Zaga Thorneveil the Uncalled
Zaga Thorneveil
There are many lies told about Zaga Thorneveil across the planes.
Some claim she is merely the latest mask worn by an ancient fiend. Others insist she is a tragic victim carrying corruption she never deserved. In Sigil, entire investigations have been built around proving she does not truly exist at all. Most records connected to her surname have been altered, sealed, erased, or fractured beyond reliability. Even among those who know the name, very few understand what it actually means.
The truth is stranger than all of those stories.
Much of what the Thorneveils protected is now lost. Some of it may have been intentionally destroyed. Some was hidden so deeply within dream rites, memory compartmentalization, and encoded ritual practices that even surviving descendants no longer understood the original purpose behind them. By the time Zaga was born, the family existed more as a fading continuity than an organized house. Pieces remained: rituals performed under moonlight, strange inherited instincts, fragmentary teachings about names and masks and the danger of allowing the planes to define who you are.
But the old protections had already begun failing long before her birth.
What eventually happened to Zaga was not random misfortune. It was the culmination of a continuity wound that had likely been moving through history for centuries.
The entity later recognized as Maryn'bl Zagnibs did not simply possess her in the way common priests describe demonic occupation. There was no singular moment where an innocent girl vanished beneath a foreign invader. The process was older, deeper, and far more catastrophic. The continuity associated with Nibs had already survived so many transformations that it no longer behaved like a simple fiend inhabiting a mortal body. It adapted. It merged. It preserved itself by learning the emotional structures, memories, and survival instincts of those it occupied.
And then it encountered someone who refused to disappear.
Zaga fought the possession with extraordinary force of will. Not only spiritually, but psychologically. She resisted assimilation so completely that the continuity itself became unstable. The older predatory patterns that had allowed Nibs to survive through the war economies of Acheron, the occult catastrophes tied to Iggwilv, and countless forgotten historical collapses no longer functioned cleanly against her.
The result was unprecedented.
Rather than one identity consuming the other, both continuities became trapped in a prolonged state of forced coexistence.
For years, perhaps decades, the shared existence was violent and chaotic. Memories bled together. Emotional responses crossed boundaries unpredictably. Rage, fear, hunger, grief, and instinct became difficult to separate into singular ownership. At times Zagnibs seized control entirely. At other times Zaga forced the continuity into retreat through sheer refusal to surrender herself. There were periods where neither identity understood where one ended and the other began.
Most beings would have collapsed beneath that pressure.
What makes Zaga extraordinary is not that she survived corruption untouched. She did not. She was fundamentally changed by it. Her memories, instincts, emotional frameworks, and perceptions of morality were all altered through prolonged coexistence with something ancient and demonic. She learned how predators think because she lived with one inside her own consciousness. She learned how fiends negotiate because she was forced to survive beside one. She learned patience because losing control even briefly could have destroyed entire lives.
And over time, she accomplished something no one expected.
She changed the continuity itself.
Nearly two thousand years ago, the balance of control shifted permanently. Zagnibs — who had once survived through domination, manipulation, and adaptive predation — lost primary authority over the shared existence. Not because he was defeated in some singular climactic struggle, but because Zaga slowly proved stronger in the one way the continuity had never anticipated: she remained herself.
Not perfectly. Not innocently. But persistently.
The continuity that emerged afterward was neither the original Zaga nor the ancient entity called Nibs. It became something layered and shared. Yet within that layered existence, Zaga increasingly became the moral and emotional center around which the continuity stabilized.
That stabilization changed the course of planar history.
Under her influence, Maryn'bl Zagnibs ceased functioning as a wandering survival organism drifting through collapsing wars and hidden occult economies. Instead, the continuity began constructing permanence. Trade systems. Fleets. Infrastructure. Agreements that lasted centuries. Eventually these efforts culminated in the creation and expansion of Veilwake Citadel, one of the most economically influential independent astral powers outside the major planar empires.
Contrary to many rumors, Veilwake was never built as a fortress for conquest.
It was built as an answer to instability.
Zaga understood something most planar powers refuse to admit openly: the planes are full of beings, factions, and entire populations considered too dangerous, corrupted, altered, displaced, or inconvenient to fit comfortably inside conventional civilization. Refugees from shattered worlds. Survivors of magical catastrophes. Laborers discarded after wars. Independent merchants too politically dangerous for established powers to tolerate. Spelljammers without allegiances. Individuals transformed by things they never chose.
Veilwake became a place for those people.
Zaga herself rarely appears publicly outside the Citadel. Across most of the planes, the recognized authority remains Maryn'bl Zagnibs, the merchant prince, fleet broker, and ancient negotiator whose reputation stabilizes trade systems across the Astral Sea. This separation is intentional. In many ways, Maryn'bl functions as armor protecting the hidden lineage of Zaga Thorneveil from political scrutiny, religious panic, and the impossible legal consequences that would emerge if Sigil fully understood the continuity involved.
Only a handful of powerful individuals even know the names belong to the same shared existence.
Even fewer understand that the continuity no longer belongs solely to the fiend.
In Sigil, this truth became one of the great unresolved crises of modern continuity law. The courts cannot determine whether Zaga is:
victim,
accomplice,
transformed survivor,
shared personhood,
or something entirely new.
The terrifying answer may be all of them simultaneously.
And perhaps the most important truth of all is this:
Zaga Thorneveil does not view herself as innocent.
She knows what the continuity has done across centuries. She carries inherited memories of wars, manipulations, bargains, and horrors she did not originally commit but can still remember with painful clarity. She understands why people fear her. She understands why the courts hesitate. She understands why many fiends, celestials, and scholars alike consider the shared existence fundamentally unnatural.
But she also knows something her enemies often do not.
The continuity survived because it learned adaptation.
Under Zaga, it finally learned restraint.
And somewhere beneath all the layered identities, corrupted memories, and ancient survival instincts, there remains a woman who chose — every day, for nearly two thousand years — to keep becoming something better than the thing that once tried to consume her.
Note: The Thornhouse in Sigil is different than the Veilwake Citadel, which is located in the tears of selune in the Astral Sea near the Rock of Bral.
Existing Hooks
Image features: The Thorn Cleric of Balance- The professional integration of an alias persona has a name, Maryn'bl Zagnibs
- Zaga was possessed by Old Grin/Zagnibs who recently got served with exile from the Merkant Guild
- Zaga's family is a target of the schemes of hags, especially the archfey Iggwilv, whose son is Kerberos Shadowdusk
- Zaga cannot understand that woman or her names
- Zaga is one of Zigga's siblings from Waterdeep
- Maerovyn Thornveil is their aunt, lives in Waterdeep still
- Maryn'bl initiated plans to release the relics into Sigil
Grisland could unbind and Old Grin to gain closer relation to Zaga- Zaga knows the Director, who is Kayne's father
- Zaga knows the location of the Tome, "Oh, By All Means"
- Although Kerberos calls her Zaga he really interacts with Maryn'bl, or the more "blended" version of the character that has "accepted the possession as reality".
See Maryn'bls page for notes. - Zaga is a Z-Merchant, she sells jammer helms out of the Rock of Bral (her primary abode outside of Sigil)
Zaga on the inside dominates constant control over the demon, as habit. However, Zaga would truly prefer to not be possessed if there was a safe removal process to do so. She's yet to find one.
- Iggwilv <-- is palyed played by Ally
- Kerberos <-- is played by Mike
- Her sister's evil echo Nyxara has a searing hatred for Zaga <--- but is now a doll lol
- Maryn'bl is in a cold war with Shemeshka over the Ledger of the House.
In Fortune's Wheel is an ancient relic of Tyche, she believes it is linked to constant data drift... among other nefarious schemes. Maryn'bl hates that they broadcast the war for profits as this is the worsing case of data drift every day.
An Archivist of Absolution: Who is Zaga?
To the gamblers and high-rollers of the Lady’s Ward, "Maryn’bl Zagnibs" is the unsettlingly composed Debt & Contracts Manager at Fortune’s Wheel. A Knowledge Cleric of Boccob with brilliant green eyes and pale skin marked by dark, vein-like fissures, she is a master of True Name Magic and the fundamental syntax of planar existence. Yet, her professional mask hides a three-thousand-year odyssey of survival and extensive planetary travel as an occult sorcerer of the Balance. (see bottom of page)
Maryn’bl’s story began in Waterdeep, where she was born named Zaga. While she was still a child, a coven performed a horrific ritual, "soul-stuffing" an abyssal demon into her body. This proximity to demonic energy physically transformed her and her two siblings into Tieflings, a "plague" that fractured her family further apart. While her siblings ended up in other realms, Zaga would flee toward the Prime Material world of Oerth at age thirteen. While Zigga went to Ravnica. This family is not related to Iggwilv, their mother was allied with enemies of the existing coven in Waterdeep actually. Their children all given various ill fates and cause for continuation of chaos.
In the war against Iggwilv on Oerth, Zagnibs overcame necromancy curses. Returning to Toril she studied under a yugoloth, read forbidden Black Scrolls in Ahm and learned early, the Ends of the Worlds. Zagnibs would never again be anyone’s puppet but rather, a master of names and an architect of war and strategy rather than a slave or statute in a re-legion. They traveled abroad throughout the plane to become an archmage with heavy installment of gith-uniter trainings which would eventually lead her to deeply changing planar challenges.
Controlled Chaos
Unlike typical cases of possession, Zaga fought her inner demon until they reached a state of co-authorship and eventually something that resembles friendship (acceptance) many centuries ago.
Following foundational training in monasteries (see Grislands page), where she refused magic (including psionics) until she learned the disciplined breath control necessary and "distance disciplines" to master her inner storms and realign her magic to be Truly Neutral (the Unaligned Art). Another name for Boccob the "Uncaring God of Magic", in other settings, is known as Odin, or the Allfather.
It was a this time that the Uncaring God become Odin realized through out worlds outside of Oerth (Boccob only reached on Oerth Prime). She became a Knowledge Cleric of the Thorn. A Sorcerer or Secrets, powers under control and the sway of alignment in fluid flux through the astral and further realms. Never forgetting the purity of the monk that warmed her heart so long ago, he was too good and too thorough for anyone to ever take from her. He doesn't keep him in her mind, she keeps him and her lessons deeper stil.
Session 7 reveals to Grisland that this is undoubtably the same woman he taught in his chambers.
She had integrated it as a "variant self," allowing her to walk the Balanced Path (guided by familiars) as a guardian of the multiverse’s stability. The demon remains chaotic, while Zaga is lawful leaning. Maryn'bl works endlessly to repair the very planar ripples and curses she may have caused before she gained mastery of the arts.
When Grisland enforces seperation from the demon, the multiverse was balanced by him joining her on the balanced path due to his masterful monk training and previous integration of his own shadow. Allowing for multiversal balance to be met in a single moment of release, something was gained.
Facing the Witch Queen
Since the events the awakened the sleeping fey hag... Zaga has been in quiet war with the darker aspects of her past, present and future.
Currently, Maryn’bl operates within the administrative shadows of Shemeshka the Marauder, who has recently hired Kerberos Shadowdusk to manage the "Discount Gallery". Kerberos, a charming associate Zaga. who has severed her contacts and bindings from the hag coven that originally claimed her.
For years, Maryn’bl has been quietly conducting "Corrective Pattern Behavior," a series of unsanctioned metaphysical stabilizing events where she unbinds curses, seals rifts, and repairs planar disruptions across Sigil and the Primes without payment or recognition.
Within the casino, a cold war is fought through the Fortune’s Wheel House Ledger.
Shemeshka utilizes the ledger as an investment instrument, tracking the party as "repeated anomalies" to monetize their recurrence and invoice their potential for her own profit. In contrast, Maryn’bl uses the ledger to track "unresolved processes" and the Data Drift caused by the multiverse’s bad bookkeeping.
Zaga recently discovered the Tome: "Oh, By All Means", which was hidden from her memory until recently.
She tells Zigga this in the depths of Undersigil, an area near the Dead Nations:
"You see, the gargoyle - (or Zagnibs in authorship) - they hid many things from me. Especially in my early years when the gargoyle had control of this body, when I was made to be the statue inside it. I didn't know the extent of this tome until I had time to go to Rigus with Mindi. I did that and Zigga - what I found it - it gave me hope but I need your help. I have a plan but it's illegal."
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