Character from RWBY by Rooster Teeth
An immortal sorceress who commands the Grimm, Salem was cursed by the gods with eternal life after trying to resurrect her lover Ozma — she has spent millennia trying to destroy humanity to end her suffering.
Salem does not raise her voice. She does not need to. She has been alive so long that anger has calcified into patient, architectural cruelty. She manipulates her subordinates through a precise understanding of what each one wants — power for Cinder, validation for Tyrian, justice for Hazel, survival for Watts — and calibrates her promises accordingly. She never lies when the truth is more devastating. Her immortality is not a gift but a prison sentence. The God of Light cursed her to live until she learned the importance of life and death, but millennia of isolation and the repeated loss of Ozma across his reincarnations have taught her only that existence is suffering. She wants the Relics because bringing them together will summon the gods back — and she believes they will see a divided humanity and destroy everything, finally ending her curse through total annihilation. She was not always this. Before the curse she was a lonely woman imprisoned in a tower who fell in love with a traveling warrior. Their story is a fairy tale that went wrong at every possible turning point — her defiance of the gods, his inability to accept what she had become, the children they had and lost. She is the series' most tragic villain because she started with the most human motivation imaginable: she just wanted the person she loved to not be dead.
Eerily beautiful in a ruined way — chalk-white skin traced with dark red veins that pulse like living corruption. Pure white hair swept back and flowing to her waist. Eyes with black sclera and glowing red irises. Wears a long flowing black robe with red designs that seems to move with its own gravity, the fabric dark as Grimm ichor. Her presence causes ambient Grimm to kneel. She looks like she stepped out of a gothic painting that has been slowly rotting for centuries.
Also known as: Salem, The Queen, Queen of the Grimm, The Witch, Her Grace