Tserrina and the Tower of Frozen Shadow

The Enchantress of Neriak

Tserrina Syl’Tor was a Teir’Dal sorceress. Her own diary records the day King Thex granted her the coveted title Enchantress of Neriak, and her next goal: a ritual for immortality whose components she meant to gather or die trying.

She found the creature she needed and took its essence, but the ritual did nothing. With the best training in Norrath she could feel no change at all.

The dark prince

In the same diary she meets a mysterious nobleman whose bloodline is deeply bound to ancient lands. She falls for him, sends a messenger with a gift to prove her worth, and is rejected: “He would rather keep the company of those beasts than with me.”

The man was Mayong Mistmoore. Her gift was a giant drachnid, and he grafted her emissary L’Dalt onto it and sent it back.

The broken engagement

A 2010 developer post fills in the rest. Tserrina became Mayong’s student and then his partner, and he granted her the gift of vampirism during their engagement. Her tower in Velious was meant to be a new vampire stronghold, conveniently placed to watch the dragons.

Desperate to please him, she learned to trap souls in objects and presented him a stone holding a dragon’s soul, with a skeletal dragon beside it. Mayong called her and her beast an abomination and banished her. She went mad, fled to her tower, and froze it forever in the state of her wedding day, wedding party and all.

The tower

The Tower of Frozen Shadow rises from the second of the Icy Fingers in the Iceclad Ocean, built of shadow and ice over seven levels. Tserrina and Vhal’Sera created its creatures, and its undead are her victims.

Players needed a key or a way through walls to climb it, and many remember it as Velious’s strangest dungeon: a frozen house party with a vampire at the top.

Older crimes

Her reach runs further back. The Vah Shir seer Saemey Wirewhisker says that when the explosion of the Erudite and Heretic war destroyed his ancestors’ land, Tserrina was drawn by the sudden abundance of spirits. The book The Dark Truth says an iksar fanatic holding the Lifeguide and the Teir’Dal wizard Vahlai Ka Izal enlisted her help, and the Fortifying Innoruuk’s Realm volumes place her in Innoruuk’s service.

Legacy

Later games kept returning to her. In the 13th anniversary raid she greets players over a fallen troll: “Ah the wedding party has arrived, how wonderful!” In Dreadspire Keep her spirit finally meets the mortality Mayong shed when he became a god, and the two embrace.

Her story is the tragic half of Mayong Mistmoore’s, and it explains why there was a vampire in Velious at all.