Ravi Sengir
| Ravi Sengir | |
|---|---|
|
Grandmother Sengir Grandmother Ravi Sengir | |
|
[[File:{{#setmainimage:GrandmotherSengir.jpg}}|250px]] | |
| Details | |
| Race |
Human Formerly Planeswalker |
| Birthplace | Dominaria (probably) |
| Lifetime | Unknown (on Ulgrotha from 3200 AR) |
| Colors | |
Center:  Lost:  [1] | |
| Sources | |
| Homelands, The Secrets of Magic | |
Ravi, now better known as Grandmother Ravi Sengir, is a former planeswalker and the adopted grandmother of Baron Sengir, on Ulgrotha. During the New Phyrexia's Invasion of the Multiverse she defended Ulgrotha, but now she is without her planeswalker's spark.
Description
Ravi is left-handed.[2]
History
Before Ulgrotha
Ravi grew up as a farmer girl with her parents, in a village in the shadow of the local baron's castle. At one point, the village became infested with Plague Rats, causing the death of almost all the inhabitants, Ravi's mother among them. At her funeral, the girl met a strange boy, richly dressed. He revealed that he was the baron's son and that the baron was studying black magic: not only didn't he care about the villagers, but it was he who had brought the rats. The boy told Ravi that the baron wanted to become immortal, and had started doing strange things to his son, like making him sleep in a coffin. The only way to free the village from the rats continued the boy, was to kill the baron. However, the law prohibited a son who killed his father to inherit, so only Ravi could kill the baron. To do this, the boy taught her a song that could control the rats.
Ravi, however, didn't want to kill a man, even one as cruel as the baron. She changed her mind about this when her father also passed away due to the infestation. Ravi saw almost all of the village empty, and without any other relatives and with nowhere to go, she decided she would do as the boy had suggested. Singing the song, she controlled the rats in a way that impressed the boy, since only a powerful wizard could sing and dominate the rats so well. That night, the two entered the baron's castle and reached the lord's sanctum, the charmed swarm of rats following them. Once again, Ravi faltered in her resolve to kill a man in cold blood, but when she realized that the baron was working on her mother's corpse, she lost every hesitation and commanded the rats to devour him. The baron was a mighty wizard too, and managed to repel the rats with the same song. Confused by the battle of wills, the rats attacked the only other prey in the room: the boy. When the baron saw his son dead, he cast a spell on him, interrupting the song. Ravi took her opportunity and ordered the rats to kill the baron. After the deed, she commanded the rats to leave the village forever. Exhausted, Ravi opened one of the closed windows to breathe fresh air and bask in the rising sunlight. A scream behind her made her turn around: the boy was still alive, brought back to life by the last spell cast by his father, but he was seemingly intolerant to light. The boy noted how Ravi must have been a powerful wizard for having overpowered the baron and he believed she would become a planeswalker. The girl, however, doesn't seem to be interested in magic. The two realized that they didn't know each other's name: Ravi was thus introduced to the new Baron Sengir. Unbeknownst to both of them, they would be reunited many centuries later.
Ulgrotha
An unspecified amount of time later, Ravi has accepted her magical inclination, becoming a planeswalker that used green, red, and black mana. She was affiliated with the Tolgath, a group of young planeswalkers opposed by the rival Ancients. The long war between the two factions reached its peak on the backwater plane of Ulgrotha. The master of Ravi had given her a mighty artifact, the Apocalypse Chime, telling her to use it in only the most sinister of times and promising her it would cleanse the world. However, her master didn't tell everything, because nobody who would have known the effects of the chime, would have rung it. At the peak of the Great War, hoping to stop the killing, Ravi rang the chime and destroyed both parties, resulting in the Great Destruction that formed the Dead Zone by disrupting the world's mana channels and killing almost all creatures on the plane. The damage propagated throughout various planes, in effect creating some sort of connection between Ulgrotha, Dominaria and Kamigawa. As instructed, Ravi hid herself in a magical coffin in the Basalt Spire, to escape the effects of the Chime; however, her master never told to the girl how to open the coffin. Being a wizard based on life and nature, feeling her ties to the land ripped away drove her to madness, and she was left with a suffocating feeling of solitude. Even though the coffin protected her against the backlash of the Chime, feeling all of her connections and relations fragment to nothingness caused her to regress into an unstable state. Trapped, Ravi lay in stasis, awake, unable to dream, aware of every passing second for the centuries she was locked within the artifact. Her spirit was rapidly broken, and claustrophobia set in. Madness does not even begin to describe the state of her mentality.[3]
After being imprisoned for generations, she was freed by her childhood friend, the Baron Sengir, now a full-fledged vampire, and left stranded on Ulgrotha. The two didn't recognize each other: Ravi's body was withered with age, and she didn't have any recollection of her previous life before being trapped in the coffin. The Baron, however, quickly noted the magical ability of the old crone, and brought her to his castle, calling her Grandmother Sengir. She now refers affectionately to the Baron as her grandson and has become his tutor.[4] She still has a singing voice, that now causes eggs to spoil, and the grain withers into dust at her touch; the Baron, however, assures she bakes a damned fine unicorn.
Now using almost exclusively black magic, she is a master at casting hexes and curses upon those she scries through her magical crystal pendant and has been known to boil the flesh off of beautiful young women and drink the juices to keep herself alive throughout the years. Among her most powerful secrets, lies the ritual needed to bring down a Serra Angel and transform her into a dread fallen angel.[5] It is from her impressive collection of spells and hexes that the Baron has been learning magic. From this knowledge come the same books that have had so much corrupting influence on the apprentices of the Floating Isle and the Death Speakers of Aysen, and from which Eron gained his immortality. Grandmother Sengir is looking forward to the day when a Death Speaker, one of the Apprentices from the Floating Isle, will become her next student.[1]
Artifacts acquired
- The Apocalypse Chime.
Planeswalkers met
Planes visited
In-game references
- Represented in:
- Quoted or referred to:
References
- ↑ a b D. G. Chichester. (February, 1996.) "Homelands.
- ↑ Jay Annelli (February 5, 2024). "Grandmother Sengir is shown writing with her left". Twitter.
- ↑ Backstory for Magic the Gathering: Homelands
- ↑ Matt Cavotta (February 15, 2006). "The Royal Bloodline (Emphasis on the blood)". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.
- ↑ Fallen Angel
