When I started playing World of Warcraft, I was playing The Burning Crusade. Wrath of the Lich King had just come out but I hadn’t bought it because I wasn’t sure I’d like the game. Well, obviously I ended up becoming addicted to the game and thus upgraded to Wrath. I was excited to make a death knight, but my main character, my blood elf hunter Sriset, had to reach a certain level before I could make a death knight.
At the time I was working on leveling Sriset, I was in a guild that had nicknamed me Sris or Srissy, and not the Sri I’ve come to be known by. So I thought I was very clever when I came up the name Ripsris for my future death knight. As in RIP (rest in peace) Sris. I remember saying back then that Ripsris was going to be the death knight version of my hunter, but at the time I didn’t really have an idea of how that would’ve been possible. Over the years, I’ve come up with a story about how Sriset and Ripsris can both exist on Azeroth and while it’s probably not loyal to Warcraft “lore,” it works just fine in Sri World.
The story goes as such. While exploring Northrend, Sriset became lost, which is quite usual for her. But this time she got lost in a snowstorm and was unable to find shelter from the cold for quite some time. She finally found a small cave and crawled inside it but the exposure had been too much and she died…briefly. For Sriset was no ordinary blood elf hunter. Her bond with animals was so strong that some of the local wildlife came to her aid and managed to revive her and warm her back up.
However, during that brief time that Sriset was dead, a part of her spirit escaped her body and started passing into the afterlife. The powers that had raised scourge armies pulsed strong in the area around the cave, and the battles against those armies had claimed the lives of both Horde and Alliance who had been fighting near the cave, so ties to the other side were in constant flux. Once the animals managed to revive Sriset, the fragment found herself no longer tied to the hunter’s body and it began to drift through the icy winds.
That piece of Sriset’s spirit drifted through the wind until it came upon a gravely injured blood elf woman who appeared near death. The fragment paused by the fallen soldier and realized that she was one of the Lich King’s death knights. The fragment was angry at first as it recalled battles against the scourge, but then it sensed the sadness and pain of the fallen soldier and felt confusion. There was unnatural strength still left in the blood elf woman due to the scourge magic, but the fragment could feel that the woman was desperate for release from her undead existence.
Feeling pity for the death knight, the spirit clung close to the dying woman and whispered that it was time for her to rest in peace. A look of relief passed over the fallen soldier’s face and her spirit drifted free, but as it did so, it passed through the fragment, bestowing a flood of memories upon the fragment. The memories were of the blood elf’s life prior to becoming a death knight, all she had endured under the Lich King’s control, and then her eventual freedom from Arthas’s control as she joined the Knights of the Ebon Blade.
Confused by the memories and also filled with fear that it would be forced to drift among the frozen winds of Northrend for eternity, the fragment became desperate for some sort of anchor to the living world. The remnants of scourge magic in the area, propelled the fragment into the body of the fallen soldier, thus finding new “life” as an undead. The strength of Sriset’s spirit was so strong that even a fragment of it was able to restore the fallen blood elf’s body to a more whole state, closing the wounds, but unable to remove the pallor of death.
Remembering her words to the fallen blood elf death knight whose body the fragment now inhabited, she decided to call herself Ripsris to acknowledge her past, the death of her ties to that past, and her rather unique new future. Ripsris rose and continued to fight for the Knights of the Ebon Blade armed with the memories of the fallen soldier. When she encountered anyone who called her by the former name of the body, she would correct them and insist that was a tie to a long dead past she no longer wanted, which was mostly true.
Aspects of Sriset’s personality linger within Ripsris, such as her connectio but the memories of the fallen death knight have grown stronger over the years and Rip developed her own personality that blends the two. She wields the power of frost to honor the icy region where she was reborn and while she has few personal ties, she’s always willing to fight for honorable causes and the defense of the innocent.
Srinity 