About

TITLE: Servant of Sight, The Lone Archivist

HALO: Eyes and Ink

Ziyaad is just trying his best but he’s so tired all the time. He gets overloaded very easily. Bright flashing lights tend to get to him the most. Definitely an ambivert; sometimes he enjoys talking to people and being around others; other times he'd rather die than have to interact with anything. It's a toss up. He's rather sweet. He’s a better listener than a talker, and you can always count on him to lend an ear and a few words of encouragement. He’s more of an empathetic person; he’s better at providing emotional support, but that doesn’t stop him from suggesting solutions to your problems. One of these days he is going to have a complete meltdown due to the stress of bearing other people’s problems in addition to his smorgasboard of trauma. Lord help the people who are present for that day. He’s surviving purely on coffee and adrenaline at the moment. Or always. Yeah, pretty much always. He fears no god and takes no shit. Everything pales in comparison to the occupational hazards he faces on a daily basis. He tends to put the safety of others before himself. He’ll survive; it’s unclear if the others will. Hell, he’s even sacrificed his own body to be devoured by another god in order to save his party member. He’s uh. Done this a few times. He would honestly rather die than take anyone else into the Archives. They don’t need to suffer the same fate he has. I think he has a martyr complex. He definitely has a martyr complex. Once he gets started talking about a special interest of his, there’s little you can do to stop him. He's slow to trust, but incredibly loyal once befriended. He'll defend his loved ones with his life. He also tends to be hyper paranoid about everything, ESPECIALLY when others are depending on him for something. Tends to bottle up emotions. He hasn’t felt anything that feels real in years. It’s like his entire life is an incredibly lucid dream. Cries easily, especially when frustrated. Gives off this air of sheepishness, but his resolve is harder than stone. He isn't easily swayed by the opinions of others. Not very sentimental, either. Don't let his friendly demeanor fool you. Ziyaad can be downright terrifying in certain circumstances. He isn't afraid to clock somebody out if they're trying to mess with him. He tends to stutter while speaking, and often goes completely nonverbal during meltdowns. He seeks physical touch when he needs to calm down. Dissociates often. More so after becoming an Archivist.

BIO

Raised in a foster home. Not because he was an orphan, but because his mothers ran one for abandoned tiefling children. So his parents would take these kids in and give them a family. Ziyaad has several adopted siblings, including the Resurrectionist Adelard and Salvation the miracle worker. He grew up in a lower-income household, but he had a happy childhood. His parents are named Mercy and Chaliss. He is the biological son of Mercy, and the stepson of Chaliss. Ziyaad has always had a passion for learning, specifically when it came to history and linguistics, so when it came time to set out on his own, he applied to attend the Vonora College of Spellwork, a renowned school for the arcane and other academic pursuits. He paid his own way there, as his parents never really had a lot of money to begin with. He didn’t really know what he wanted to do as a career. He briefly tossed around the idea of becoming one of three things: a teacher, an linguistics scholar, or a librarian. In a way, some of these worked out.  Over time, he warmed up to the idea of adopting the arcane into his academic pursuits, and he started to study magic more devotedly. This is where the one level in wizard came from. He. didn’t really get that far into these studies before he started to look for something… a little more esoteric.  In his spare time, Ziyaad started to seek out some of the more occult-ish texts. He figured that if he was going to be focusing on arcane history more seriously, then he’d need to know more about the fringe magic stuff, right? Right? He was eventually led (whether intentionally or coincidentally) to a being by the name of Az’edreth. The Sight Lord. A creature that saw out of every eye on the Mortal Plane. The Curator of an immense library that housed knowledge of everything since the beginning of the written word. And something about what he was reading piqued Ziyaad’s interest. It’s. Not hard to imagine why Ziyaad began to fixate on this Az’edreth. He began to seek out any and all information that was recorded about Az’edreth and His Archive, to little avail. Almost nothing has been written about the being. Because of this, Ziyaad had begun to neglect his other studies, which didn’t exactly bode well for his academic career. We’ll come back to this. Without even noticing, he began to idolize/worship Az’edreth. He became more withdrawn, avoiding the rest of the world while he continued his dogged search for knowledge that was just beyond his grasp. His colleagues started to worry for him. Little did he know, that as he started to look at Az’edreth, Az’dreth had started looking back at him. If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.  Ziyaad reached out to Him, through a ritual of his own design conducted in a broom closet. He was met with a door. A door that swung silently open, beckoning him into the Archive he so desperately wanted to visit. This was to serve as a test of sorts. If Ziyaad could find his way out of the Archives with no prior knowledge of its inner workings, then he was worthy of serving its Curator. If he died, well, it wouldn’t have mattered much anyways. He wandered the halls for hours, led on by a trail of books that would eventually end in the bell that would let him leave. During his time there, Ziyaad had attracted the attention of the Silent One, the live-in librarian of the Archives. A beast that stalks the shadows and devours any interlopers it finds. It is very sensitive to sound. Ziyaad did not know this. He barely escaped with his life. He woke up in the same broom closet, his skin covered with the eye tattoos that marked him as a Servant of the Sight Lord. A deal had been struck. Ziyaad had been made into an Archivist. This trial, well, broke his mind, per se. During his time in the Archives, Ziyaad was forced to read a variety of uniquely terrible tomes in order to escape. Some of which were laden with knowledge that no mortal was meant to know. As he progressed through the line of literature, his mind was gradually being broken down and reshaped into what Az’ed desired in his Archivists. By the end, Ziyaad was almost completely mad. Rebuilt in the Sight Lord’s image. After his near death experience and mind-altering trauma in the Accursed Archive, Ziyaad tried desperately to catch up with the work he had been neglecting for so long. This didn’t work so well. Word of his occult dealings began to spread at Vonora. Which is exactly what you don’t want your professors to hear about. This, combined with his already unpredictable spellwork and steadily slipping grades was what got him ‘suspended’ from attending classes. Ziyaad recognized this as a soft expulsion, and chose to leave with what little dignity he retained before they could officially expel him. 

His relationship with Az’edreth has been a rather hands-off experience after the initial deal was struck. Every so often, Az’ed will request that Ziyaad track down a certain tome that either needs to be collected for the Archive, or returned to the Archive. In exchange for these book runs, Ziyaad keeps his freaky-deaky magic powers. If Ziyaad tries to turn it down, he’ll start to grow more and more eyes in incredibly inconvenient places until he finally locates the damn thing. Have you ever had a functioning eye on your tongue. That shit is not fun. Another part of the deal is recording history and information to be stored in the Archive. Ziyaad does this by keeping meticulous accounts of everything that happens to him in a series of journals that he stores in the Archive. Despite the business arrangement aspect, Ziyaad worships Az’edreth. Prayer and everything. He’s as devoted to his Sight Lord as any cleric is to their god. A decent amount of the exchanges the two have has a detrimental impact on Ziyaad’s body. Sometimes it renders him temporarily blind, or unable to eat or drink for fear of throwing up, or bleeding from the eyes, ears, and nose. Even using his pact powers causes painful side effects. Ziyaad has never seen Az’edreth in person. He has only dealt with him through notes in books, lucid dreams, and brief periods of possession.

As he grows more powerful, more eyes start to show up on his body. Not like eye tattoos. Functioning eyes. He has nine of them at the moment, excluding the two he had before the deal.