NAME: Maria, Mercy Bound in Fury
PRONOUNS: She/Her
MAGE CLASS: Occultist → Eidolist / Riftwalker / Vitalis
LINEAGE: Undead & Ethereal → Spirit
SUBTYPE: Shadows → Rogue
ERA PLACEMENT: Post-2170 AD — Late Age of Mages
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There are souls who pass peacefully into the Veil, and then there are those like Maria — torn from the world, remade in Aether, and returned not by fate, but by fury.

She was once a woman of warm silences and sharp laughter, born in the reclamation wards of southern Iridia, where fragmented memories drifted like mist over cratered cities. The daughter of a bloodline lost in the Collapse, Maria grew among the unrecorded — those whose grief never earned a monument. Her gift, even before death, was always one of feeling: she knew when lies were forming, when pain was too deep for words, and when a person needed saving before they knew it themselves. She smiled often, laughed more, and healed where others hid.

And then they took everything from her.

No consensus exists on what precisely happened — only that a covert Rift experiment ignited near the sanctum at Calder’s Grief, rupturing the spiritual lattice of the region. Hundreds died. But Maria did not. Her body perished. Her mind did not.

Something clung to the Veil.

She returned not as a ghost, nor as a revenant, but as something rarer: a Spirit, fully coherent, fully animate — a soul with memory, purpose, and wrath. Her body reformed in partial matter, her skin laced with shimmerlines of ghoststeel, her voice layered with frequencies most minds felt before they heard. She was not resurrected. She was unfinished, and in that incompletion, her powers crystallized.

Maria emerged a Riftwalker, able to blink between places as if tethered to space only by memory. She could heal with a touch, even as her own essence frayed with every spell. But more terrifying was her mind — a telepathic reach that did not request access, but pierced. She could feel your lies before you spoke them, hold your thoughts in her grasp, and in her darkest moments, fracture them.

Her motivations were twofold: to heal, and to punish. She saved those who deserved more than this world offered — the abandoned, the damaged, the overlooked. But those who enacted cruelty? Who ripped light from others? Maria hunted them. Quietly. Without mercy. The factions never claimed her — she would not be used. The Orders tried to bind her to doctrine, but she vanished mid-initiation. The Veilborn called her unstable. Survivors called her salvation.

And yet, she bore her own collapse within. Maria’s rage was not random — it was structured, obsessive. Those who had harmed her, who had shattered her life, remained burned into her telepathic matrix like acid scars. She could not forget. Nor could she forgive. The names were gone, but the feeling of them remained. And that feeling bled into everything. It made her reckless, made her impulsive, made her overreach in ways that cost her allies and nearly fractured her mind more than once.

She was stubborn — unable to release pain, unable to accept that some things could not be healed. And when kindness failed, when her empathy collapsed beneath the weight of vengeance, she would lash out with devastating focus. Yet the moment the fury passed, she would be the first to kneel beside the broken, whispering apologies no one else could hear, mending wounds she caused with trembling hands.

For this, she was feared. But more often, she was followed — not for what she promised, but for what she never stopped trying to be: better.

It was the nomads of the Dust Verge who gave her the name that entered the Annals:
Maria, Mercy Bound in Fury.
Because even at her most violent, the thing she wanted — the thing she always wanted — was to save someone. Anyone.

Her final fate is unrecorded. Some say she disappeared into a Rift she herself opened — one that pulsed with both grief and hope. Others claim she was last seen at the Black Sun convergence, shielding a child from mindfire with her own unraveling soul.

But in the psionic echoes that linger in Rift-touched ruins, you can sometimes feel her signature — a flash of laughter, a flicker of pain, a warmth too bright to be safe.

She does not haunt.
She hunts, still.