Varang, the Ash-Mender

Chthonic Tiefling • Life Cleric • Cinderborn Healer

A grim ash-cult healer from the hidden Cinderborn enclave, Varang drags the dying back from death with red-black fire, smoke, pressure, bone charms, and whispered commands to breathe.

“If you fall, I will drag you back. If you waste the life I return to you, I may let the dark have you next time.”

Visual References

Use these images for Varang’s face, silhouette, armour, weapons, expressions, and overall tone.

Full Body Reference
Armour, build, horns, markings, charms, and silhouette.

Expression Reference
Snarling, shocked, neutral, mournful, and other moods.

Weapons
Spiked skull-mace and dark ritual shield.

Spell Focus

Varang’s spell focus is a ritual object that looks as though it belongs equally in a healer’s kit, a funerary rite, and a cave-shrine. It reflects the same core themes as their magic: ash, bone, ember-heat, death without waste, and life dragged back through will.

Rather than feeling polished or priestly, the focus should read as ancestral, practical, and unsettling — a sacred tool used for rites of mending, warding, and command. It is the kind of object Varang would hold over the wounded while whispering harsh prayers, pressing back the dark one breath at a time.

Who Varang Is

Varang is a gender-fluid Chthonic Tiefling and former healer of the Cinderborn: a hidden people who live in volcanic tunnels, old border-caves, and the shadowed reaches near the Underdark. They are not a soft temple healer or shining saint. They are a battlefield mender, a survivalist, and a death-reverent ritualist who treats life as something sacred because it is fragile.

To those who travel with them, Varang can seem severe, frightening, or even cold. But beneath the ash, bone, and harsh words is a brutal kind of compassion. They do not comfort the dying with pretty lies. They grip the wound, speak the rite, burn the bleeding closed, and order the body to keep living.

At a Glance

Backstory

The Cinderborn

Varang was born among the Cinderborn, an isolated enclave of Chthonic Tieflings who survive through secrecy, discipline, ritual, and harsh practicality. Their homes sit near the Underdark, where volcanic heat, old stone, fungi, ash, and bone shape daily life.

The Ember Below

The Cinderborn do not worship bright gods of mercy. Varang was taught that life, death, decay, ash, earth, and rebirth are parts of one sacred furnace. Death is natural; meaningless death is theft from the cycle.

The Ash Vigil

As part of their healer’s path, Varang undertook the Ash Vigil: a sacred isolation in the deep caves. There they listened to buried heat, old shrines, bones, fungi, and the silence of the dead.

What Varang Found

The vigil became more than a rite of humility. Varang found signs that something beneath the world was poisoning the natural cycle: corrupted growths in the caves, violated shrines, creatures fleeing tunnels that should have been still, and a spiritual wrongness in the stone itself.

Burdened by this discovery, Varang never returned home. Worn down by isolation, they were ambushed by Drow slavers. They fought with shield, skull-mace, spellcraft, tooth, curse, and survival instinct, but were overwhelmed and taken captive into the Underdark.

Healing Style

Varang’s healing is sacred, but it is not gentle. Their magic burns, seals, cauterises, binds, and drags the dying back before death can claim them. Wounds close beneath red-black ash and ember-smoke. Bone charms clatter. Fungal medicines bite the tongue. Their prayers sound less like hymns and more like commands given at the edge of a grave.

“Breathe. That is not a request.”

Magic Feels Like

Smoke, pressure, heat shimmer, grave-soil, blood-binding, ghostly hands, ember-flame, ash marks, whispered ancestral names, and the body being forced to remember life.

Personality & Identity

How They Seem

Stern, watchful, grimly compassionate, practical, suspicious of false comfort, and deeply protective through action rather than softness.

What They Believe

Pain means the body still clings to the world. Death is patient. Survival is sacred. A life returned should not be wasted.

Gender & Selfhood

Varang is gender-fluid and may present masculine, feminine, neither, or shifting. Among the Cinderborn, identity is sacred because it transforms: like fire burning down into ash, then being reforged into something new.

Current Story

Varang begins the story as a captive in the Underdark after the Drow ambush. Their immediate goal is survival and escape, but their deeper purpose remains unresolved: something below the world is corrupting the cycle of death and rebirth, and Varang may be one of the few who has seen the signs clearly enough to understand the danger.

Survive
Endure captivity and escape the Drow.

Protect
Keep useful lives from being wasted.

Uncover
Find what is poisoning the deep cycle.

Return
Seek the Cinderborn, if home still remains.