User:Joshmaul/Nyssha Swiftblade
The contents herein are entirely player made and in no way represent official Warcraft lore or history. The characters and events listed are of an independent nature and are applied for roleplaying purposes only.
 Nyssha Swiftblade | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Gender | Female |
| Race | Human (Undead) |
| Class | Death Knight, formerly Rogue |
| Affiliation(s) | Necrolord Covenant |
| Former affiliation(s) |
The Alliance Knights of the Ebon Blade Metheius' Deathguard SI:7 |
| Occupation | Warrior of Maldraxxus |
| Former occupation(s) | Ebon Blade instructor, personal bodyguard of General Metheius, SI:7 operative, Saavedro's chief assassin |
| Location | Maldraxxus |
| Status | Deceased in body, Maldraxxi in spirit |
| Relative(s) | Catherine (sister), Saavedro (adoptive father) |
| Mentor(s) | Varan Metheius |
| Student(s) | Randarel Vendross |
| Alignment | Lawful evil |
"You've all been plucked out of whatever safe graves you thought would contain your sorry corpses and whatever pleasant afterlife you thought awaited your pathetic souls for a single reason: This world is not done with you yet. And with some of you lot, having to be stitched together like the poor bastards you are, this is an improvement over rotting in the ground. Believe me, I get it, this is hardly a pleasant fate, but we've got a job to do, so we'll just have to do it. Anyone who wants to whine about it or thinks they can sit it out, your exit is over the side of that balcony there, where you'll serve Azeroth by feeding the carrion birds. Welcome to the Ebon Blade."
- - Nyssha Swiftblade, address to new recruits
A former member of the Defias Brotherhood, Nyssha Swiftblade was killed during the war in Outland... but her putrified, decapitated body was stolen by agents of the Scourge from her resting place, just prior to the war against the Lich King, and raised as a death knight to fight in the Scarlet Enclave. As a Knight of the Ebon Blade, she helped in the training of the "new recruits" in the wake of the recently-concluded Fourth War, and followed her dark brethren into their natural battlefield: the land of the dead.
Origins
Born in the town of Moonbrook, Nyssha Petrand's parents joined the Defias Brotherhood, under the disgruntled Stonemason Edwin VanCleef, when she was eight years old. When her parents were killed by the Stormwind army, Nyssha was trained by the Defias as an assassin. Nyssha fought against the invaders sent by the Westfall People's Militia into the ruins of Moonbrook for many years before VanCleef sent her on a mission to kill a target inside Sentinel Hill: A paladin named Saavedro of Stratholme. But she was not as stealthy as she had wished, and was quickly captured by the People's Militia. She was sent to the Stockade in Stormwind, along with the other Defias prisoners, awaiting her execution... when fate offered her a second chance.
Saavedro - guided either by compassion or by some whim of the Light - offered Nyssha two choices: Die by the hangman's rope, or serve him in battle. Nyssha, ever opportunistic, chose the latter. She still wore the blackened Defias armor and the red mask that was the primary trademark of the Brotherhood, but instead chose to fight for the Alliance against them. In return for her loyalty, Saavedro had a pair of bronze knives crafted for her. She saw the altruistic paladin as a father figure, and Saavedro saw her as the daughter he never had.
After the death of Defias kingpin Edwin VanCleef, Nyssha offered her services to SI:7. She was paired with Arrhae Leafrunner, Saavedro's ally in the Cenarion Circle, who gave Nyssha a wyvern tailspike to act as a blade. They travelled east to the Redridge Mountains, to do battle against the Blackrock orcs that had begun their incursion from the Burning Steppes. But before long, she was summoned by SI:7 chief Mathias Shaw, for an important mission - one she would not return from.
Death and Resurrection
Based on information gained with some urging from Saavedro, SI:7 targeted Urgan the Corruptor, a powerful orc warlock who had belonged to the Shadow Council during the First War, and was responsible for killing Alliance agents in Outland. To break his support base within the Horde, Nyssha was sent to assassinate Ordevaas Portalseeker, a Blood Knight Master who served as the Corruptor's lieutenant.
However, the Blood Knight Master got wind of Nyssha's mission from the draenei vindicator Velenkayn, who was captured and tortured by the Corruptor shortly after Nyssha received her mission. Nyssha began her journey to Quel'Thalas to locate the Corruptor's lieutenant, but he located her first. Two Ghostland guardians ambushed her near the Quel'Lithien Lodge in the Eastern Plaguelands and took her before the Master, who waited at the gatehouse in the Thalassian Pass. Taking the wyvern tailspike from her belt, Ordevaas ran it into Nyssha's chest and left her lying on the ground, then watched and waited as the poison slowly killed her. He then had her decapitated, and the body dumped at Chillwind Camp. Her head was delivered to Saavedro as a package. Grief-stricken and enraged, Saavedro swore vengeance against Ordevaas, but was convinced (reluctantly) to forgive once it became clear that Ordevaas was a puppet of the Corruptor.
Saavedro had Nyssha buried outside Shattrath, a place where the Light would watch her rest... or so he thought. Just before the war against the Lich King, agents of the Cult of the Damned raided the cemetery outside Shattrath City. Nyssha's body had putrified by this point, and her head was reattached to her body. She was placed under the command of General Varan Metheius, a former Forsaken executor and battle-hardened warrior. The general had lost his jaw during his "second death", and had to rely on writing notes or sign language to communicate - but found that Nyssha took to the death knight's training very quickly, and was pleased with her progress. Together, they battled against the Scarlet Crusade, and later the Argent Dawn at Light's Hope Chapel. Upon the defeat at Light's Hope and the breaking of the Lich King's hold on his death knights, Nyssha was inducted into the newly-formed Knights of the Ebon Blade.
But Metheius, wishing to rejoin the service of his Dark Lady, returned to the Undercity after his liberation. As a token of his esteem for her, he invited Nyssha to fight alongside him as the war moved to Northrend - telling her that the Forsaken had no real love of the Horde it was ostensibly part of. Although she agreed to fight as an "auxiliary" of what became the 122nd Deathguard Battalion, Nyssha remained a member of the Alliance and the Ebon Blade, working in Valiance Keep in the Borean Tundra, on the opposite coast from where Metheius was deployed - a means to avoid coming into contact (or conflict) with her mentor. When they reached Icecrown, Nyssha convinced Metheius to formally join the Ebon Blade, which he had refused to do at first. Together, they would serve as part of the "Ashen Verdict", the combined Argent-Ebon forces assaulting Icecrown Citadel, ending with the fall of one Lich King and the rise of another - one who would play a major role in Nyssha's later destiny.
After Arthas' Fall
Though Saavedro would prevail over his hated enemy, the Corruptor, he was never the same after that... and Nyssha watched as the world became engulfed in continuous warfare - the Cataclysm, in Pandaria, on Draenor, in the Broken Isles and on Argus, and in Kul Tiras and Zandalar. As the years went on, she watched friends and comrades die in what she considered ultimately pointless conflicts: General Metheius, Baron Artimus Devaneaux, Battlelord Velenkayn (who had been raised by the Ebon Blade following his death), Admiral Eliphas Aximand, Taeril'hane Ketiron... and ultimately, Saavedro himself, who eventually became corrupted and reborn as Father Shankolin Blightpath, a fanatical follower of the Forsaken, who would meet his end in Nazjatar at the hands of the reborn Corruptor.
Following the Fourth War, a conflict Nyssha judged "irredeemably stupid", the Lich King - revealed for all the world to be Bolvar Fordragon, the former Regent of Stormwind - issued a call to the Ebon Blade to raise new death knights. Nyssha was troubled by the idea, but did not protest it, and soon became involved in training the new recruits in the way of the death knight alongside her friend Laneth Sorrowspear, like her an "old guard" raised to fight in Lordaeron just before the Northrend war. Among the new recruits were the former Nightborne arcanist Randarel Vendross and the fallen Shado-Pan Blackguard Zhaoren Deathtide, with whom she would work closely during the conflict that was coming. She also found herself drawn back to Westfall for the first time in a long time, and was horrified to discover that Taran Heskin, the son of veteran knight Sir Eran Heskin, had defected to the Cult of the Damned, had killed his wife, and attempted to kill both his parents and his son before the latter, the young squire Donal, ran him through with his training blade. It was a forboding sign of things to come.
On Borrowed Time
Bolvar had suspected that, following Sylvanas Windrunner's revelation of her true loyalties (as in, not to the Horde), she would attempt to take his power. He was mistaken - upon taking the crown of the Lich King in her hands, she tore it in two, creating a massive rift in the sky above Icecrown. Though no longer in control of the Scourge, Bolvar still commanded the loyalty of the Ebon Blade by his reputation, and when he called, the warriors of Acherus answered. Nyssha, Laneth, Zhaoren, and Randarel were among the first wave, along with their comrade Suzl Grimblade. All made their way through the portal through the rift - into the Maw, a place of nightmares deep in the bowels of the Shadowlands. All of them save Suzl managed to escape with the others to Oribos, the city in the center of the land of the dead.
Getting her bearings in Oribos, Nyssha learned of the disabling of the Arbiter, and the flow of souls being directed to the Maw; of the four main realms connected to the Eternal City; and of the drought of anima, or soul essence, that plagued them. Nyssha set out to explore the Shadowlands for herself. Of the four realms, she felt herself drawn to Maldraxxus most of all, as she had spent many years among the Ebon Blade and its Scourge influences (which appear to have been taken from this strange land), and felt a sense of familiarity she didn't feel in the other three realms. When the caretakers of Oribos bade her choose who she would serve alongside in the war to come, she chose the Necrolords without hesitation.
All throughout the war - against Sylvanas and her patron and lord of the Maw, a megalomaniac known as the Jailer - Nyssha felt a sense of forboding, thinking that she would not be returning from the Shadowlands, that once the war was done, win or lose, she would be remaining behind. This did not slow her desire to contribute, however, as she learned the ways of the Maldraxxi and brought those ways into the campaign in the Maw and the pursuit of the Jailer to Zereth Mortis. It would be in the latter location that her sense of forboding paid off. Guided by a broker pilgrim known as Hazir, Nyssha discovered a powerful Mawsworn sorcerer known as the Stoker of Hate was specifically hunting for her and her comrades. She soon realized that the Stoker was none other than Taran Heskin, who had pledged himself to the Jailer in life and was reborn in a monstrous form in death... and would be seeking to end his father's life. Nyssha stood at Sir Eran's side during the battle, which resulted in his being forced to embrace the worgen curse to save his life, having been healed with the blood of the mortally-wounded Gilnean archdruid Lucia Zherron. An investigation by Laneth at Nyssha's request soon discovered that the Stoker had private torture chambers within the Jailer's tower of Torghast, and that a number of waiting souls (including those of Saavedro and Ketiron) and those reborn in their new eternal selves (like Artimus, who had become a Maldraxxi necromancer who opposed the House of Rituals' allegiance to the Jailer) had been held there, as well as mortal captives, including Suzl, who did not survive.
With the death of the Jailer and the restoration of the Shadowlands, Nyssha began to plan a return to Azeroth. But that sense of forboding had not ever left her; indeed, she had remarked to Hazir during her explorations of Zereth Mortis that she had been on "borrowed time" since she was raised by the Ebon Blade, and as she was preparing to leave Oribos, that time ran out. Her body quite literally gave up the ghost, and she suddenly found herself in the presence of the newly-instated Arbiter. Having seen her work with them in the war, he ultimately dispatched her back to Maldraxxus... this time, to stay.
