Arcael

Arcael is an NPC Wizard of High Sorcery and Knight of Takhisis from the world of Krynn in the Dragonlance setting.

Krynn

Qualinesti

Arcael was born in the city of Qualinost, half of a pair of fraternal twins. Her father was a minor Wizard of the White Robes with an overinflated opinion of himself; her mother was a Ranger who spent more time patrolling the borders of the kingdom than she did with her family once the children were weened. Arcael was closer to her twin brother Valael than either of them was to their parents, but her brother's health was weak and he started displaying signs of a recurring lung disease around his twentieth birthday.

Against all reason and the advice of several healers, the twins' father strove to confine his son to the house, demanding that he start his studies of arcane magic, instead of engaging in exercizes in the fresh air that might have improved his health. When Arcael asked him to teach her as well - in part out of a genuine interest in magic and in part because she wanted to help her brother - her father rebuffed her, saying she lacked the proper temperament and tried to apprentice her to the city's Ranger squad. In truth, this was a snub because Arcael closely resembled her mother where their looks were concerned, and her father resented the fact that his wife had more or less abandoned him to raise their children when he had expected that to be her role in the marriage.

The twins decided to defy their father's wishes. Arcael would sneak Valael out of the house so he could spend time outside and clear the dust of their father's library from his lungs. Valael would instruct Arcael in the basics of arcane magic out of his own instruction books. They continued to do so right up to the eruption of the War of the Lance. When Qualinost itself came under attack, the twins' mother had already abandoned her post and family for a new lover; a fellow Ranger. The twins fled their homeland with a group of refugees that included their father, only to come under attack in the woods.

While their father dithered and Valael was wracked by a severe asthma attack, Arcael skillfully blended Enchantment and Illusion to make the enemy troops attach each other, saving the band of refugees. Instead of congratulating his daughter on her level of skill, her father exploded in fury, disowning Arcael on the spot for defying his wishes, and named her a Dark Elf for using magic associated with the Orders of the Red and Black Robes. The refugees forced Arcael to go her own way, over her brother Valael's wheezed objections. The young Elfmaid was on her own in a world gone to war.

Traven

Arcael made her way through the war-torn Krynn. After two years of wandering, and after the end of the War of the Lance, she found an established Wizard of High Sorcery who was willing to take her in as an apprentice and hone her talent so she could eventually take the Test of High Sorcery at the Tower of Wayreth. While this might seem like a good thing, the Wizard in question was the insane Traven, who saw her not as a pupil, but as a possible accomplice in his blasphemous research into channeling, manipulating and creating life. He fed her anger and resentment towards her father and the people who exiled her, as well as her concern for her brother Valael's health, and directed her interest towards the field of Necromancy as it allowed for the manipulating of life and death energies.

Arcael felt drawn to what her new master suggested, but was initially hesitant to plunge into a field of study that belonged to the Order of the Black Robes; joining that Order would forever make her an exile of Elven lands on Krynn. The Elfmaid meditated on the issue and had a vision of the three gods of magic. Solinari offered her wisdom and the power to defend; Lunitari offered her balance and the power to change; Nuitari offered her power and control. After everything that had happened to her up to that point, Arcael was swayed and chose Nuitari, consigning herself to darkness.

Thirteen years later, Arcael passed the Test of High Sorcery at the Tower of Wayreth and formally joined the Order of the Black Robes as an Enchanter. While she was willing to study Necromancy to further the secret work she was doing with her master Traven, she was far more interested in controlling the living than she was in mucking about with the undead; this explained the focus of her magic.

To her delight, Arcael met her twin brother at the Conclave of Wizards. Although Valael was now a member of the Order of the White Robes, and their father became nearly apoplectic with rage when he saw her at Wayreth, the twins were genuinely happy to meet again. The only dampener on their reunion was the way Valael's health had deteriorated since Arcael saw him last. She resolved to give her all to the research she was doing with Traven, so she might save her brother and grant him the long life and health he was owed by his Elven heritage. For six years, the two Wizards laboured, utilizing all the resources their respective Orders were willing and able to provide, combining her Necromancy and his Transmutation in new and disturbing ways and making great strides... and then Valael succumbed to his recurring lung disease.

Knight of Takhisis

Arcael was crushed by her brother's death, and struggled with the feeling that all of her work and study had been futile and a waste of time she might have spent with the only relative she had ever genuinely loved. What made things worse was that her father held a grand eulogy for his son before the Conclave at Wayreth, during which he denounced her as a 'pointless existence' that had stolen his son and heir's health from him in the womb.

Desperate to prove her worth, Arcael decided she needed to do something big and amazing. She petitioned Nuitari for spells she could use to shroud her true intentions even from the gods themselves, and pretended to defect to the Knights of Takhisis as a new Knight of the Thorn. What she lacked in the power of Illusion, Arcael believed she could make up for with her cunning and powers of deception. Her intent was to fool Takhisis herself and become a double agent within the ranks of the Thorn Knights, allowing her to feed the Orders of High Sorcery the information they would need to eventually destroy the Order of the Thorn for its Renegade ways.

Unfortunately for her, Arcael overestimated her powers of duplicity. Takhisis was well-aware of the Dark Elf's intentions, but allowed her to join the Order of the Thorn on the basis that she could be used to feed her enemies misinformation as well.

When the Orders of High Sorcery finally attacked the Knights of Takhisis, the doublecross bore exactly the kind of fruit one might expect. Arcael, who had expected to join her brothers and sisters in the Order of the Black Robes during the attack, instead became caught between the two opposing forces. On the one hand, the Orders of High Sorcery believed that she had genuinely betrayed them, due to the erroneous information she had been providing. On the other, the Knights of Takhisis already knew that she was a spy and a traitor in their midst. With no allies and no way out, Arcael found herself lashing out at everyone who came close with all the power she could muster, until all that remained to her was a single spell to conjure a fogbank. Hoping to cover her escape for a few precious minutes, Arcael invoked the spell... but instead of the magical fog she wanted, what washed over her were the Mists.

When the fog rose on Krynn, Arcael was simply gone and soon enough she was mostly forgotten. But when the fog faded before Arcael's eyes, she was in the domain of Keening.