Editing Darklord (section)

===The Lady of Ravens===
The Darklord of the Isle of Ravens occupies a strange and nebulous position between being a canonical darklord and a netbook darklord. Whilst she was first mentioned in the official [[splatbook]] "Domains of Dread", the last [[TSR]]-produced iteration of the [[Ravenloft]] corebook released to revise the setting in the wake of the [[Grim Harvest]], all of her actual lore expansions have been through [[netbook]]s, starting with the [[Books of S|Book of Sacrifices]] - canon simply mentions she existed and left it at that.

According to the Book of Sacrifices, the future Lady of Ravens was born the only child of a noble family who inhabited a massive, decaying castle in a remote corner of their world, scion to a once-great line fallen into steep degeneration through isolation and inbreeding. Her mother died before she could speak, and her father might as well have been dead, spending all his time either deep in a narcotic-induced stupor or drifting through his castle in the same vapid indifference as the ancestral ghosts. With servants who were forbidden by social codes to casually speak to her, she grew up alone and largely in silence, so isolated that she took the fairytales, myths and legends in her castle library to be unvarnished truth. Naturally aloof and disdainful, her circumstances merely shaped her belief that all others were beneath her, strengthening social awkwardness into full-blown narcissism and borderline solipsism.

The only friends she had, for the other children of the castle disliked her and avoided her when they could, were the ravens who inhabited the 400ft tall Tower of Flint, a spire constructed entirely of flint that was the central structure of the castle. Like all her family, the girl could talk to birds, and she fixated upon them as the only other "real" things in her life, spending much of her time telling them stories from the castle's library and hearing their stories in turn.

As she aged, the girl developed [[Sorcerer (Dungeons & Dragons)|innate magical powers]] to summon, control, transform, create and destroy, which only furthered her budding solipsism. She became convinced that she deserved to have anything she desired, and that she should always be the best at anything she cared for. At the age of eleven, she used the ravens to murder a serving girl by causing her to fall from a high parapet as she was engaging in one of the climbing games so popular amongst the children of the castle, all because she'd overheard the girl's beauty being compared favorably to her own. This was but the first of several "accidents" to bedevil the servants, and it soon became understood that any criticism of its future mistress was best kept to one's self, which only heightened her isolation.

In her late teens, the girl's father died and she retired to the Tower of Flints, rarely emerging. But one day, on one of her rare excursions into the rest of the castle, she saw one of the serving boys, who had grown into the most desirable man of her generation in the castle - handsome, graceful, cheerful and well-spoken. She fell instantly in love, and began to leave the Tower more frequently, hoping to catch glimpses of him and sometimes covertly following him. Naturally, she never once gave thought to the idea that he might not reciprocate her feelings. Soon afterwards, the outside world finally came to the castle in the form of a draft; the heiress's "lover" was amongst the young men who were taken away to fight in a foreign war, and so she spent two years pining for his return, tormenting herself with dreams. When he came home safe and sound, she was ecstatic, refusing to eat or sleep for three days prior to his arrival.

...Naturally, she was less than thrilled when the first thing he did upon his return to the castle was seek out one of the serving girls and carry her off to a secluded spot, where they exchanged vows of undying love and discussed their plans to wed.

Enraged, the narcissistic sorceress fled to the Tower of Flints and whipped up the ravens into a murderous frenzy before setting them upon the young lovers. She watched them die a horrible death at the beaks and claws of her avian friends, then retreated into the tower's depths to weep over how she had been "betrayed".

When she emerged days later, she found the entire castle gone! She now occupied the lone Tower of Flints, which sat upon a lonely island. She could no longer speak to the ravens, although she could now see through their eyes and speak through their mouths, and strangest of all... she couldn't remember her name or the name of her family.

Ever since then, the Lady of Ravens has been left in total isolation. She desperately wants to regain her friendship with the ravens, but can't do so; she is convinced that the cause is because she doesn't remember her name, and so she often sends "agents" (people who dared to land on her island) to search for her name. As a result of these unwilling emissaries, typically magically compelled to obey her, she has amassed quite a library of tomes, parchments and papers on the Demiplane of Dread, especially its folklore and its noble families. Regarding all other beings as nothing more than tools or nuisances, depending on the context, she is more alone than she has ever been in her life.

Those who dare to face the Lady of Ravens are in for a massive struggle. She's an 18th level [[Sorcerer (Dungeons & Dragons)|Sorceress]], but she can also polymorph anybody she can see into a raven 1/day, and turn people into ravens with her touch. When she wishes to close the borders, her ravens flock out over the sea and attack anyone who tries to pass, which causes an irresistable 5d4 damage per round unless you turn back. If slain, she remains dead for 1 week, during which time her minions are uncontrolled and her borders unclosable, before a random raven will transform into her. Theoretically, you could kill her for good by wiping out all of the ravens on the island, as fans have theorized is the case with Harkon Lukas.