Sifynn Snowmane

Sifynn Snowmane was the youngest son of Aldberth Snowmane and his wife Agna Grayhilt. He was an ambitious mage with a knack for conjuration, and was a master necromancer and alchemist, though he did it not because he was an evil or sadistic man, but because he had an undying desire to learn and study magic and how alchemy and magic had effects on the bodies of people and animals.

Early life
Sifynn was born in 4E 103 in Solitude. While he father tried his hardest to train him as a warrior, in following with the tradition that all males enlist in the Legion, Sifynn proved to be more of the scholarly type, unlike his brother Eric, who soaked in the peculiarities of swordplay like a sponge.

When his older brother and his friends were out back being taught how to carry a sword properly, Sifynn would sneak off into the woods, and he would study different plant life and read books while enjoying the mountain air that Solitude provided.

Whereas his brother Eric longed for combat and death as a proof of strenth, Sifynn viewed death more as a means of study, and would practice conjuration and necromantic magic from books he'd find in the local book store or with the court wizard of Solitude, typically on deceased wildlife or occasionally himself, and by the time he was 14, he had a collection of scars on his arms and legs from cutting himself simply to heal himself with alchemical ingredient or magic, although in some cases, he'd cut himself just to poison himself and then test his theories on antidotes.

By the time he was 15, he was an accomplished novice conjurer and alchemist, and he could summon any but the strongest of Daedra, and he could, with a little work, get a body prepped for resurrection as a zombie or skeleton warrior.

College of Winterhold Years
In 4E 123, a year after the Great Collapse, Sifynn traveled to the College of Winterhold to begin formal education in the schools of magic, with a focus primarily on alchemical properties, conjuration, and restoration, opting to keep his studies of necromancy a secret.

While he was in the College, he continued his studies of life and death, and would go into the mountains south of Winterhold to kill wolves, spriggans that would occasionally show up, and various other creatures. While he was largely satisfied, he felt that the best test subjects would have to be man or mer, to study the effects of magics, poisons, and the like on an actual person, to see how it would affect them, because he quickly realized that certain creatures carried immunities to certain things.

In 4E 126, he took his first life for study. While he would occasionally return to the town for the College's library or food and his mail from the tavern, he was at this point operating out of his own cabin, constructed in the mountains, where he had the privacy to pull in wandering travelers posing as a kind man who could provide them with a hot meal and rest on the long travels between towns during the typically cold days.

His studies on the anatomy of his Dunmer victim fascinated him, and quickly branched out to begin capturing other victims, men and women of all races, which he would either kill for necromantic purposes, or restrain alive in order to observe how their bodies reacted to various poisons and potions, or to be dissected to study the organs themselves.

Bryla Ice-Caller
When Imperial authorities became suspicious of missing persons in the area going on so often, he magically cloaked his home with his quickly advancing illusion skills, which he began developing to calm his struggling victims as he caught them, and he returned to Solitude for a few years, where he met his future wife Bryla Ice-Caller, a local tavern maid.

He began courting her, finally ready to settle down and start a family. A few months later, she was pregnant with their daughter Karlaith, and he set aside his personal projects and experiments in Winterhold to raise his beautiful daughter and commit to marrying Bryla and being a father.

He would still return to Winterhold alone occasionally, but it was to gather books from the library, and his detailed notes on his studies, which he felt needed to stay with him and taken care of, and to occasionally spend a day or so studying, but he never put weeks into it like he used to.

Arrest and Death
While his cabin was isolated and always magically guarded when he left for Solitude, that didn't make it unfindable, and by mistake, a group of hunters discovered it when they literally wandered into the cloaked building, finding that a solid object was in there, albeit invisible in 4E 156. A group of mages from the college set out to investigate the phenomenon, and they revealed the structure and discovered the many corpses of man, mer, and beast, all perfectly preserved with necromantic magic, as well as a few tomes missed by Sifynn when he last departed a year ago after a weekend there.

With the information in hand, the Imperial guard were notified, and a dozen Legionnaires, a mixture of guards and battlemages, broke into his Solitude home, taking him away to the city prison, where he was detained for a couple weeks before being tried and executed for the murders of over a dozen people.

The cabin was then burned to the ground, along with all the rotting bodies, and his notes were given to the College of Winterhold, where they were put under lock and key.