eyes, which had possessed the clear serpentine gaze common to her kind, began to recede into her skull as her brow ridges thrust forward with unnatural prominence. These changes troubled her at first, but as her power grew and she discovered capabilities that no traditional sitheri magic could match, Saress came to view her transformation not as corruption but as evolution, the necessary cost of transcending the limitations that bound lesser beings.
Her break with the Okzimba-ma came not through open rebellion but through calculated departure. Saress had grown skilled enough in her dark arts to recognize that remaining within the brood's territory would eventually lead to discovery and almost certainly to execution, for the brood mother had begun to notice the changes in her appearance and to question the sources of knowledge she occasionally revealed in unguarded moments. Rather than face confrontation, Saress simply vanished one night during the chaos of an inter-tribal raid, using the confusion of battle to slip away into the deeper swamps and then beyond them entirely. She carried with her only what she could transport easily: certain texts she had acquired, materials necessary for her rituals, and the accumulated knowledge of years spent studying practices that most sitheri would have destroyed on sight.
The world beyond the Grimmere presented challenges that Saress had not fully anticipated. Among the races that dwelt on dry land, a lone sitheri was viewed with suspicion at best and outright hostility at worst. The reputation of her people as raiders and slavers preceded her wherever she traveled, and her increasingly grotesque appearance did nothing to endear her to those she encountered. Yet Saress discovered that fear could be as useful as acceptance, and that her obvious power and willingness to employ it without hesitation opened doors that might otherwise have remained closed. She began to establish herself as a witch, offering services to those desperate or foolish enough to seek her aid while using each transaction as an opportunity to expand her knowledge and accumulate resources for her continuing studies.
It was during these wandering years that Saress first encountered Murik Alon Rin'kres, the eslar sorcerer whose pursuit would haunt her for decades. Their initial meeting held none of the animosity that would later define their relationship. Both were seekers of knowledge, individuals who had stepped outside the bounds of conventional practice in pursuit of understanding that most of their contemporaries either could not or would not attempt to grasp. Murik possessed expertise in areas where Saress remained ignorant, while she had delved into realms of forbidden lore that the eslar's more structured approach to magic had not permitted him to explore. The arrangement between them seemed mutually beneficial, a partnership of convenience between two practitioners who recognized in each other a kindred dedication to the acquisition of power and understanding.
For several years, their collaboration proved remarkably productive. Saress traded secrets she had wrested from entities that dwelt in places beyond conventional reality, while Murik shared techniques he had mastered through centuries of study and practice. Each benefited from the other's expertise, and their combined knowledge allowed them to pursue projects that neither could have accomplished alone. Yet even as they worked together, Saress nursed a growing resentment toward her partner. Murik's approach to magic remained fundamentally different from her own; where she embraced transformation and was willing to pay whatever price her dark patrons demanded, the eslar maintained boundaries and ethical considerations that Saress viewed as needless limitations. More troubling still, Murik's natural lifespan and accumulated experience gave him advantages that no amount of stolen knowledge could fully overcome.
The betrayal, when it came, was deliberate and calculated. Saress had spent months preparing false information, carefully crafting incantations and eldritch teachings that appeared genuine but contained subtle flaws that would prove catastrophic when employed. She fed these corrupted secrets to Murik gradually, mixing them with legitimate knowledge to avoid suspicion while ensuring that when he attempted to use what she had taught him, the results would be deadly. Her plan nearly succeeded; Murik survived only through a combination of skill, luck, and the intervention of protective magic he had established long before their partnership began. The eslar's realization of her treachery marked the end of their collaboration and the beginning of a pursuit that would span decades.
Saress fled from Murik's wrath, using every resource at her disposal to stay ahead of the vengeful sorcerer while continuing her own dark work. She discovered that her betrayal had brought certain benefits; the entities she served rewarded treachery and the successful manipulation of a powerful practitioner like Murik represented an offering that earned her additional secrets and capabilities. Yet the eslar proved far more persistent than she had anticipated. Despite her best efforts to lose herself in distant lands and forgotten places, Murik always managed to find her trail. On one memorable occasion, they met in open conflict, a battle that left the sorcerer with a crippled leg and taught Saress a healthy respect for her pursuer's capabilities even as it demonstrated that she had grown powerful enough to survive direct confrontation with one of the most formidable mages in the known world.
Her wanderings eventually brought her to the Simmaron, that great forest of druids and nature spirits where ancient powers slumbered beneath the green canopy. Saress sensed immediately that something profound existed within those woods, a source of power that called to her with promises of transformation beyond anything she had yet achieved. Her investigations led her to discover references to a place called the Well of Darkness, a font of primordial corruption associated with Sarrengrave himself, the immortal Lord of Rot. The prospect of claiming such power consumed her thoughts and drove her to establish a presence within the forest despite the risks such proximity to druidic authority entailed.
She set up her dwelling on the forest's edge, cultivating an appearance of harmlessness while she searched for the Well's location. The local inhabitants knew her as merely another woodswoman, one of those hermits and hedge witches who occasionally made homes in wild places and were tolerated so long as they caused no obvious trouble. Yet even as she maintained this facade, Saress conducted dark rituals and communed with entities that whispered secrets about the forest's hidden places. Her body continued its corruption, the price of her ever-deepening commitment to powers that demanded physical transformation as payment for their gifts. She sacrificed her tail in a particularly demanding ritual, severing that most distinctively sitheri appendage in exchange for knowledge about ancient sites within the Simmaron where the boundaries between worlds grew thin.
Her search for the Well brought her into contact with Evar, the Eldest of the Elders of the Hall of the Wood. The old human had discovered the Well's location as a boy and had concealed its existence for decades, but desperation drove him to reveal the secret to Saress when his wife fell terminally ill and he sought the witch's aid in curing her. Saress saw immediately the opportunity this presented. She agreed to provide a healing potion in exchange for knowledge of the Well's location, but she also insisted on additional terms that Evar, in his desperation, agreed to without fully understanding their implications. She bound him with a witch's pact, a magical covenant that would prevent her from using the Well's power directly against the Hall or the people of the Simmaron. At the time, Saress had no intention of honoring such restrictions indefinitely, but she recognized that the pact would allay Evar's suspicions and give her time to study the Well without immediate interference.
When she finally stood before the Well of Darkness, Saress understood that she had found what she had been seeking throughout her entire adult life. The dark waters that filled that ancient depression held power that dwarfed anything she had yet encountered, a concentration of primordial evil that represented nothing less than the imprisoned essence of an immortal being. The Well called to her with voices that spoke in languages older than civilization, promising transformations that would elevate her beyond the merely mortal and grant her capabilities that no traditional practitioner of any discipline could hope to match. She knew immediately that claiming such power would require time, extensive preparation, and rituals of a complexity that she had never before attempted.
For years, Saress worked toward her goal with patient determination. She established protections around her dwelling and the approaches to the Well, creating wards and guardians that would alert her to intruders while allowing her to continue her studies undisturbed. She delved into the Well's dark waters both literally and metaphorically, learning its secrets while allowing its corruption to seep ever deeper into her being. The witch's pact with Evar proved more binding than she had anticipated, but she also discovered loopholes and interpretations that would allow her to work around its restrictions when the time came to claim the Well's full power. Her schemes grew increasingly ambitious as she planned not merely to draw upon the Well's strength but to fully possess it, to claim for herself the immortal power of Sarrengrave and become something far greater than the sitheri female who had once hunted in the Grimmere's depths.
The forest itself began to sicken as Saress's workings intensified. The corruption she channeled through her rituals spread outward from the Well's location, killing trees and fouling streams as the land itself recoiled from the dark power she manipulated with growing confidence. The patrollers from the Hall of the Wood who investigated the forest's decay found themselves confronting threats beyond their training or experience, and many who ventured too close to the Well's location simply vanished, their bodies added to the growing collection of sacrifices that Saress offered to the entities that granted her power. The witch's arrogance grew with each success, and she began to believe that nothing could prevent her from achieving her ultimate goal.
She did not know that Murik had finally tracked her to the Simmaron, that the eslar sorcerer who had pursued her for three decades was once again closing in on her location. She did not anticipate that her carefully maintained facade would crumble when the corruption of the forest became too obvious to ignore or that the witch's pact she had made with Evar would prove more consequential than she had imagined when she broke its terms through actions that technically fell outside its explicit restrictions yet violated its spirit completely. Most of all, Saress failed to recognize that her transformation, which she viewed as ascension toward something greater, had cost her more than just her physical form. The being she had become bore little resemblance to the curious young sitheri who had first glimpsed possibilities beyond traditional bounds. That female had possessed intelligence tempered by cultural wisdom and ambition checked by the practical understanding of consequences. The witch who now dwelt on the edge of the Simmaron had shed such limitations along with her sleek scales and elegant tail, becoming a creature of pure appetite whose hunger for power had consumed everything else that might once have made her complete.
In her shanty filled with bubbling potions and arcane implements, surrounded by the implements of her dark craft and the evidence of rituals that would have horrified even the sacrifice-practicing sitheri of her youth, Saress prepared for what she believed would be her final triumph. She had gathered the necessary components for the ultimate working, the ritual that would crack open the Well of Darkness and allow her to consume the power contained within. She commanded servants both living and dead, creatures bound to her will through magic that recognized no limits and honored no ethical boundaries. The Well itself seemed to pulse with anticipation as she readied herself for the transformation that would elevate her beyond anything the world had seen in ages. That Murik approached with allies drawn from those she had wronged through her machinations troubled her not at all. Let them come; once she possessed the power of an immortal, no sorcerer or warrior or druid would pose any threat to her dominion. The witch who had begun life as a promising daughter of the Okzimba-ma brood would achieve a destiny far grander than anything sitheri tradition could have offered, and if the price of that achievement was the complete corruption of everything she had once been, then Saress considered it a bargain well made and a transformation long overdue.
FIRST APPEARANCE
Saress first appears in The Hall of the Wood.
