Shrouded in rags and tattered clothes, the figure known as the Ragman has become a creature of dark legend. He is most often seen lurking among the detritus of fresh battlefields, carefully studying death in its countless manifestations. He can spend weeks at a time haunting the ruins left in the passing of great armies. Bartering his services to generals and kings, he asks only for the chance to walk where death has tread.
The Ragman hides the truth of his noble birth behind the remnants of a tattered mask. Lord Mylo di Northryne is a Thamarite sorcerer and follower of Scion Delesle, the patron of necromancy and death. Once the head of a small cult based in the north of Llael, for years he limited his activities to the lands dominated by his family and took pains to conceal his arts. Since the Khadoran occupation, however, he has taken the opportunity to greatly expand his research. Lord Northryne viewed the dissolution of his country, a tragedy to many, as the blossoming of a great possibility.
Assuming the guise of a dispossessed wanderer, Northryne made his way to the smoking ruins of Riversmet. Protracted battle had reduced the once-great city to a charnel field. The multitude of corpses spoke to Lord Northryne without words. Each of them told a unique story, the contortion of their faces and limbs in rigor mortis whispering tales of the death that had come for warriors, peasants, merchants, and nobles alike. He spent months walking among the ruins, moving from habitations that had collapsed to sepulchers, from mass graves to plague pits, studying death in all its manifestations. When the Khadoran occupiers began the reconstruction of that shattered country, his morbid fascinations had only been whetted.
Following the war, he became a common sight at the mercenary camps that dotted the heartlands of the Iron Kingdoms. With soft words and impeccable politeness, he made his dark talents available to the most desperate of military commanders, asking only that in return for his services he be allowed to walk unhindered and unobserved through the blasted battlefields once the fighting had ceased. Disquieting as this proposition was, few turned down his services.
The Ragman has chosen a solitary path of dark ascension; he knows the knowledge gleaned from studying the dead eyes of the slain brings him closer to his true path than any instruction by his necromantic peers. The dead move at his whim, corpses rising from where they have fallen to do his bidding.