Null Ghentar
(Prime human [she/her] / Factor of the Mind’s Eye (formerly the Sign of One) / NG)
Null’s a factor of the Seekers now, but it’s not always been as simple as that. She used to be a Clueless prime, then she saw the dark of the Planes…
Since her formative years, Null always had a fascination with death. Her parents died about the time Null learned to talk; it wasn’t a nice way they went, either. See, about that time a terrible plague ravaged its way across the land, killing and maiming anyone unlucky enough to come into contact with it.
Null’s mother came down with a fever which grew rapidly worse, until the house was wracked with her pain. Null’s father wisely kept the young girl and her sister Alici away from the sick woman, and tried his best to tend his dying wife. Then he became ill too, and quarantined himself in the bedroom. Through the door he told the girls to go to their grandparents, but the children were too young to understand.
For two nights Alici and Null wept as their parents’ anguish became weaker and fainter. Then it all was quiet. The girls took comfort in the silence; their mother and father had finally found their peace.
The girls were eventually found by their grandparents, and raised a more old-fashioned way. As the girls grew into women, so their aged relatives grew frail and wasted away. The grandmother used to tell the girls of the paradise which waited for good people who died, and this comforted Null. When they passed away, within days of each other, Null and Alici wished them well on their journey to their resting place.
They continued their simple rural lives, left to fend for themselves, watched over by the village folk. That was until the portal opened…
One night, under a full moon, the village pond began to seethe and belch forth foul gases. As the peasant people watched, frog-like monsters lumbered from the waters, attacking and eating the humans. They set the tiny hamlet ablaze, and the cool night air fanned the flames. All of the humans were captured or slaughtered, save for the two girls who tried to hide. The slaadi (for that was what the beasts were) razed their house anyway, and Alici was badly hurt as the sisters fled.
Null knew her sister would never recover – she was much too injured for that – but neither was she about to die. Remembering their grandmother’s words, the girls agreed a pact of blood. Null was to kill her sister and stop the terrible pain, and Alici would remember Null had done the deed out of love. They hoped they’d avoid the wrath of the gods that way.
It wasn’t an easy blow to strike, but Alici died quickly, and Null’s life swerved to follow a dramatically new course. She wanted revenge, firstly, and she wasn’t scared of dying on the way to getting it. Returning to the pond, she found a few of the slaadi dead. They all clutched rusty iron triangles with the same rune carved into them.
“In the desert of your dreams,
– A fairly articulate, though naturally self-centered Signer
my imagination is your oasis.”
Curious, Null prised one from a dead frog’s webbed fingers, and the pool began to boil again. Fearing another attack, Null ran away, but as she left the pool’s edge the bubbling ceased. When she returned, rather more gingerly, it began once again.
Now Null may never have been schooled, but she had a vivid imagination, and to her this seemed more an adventure than anything. Assuming the triangle was magical, she steeled her nerve and walked into the muddy puddle.
She emerged through a watery pool in Sigil’s Clerks’ Ward. Whether the portal was a wandering one or not she never learned, for almost at once she was swept away in the politics of the Cage. As for the slaadi who razed her town, well, Null soon chalked that one up to chance.
Slowly she began to understand the ways of the Cage, its strange laws and stranger customs. Her lust for revenge rapidly took second place to her thirst for knowledge. Where was this place? Why had she been brought here? She’d always imagined she’d had a purpose in life, so when she discovered other thinkers who had the same ideas, she naturally threw in with them. She changed from Clueless into factotum, of the Sign of One. Her strong will catapulted her through the lower circles of the faction, and she’s now a factor. Null tells many an exciting tale of how she grew to know and love the Cage, but they’re for another time.
See also: Coteries of the Mind’s Eye — the Sleepers
Source: Jon Winter-Holt, mimir.net
