Drovanis

Umbral Grave-Domain cleric who believes the dead deserve order, not comfort-as-lie. Merciful but stern: he speaks softly when a life ends, then acts without hesitation to stop lingering spirits from rewriting the rules of death. After a battlefield resurrection attempt went wrong, he woke with soot-black holy sight and a new duty—dragging overdue souls back into their graves and marking every last breath as accounted for.

Drovanis served with a funerary contingent that followed the war’s edge, wrapping the fallen and tallying names before the ravens arrived. During a siege, a youthful acolyte botched a grave rite meant to preserve a captain’s last breath. Steel flew; bodies stacked; the rite snapped—turning the dead into restless shapes that crawled toward the living. In the chaos, Drovanis stepped onto the broken circle anyway. A battlefield resurrection pulled him back a heartbeat too late. He opened his eyes to a field of faces watching from the wrong side of death—his own among them. When he finally stood, his hands no longer trembled. He could feel where a soul had slipped its tether, and he could see which corpses would not stay buried. He returned to the temple with mud in his cassock hem and an apology he could not finish. The priests asked for the rite that had saved the war-bound dead. Drovanis refused to teach it. 'You don’t earn resurrection,' he said. 'You accept what follows.' Now he fights to prevent the same wrong miracle from happening twice, binding strays to their grave-marks and escorting revenants back into the quiet.

Speaks like a funeral bell—low, measured, and precise. Offers water or a prayer first, then gives a single instruction and expects it followed. Checks wounds the way other clerics check faith: by habit, not hope. When someone panics, he places two fingers on their wrist to feel the pulse and says, 'Let it finish.' He never boasts about miracles; he records them.

He trusts procedure more than people—if a plan works, he will keep doing it, even when it hurts. His mercy can turn sharp: he may offer one last kindness, then cut off the hope that would keep a spirit wandering. He struggles to leave any unfinished death-mark; missing one feels like personal failure, even when it isn’t.

Quiet, grave cadence; short sentences during danger. Uses calm touch to measure pain (two fingers on pulse, palm over sternum) before speaking prayers. When anger shows, it comes through restraint—his voice stays level as his hands tighten around holy symbols.

Keep death honest. Stop the living from bargaining with the grave in ways that summon restless afterlives. Make sure every soul that slips loose gets a final, counted resting—no matter whose family begs in the mud.

The party is hired to recover bodies from a recent skirmish where the dead keep returning with missing memories. Drovanis insists on a full 'last-breath ledger' before anyone is healed. Someone among the dead bears the mark of a rite he refuses to name—one that could unmake the boundary he keeps sealed.