First appearance: Into the Mirror 10 Shatter + Into the Mirror 11 Mortaurios · watch it on YouTube
Cerys is an Aasimar paladin who has wandered The Sands of Eternity far longer than any of her companions there. She came from a part of The Void long ago and was killed, which is how she found herself stranded in the land of the dead. She joined the Into the Mirror party in the worst way imaginable: one of her arrows went astray and killed Locket. From that grim start she became their guide to the city of Mortaurios, their blood-sworn ally against The Arbiter, and the woman who put a dragon in the snow.
Story
Into the Mirror 10–11: Mortaurios
Cerys entered the story moments before Locket’s death. She was surrounded in the dunes by four outlanders, who tore away her shield and her sword. When she dove for one of their crossbows, a blade slashed across her back. The archer among them decided to make a game of it. He tossed his heavy bow and a single arrow at her feet and told her to take her shot. “Is this a game to you?” she demanded. “We’ve got nothing else to do,” he answered. “Nothing but time here. Why not have a little fun?” One of them stepped forward and spread his arms to make himself a target.
Enraged, Cerys erupted in divine light and fired. The arrow flew wide over the man’s head and over the next dune, and it found the back of Locket’s neck and pierced her throat. At the table, her player had the grim distinction of killing her own previous character. A spear was pulled from Cerys’s body, and she bled into the sand on her knees. Then Flynry came charging toward the glowing figure, and Elianna cast a spell that put three of the attackers to sleep. Still radiant, Cerys picked up her weapons and cut deep into the archer. She drove her longsword through a sleeping spearman’s chest (“Oh, I’ve been waiting for you”), and he crumbled into sand.
Meeting her rescuers did not go smoothly. The two nearly came to blows, with blue flame engulfing Flynry’s sword. Flynry laid Locket’s death squarely at her feet. Cerys apologized, saying “I meant to kill one of them. They set me up”. Elianna kept the peace because Cerys knew of the walled city with the ziggurat that Elianna had glimpsed through Flynry’s sword. Cerys explained that anyone who dies in the Sands does not come back; they become sand, as her own friends had. She wanted vengeance on whoever had made this place, and she wanted to go home. When Flynry slyly angled his sword so Toddleheim could look into it, Toddleheim saw her true inner self: radiant and angelic, with bright blue eyes and white wings. His verdict: “She’s all right. I don’t like her, but she’s all right.”
Cerys wrote the city’s name in Elianna’s book, blew sand from her palm and whispered it into the wind. The desert opened a portal to the foot of the great stairs before Mortaurios, beneath the great ziggurat and its crystal beam of light. She had never been to the ziggurat herself. When royal guards arrived with a polite request from their majesties, she advised the group to comply. When Elianna blamed the party’s state on the abrasive sand, Cerys helpfully added that it “causes hallucinations sometimes, a lot of brain fog.”
Into the Mirror 12–13: Royal Audience and Otherside
Cerys led the party before the throne with a cordial bow. Queen Cantressa greeted her warmly. She recalled welcoming Cerys into the city and noted that Cerys had not graced the hall in hundreds of years. Cerys hesitated, then vouched for her new companions as “trustworthy and capable.” The queen spoke of The Orrery of Dreams, an item that might lead the dead back to the living.
Later, over dinner, the party grumbled that she had been suspiciously “chummy” with the queen, while Cerys kept eating, unbothered. When Flynry questioned her directly, she explained that she had “taken care of various outlanders” for the queen and so held good standing. She also said she wanted out just as badly as they did. He found she was telling the truth as far as she knew it. Flynry dared her to be first through the mirror, and she stubbornly obliged. She vanished into a reflection of snow and ruins, “decidedly not green.”
On the other side waited an ice dragon. Cerys healed Elianna, pointed her blade at the beast and marked it as her quarry. Then she landed two perfect strikes in a row. “Cerys. Write its obituary.” She gave Flynry a little smirk and struck into the dragon’s neck with a flash of the same divine light he had glimpsed when they first met. The dragon’s blood poured over the gold, and it staggered and turned to snow before it hit the ground.
Into the Mirror 14: The Scholar
Still reeling from those back-to-back blows, Cerys spotted a glint in the dragon’s snowy remains. It was a big white soul gem, and she pocketed it with satisfaction. “Well, let’s get a-lookin’ for this orrery. I command.” Flynry, who had last seen her fight on her knees and bleeding, was openly impressed. The party found the golden orrery on the hoard, and it carried them somewhere Cerys had never been. Cerys argued it “brought us here for a reason,” and Flynry agreed to follow.
Into the Mirror 15–16: Old Friends
The orrery had brought them to a library and to Vythorn, the Arbiter, the man who had killed the rest of the party. Cerys welcomed him to death with dry cheer and casually asked whether they should kill him. In the end she sought common ground, since everyone was looking for the Grandmaster. When Flynry demanded she swear to stand with them against Vythorn, she replied, “Oh, swear. You know I’m a paladin, right?” She sealed it properly: a blood oath on Elianna’s contract, her bloody palm marked over with Flynry’s bloody X. “So I swear fealty to you all. And if this one tries to get me to turn on you, I will not.” At the table, her player admitted, perhaps only out of character, that Cerys is an oathbreaker paladin.
She admitted she had been in the Sands longer than the others and had believed there was no way out. She eventually came clean to Vythorn that the orrery was exactly what they had been seeking, and she suggested “some sort of fate play here.” When strangers gathered outside the library, she warned that they might be outlanders and could not be trusted. Her attempt to whisk everyone away by speaking the city’s name to the orrery did nothing.
In the fight that followed, a whirling ethereal blade hit the whole party hard and dropped Cerys unconscious. Elianna’s healing brought her back to her feet. She then struck the outlander leader, Sky, with a holy, critical blow that left him barely standing.
Into the Mirror 17: The Way Out
It was not enough. A crushing orb of gravity dropped Flynry and Toddleheim, and an orc raider’s greatsword cut down Cerys and then Elianna. Sky, magnanimous in victory, only wanted “half your stuff,” and Cerys handed over a torch, rations and a shield. She questioned him about the outlanders, who called themselves “free thinkers” and dismissed the king’s sandsickness as one of the queen’s lies. After a whisper from his mage, Sky told the party of The Oasis, a place once joined to the land of the living. Cerys declined Sky’s company (“You did just… nearly kill us all”). In the outlanders’ camp she traded for a +2 longsword that dealt “righteous holy damage.”
The mirror carried them not to an oasis but to a field of lava, where a great ringed structure echoed the orrery. Cerys hurried Vythorn’s work along by speeding him up, then held back fire elementals with a divine command that froze one in place. As a giant lumbered toward them through the lava, she urged Vythorn on: “You have got to get us out of here, man. By Thorn.” When the giant reached over the platform and brought its sword down on her, she went “full supernova,” screaming and blazing with radiant light. At first the blaze fizzled like “one of those balloons you let go of.” It was then deemed “way too cool to be this lame” and allowed to burn properly. With Vythorn nearly finished, Cerys flared her light to keep the giant’s attention on herself.
Personality and Abilities
Cerys stands about six feet tall, ethereal, with grayish skin and long blue hair tied back. She wears tattered, dulled heavy armor over blue robes and vestments, and her face is worn and unsmiling, “jaded by this place.” Beneath that lies the angelic self Toddleheim saw: bright hair, bright skin, blue eyes and white wings. She is proud, unflappable and dryly funny. She cracks her neck before a fight, answers threats with “I’d like to see you try” and “I’m not afraid of you,” and eats calmly while being whispered about.
She fights with longsword and shield and channels divine light into her blows. She can heal with a touch, mark a foe as her prey, frighten enemies into stillness, quicken an ally, and burst into a blinding radiant aura when enraged. She knows the Sands well: she knows how soul gems serve as currency and how to whisper the city’s name to open its portal. She also knows who rules there.
Relationships
- Locket: Killed by Cerys’s misfired arrow before the two ever met.
- Flynry: Blamed her for Locket’s death and distrusted her, then came to respect her; they sealed a blood oath together.
- Elianna: Defended Cerys from the start, and Cerys healed her in return.
- Toddleheim: Gruffly accepting: “I don’t like her, but she’s all right.”
- The Arbiter: Sworn against him, yet she worked beside him and sped him up when it mattered.
- Sky: The outlander leader she nearly felled, lost to, and traded with.
- Queen Cantressa: Welcomed Cerys to Mortaurios centuries ago; Cerys has done her bidding against outlanders.
Memorable Quotes
- “Is this a game to you?” (Into the Mirror 10–11)
- “If you die here, there is no coming back. You become sand.” (Into the Mirror 10–11)
- “Well, let’s get a-lookin’ for this orrery. I command.” (Into the Mirror 14)
- “Oh, swear. You know I’m a paladin, right?” (Into the Mirror 15–16)
- “So I swear fealty to you all. And if this one tries to get me to turn on you, I will not.” (Into the Mirror 15–16)
- “You have got to get us out of here, man. By Thorn.” (Into the Mirror 17)