Zerai Slagwright - Obsidian Carver of Ash'rift
Ash'rift's ancestor tablets are inscribed by a priest, but they are poured, ground and made by Zerai Slagwright. The tiefling carver behind the settlement's obsidian and slagglass has put a keepsake in almost every grieving household in town.
Introduction
Ash'rift measures a life in what it forged, what it endured, and what it left behind for the next hand to pick up. Once a year the molten-stone tablets kindle and hold their glow until dawn, and the settlement reads its ancestors off them by name. But long before a single letter goes into that stone, the stone itself has to exist — poured flat, ground true, cooled without a crack, ready to take a cut. And long after the glow fades, the families walk home carrying something smaller: a chip of polished obsidian on a cord, a slagglass bead the color of a banked fire, a ring cut from the offcut of somebody's slab. All of it comes out of one sweltering cutting yard down at the vent line, and out of the hands of a soot-fingered tiefling who has made a keepsake for almost every household in town.
Profile
Name: Zerai Slagwright
Race: Tiefling
Gender: Female
Alignment: Lawful Good
Role/Class: Obsidian Carver & Slagglass-Wright of Ash'rift
Challenge Rating: 1/2
"A name needs somewhere to live. I make the somewhere."
Appearance: Zerai is a broad-shouldered tiefling somewhere past her middle years, with skin the flat grey of cooled ash and a faint ember warmth beneath it that shows most at the knuckles and the hollow of her throat. Her horns sweep back close to the skull and are worn visibly smooth along the left side, polished by decades of resting her head against the stone to sight down a cut. Her eyes are solid copper with no visible pupil, which unsettles strangers and reassures the grieving, who tend to find it easier to speak to someone who doesn't quite look back. She wears a heavy ash-hide apron scored with a thousand small burns, sleeves rolled past the elbow, and keeps her tail wrapped in leather cord to stop it catching on the shelving. Her hands are the giveaway: fingertips permanently blackened, palms glazed shiny where old burns healed over, and a long pale scar down the inside of her left forearm from a ladle that tipped when she was still young enough to be careless.
