Description

Rishida Xinja was a vampire originally born into the powerful Temerian family, from which Sardielr Koskides descends. She was the one who arranged the death of his mother, in an attempt to end the bloodline of the last emperor.

Appearance

Rishida was originally a pretty woman born into an affluent family, dressed in the finest silks the Temerian Empire could provide. After suffering the attack of the ilithids, she was partially transformed by one of their tadpoles, deforming one half of her face, making her eye a milky white and giving her tentacle like protrusions. As a vampire, she often wore half-masks to hide the transformed part of her face and a hood to go unnoticed.

Personality

Rishida's personality was greatly warped by her encounter with the ilithids. Before that, she was like most noble ladies, naive and entitled, but the deformities suffered in the attack saw her shunned from society. As a vampire, she is a cold person, unconcerned with the wellbeing of anyone other than Lokaci Wuce. Her hatred of her family could be seen, in her working to slay all of their descendants.

Biography

Early History

Rishida was born into the Xinja family, a noble house of Temeria, that had been gaining influence. Her life went mostly without care, until the city was attacked by Mind Flayers and young Rishida was infected with one of their tadpoles. She was saved by a wandering knight, a member of the Order of the Bloody Thistle, who arrived just in time. For some unknown reason, her transformation into an illithid remained incomplete, but it left her with a permanent deformity of one half of her face.

Her family, having worked on improving their ties with the imperial house, and even seeking to join the houses together, could not afford this public embarrassment and so declared her dead and exiled her from the capital. Left alone, she wandered the empire, until eventually meeting Lokaci Wuce. The two of them got along and he would later transform her into a vampire. It appeared that her condition inflicted by the illithids interacted oddly with her vampirism, giving her unusual abilities, chief amongst them was lacking the vampires' weakness to sunlight.

Now immortal, Rishida watched as a couple of generations after hers, the daughter of the emperor would marry into the Xinja household. Years later, the rest of the continent would declare war on Temeria and in his madness and rage, the emperor would have his construct armies perform unspeakable acts. After the fall of Temeria, Rishida, fueled by her hatred of her family and her disgust at the emperor, would then decide to ensure that their bloodlines were finished, so that there will never be one to raise claim to the imperial throne.

The emperor's house had died in the war, so the only place the blood of the emperor's remained was in the Xinja house. She systematically killed all of it's members, lesser houses and descendants. When she would hear news of a descendant over the centuries she would arrange for their death, destroying all records of the house that she could find.

Eventually, Lokaci Wuce would fall to Porton Thanin's trick and she would join him in creating Metua, while working on a way to escape the lich's thrall. Centuries later, she would find another bearing the blood of her house - their last descendant Helana Xinja. Living in obscurity and not knowing the significance of her name, she was a poor woman from Maidenview. She contracted a band of thugs and pirates, who were in the area called the Serpents of Fortune to do the job. They would corner and kill the woman, but unknown to either them or Rishida, her children lived on and her oldest son, would be the one to end Rishida's life.

Current

During the war, Rishida and Lokaci's plans to earn their freedom were progressing well. It had reached the point that they decided to make contact with the Order of the Brown Dragon and complete their plan. Rishida appeared before them in Blood Gate and gave them a letter from Wuce, arranging to meet at his manor. When the Order arrived there and freed Wuce, right before using a Wish to condemn him to be punished for eternity, Rishida was furious. She ran, knowing that she could not defeat the Order and hid in the Elemental Plane of Water.

Over a year later, she would be contacted by Sardielr Koskides, who still had a sending stone that she had given them before, and he would ask for a meeting. They would meet at the Palace of 10000 Pearls and talk about her illithid affliction, as they themselves were in the process of fighting the aberrations. Soon after he would ask for another meeting. Unknown to her, he had found out who his mother was and what had happened to her with help from Quiggly Cartwright and theTome of Ioun. Without any warning, Rishida was faced with one of the descendants of her family and met her end at his hand, mere moments after he told her that Lokaci Wuce still lived.