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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 3654770" data-attributes="member: 63">In brief, her motif is that she controls magic. Her minions, the inquisitors (whom the party have faced many times throughout the saga), are clerics who are trained in counterspelling and other antimage tactics. Leska founded the inquisitors, and throughout the campaign saga she has set her forces to the task of capturing enemy mages. In the 8th adventure the heroes find the prison where all the captives are held. The mages are subjected to constant torture and magical agony, and special magic Leska devised feeds upon their suffering, powering an eldritch superweapon, the Scourge, that if completed would have let Leska create fields of antimagic anywhere in the world, from tiny and precise targeted areas to huge swaths of land large enough to render an entire army powerless. She wants to be the only one who can wield truly powerful magic. Her background was that she was loyal to her nation, such that when she was much younger and less cruel, she traveled the world looking for powerful magic to help keep her nation strong. Along the way she fell in love with one of her traveling companions, a fey man named Etinifi. Eventually the two followed a trail of clues that led them to the lost location of the Aquiline Heart. There are many defenses that protect the Heart, but the most powerful is that the entire cavern's timeline is like an asymptotic curve. The deeper you go into it, the closer you get to the Heart, the older you become, until by the time you reach the blood-soaked shore of the lake in which it lies, you are only inches from death. When this happened to young Leska, she was betrayed by her lover. Etinifi, too greedy to turn back and too frightened to risk dying, used magic to suck the life from her and give himself enough strength to make it to the Heart. He greedily drank its blood, gaining eternal life, but also being trapped as perpetually feeble, on the brink of death. Leska he left behind, thinking she was dead.Leska, however, was made even stronger by her rage over this betrayal. With sheer will she forced her broken body to gather a vial of the Heart's blood, but then rather than drink it to save herself, she turned back to the surface, believing that if she was not strong enough to survive on her own, she would not take the power of the Heart. When she reached the surface, the grip of the strange timeline released her, and she drank the blood and gained the power of the Aquiline Heart. But despite her now timeless youth, she felt as if she had died. The betrayal by the one she had loved left her with nothing but a desire to be certain she never needed anyone again. Everyone she meets now she treats only as tools, using them and then casting them aside whenever she has taken from them all she can. She learned that from her lover.Oh, and as for Etinifi, she eventually found him. He was the first prisoner of her scourge prison. The perpetual torture and agony was intended to last for all of the man's eternal life. It was only by accident that Leska discovered she could draw power from his pain. Her look is like Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty, or a dark Galadriel from Lord of the Rings: imposing, majestic, but heartless, and cold despite the fires of war around her. She wears a skull-like mask to hide the youthful beauty she does not feel is hers, and her robes are adorned with all manner of primitive charms and wards she learned in her journeys across the world, to give a somewhat primordial feel to her magic, in contrast to her regal countenance.</blockquote>

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