Player: Seth
Race: Elf
Class: Knight of Ydris
Appearance
A young elf with olive skin and long, curly black hair, the sides of his head shaved. He wears tattered gold and royal blue leathers left over from his circus years as a juggler and gymnast, under a thick black poncho that cuts off at the waist, and gold hoops in both ears. He travels light, carrying little but the ornamental broadsword that holds his brother’s soul — brilliant and spotless, since Enki cherishes the blade more than he does himself. Athletic and agile in build, and the strong, silent type: the sort of man who kicks a door open rather than opening it.
Origins
Enki is a young elf, raised as a vagabond circus performer alongside his little brother — the two of them purchased outright by the circus’s Ringmaster to work off a family debt. Enki specialized in juggling and gymnastics. The Ringmaster kept an elder, ancient witch on his staff, and when Enki and his brother finally tried to flee the circus, the Ringmaster caught them and had the witch turn his brother into a sword as punishment. Enki, not knowing what else to do, killed the witch on the spot and fled the camp with the transformed blade — his brother — in hand.
In the years since, Enki has traveled searching for a wizard skilled enough to break the curse, without success. Along the way he’s worked as a bounty hunter, mercenary, and performer, but has increasingly turned to darker methods, taking up the banner of Saint Ydris as a Knight and hunting down witches and magic-users who might hold the key to freeing his brother. He has come to believe that hunting demons requires becoming one himself, and has developed an intense hatred of magic and trickery in the process — even as he isn’t entirely certain his brother’s soul is truly bound in the blade at all. The Ringmaster, meanwhile, still hunts him: by the circus’s reckoning, both Enki and his brother still owe a slave’s debt.
Enki trained the hard way, through trial and error on the road, and has killed or persecuted several dark magic users — by his own account, all fairly weak ones so far. He fights light and agile rather than heavily armored.
The Red Vigil
Enki was not raised into the Knights of Ydris. His power was given to him by a man who was no longer welcome in the order.
Somewhere on the road he crossed paths with Ser Emeric Stagg, a wandering Knight of Ydris travelling alone and unsupported, with no chapter left to return to — exiled by his own Grand Master and carrying one last vial of the blood, the final one he would ever be given. Enki asked him for it. Stagg refused. Enki kept asking.
The blooding is called the Red Vigil, and it is less a ceremony than a survivable poisoning: the candidate drinks, is bound, and endures. Most do not. The order takes its squires young for exactly that reason — the younger the body, the better the odds. Enki was a grown man when he drank it, which by every reckoning of the order should have killed him on the floor. It did not.
Stagg gave him the vial for two reasons and was honest about both. He wanted rid of it. And he knew that making a new Knight of Ydris without his Grand Master’s sanction — with his last vial, on a full-grown elf who would almost certainly die — would enrage the man who had cast him out.
Stagg never said whose blood it was. He called it the blood, did not elaborate, and Enki did not press. Where he is now, Enki does not know.
The Gloaming
Enki came to Marin’s Hold hunting any magic that might help him free his brother’s soul from the sword. His years in the circus left him agile and quick on his feet.
At Count Demetrius’s masquerade, Enki pressed the Count directly for his true name on the Reeve’s orders, and got more than he bargained for: the Count revealed himself as Strahd von Zarovich, ancient lord of Ravenloft. Deeper in the castle’s dungeons, Enki was the first of the party to feel the pull of the vampiric curse Strahd had secretly inflicted on them all — tasting blood from a gargoyle statue left him with sticky, spider-climbing hands, and later drinking a cursed vial labeled “Virgin’s Blood” granted him the ability to shift into a bat, along with a shadow that had begun moving with a mind of its own. In the climactic fight in the witch’s kitchen, he screamed one of the giant spiders clean off its feet with nothing but the force of his voice.
Session 2 pushed Enki’s curse further still. Chasing a winged shape up a spiral staircase in bat form, he cornered Strahd himself at a window and traded words with him before the Count dissolved into mist. Later, in the castle’s nursery, Enki found a freshly born infant swaddled — inexplicably — in his own childhood blanket; he named her Clover and has carried her ever since, watching her age with unnerving speed over the course of a single night. Flying up to the castle’s belfry to ring a bell and unseal a hidden stairway, he stumbled into a hidden study and briefly met an illusion of Tatiana, Strahd’s murdered wife, before a cackling, unseen crone plunged the room into darkness and sent him fleeing. Twice this session he came close to losing himself to hunger and rage entirely, steadied only by the trinkets he still carries from his old life.
Session 3 was Enki at his most reckless and his most loyal. He climbed bodily into a bride’s coffin and tore an ornate enchanted dagger out of the lining behind the collar, handing it straight to Brielle. He finally ate the cookie the old woman had baked for him back at the start of all this and found the taste of his mother’s kitchen turning, mid-memory, into a beast coming through the window and tearing her apart in front of him. He took the chainmail Brielle cut out of the cobwebbed sarcophagus.
In the courtyard he charged the corrupted Sister Geraldine head-on and was held kneeling and mesmerised at her feet, his own sword driven point-first into the mud, until she seized him by the throat and threw him into the bonfire. He rolled clear and spent the rest of the fight trying to kill her — screaming two wolves dead where they stood, putting two spears into her that she snapped off and discarded, and finally setting her dress alight with a bottle of oil and a rag. She told him that through the fires of agony she would prove her true devotion. He crossed the river rock to rock in a run of pirouettes and backflips, twenty years of circus in every step, then stripped off the chainmail and dove back in when Ulfgar was swept away — cracking his head against a rock, and being hauled out by the dwarf he’d gone in to save. He shouted across the water that he would come back and kill Geraldine.
It was Enki who gave the black rose — all that was left of Clover — to the spider-bodied maid in the webbed clearing, and who cut Ivek and Ulfgar free of the webs afterward. At Christine’s banquet he drew his greatsword and swung it past her ear without her so much as pausing mid-sip, then, once Randoah had left her hypnotised, sharpened a stick from the fire and drove it into her heart. She screamed, and the scream turned to ecstasy, and she pushed the stake in deeper herself before hurling him the length of the campsite. Riding out, he terrified their horse into a barely controllable gallop to help lose the hunt.
In the mist, Strahd offered him a countryside to ravage, a castle of his own, women and money, and told him he had already embraced a demon and was more alike to the Count than he realised. Enki said he didn’t need it — but that he would be back. Strahd snapped his fingers and drew every scrap of stolen power out of him, the blood running from his face and nose and swirling up into the air for the Count to inhale, and sent him out a weak mortal, with a parting remark about the farmer’s daughter he never saved.
In Session 4 Enki paid a farmer’s wife a gold coin for a bowl of porridge — enough, she said, to mend her well. He kicked open a poisoned grain silo and lost his boots, and very nearly his feet, to the ooze inside; Captain Gor salved them. When Randoah fell to the ooze-risen rats he let the demon in him rise and forced its power into her, eyes flaring red, and dragged her back from death. He found the emptied barrels by the poisoned well, smashed them, and kept the Bittermold seal, and he kept a vial of the ooze as well, despite Finch asking him to destroy it. Inquisitor Morvath searched his neck for bite marks, warned him to be careful whom he threatened, and made him the sign of the Order of Ydris. Enki spoke for the party to the Reeve — who paid half the reward for Ravenloft and is now on Enki’s list — accepted Castellan Vane’s commission to investigate the Bittermold keep, and took Morvath’s lead coffer and his job: bring back a book called the Threshold of Twilight, unread and untouched. Privately, he means to let Randoah read it first. After the Crayfish feast he woke in the stocks for arson beside Ulfgar — the two of them had burned down someone’s house testing how far a fire arrow would fly — and spent two days there. He finally bought boots.
Attendance Log
- Session 1: The Invitation to Ravenloft August 9, 2026
- Session 2: The Bells of Ravenloft August 23, 2026
- Session 3: The Mists of Ravenloft September 5, 2026
- Session 4: The Withered Homecoming September 26, 2026