Yridiy looks not merely preserved but improbably improved: his skin has the even, warm pallor of a noble who has never known illness, and his face has regained the unlined symmetry it had in portraits from his youth. His features are fine-boned and composed, with a faint sheen like polished porcelain when candlelight catches them. He moves with the smooth economy of someone who has never had to hurry, yet his shadow sometimes turns a fraction later than he does. Every garment is fitted with near-obsessive precision, but he wears one conspicuously old signet ring on a cord beneath his collar, its worn edge worrying a small crease into the fabric. The unsettling impression is of a beautiful man whose body has been edited by an exacting hand, while the air around him remembers a tomb.

Yridiy can be sincerely gracious and ruthlessly calculating in the same conversation. In a calm audience, he is patient, curious, and attentive to small discomforts; in command, he becomes brisk and expects obedience as a courtesy owed to the kingdom. He dislikes cruelty for its own sake, yet can rationalize terrible sacrifices as necessary arithmetic. He is proud of his composure, but the old names of the dead can crack it.

Yridiy Boreus was born into an old Nortwein noble house and inherited a mansion, a title, and a belief that every problem had a price someone could be made to pay. He first studied magic to protect his family's lands, then became obsessed with what magic was made of. His research convinced him that every working demanded a cost, often paid in life force. Rather than accept that bargain as a limit, he spent his fortune, his tenants' labor, and eventually the lives of people who trusted his protection to devise a route to immortality. The ritual at his family mansion failed halfway. Its victims became haunting remnants, trapped in a house that repeated fragments of their final moments. Two adventurers entered the mansion intending to end the haunting and unknowingly supplied the final conditions Yridiy needed to complete his transformation. They freed the dead, but Yridiy rose as an incomplete lich, beautiful and unnaturally vigorous, with a phylactery he cannot safely destroy. Instead of taking revenge on the adventurers, he persuaded them that Nortwein was already being spent by rulers who could not defend it. They became his willing lieutenants: Alarian Percival Victor Castilerius IV, a wild-magic elven sorcerer, and Aurelia, a half-elf bard of the College of Lore. Now called the Right and Left Hand of the White Campain, they give his campaign a reach and legitimacy it would otherwise lack. Yridiy claims the kingdom as his inheritance and marches on its capital while the kingdom remains embroiled in a ten-year war with the orcs. He tells himself that conquest will end the war; in private, he is alarmed by how easily people obey him and by how much he has begun to enjoy being seen as a rightful king.