Gyora_Cantalli

Necromancy, a dread and foul art... or so the popularly held belief goes. The problems surrounding necromancy are many but in the Freecity of Druxel they have found an excellent solution to the ever-present problems surrounding the magic of death. They have legalized it, regulated it, and heavily taxed the hell out of it.

The Cantalli family have been practicing the Dread Art for three generations legally, and five before that quietly. While their talents have always made them finanically stable, it is Gyora that have made them one of the wealthiest clans in the city of merchants. So wealthy, in fact, that she herself has become one of the Priori; a member of the Council of Coin that rules the city-state. Gyora, unlike her parents, does not bother with being a physiker, or dole out life extentions for the rich. Nor does she perform detective work for the City Watch, nor communicate with dead relatives on behalf of those that have the coin to pay, become a caretaker at Shades Hollow, nor any of the many other honorable enough professions that are more or less lucrative.

Gyora has, instead, cornered the market on cheap labor.

It started when she was a teenager; she purchased several corpses of executed criminals and stripped them down to bare bones. Animating them with her magic, she started renting them out to workshops to suppliment their labor pools. She aggressively invested her profits into the acquisition of more skeletons and things spiraled upwards from there. Now, Gyora owns many of the businesses that formerly used her undead labor. Having been reliant on the use of her tireless 'employees', Gyora simply refused to renew their contracts and after they folded, she purchased them. Now, Gyora owns a wide and diverse array of profitable businesses, from hansas in the artisan's quartier, to warehouses down on the docks, to apple orchards out beyond the city walls. All staffed by necromancers skilled enough to animate their work force but not strong enough to consider striking out on thier own. Gyora is very sparse with doling out her family's secrets with the Dread Art, using knowledge as a potential reward to particularly loyal living employees.

Her rise has been meteoric but not without difficulty. Gyora started with wealth but her ascention to the Priori has been opposed by many. Her operations are legal and very much need to appear to be at all times; the regulations on necromancy are many and carry harsh penalties. Among other things, her subordinant necromancers need to be licenced, her animated corpses must be consenting ones, must have serial codes etched into their skulls, and the simple number of them that the Cantalli Consortium is allowed to possess is an ongoing legal wrangle. Naturally, the appearence that the law is being upheld is of the utmost importance, especially when it is being broken. Gyora is no less cut-throat and ruthless then any Druxilli upper crust and those that earn her ire have bad things happen to them. After all, one skeleton looks much the same as the next, save for the serial code stamped upon it's forehead.

The wealthy, however, always have enemies and the Cantalli family's practices have made them more then most. There are a long list of people that want Gyora dead... guilds, labor unions, relatives of the recently deceased that have had their arms twisted into signing over their corpses, an assortment of priests, paladins, and holy figures that despise necromancers on general principle, rich merchants that wish to replace one of the Priori, rivals on the Priori that want her removed... the list goes on and on. But Gyora is a very talented necromancer... surely she can keep herself safe, right?