A gaunt human man with sallow skin, deep-set gray eyes, and long black hair streaked with premature white. His narrow face is marked by sleeplessness and faint ink stains. He wears a weathered scholar's robe beneath a dark traveling coat, with a silver symbol of Myrkul hanging at his throat. His spellbook is bound in cracked black leather, and his fingers are covered in tiny scars from years of dissection and ritual work.

Nethren is patient, observant, and unnervingly courteous. He prefers libraries, morgues, and abandoned sanctuaries to crowded taverns. He rarely raises his voice because he assumes that anyone worth convincing will eventually understand the logic of his position. He displays genuine fascination with other people's experiences, but that curiosity is clinical rather than empathetic.

Nethren Vhal was orphaned at the age of nine when fever claimed both of his parents within the same winter. Refusing to accept that death had taken them beyond his reach, he searched through his father's medical notes and his mother's collection of forbidden theological texts. There he found fragments concerning Myrkul, the Lord of Bones, and learned his first crude principles of necromancy. Before his tenth birthday, Nethren had reanimated his parents in the cellar beneath their abandoned home. They did not return as loving guardians. They returned as silent, decaying instruments, and Nethren considered the experiment a qualified success. As he grew older, Nethren traveled from academy to monastery, presenting himself as a diligent scholar of comparative anatomy, funerary rites, and magical history. His talent for research earned him access to restricted libraries, though his questions about bodily preservation and the limits of the soul eventually made him unwelcome. He now wanders in search of rare corpses, unusual creatures, and knowledgeable accomplices who can help him create more durable vessels. He believes every body is a container awaiting a proper purpose, and every death is merely an opportunity to gather better data in service to Myrkul's inevitable dominion.