The Raven Queen

Though the Raven Queen has no physical form, she is often depicted as a woman in long black robes wearing a white mask, with a large raven on her shoulder.

The Raven Queen is trapped by her fascination with the past. She sits in her fortress, amidst all the memories of the world, looking at the ones that please her most as though they were glittering jewels. Many great wizards have attempted to understand her motives, but like a raven she has always remained cryptic, keeping her cache of secrets just out of their reach.

The Raven Queen is obsessed with collecting and observing mementos and fragments of memories and essences. Many sages speculate that she is in fact insane, believing her methods and behavior little more than aimless curiosity or a desperate attempt to prevent her fragile existence from fading into oblivion. Others maintain that there is a cosmological function that is performed by the Queen's actions, as she purifies souls by forcing mortals to deal with their fears and pains. It is believed that her true intentions are only known to the Lady of Pain.

The whole existence of the Raven Queen is focused on collecting memories and strong emotions, typically associated with loss and tragedy. To that end, she dispatches Shadar-Kai to the far confines of the multiverse to wait for such an event to unfold, as scouted by her ravens. They then collect mementos, such as trinkets, memories from the living and sometimes the souls of the dead, and bring them back to her.

Although a complete account of the Raven Queen's motivations and origins was not generally known, it was believed that she was originally a much beloved elf queen from the Feywild who witnessed the conflict between Corellon and Lolth. Worried that the dispute might tear the Seldarine asunder, she rallied her followers to perform a powerful ritual in order to become a deity, so she could have the leverage to appeal to the deities' senses.

The ritual involved the offering of the queen's followers' souls and magic to add to her own power, enabling her to reach Arvandor. The followers, who called themselves Shadar-Kai, firmly believed that their queen was capable of reunifying the elven pantheon and the sundered elves.

However, evil wizards among the queen's followers attempted to divert some of the energy from the ritual to amplify their own powers. Moments before completing the ritual and reaching Arvandor, the queen reacted by punishing the wizards with a burst of divine fury. This curse corrupted the ritual into a siphon that dragged the queen and her followers into the Shadowfell, causing her to lose her physical form. However, thanks to her recently acquired divine powers, the queen rose from the ashes and, in her growing madness and grief, transformed the wizards into wretched avian forms known as Nagpas, and banished them forever to wander the planes.

The queen herself was still further transformed by the corrupted ritual, her form dissolving into disconnected sensory perceptions. Moreover, both Corellon and Lolth considered her actions to be treason, so they erased the memory of her existence from all elves. In order to avoid disappearing entirely, she drew memories of her existence from the Shadowfell itself in order to sustain her identity. Over time, the subjective remains of the queen and the loose darkened memories gave rise to the entity that became known as the Raven Queen.

Another account of the Raven Queen's origin stated that she was originally a sorceress who led a rebellion against a former god of death in Pluton. In order to prevent her from becoming a tyrant in the same fashion as the defeated god, other deities elevated her to the status of goddess of death, but with no power over the dead themselves.