A devil in the dustmen? She had gotten a few questions, and many strange glances, although she rarely answered. Was it possible? Why would she want too? What even was the point?
Too an eternal creature true death seems a strange idea. People who delve catch a hint that Sarin is a very, very old devil. She speaks of places, people, beings, battles, ideas, forgotten thousands and thousands of years ago. But, she did her duty well, and without complaint. Outside she was social, and often sold items, but within the ranks of the dustmen, she mostly kept to herself, and did what the faction required of her.
A celestial seeks no death. If they die outside their plane, they live again. And if they want to die, they can simply die on their own plane. They have no reason. A devil does not. A devil who dies outside the hells returns, yes. But there is always a punishment. Always. One can say a devil is driven forward by a endless desire to be more powerful, and this is true, but it is always equally true a devil fears nothing more than demotion. A Archdevil can be cast into a lowly spined devil, a pit fiend directly into a lemure. And there is nothing a devil hates more than that idea. Those outside of baator don't understand this, but it is a painful reality to those within. At some point, there will be punishment in your future. Perhaps endless. Even an archduke is in eternal punishment. To learn how to die. to escape such a cycle makes some sense, at least to Sarin.
The dustmen are painfully young, and rather short sighted. Almost all where human, or equally short-lived races. At first Sarin look down on them, but over time she has stopped. They are young, short term, somewhat silly, but they have a depth of knowledge in what they need that surpasses the rest of the multiverse. Not even the gods of death ask such questions, and the writings and teachings in their very strange field go far beyond what anybody else can muster.
She has learned much, and thus far has acted little. Sarin is not the quickest, nor the wisest, but while the dustmen know more about their field than Sarin can hope to gain in even a thousand years of study, she knows things that are secrets simply by their age. Her knowledge has many archaic, hidden spots too it, very few others know or care about.
One in particular she could expand on. But has not. Until now.
The Hells have an open relationship with necromancy. One of the simplest powers all pit fiends have is raising an undead legion with the wave of a hand, and one of the most basic tools for harvesters is the teaching of necromancy too a human with sufficient drive and a desire for power. In most primes the mere act of summoning the undead pushes one towards evil, and doing so can easily be abused, bringing more souls too the pit at long as the devil has the necromancers ear. Sarin has avoided this in her recent quest to separate herself from the nine hells. But recently, she has rethought this choice. Sometimes throwing away knowledge just due to proximity to something you dislikes is a poor choice. And so she has set out on something very few even think possible.
To a wizard a planar creature who uses arcane magic is a sorcerer. This is true, in a sense, but that is like saying a dragon is a sorcerer. Mortal sorcerers are wellsprings of magic. They don't need to study, they don't need to practice, they simply grow, and are. And generally, they don't study. They gain nothing from it. Whats the point in learning the hows and whys of what you are? Why create a new spell when you cannot learn it, and must just pass it to the closest wizard. Some may craft magic items, but it doesn't go much farther beyond that. Those creatures that fall under the ‘sorcerer’ category through the fact they are simply magic incarnate, or so magical as to be such, do study. They do learn. A dragon sorcerer may be just as much a cunning, plotting, work-shopping bookwyrm as a human wizard, even though they are a sorcerer. The same thing applies to devils.
Once, a very, very long time ago Sarin knew a devil who practiced necromancy to an extreme degree. A general in the blood war, he could field massive armies of undead when the devils would not suffice. Eventually, he was shifted back from the blood war, but his knowledge remained with Sarin. A devil’s body functions similarly to a mortals. At least in form. They bleed, they can eat, they have bones, organ. They even need to breath, if only slightly. While a devil ‘Lich’ is preposterous on several levels, a devil who has altered their body via necromancy is not. Its just something so rarely tried as to be thought impossible. Sarin knew it possible, and she even knew some of the steps to get there.
The Dustmen have a large amount of undead membership, and while Sarin did not wish to join that, she sought to both bring her closer to their mortality, and closer to giving away her self, via these changes. Much of a devil is charged emotions, ready to strike, and much of her distance too the dustmen was her lack of ability to empathies with their scale. Lowering her emotions, while changing her form and essence more towards that of an undead creature, allowed her to experience something new from the start. This would help her in both cases, and might actually implant her as a true member of the order.
So do such a thing on a mortal would result in both a very dead mortal, and a very abused corpse. Certain wizards go through rites and processes which embalm organs, implant bone armor, deaden pain. A half dead creature. Sarin’s goal looked something like that, but to a far harsher extreme. Slowly she began to ruin her body, shift flesh into bone armor, turn organs into nothing, slow her heart beat, lower her body temperature. Without the knowledge of the blood wars general at her disposal, this would all be impossible due to her natural healing, but with it she could do it. Half of it was physical, but the other half mental. Shifting your body in your mind stopped it from healing to its past self, and helped it heal to its new.
All appearances of moving closer to ‘undead’ were simply cosmetic. Sarin was neither alive, nor dead, as all planars are. A force of creation itself. Mortal terms such and living and dead simply cannot apply. What wasn't cosmetic was the change in her emotions. The magic, and the internal discipline, deadened herself somewhat. Considering her emotions were that of a devil, too all those looking at it from the outside, it would seem like she had made a sudden change towards good, but in realty her strong devilish emotions had been deadened, and she acted less harshly, but that in no way meant she picked up anything close to empathy or sympathy, and in fact moved her farther away from such possibilities. What was left was a colder, harder, calmer Sarin, tapped directly into a small amount of negative energy, and with a body closer to resembling a corpse. She wrote all her findings up in a small book, and presented them to the dustmen, before asking that she be allowed to shift her work for them from the grunt labor she had been doing to other jobs she could be much more useful in. She wished to speak to those who fought against red sigil, and help them work through any qualms they might have about death, and examine the souls of those who are soon to die, and Sheppard their soul if needed, towards something closer to that mortals true death, if at all possible. Instead of Celestia, Arcadia, instead of the Abyss Hades. Not possible every time, but even shifting one soul by one degree would impact the multiverse infinitely more than another collected body and jotted down name.
A new book to the collection.
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