Rafaias

"Night-time is as good a time as any to sneak up on the dead." -Rafaias, on hunting the dead.

Rafaias is a Death Hunter from Saloni, adventurer, and valued asset to the Cult of Listria. ...and Algam.

This biographical text was written by his wife Fanshen Siannodel, with her express permission. The purpose of this biography is not to be disclosed until deemed appropriate by Fayruz Blue-Ink, High Scribe of Listria (as of 751 IC).

Appearance
Rafaias looks pretty good for a man! I get that he looks like a muscular, flat-chested woman a lot, but what do the naysayers know. He's about six feet tall and his build sort of reminds me of a big hunting cat. He must have at least some elven ancestry in him, because I've seen lots of half-elves with the same kind of build, and he doesn't seem to grow a lot of body hair. If he does, he doesn't really let on.

Like most of the people born in Saloni, he's pale and has dark hair and eyes. All the time he spends in tombs doesn't really help his complexion any, and some of his hair has started to go grey from being hit by undead so much. He has two braids that hang from his right temple, and one that hangs from his left. I'm not sure what their significance is, but they're always held with wooden beads.

Personality
Rafe's kind of distant to people he doesn't know. It comes with the territory of his being a Death Hunter, really, since they kind of have to distance themselves from the way normal people think (they say it keeps the undead from bothering them as much). He's still reasonably warm to people he knows and trusts...

Youth
Rafe tells me that he was born in Saloni, where he was brought up by friends of his parents as a favor. He says that his childhood was happy enough, and the existing children of his foster parents treated him reasonably well. He became a member of the Death Hunters when he was fifteen, as was normal in Saloni "at the time" (what time this is, I do not know, as there have been several periods during which young men and women were allowed to become Death Hunters). Before he was trained in the art of combat, he chronicled things. As soon as he turned twenty (the age of adulthood in Saloni) he was trained in the art of combat by Binyamin of Ogadi, and even learned a little bit of hand-to-hand combat for living opponents.

Work, Work...
Five additional years were spent conditioning Rafe to the undead: he speaks of long nights spent in dark crypts talking to the dead, studying material and immaterial types, and other things. His first assignment saw him go all the way to Ivria, where he was to aid in bringing peace to the spirits of people who were experimented on by a necromancer named Karrakh. He exceeded expectations, going as far as delivering Karrakh to a temple of Algam! While resting and preparing for his next task, he met some girl from Asgardia (I think her last name was "Oestra"?). They had an adventurer's romance (short and bittersweet), and after about a year they decided to call things off. On that note, I swear he told me a couple of things about a few undead women after the warrior girl. I'll have to check with him.

Scrawled into the margin, with a line and arrow pointing to the period that ends the sentence about undead women, is the word "YES".

Libraries and Lies
In any case, he met me in Padan not long after returning from delivering some letter for a lazy postman or the other... After an altercation with a noble who technically owned some of the land my library was on (and wanted to be catty about some old law about women owning land that his family enacted while I was still a child), we (Rafaias and I!) got married so I could keep it, since it was either "marry the noble and keep the library" (which his son told us would just end up getting torn down like the tavern his girlfriend's father's younger brother's best friend owned), or "marry a man to take the land and keep the library". And let me tell you, that was a great idea -- not only did I get to keep my library and not have to marry that pruny old guy, but Rafe's found so many books to add to the shelves about all sorts of different things, that I've had to buy seven new ones in five years!

And between you and me Fayruz, he lets me see my mistress, while I let him see that Morani girl. So he's probably the best husband ever. By the way, you really need to work on rooting out the unfair laws, because it's not fair that I had to marry somebody to keep a library that was already mine. Just saying.

Current Events
To this day, Rafaias is finding and capturing things to bring to Algam, as well as doing other things on the side.

Quotes from Rafaias
"Some undead can generate body heat like the living, through some quirk of the magics that animated them. They say that it's like the flowing of otherwise clotted blood through their veins, and more intelligent undead can even control where this blood goes." -Rafaias told me this when I asked him about Morani.

"When I was your age, I had to sleep in a crypt for two weeks and learn how to communicate with the dead! I would have loved to stick rats instead." -Rafaias says that he told a griping militia recruit this when he expressed displeasure over having to clear a storehouse of rats.