First appearance: S4E15, Vythorn’s Return Part 2 · watch it on YouTube
Ise is a shapeshifting changeling who failed one of Fil’s tests long ago and was sent back to the dirt for it. The God of Fate raised him again as one of two companions to watch over Vythorn on the road to the Ruins of Giant’s Breath. Ise was dry, merciless, unexpectedly kind in a sideways sort of way, and alarming in a fight. He also carried the one secret that changed everything Vythorn believed about his own past.
Story
Ise rose out of the mud of Fil’s silent forest beside the grung Biff. Both had been pulled from the moments just before their deaths and restored to their prime. Fil wanted them as her “eyes and ears and mind,” and they would decide whether Vythorn deserved the Testaments of Morir’s Cataclysm. Ise objected to dancing “on your puppet strings for free.” Fil reminded him she could step on him again, and that settled it. He looked Vythorn up and down and delivered his verdict on the spot: “He won’t make it. Send us back now.” On the road he lifted Vythorn’s coin purse before anyone noticed. He explained that he had failed his own test and been “consigned to the hells.” He also spent the trip trying on a series of faces, among them a grung to teach Biff to walk quietly and a squire who could pass for Vythorn’s younger brother.
His approach to the trial was to watch and let the Arbiter make his own mistakes. At an abandoned carriage, Ise heard a whimper inside and stopped Biff with a finger to his lips. He let Vythorn walk in unwarned, and a small tabaxi named Kuro dropped onto the Arbiter’s back and stabbed a dagger into his neck. “And it’s not our test,” Ise pointed out. He then turned into a perfect copy of the boy, and later of the boy’s missing mother. In her shape he licked Vythorn’s neck wound closed with a rough cat’s tongue. Vythorn promised to kill him if he ever did it again. Ise replied, “Unlikely, but okay.” When the trail led to a gnoll cave where Kuro’s mother was caged, Ise took the exact form of the gnoll leader, down to the sagging shoulder and the missing toe. He conjured a blade of shadow behind the real leader and killed him with a single strike. Then he told the gnolls who came running that they had been “deceived by a shapeshifter.”
The gnolls were not entirely fooled, because the real leader always howled and Ise didn’t. So he stopped trying to pass and fought, still wearing the leader’s shape. He went still and let a gnoll’s jaws close harmlessly on his armor. He whirled into a blade-dance, cutting at souls rather than flesh. When six gnolls surrounded him, he announced, “I offered you mercy. Now burn,” and threw a fireball that caught the Arbiter too. “You might say fate intervened.” Then he ordered the survivors to take their cubs and run. He healed the mother’s mangled foot after asking Biff, “the moralist here,” whether he should, even though she had tried to fight him off. “We all know consent is sexy,” he reasoned, and promised that if she was still mad about it later, he’d be “more than willing to chop it off.” In the narrow tunnel to the ruins, Ise explained how he had failed his own test. He had beaten an opponent who begged for mercy and spared him, and he now suspected he should have followed his heart. When Biff wondered aloud whether grungs have a cloaca, Ise grabbed his hands: “Do not check.” Biff checked anyway, and walked on through the tunnel staring at his own junk and screaming. At the great carved door of Giant’s Breath, the door was “thirsty” for blood. Vythorn stabbed Ise to feed it, and Ise held his gaze the whole time. When the blood fell short, Ise grabbed the Arbiter’s hand and drove the knife in deeper himself. “The difference between you and me is I understand what I owe.”
Inside, before the scribe Master Skreca, Ise showed his true form for the first time and asked the name of Vythorn’s foe. When Vythorn named Agdrel, called the Shadow King, Ise recognized it. He turned into Vythorn’s father and revealed that in another time, while in the employ of “less than reputable parties,” he had watched The Shadow King kill Vythorn’s parents with his own hands. Vythorn had believed his whole life that his own uncontrolled chaos killed them. When he protested, Ise turned into his mother and asked, “Then how do I know this face?” Ise then called out to Fil, who stepped from behind a column. He asked her not to return him to the dust but to let him serve as her instrument, and he sealed the bargain with his own blood. The blood wound up his arm in strange characters, and against his will he became a small crow. His final judgment was that Vythorn’s choices had been “alternatively seemingly selfless and ultimately selfish,” and that Fil should grant him the tome and “let him end up where he seems intent to go.” He stayed behind as Fil’s pet when the Arbiter was sent back into The Void.
Personality and Abilities
Ise’s true form is very small, not much bigger than Biff, ashen white, with dark circles around his eyes and long white hair to his shoulders. He almost never wore it. His usual face was a pale, gaunt drow who looked “sleep deprived or possibly dead.” He described himself as “whoever circumstances require.” He studied his targets down to their posture and scars, and he could fool a cave full of gnolls by sight, sound and smell, if not by rhythm.
He was a master thief and a deadly duelist. He fought with a conjured shadow blade wreathed in green flame, struck from hiding, wove a spinning blade-dance, and could call down fireballs. He could also heal, send whispered messages into other people’s heads, and sense what was around him. His humor was bone-dry and frequently cruel (“Are you stupid?”). He insisted, “My primary export is violence,” and he didn’t like candy. Under that, he offered real kindness when it suited him. He defended Biff’s intelligence as “a valid way of existing,” quietly took the knife for the party, and told Biff, “Your idealism is not misplaced.”
Relationships
- Fil: The God of Fate who failed him, raised him, and finally accepted him as her bound instrument and pet crow.
- Biff: His fellow companion on the trial. Ise mocked him, protected him, and found out they had both failed their tests by showing mercy.
- The Arbiter: The scholar Ise was sent to judge. Ise found him selfish but recommended he be given the tome, and told him the truth about his parents.
- The Shadow King: Ise once saw him kill Vythorn’s parents.
- Master Skreca: The keeper of Giant’s Breath, before whom Ise revealed his true face.
Memorable Quotes
“The difference between you and me is I understand what I owe.” (S4E15, Vythorn’s Return Part 2)
“Ah, Agdrel. That’s why I know you. As you might imagine, I never forget a face.” (S4E15, Vythorn’s Return Part 2)
- “He won’t make it. Send us back now.” (S4E15, Vythorn’s Return Part 2)
- “I offered you mercy. Now burn.” (S4E15, Vythorn’s Return Part 2)
- “I’m whoever circumstances require. Do you ever want to walk again or not?” (S4E15, Vythorn’s Return Part 2)
- “Let me be your instrument… my blade will be yours for all time.” (S4E15, Vythorn’s Return Part 2)