Born in the sunless pits of Itzl-Coi, Ssaress was intended to be the ultimate infiltrator—a 'Pureblood' who could mirror the 'warm-bloods' so perfectly that no courtly intrigue could expose them. While their kin mastered the art of faking laughter and lust, Ssaress encountered a terrifying mutation: they began to feel the vibration of others' heartbeats as if it were a symphony they were conducting. To a society built on the cold calculus of the Great Serpent, this empathy was a terminal defect. Ssaress was ordered to execute a terminal High Priest to destabilize a human kingdom, but upon touching the man's fevered brow, they didn't see a target; they saw a dissonant chord in the grand design of life.
Ssaress siphoned the infection into their own blood, a feat of Ki-manipulation that nearly killed them, and vanished into the rain. They spent years as a pariah, wandering the borderlands and refining the 'Way of Mercy.' They carry a blackened fang-needle—a relic of their former life as an assassin—now repurposed to stitch flesh and stabilize the dying. Ssaress views every wound as a mathematical error in the world's geometry, a mistake they are biologically compelled to correct, even as they struggle with the predatory instincts that scream at them to consume the weak.
The 'tears' that give Ssaress their title are a biological anomaly—saline excretions caused by the intense metabolic stress of suppressing their Yuan-Ti nature. To Ssaress, these tears are not sorrow, but the physical cost of maintaining a soul they were never meant to have. They remain a creature of two worlds, hunted by the scaly hand of their past and mistrusted by the very people they bleed to save.