"Yama was the first to find us our abode,
a place that can never be taken away,
where our ancient Fathers have departed;
all who are born go there by that path, treading their own.

Meet the Fathers, meet Yama, and meet with the
fulfillment of wishes in the highest heaven;
casting off imperfections, find anew thy dwelling,
and be united with a lustrous body."
Rig Veda 10.14.2,8

Dr. Jacob Bell is an archeologist and an expert in ancient Indian and East Asian cultures.  He previously had a tenured position at the British Museum.  A car crash left Jacob's body in a comatose state, but his soul was in Stygia with his daughter, Tara who had died only months before.  This time in the underworld revealed secrets to the nature of reality that fifteen years of research and academia never had.  When he was brought out of his coma, Jacob had awoken.

As a mage, Jacob goes by the Shadow Name, Yama, the Hindu god of the dead.  He is 40 years old and his dark hair is greying at the temples.  He stands tall at 6'4" and is a thin shadow of a man, his dark eyes deep-set against his strong cheekbones.  He is missing his left leg from just below the knee and wears a realistic prosthetic, a result of his car crash.  He tends to wear suits and has a style that is more at home in the 1930s than today.  He wears round framed metal glasses for reading.  He is somewhat anachronistic, he does not carry a cell phone or a computer and avoids modern technological comforts when he can.  In what others may find rather macabre, Yama carved his own severed tibia into a rod that he uses as his dedicated tool.  The rod is inscribed with skulls and mantras of death and time are inlaid in Sanskrit, spiraling around the bone rod.  Covered by his clothing, Yama is covered in tattoos some of the likenesses of Hindu gods, others of the Buddha, mantras in Sanskrit and in Pali.  In each of these tattoos, ashes from funeral pyres are mixed in with the ink.


Yama is always followed by the ghost of his daughter, who he has taken as his familiar.  She appears to be a reserved young woman around 17 years of age.  When Yama flares his nimbus, shadows deepen and reach from their depths to engulf the light, and others can hear the soft moans of ghosts calling out.  Yama is a member of the Mysterium and serves them well with his continued research into the nature of the Underworld.

Dr. Bell has recently begun a position teaching at Harvard is also a curator at the Harvard Museum of Natural Sciences.  He had a thriving business as an exorcist as well, well as thriving as anything that fringe can be, and he is seeking to start up a similar business in Boston.