Dr. Ruth’lyssant D’victrianel
Vorator Mentis · Mentis Ruina · Dominamentis · Cogitationis Architectus · Mentiphagus
The wardens who first catalogued him would write, in quavering ink, that there was something psionic—misaligned—about his very presence. In the lantern-lit levels beneath Old Sharlayan his records still list him as Elezen (Duskwight, presumed), forty summers old, standing an unassuming five fulm and eleven ilms. Yet every examiner notes the same divergence: the aether around him drifts off-tempo, as though responding to a second heartbeat no one else can hear. Trained first in anima surgery and later in the forbidden geometries of the Thirteenth, he practises today as an unlicensed chirurgeon, wielding shadow and void not as weapons but as bone-saws made of thought.
Contemporaries who encounter him describe a scholar stitched from discordant parts. Copper-blond hair clings to half a scalp; the other hemisphere is replaced by a translucent soulglass dome whose perforations vent slow violet vapour. One eye remains the washed-out blue of an Ishgardian winter corpse, while the other gleams black—shot through with a magenta corona—like the pupil of some star-hung horror. A porcelain respirator masks most of his lower face, but rumours insist that beneath it someone else’s jaw has been grafted to his own, the flesh grey-blue and long starved of air. His robes, neither healer’s whites nor thaumaturge’s blacks, are plum-dark and embroidered with a single, jagged scalpel-sigil set among three sun-bleached crimson stars: the banner of a forgotten clinic that no longer exists outside his dreams.
Vindictive intellect tempers every gesture. Ruth’lyssant is exacting, judgmental, and unflinchingly truthful when it suits his designs—yet that candour often serves as a scalpel meant to lay others bare. He will dissect a lie the way a maestro undresses a fugue, smiling thinly while the subject bleeds metaphors at his feet. Compassion is present, but crooked: he repairs rather than saves, viewing mercy as the cruellest anaesthetic of all. Isolation has honed him into a creature of cool observation who tastes every silence for subtext, while chronic migraines and tension headaches fuel a baseline irritability that can spiral into brutal eloquence when provoked.
The void is the first tongue he ever truly spoke. Shadows answer like obedient hounds, folding into threads he can weave through flesh, memory, and mind. Arcane symmetries hold his techniques together; fel-green chaos he studies purely for contrast, a scientist sniffing poison before corking the vial. Rumours persist that he once attempted to graft primal aether into living cortex, but only the patient’s ashes remain to testify.
Born to Beatrix and Ernest D’victrianel, radical anatomists banished from the Studium for experiments that blurred soul and sinew, Ruth spent thirteen years entombed beneath their estate as proof of concept. Freedom arrived wearing a healer’s mask: Markus Aurelio, travelling cleric and alleged disciple of the light. Markus’s mentorship, however, proved a chrysalis spun by darker design—he served The Harbinger, an ancient Voidsent of the Thirteenth whose true name curls the tongue and unthreads lesser minds. When Ruth uncovered the ruse and the theft of his soulpathology folios, he opened his teacher’s skull with psionic tethers and read every secret written on the wet parchment within. Markus did not survive the revelation; the Harbinger merely laughed in the walls of Ruth’s thoughts and waited.Today, whispers place Ruth among the shadow markets of Ul’dah, exchanging outlawed neural procedures for relics of the Void. Others claim he wanders the Hinterlands, tending to broken Dark Knights in exchange for their nightmares. Through every rumour runs a single corporate stamp: UNITYCorp, a clandestine cabal of Sharlayan expatriates and void-augurs who trade in anima patents and moral compromises. Some say Ruth is their surgical prodigy; others insist UNITYCorp is simply a sigil he scrawls on invoices to keep true debtors at bay. The truth, like the aether around him, warps when observed too closely.
He finds a rare, aching comfort in sunflowers pressed flat between grimoires, remembers the sister who once showed him their faces, and plays forlorn piano études in places no audience will dare to follow. He loathes loud taverns, the reek of cheap ale, and being stared at—as though the act of observation itself were another scalpel cutting into his sense of self.
He stood at the far end of the hallway, clinic whites reduced to ash-soaked rags, and watched me as one might regard an insect pinned to cork. In that gaze I felt the fracture—reality bending around his contempt like heat above desert stone. The stairs behind me were gone, rewritten, the world soldered shut by a will older than mercy. I understood then that Ruth’lyssant D’victrianel had ceased to be merely a man; he had become a sovereign anomaly, and he hated me for ever believing otherwise.—Markus Aurelio Voidmarrow, Chief of Staff, Sanguinum Sanitarium (deceased)
OOC
The writer behind Ruth has limited social reserves and may drift in and out of character during extended scenes. Slow typing is inevitable. Diagnoses of PTSD, Bipolar II, ASD, OCPD, and chronic anxiety inform the character’s presentation; they are used here because lived experience makes them easier to portray responsibly. If you’re intrigued by abnormal psychology, obscure medical history, or want to build collaborative plotlines involving UNITYCorp, feel free to whisper.