Akemtum

Akemtum, in his life in the form of both Human and Skinwalker, has always lived in the shadow of dread Ireth, city of immortal madmen. Long ago the mages there sought the secrets of life and death, and the machinations of ever-living necromancers plagued by madness brought the once-thriving metropolis to a state of rotting, horrific ruin. Few sane living beings tread willingly into the center of Ireth, but on the outskirts there exist slums that house the few living mortal remnants of the fallen city-state. They cling to what sustenance they can, and collect fees to act as liaisons between the mad alchemist-princes and the wider world. Ireth may fester with corruption, but its coin remains highly persuasive. Akemtum was a slum-dweller, feeling forever trapped between the inner rot and the outer desert. He was a nobody, who became a thief and then a killer. His methods included using metal claws to slash his targets to ribbons while they slept or were otherwise vulnerable. He could then claw open a door or window, and drag the body away to be partially consumed by scavengers, thus disguising them as victims of animal attacks. After masking his crimes in this way several times, he silently but heartily laughed to see a bounty on a dangerous, large desert cat be issued. Perhaps he would hunt one of the carrion-fatted wildcats that prowled beneath lreth's walls and try to claim the reward. Or perhaps not. The bounty on the killer beast was a puny sum compared to another contracted killing at the behest of some foreign merchant or local would-be immortal. Time passed, until Akemtum embarked on a mission he thought was simple, to eliminate an aggravating junk-sifter scavenging in a scrapyard claimed by Akemtum's client. Akemtum was creeping through the sump when a pink, hairless cat emerged from the heaps of refuse, hissing and yowling. The noise attracted another salvager to the scene, who chased off the cat. Lest his crime be witnessed, Akemtum hid, fuming, among the rusty filth and waited for the bystander to leave. When he finally did, Akemtum caught up with his target and saw again the noisy cat, this time clutched in the feeble scrap-monger's arms. Contemptuously, Akemtum ripped his iron claws through both Human and animal, and sealed the fate of the cat, the man, and himself. Alone in the junkyard standing over the cooling corpses, Akemtum was assailed by the dark and vengeful spirit of the cat he had killed. He fell to his knees and hallucinated, the rubbish around him distorting in size to become fearsome hills and mountains. Then he saw a great cat, whose soul was the hairless sphynx he had just gutted but whose form was that of the true man-killing beast of prey that he had been falsely imitating. It said that for living by the ways of the beast he would be judged and punished by the revenant spirit of primal beastliness that all Skinwalkers have touched in some form. Akemtum lives on, but no longer in the slums. Exiled by popular outcry to the wasteland of ruined buildings closer to the dense and odious center of fell Ireth than wholesome folk dare, he still wields claws to ply the trade of assassin, which drip with the rot of Ireth, promising death to those marked for him and all others who stand against him. His fractured mind yearns to hunt and kill, and his new hybrid feline form has rendered him all the more capable of doing so.