Acacia Zardonis: Nightblade

Only those who deal in the shadows know the name of Clan Zardonis. For ages, the clan's ruthless regime of physical training produced the finest murderers and cutthroats. Their teachings shunned the arcane arts as weak and unreliable, but one young upstart would prove them wrong.

Acacia was the finest disciple of her generation, and mastered the art of the veiled blade at a young age. Yearning for more power, she studied the arcane in secret, experimenting in the shadows and growing more lethal with every passing season. For almost a decade the young woman ruthlessly enforced her clan's will by night, poring over eldritch tomes in the dim light of dawn.

In the winter of her twenty-second year, Clan Zardonis took a contract to ruin a family of wealthy Mathosian traders. Such a large endeavor required the clan to dispatch many of its finest killers, Acacia included, on a midnight raid on the trader's compound. The clan did not realize its folly until the assault was well under way, for they faced not fat merchants, but the mages of the Abyssal cult, and within moments found themselves tightly bound in chains of planar energy.

Of course, the Abyssal did not expect a foe with knowledge so similar to their own, and were completely unprepared when Acacia slipped from the shadows, cold flame dancing on her daggers. A whirlwind of fire and steel, she moved through the cultists, her blades piercing magical wards and flesh alike. With the spell of binding broken, the assassins of Clan Zardonis were free to exact their revenge, and by dawn not a single cultist remained among the living.

Saved from the brink of annihilation, the assassins embraced Acacia's power and made it their own. Over the decades to come, Clan Zardonis flourished, spreading their teachings to a new generation of Rogues, who became known as masters of shadow and flame.