Lady of Pain

The Lady of Pain is a fictional entity, the protector of the city of Sigil in the Dungeons & Dragons Planescape campaign setting. She is also known as Her Serenity, for the permanently vacant expression on her face, or simply The Lady. She is only a lady insofar as she is characterized as female in her countenance. The Lady may as well be male or sexless, or such a type that traditional gender classification is impossible.

The Lady is sometimes seen as a floating, robed woman with a mantle of blades around her expressionless face. She does not concern herself with the laws of the city, and typically interferes only when something threatens the stability of Sigil itself.

The Lady is an entity of inscrutable motives, and often those who cross her path, even if accidentally, are flayed to death or teleported to one of her hidden Mazes (being almost inescapable pocket universes, usually endless and twisted in on themselves). Rumor has it that even minor deities have fallen before the Lady. The Shattered Temple in Sigil, as it is said, was a major temple of Aoskar, the god of portals, who wanted to get the city under his control. Once his meddling annoyed the Lady enough, she killed him with but a thought, shattering the grand temple and throwing his priests into the Mazes of her making. The temple became the headquarters of the Athar later on. It is therefore no surprise that the vast majority of Sigil's denizens dread her apparitions, and some even avoid mentioning her name aloud for fear of drawing her attention upon them.

The Lady has the power to control each and every portal in Sigil, opening and barring them as she sees fit.

Her obvious goal is to keep Sigil a safe haven for all planar travellers, protecting Sigil against all deities that would want to control the city. The dabus, her servants, maintain the city, forever fixing and patching its streets.

For all her power, she apparently refuses to be regarded as a goddess, and anyone brave (or careless) enough to worship her has met a grisly demise in the shadow of her blades.

A theory that appears late in the computer game Planescape: Torment is that the Lady is a prisoner and that Sigil is her cage. This theory is plausible in that its coiner, Ravel Puzzlewell, who would refer to herself as "the solver of puzzles not needing solving", had a level of understanding about the mechanics of the planes incomprehensible by men. Unfortunately (or perhaps for that very reason), she was also insane; whether her insanity set in before or after being "mazed" by the Lady is unknown.

Additionally, the novel Pages of Pain suggests that she may be the daughter of Apollo from the Greek Pantheon. However this is not made clear and even suggested that the memories of her early life released from an Urn may have been faked by the God himself in order to potentially sway the Protector of the Cage towards his way of thinking.

Influences
The main inspiration for the character of the Lady of Pain comes from "Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)", by English Decadent poet Algernon Swinburne.

The Shrike, the robotic monster and anti-hero of the Hyperion series of science fiction books by Dan Simmons, also bears a minor resemblance to the Lady. Both creaturs have metal blades as prominent features of their designs, both have inscrutable motives, and an often repeated title of The Shrike is The Lord of Pain.