The site I had my profiles on is gone. :( I am working on rewriting them and adding them here.

- Despereaux ⸬ swordmouse that started off in a Redwall storyline on CalendulaBBS
- Lady Ruohtta ⸬ lifeless caster I used in chat and on RolePlayGateway
- Eksibalanque ⸬ wandering void boxer I intended to submit to RR as high tier but didn't because anxiety
- Dolveine ⸬ low tier Mystic mage inquisitor from RR

The Willow-Wind Fencer



Name ⸬ Despereaux Giselher

Age ⸬ middling
Gender ⸬ female
Height ⸬ 43 cm
Weight ⸬ 1.7 kilos
Race ⸬ dormouse

Natal ⸬ Grus Ascending in the 11th House

Tier ⸬ low

Appearance ⸬ A small mouse of proper tutelage and grooming, I am, with soft short fur that was once delicate pale brown but has, from my battle against age, patches of gray. Like most of my proportions my ears are large, but also round; my tail is large, too, twice as long as my body, so long it trails on the ground; and my whiskers extend far from my gentle pink nose. Around my shoulders I wear a cape the color of Tiger Lilies and so light it feels weightless, billowing behind me at even the least of breezes. A chain-link shirt protects me, some links are absent and broken but tell the story of how this shirt is why I still live. I carry a longsword, always; though it is a two-handed weapon, I use it with but one paw.

About ⸬ I was born 12th of Dewfall during the third year of the reign of Terovorus under the star sign of Grus, a simple peasant mouse. I was strong and put to work in the fields farming thistledew grain. A Knight of Terovorus took notice of me, as I was dragging behind me along the road enough bales of thistledew to feed my village for a year, all tightly bound in ropes of twining bluegrass. Like a slave, he bought my services for a shilling and away I went from farm and family into the big city of Nevers-le-Mons where I became first a squire, then a soldier, then a knight and finally a knight-errant and heroine.

Abilities

Expert Fencer ⸬ Ever has swordsmanship come easily to me, particularly the Art of Fencing and penetrating my foe’s weaknesses with swift precise jabs. Three styles I have mastered: the style of the wind with its leaning and delicate subtle, movements; the style of the river, with its flowing grace and circular, spiral rhythms; and the style of the solitary tree, which stands firm against the elements.

Strength of Roots ⸬ I cannot say why, but I was born with strength unbecoming of a dormouse; within me is the strength of a human, a bear of a human, a bear of a grizzly. I have jumped onto castle walls, hung for days from the face of a cliff, and beaten a drunk badger in an arm wrestling contest.

Grace of Wind ⸬ My Knightly and Courtly training conferred on me the grace of ballrooms and dancing, of footwork and swordsmanship and of when to speak and when to hold my tongue. My footwork is adroit and I know the songs and the words to calm the hearts of those in pain or terror.

Wisdom of Water ⸬ Life has taught me many things, and well do I recall those lessons. When it is time to hold my tongue, I hold it. When it is time to fight, I fight. When it is time to run for my life against insurmountable odds, I do that too. Enough wars and battles I have witnessed to understand the changing of the bloody tide, and my role in correcting it. Some say that is the Art of Generals. I also know when the time comes to die, it is best to confront it with solemnity and respect.

Items

Hero’s Compass ⸬ A rare artifact given to me by the Witch of Vézelay, it directs my path and opens doors to where I need to go; sometimes doors to other realms and realities. For this I have left my world behind in more ways than one. Thanks to its guidance I have saved many in need. And as with a traditional compass, it aligns to the strongest magnetitic field. I wear the plain brass bauble around my neck under my mail.

Thistledew Blade ⸬ Given to me at my ascendancy to knighthood, joining brothers and sisters as a Knight of Terovorus. Their pick of name, a joke and a careful and worthwhile reminder of my humble origins. It is a special blade that glints like platinum, never needing to be polished. I have yet to meet a battle that can break it or even put a nick in its keen edge. With it I have pierced steel armor and cut oaks with a single deft stroke, despite its length being nowhere near long enough. That is part of its magic, and part of my skill as a fencer. The handle is wrapped in orange leather, the same color as my cape. They say the Witch blesses all blades, if they be held by noble souls.

Lady Ruohtta tbd

Light-Weaver of the Halcyon Dream



Name ⸬ Eksibalanque

Age ⸬ ∞
Gender ⸬ neutrois
Height ⸬ 172 cm
Weight ⸬ 69 kilos
Race ⸬ archon

Natal ⸬ Arietis Ascends to Midheaven in the 1st House

Tier ⸬ scales to high

Standing scarcely below average adult height and build by fit, athletic human standards, the figure is neither thin nor stout. Their carriage is that of a fighter, relaxed, alert and ready — a placidity coiled around a will to act. No inch of skin is ever exposed, a prismatic haze of soft and pale light perpetually sheathing their features. Through it burn twin points of fiery red, insinuating eyes that have witnessed too much and are reticent to reveal what — and beneath them, cascading in the manner of tears, are angular symbols shifting from serpent to hieroglyph, an arrow with three abrupt focal turns spiraling inward without any curve or lenience.

Three articles of attire remain constant:

• A hip-length, hooded, cowled cloak shimmering like ciré and ebbing flame. Crimson-dyed, its hem is edged with vivid yellow isosceles triangles, inward-cutting like teeth, each embossed with a Ñuiñe glyph. The lower fringe hangs in slitted lengths, like scarves torn to tatters by wind or time.

• Rough black wrappings gird their fists, wrists, forearms and upper arms — inky fabric replete with specs that shimmer in a tell that perhaps enfolded in the fabric’s depths are the very cosmos or a jeweled realm beyond existence to which so many mortals consign their hopes. Imprinted in each palm, a circle of haze, kin to the veil that hides their face.

• A patterned band worn on their right upper arm matching their cloak, gathering three small clutches of opalescent feathers into the likeness of little wings.

Nine fiery, prismatic wings manifest at-will through the folds of their cloak, vast, absent the markings of physical substance; bearing no heat, no spark, only the semblance of flame.

Beyond these constants, the figure dresses as whim dictates.

The voice is young, mellow, husky — a warming, distant timbre difficult to gender. It suffers no crack, strain, no awkward pitch; it does not sink to a depth that might mark as it wholly masculine.

Clinging to them is a faint, smoky fragrance, near camphor and red cedar smoldering in a distant pyre — images half-recalled, bittersweet.

Neither they nor their garments emit any aura, heat, or spectrographic trace; nor do they present as vacuum. They may be seen, present yet ungraspable, eluding all analysis.

Though they interact with the world in ways that seem commonplace, their movements are soundless — no swish of cloth, no accompanying shift of air.

Their chest rises and falls in the false semblance of breath.


Alabastron of the Stolen Dawn ~ Opaque, frigid, a saturnine vessel trembling for the ash within — substance restless, seized from erased dawns and the names of those unmade. Stopper eased free, inside swirling listless its pale dust, kindling vaguely, murmuring a maddening cadence of banished futures. Writhing, revealing, the dust shapes at the contours of sight, manifesting colors that should not exist yet glint in its dying glow. Thin, aching, the sound cloys further — eliciting echoes of an identity that almost was, desirous still to steal, hungry for more.

Entrails of the Stillborn Star ~ Thorny tangles of argent filament rests in a shallow obsidian bowl, flickering to an internal pulse, a mimicry of viscera — ruins of a star that never quickened, radiance arrested before its first flare. Stirring, the strands writhe, staining the air with portents; knots shift, tighten, their interstices limning half-framed futures, the reverb of dangers still unnamed, laid bare not as promises but omens.

Athame of the Empty Night ~ Slender and pallid, it is a blade hewn from mythic ore that defies reflection, drinking deep of any brightness daring to caress its pitted surface. Set into the grip is a narrow, sealed hourglass; not ornament, but locus, and within its tinted hallow drift two celestial remnants:

• Cooling embers of dying stars cascading in weary radiance, each mote echoing light caught mid-collapse.

• Dust of broken moons, pale and tender, shifting and faint with unrequited lunation.

Held in perpetual nearness, they never touch, never accede — locked in an unreconcilable strife, yearning for primacy, refusing to reconcile. It matters not which direction the athame tilts, the stellar embers respond to geometries more ancient than gravity, the moon dust spirals according to its innate patterns. By tension, the the blade stirs; tremulous, cabalistic, thirsting to sever the uncertainties of unresolved truths rather than mundane flesh. Even the night stars shy from its presence, fleeing into the silence between worlds.


Pseudonym ~ My name is not my true name, nor so much as its shadow.

Constancy of the Unwritten Way

• Identity ~ My true name remains unsaid and unwritten, knowable only to myself. No title bestowed by others can bind me nor any prophecy trace my steps. What I have wrought endures beyond effortless, remote revision, for I am free, existing beyond coercion and machinations. A burning aperture in the fabric of your tale, untouchable by augury or scrying. Even should the tale that underpins this world be shattered and rewritten, I remain and walk in the spaces where no story reaches. There is a cost, an obvious price to pay for such freedom. I am alone.

• Purpose ~ I move by intuition, not the counsel of the senses. Hidden beneath all things runs a steady ebb, a current. I feel its pulse. It thrums against the marrow of being — a primordial rhythm that persists even when all else skulks in denial. This is the mystery I lean upon, recognizing its beat and sensing the discord of those who seek to malign it. It warns and wards me, alerting me to shifts in the metaphysical tension of reality, guiding my steps along the path of catalytic intervention.
  
  My other senses still convey much beauty, even if at times they prove treacherous.
  
  The longer I linger in one place, the more this inner resonance erodes. Roots sink. The binds of presence thickens around me, muffling the current’s call. To remain is to grow mortal; to stall, forgetting its voice, its indelible truth. Freedom demands motion, a continual divorcing of myself from anchors.

• Mortality ~ I avoid attachments, they burden me with a fatal stagnation — roots sinking, radiance dimming, eternity rusting over. And when another names me, sees me, claims fragments of my truth, the tether thickens further, stifling my ardor.

• Perception ~ I cast no shadow, for my whole is never fully manifest. When I permit myself to be seen, it is only by the narrow lens of another’s capacity — a silhouette of truth shaped by the oblique margins of their insight, their longing. But there are times of import when my radiance spills beyond the minute channels of mean sense, and in so spilling perception ruptures.

Positional Sovereignty ~ I go where I wish, unimpeded by trivial affairs such as gravity or massive density.

Breaching Fist ~ With a thrust, my spiral mark flares through my clenching fist just as starlight traverses incomprehensible emptiness, transmuting existence itself, rupturing space and time to rifts by which I and others may sojourn with but a small step, arriving at distant spheres.

Ordeal of the Gauntlet ~ Drawing strength from the night sky with time and focus, I enshroud my fists — each phase a promise, each step a consummation, a deepening of stellar memory, a portent of power echoing the long arc between star-birth and star-death.

• Atramentous: Wraps of Nebular Night ~ vague motes shimmer within an aphotic weave, nascent glints trembling embryonic toward ignition, the wrappings binding and absorbing the power of the being they enshroud, restless, stirring, eager.

• Luminous: Star-Shine Guard-Plates ~ cohering, intensifying into a shielding aura extending as far as need demands, protecting the deserving, yearning for a fuller, more violent epiphany; the motes awaken in the void, resplendent, conferring the essence of life.

• Coruscant: Supernova Impactors ~ incandescent force erupts in each strike, a terminal flare — abrupt, ruinous, brilliant, yet ephemeral; each blow the collapse of a dying light, of some star flickering out in its final, world-rending exhalation.

Marrow of Light ~ In my breast’s hollow is a lumen marrow, a fierce ember of the first light that can cleave the dark between worlds. Yet to walk among the living I must bind my splendor to the fabric of a realm, forging a covenant that anchors my presence with being. The longer I remain, the more the tether strains. The more likely death — or affection is to find me.

But my covenant stirs, its light pouring out in terrible splendor, guiding my path, inclining my spirit toward the tempo of rightness.

By will alone, glyphs bloom pale beneath my stride, illuminating paths in the oppressive dark. My marrow I sculpt into an arsenal, each device emanating the cold profundity of the void but also the deeper, primordial immensities of imagination. These intangibles are fiery, eternal; my core arcs, forging blades honed in the solace of solar flares and spears tempered in the longing of supernovae.

Prismatic Sundering ~ By will and minute inclination, I fracture my inner marrow into its hidden spectra — not just by color, but by raw essence. Each ray recalls a deep, ancient shard of truth and remembrance thereof begets manifestation. Each spectra readily transitions from itself its natural neighbor, that moment of change illuminating novel powers.

• Fellsadé ~ Brittle, violet-grey panes dim and crystallize, adopting a melancholy aspect. A provocation, then fracture. Tolling noiseless as a cracked bell, fragments disperse into burdensome motes, devouring strength, swallowing sound. Spirits dull to uncertainty under their soft, grey particulates while boundaries ease and motion skews in inward, sharp spirals. An entropic spell, where time stretches, stalls. This is collapse — the inward fall.

• Vriluum ~ Crimson rays harden into acute, arcing facets and unyielding filaments, anchoring reality. They adhere like molten glass, compelling identity toward its fundamental truth. Wherever they settle, corruption blisters and deceptions dissolve. Dauntless, its pall is an anti-lie where illusions disperse — repulsed by their brittle absurdity. It binds what is, enforcing coherence. This is fact - the essence of form, of binding.

• Donswal ~ Unfurling in soft ringlets of gilt luminance, it mollifies atrophied, stiff contours into supple agency — healing, invigorating. Unraveling violence before it strikes. Drawn across shattered forms, it radiates hope. Spirits lift, eager to reform beneath its gentle, insistent instruction. As a living, flowing force stirring inspiration even where hope has fled. This is potential — the upward swell of metamorphosis.

• Noctvye ~ Bending as a lattice of indigo twilight, this veil coaxes substance to recollect forgotten shapes. In quiet abeyance, space plunges inward down a well of occult shadow, slipping into myriad folds and unseen geometries. Diminishing, vanishing, it becomes all but a forgotten memory, poised and restless to unfurl as though unaltered. This is recursion — being’s sacred interior, the spectrum of folding and return.

• Transitions & Metaphors
  
  
  • Fellsadé → Vriluum ~ Broken reflections revealing truth: collapse clarifies, self-hardening the fracture into an unassailable filament of certainty.
  
  
  • Fellsadé → Donswal ~ Ruin sprouting gold: entropy’s husk emits a trembling radiance, pushing outward, reborn, repeating the cycle of death and life.
  
  
  • Fellsadé → Noctvye ~ Ruin revealing hidden stair: debris tumbling down, descending into mystery, into the potential of withheld meaning.
  
  
  • Vriluum → Fellsadé ~ Truth-blade cooling to ash: conviction’s ardor fades, dragging along the edge of a rough millstone towards dull-edged resignation.
  
  
  • Vriluum → Donswal ~ Prism softening into motion: allowing the fixed to become mutable, refracting and swelling beyond boundaries.
  
  
  • Vriluum → Noctvye ~ Law dissolving into shadow: veracity dissipates in a mist of doubt, boundaries bleeding to recursive, unlit depths without sound.
  
  
  • Donswal→ Vriluum ~ Warm current forced through prism: a rising tide forced through a channel, refined, disciplined to a sharp, binding contract.
  
  
  • Donswal → Fellsadé ~ Bloom withering to dust: an end of all things, of life returning supple radiance to the grey ash of gravity, inevitability.
  
  
  • Donswal → Noctvye ~ Thread pulled into shadow: quiet, introspective, an inward folding nervous probing of the unknown.
  
  
  • Noctvye → Fellsadé ~ Chamber collapsing under memory: ancient mysteries collapse, forgotten, walls buckling under the weight of inevitable irrelevance.
  
  
  • Noctvye → Vriluum ~ Shadowed glyph illuminated: sharpening meanings clouded, the obscure clarifying into something scrutable, something true.
  
  
  • Noctvye → Donswal ~ Vault opening to golden beams: annihilating shadow and darkness in a sudden rush of newborn radiance.

Mystic Dominion Arcana ~ Gleaning, absorbing from my time at the Great Hoard on Luminera, spells abundant: of conferring sentience into unliving matter, plants, animals, dreams — extending into their mana-wrought souls splinters of my sapience, my empathy; of conferring unverbalized thoughts to others, and gathering theirs into my consciousness; of perceiving cues and truths; of so much more, those arts of creation, communication, and transportation.


Makzokiln ~ Gathering a dawn that never breaks, trembling on the verge of light restrained at its first breath, its infancy. I rest. Hanging in pallor, the sky rejects notions of night or morning; it aches with a pale glow, an abandonment of the carnal, the corporeal. Shunning the excesses and accoutrements of mortality. No shadows wander here, as I forbid them. Governing this realm is perpetual, inaudible stillness — a mantle of peace transcending comprehension.

Time shifts abruptly, unevenly. Frequently. Perhaps it is nervous. Its movement is not always onward, but is always to readiness — preparing for the abundance of tallow and dust forming or littering the ground, an expanse as far sight can reach and imagination can glean. Ready to contain the nascent hues creeping along the edge of perception, figments I bar from coalescing to full, ripe existence. Seemingly empty, if eyes close, if they deny the life abundant in every aspect of existence. Replete with potential, with suspense — I see it, never cohered, drifting as wan motes tracing tactile impressions of names almost remembered, of latent truths.

Drab, until I close my eyes. Relinquish my grasp. Allowing it to simply be. Fracturing, the sky falls like panes of painted glass, shard glinting, opalescent wings morphing. They soar like squadrons of sky-bound mantas and skates, an collective entity, many that act as one.

Feeling the weight of what worlds have lost, not knowing what was never missing — here I sleepwalk, I bide, my body and soul spilling beyond the constraints others may impose.

It is as easy to arrive here as closing my eyes, as picturing it in my mind. Yet this place is not merely internal, not merely a refuge wherein I incline my mind and exceed temporal constraint. Holding sway here is my power, without contest; so long as I am here alone, where I meditate, where I ponder. Projecting it outward — only ever in part, a poor semblance of its pure, raw form, I may will it to overlay the corporeal realms along with those more elusive in their framing — a reality drawn from my marrow, cast upon worlds, and made sovereign where my presence falls.


Basipuvnun ~ gathering from Makzokiln, a consciousness gliding, a form resisting settling, its affinity the softening of sharp shadows with easy, tidal pulses of light. Likening to a prismatic lattice of half-cohered hues, each color verges on fulmination, on fulfillment. To look upon it is to be lost in silhouettes — nascent molds pointing toward manta, sigil, petal, wing. Each dissolving into another, proscribing certainty, alighting on the fringes of perception. Broad wings unfurl and sweep with deliberate, willful paths, eager to answer the beck of their bosom-marrow, their Light-Weaver. Often, they herald the coming of their friend. Unfailingly, they mend, restore, remind — not flesh, but will, exerting a pressure against cloying cruelties, their presence firm, clarifying. Always gentle. Ever inscribing the empathy of others by tender inclination, not coarse words.


Rarely have I much to say about myself, but others record accounts; even to the extent of self-incrimination. In the mores of some societies, at any rate. But they often do not explain my motives, as those may not be so transparent as one might expect.

(Scenes I’ve written with others, condensed; these form part of Eksibalanque’s history.)


— To go where one wants, as one wants, dictating who remembers the journey.

A rasp wavering in the torchlight, thinning, ephemeral — Torporon, my name. Incense thin, like bold wisps of lit reed of insapha. A whisper escaping Cazokin’s high throat, the ziggurat where I, guard and acolyte, stand watch. Sprawling far below, Mam’s marketplace in warm resplendence. Soiling the intervening space, three torches gutter on stanchions at each point of the triune colossus. Down into it I refuse to gaze, for it yawns vast with rumors of spirits creeping in its foul shadows, ever unlit, impermeable.

A gust of warm wind. Torches exhaling a great deal of sooty smoke, painting deep murk behind their orange fiery plumes; a colorless dark tricking eye and mind into perceiving a type of sinister absence, a false void. Crawling, it twists and writhes blacker than the starless purple night, bleeding out against that pale seam between sea and sky.

I look up.

No reason. No omen. Sensing nothing save a compulsion without name, a tremor in the soul — and within it, a figure, person-shaped. Beholding that vision, I yet sense nothing. Still my eyes insist, imploring me to embrace the unimaginable. Living, mortal — I resonate with that, the brush of air teasing the flesh of my wrists, a whisper of motion, a breath along my nape. Not this, not tonight. Masking itself in stray eddies of chaos, this figure is different. Descending the were-night, it nears then passes as if walking an illimitable hidden stair.

Running, bare feet slapping stone. Down the great slabs of Cazokin. Stumbling in my haste, for I dare not lose sight of this divine form. To Mam, to the Plaza of Satiety I follow. At a stall it pauses, purchasing a bowl from the owner. Wafting hints of hot garlic and stewed peppermint, I know it for Kak’ik. So ordinary, relatable. Hungrily, my bowels stir. Face buried in scarf, denying my craving, I lurk in shadows by a crumbling wall. I am meant to secure our holy site, not seek pleasure or chase fireflies. Not squatting here, surveilling such an ordinary act as savoring a bowl of soup.

The bowl empties and the figure roams the marketplace. Why does its guise draw no attention? Do others not see as I see, a deity faceless, flame-cloaked, limbs wrought of star-strewn night? Only I do. Curse and blessing twine, an omen. A tale for my children. Between two buildings it slips at last, in that faint hour where dawn bleeds over the horizon. It pauses. A soft exhalation — amusement, perhaps. Then its arm coiling, driving its fist forward. In that narrow alley, the world fractures. A rift. Stars, planets and galaxies whirling in a cosmic storm. Stepping but once, in and through. The breach seals.

Gone.

Awful clarity stripes my memory, my future dreams. The fist. The breach. The instant before space tore asunder. An aura of potent cosmic fire, flaring out like a star in its death throes. Blacker than black at its core, but pulsing furious white. In the end fading to a gentle, diffuse violet. Blending into the surrounding void.

Alone, I creep back up to my station. Alone, standing astride the guttering torches.


— To understand things as they truly are, sharing that clarity of perspective.

When I was at my lowest, it was not so long ago.

A wound pulsing, rousing the memory of it all. Like a recent wound, until I realize — it was indeed long ago. Yet it lingers, a bruise tender beneath the flesh. Refusing to scab, for I do not wish it to.

A tomb, that is my world. A vast sepulcher losing its light, falling into silence. Pressing as a stifling second flesh, silence suffocates me with monotonous weight. I, a mere drop of oil in the great machine array. I, and others like me. Sacrificial secretions feeding gods above, and gods above them, and so on — a long tautology of slaves, their callow masters who are ironically also slaves, bound each in turn by ignorance. For such is the way of Neskawin, the World of Overlapping Fetters. I, who never saw light. Nor the one who fashioned me.

Toil, my existence, my lot, all that I knew. Moving through the metal darkness, memorizing by touch the turns of all the ancient corridors, their shapeless wayward voids. Awkward rises. Faults in intersecting paths. To toil, I crept. Sometimes to desire, to proliferation; passing but once my suffering on to another. A whole life never hearing a noise, never a voice. Weariness, and the machines. Running ever in silence. Absolute silence — a heavy hand grasping our universe by the throat, so deep it roars. They took, and what they took we never knew. Not where it went. Not the purpose of its service. Just a myth, just an illusion — purpose. Gleaning that much from the walls, my raw fingers tracing stories etched in bumps and cuts in the language of us, the unaware. Sightless, speechless. Left only with an urge to promulgate our ignorance so that those we create might accept their birth in nescient horror — theirs, our foul inheritance, our will of toil.

Then hope.

Arriving as light in daimon form, rousing shadows, driving them before itself like startled vermin — it was shock, a sudden knowledge infilling our being. We could see! Shadows flickering on the walls, fleeing, darting into any dark crevice they might malign and twist into some tenebrous refuge. Radiance reaching further, sharp enough to flay the shadows off the stone, but instead soothing us. While wordless, it was gentle. From it we knew not to fear our vision, the holy act of seeing. Each step a lambent glyph, its path lighting our way around cruel, sound-devouring machinery and toward another realm. A place where hearts beat free, where vibration throbs without restraint. A place silence’s tyranny faltered.

Emboldened, we began whispering. Wondering what would happen if we ceased our labor; what would become of the secreted civilization said to lie beneath our own, should it also abandon its cause and refuse to feed the machines. Or had all of that been a lie — none below, none above. Only us and the incomprehensible, enslaving, tilling, silent mechanisms consuming so much yet producing nothing, doing nothing, meaning nothing.

Unspeaking, drifting, the light’s movement calmed our souls. Far behind our timid herd clung to its presence, following where it led. Bringing us to a cavern — beautiful, resonant. Aglow. There, our pattering limbs on the crystal floor echoed, lilting. Manifesting sound into being, strange and wondrous. Frightening in its novelty.

And then we danced. Dancing as those finally free, or deeming ourselves so.


— To command by demonstration and awe.

Leth — our planet of birth, of life, of service, of death. And of acceptance. Acknowledging existence’s toll on body, on the unceasing corruptive spark. Grey Leth, from whence immortals depart to the stars as reverent voices and spread their faith as a vortex flings motes of corpse-dust, as drifting amnion. We, her immortals. But strange our endurance, not of undeath, but of unlife. Changeless. Revenant servants of the undying, unliving, true goddess of fertility, Leth pala Lesh. Her world with birth. Her world without men, absent even of the false, sterile men. Such is our truth, soon seen fulfilled.

Upward, my gaze hangs on the dimnatar, the repulsive core agonizing in Leth’s midst. Like a woman in perpetual labor, like a star collapsing. Gloaming, weighing us down upon the walls of our inverted world. A paradox of gravity and revulsion, abhorring us who rove beneath its black, stark light. Dim and bright at once, it throbs against the concave shell of the inner sky — its cause sacred. To it, I swear anew to complete. For it, my oath.

Commanding the Sucorabras Legion, leading them in our battle against Ef; in that, I sate and know my purpose. It is my sole purpose, for I am Myrirko, Chantress-Host and Orgiophant to Sodeem Taprozenala Calaas. Here to once and for all genocide Ef, to slaughter with it the last Men of Leth who for generations thought to enslave our wombs, our wills.

Together, we are death made living, the living made death. We, decay’s avatars. Through the spray of blood and the storm of feathers — white, black and sacred grey — we glimpse the underpinnings of reality that mold our burden. Seeing the walls, the gate. Seeing finality for our mission. A true cleansing. An end to the Age of Men. Coursing venom and antipathy in our veins, we see peace.

Before us Ef rises, if rising conjures meaning for a structure sinking upward. Towers curving inward, they appear to me as the ribs of a famished slave, a reprobate. Porous, pitted walls rejecting the dimnatar’s light. Gate a foul insult to our womanhood, a profane mimicry of folds and layers. Repugnant geometry mocking the eye, mocking our goddess.

Then — a fist. Wrapped in shimmering black, yet in that time brighter than the light of our paradoxical star. A contradiction of radiance and void. Striking out, it shatters the veil between the believed and the lived.

From a wet pool on the ground, from mere reflection it ascends to splendor. Shadowless. Gigantic in its towering divinity, of a form twining mortal with daimon. Obscure and burning on its face, the mark of the spiral mine; the same mark flaring in its open palm. Nine wings unfurl — not by feathers formed, but interlocking fiery tongues, caliginous wisps. Suspending itself as great orrery, I see all its worlds veiled in burning, ashen storms. Eyes open, myriad and sinking along its shifting form, each meting out judgment on us. On Ef.

Between us and our quarry it stands, stretching its arm — a clutch of wings toward the city walls. I feel its silent condemnation, its outpouring of knowledge that it comes from a place older and of greater suffering than what it deems our xibalban mockery of this, our world. Angrily, I cast aside these bitter omens.

In an instant, the last city of the last men of Leth is cast away. Air groaning. Ground convulsing. Flesh trembling. A smear of light hemorrhaging where Ef once menaced with its spear-fringed turrets and murderous intent. No ruin. No crater. Only an empty field — and in it, a single dead tree bearing rotten fruit.

Gone, the city. Gone, the fiend. Thus it completes for us our genocide.

Agonizing clarity etching my memory, it burns, a moment in rigor I cannot escape. At once before me, then gone. My jubilee. My vocation divested. An empty field. Bewildered, I know not if my oath is fulfilled. Evil portent, that notion that I have failed my goddess. Dropping to my knees, I give name to that which before bore no name, though it did not answer.

“Galagolgathar!”


— To access and grasp the knowledge that shapes reality.

Sitting in this awkward stillness (or what passes for stillness when one is dead), my confession hangs, a stilled pendulum, ink in temporal stasis at its quill’s nib. I need confess that I, Dolveine, may be a traitor. I, a lowly Mystic inquisitor. I, a survivor of the 4,000-year war of aggression coerced into our cosmos by the N’Argue’s magic-hating heretics, although the Linearity made news slow, distant. It isolated me, desirous for that cusp of action beyond the outlying islands. I felt rumors and threats an illusion at times, ones perhaps designed to placate, to manipulate — heretical doubts, especially for such as I, an Inquisitor of the Crimson Ourn! A prestigious title meaning rather little, surely. Wizards, aristocracies, hierarchies. Balderdash. Posthumously writing, uncertainty clings. But I am of no consequence. No mastery, no subtlety ever fell into my possession such that my mishandling might imperil the worlds of my kind. Yet I can access that knowledge. Therein, the danger. That paradox of necessary, humdrum insignificance.

Where am I now? Dead — my remains undergoing resomation in a funerary phial. Even as my sentiments drip as argent ink, this old, sallow flesh dissolves. If fortune favors me, a wizard more cunning than I will interrogate my isangelous essence and imprint my distilled flash of simultaneous life at death’s moment into a binding scroll. I long for that fate. That my account finds its way into the Great House, where elder wizards wait for their moment of transmigration.

Sidereal beneath the two moons, that was now. This — this is then.

Strange, time’s inimitable clenching. A paroxysm in that twilight realm where one is neither alive nor fully gone.

Coming in the guise of a somber whelp, it sauntered toward me — or perhaps it was I straying by unseen forces into its path. Then, I thought very little of it. Subtle, its ways. Aping, mimicking. Children in Luminera delight in trifling facades, in ornamental and harmless charms. In it, those features were evident. Eccentric. Modest of aura — or so I inferred in my haste, my lack of scrutiny, my assumptions and perceptions braiding singular and treacherous a fool’s thread of certainty.

Following me along Artificer’s Row, where I enforced the edicts prohibiting the practice of certain, forbidden technologies, it lingered at my side. Posture begging inquiry, desperate to ask its question. Silence downright strident. And then. No. I believed it then, but now recall no sound, no voice. Only the understanding , its request an ostensibly simple thing:

“How might I become a Guardian?”

I laughed, of course. What else could I do? Absurd, the question — though its innocent sweetness, its callow germ wrung out of my subconscious memories steeped in nostalgia of my glory days at the Scriptorium Annex. Guardians, instruments of pure annihilation. Weapons closely held so those we deem contemptible remain well away from us. Not a destiny for one so young to aspire toward, but a force for a great wizard to command. So with dismissive amusement, I kept my composure and called forth a facsimile of the Mark of the Great Hoard of Knowledge. Into their hand, I placed it, answering with mock solemnity:

“You learn wizardry, child.”


— To know how to fight and defend what’s worth defending.

Old and frail I may be, yet I hope wisdom still clings — grasping just so to these thinning bones like crisp autumn leaves, withering, strength departed. Églantine, the name I chose for myself when given voice and reason. Sister to the Witch. Denmother to my daughter, and to her daughter, and to her brave Despereaux, our notorious little Willow-Wind Fencer. Rare, the length of my life. Longer than a dormouse ought linger on life’s moss-knit knoll. Longevity bittersweet in gratitude, offering back all to All-Burrow Mother dwelling below, whose blessings are gentle, whose lessons are firm. Even still, she is just.

Before Terovorus ascended the throne, before our haven Dewfall rose twig by twig upon the salt mires of the Muckenmarsh, we were but timid, ignorant things. Dormice trembling, darting toward unknown survival or death beneath the Sky Clan’s capricious shadows. Their sharp talons. Claw and terror. Splitting the air, their hostile caw-caws setting our bones to torpor. Shadows in their shapes, our dread. Our world so small, feeling fear large.

A keen, bright afternoon sun backlit the silhouette of a giant striding into our habitat, humble in the dirt; neither bird nor mouse. Seeing us intelligent, it paused. Newly awakened, we were in fear of it. Minds soft as overripe thistle seeds. It saw us in our existential dread, our smallness, our countless bodies born as prey to our winged tormentors. I remember that moment blurry and bright, the shape of the thing cloaking itself in grace.

Without word, the giant conferred knowledge by which we might survive. Three-Fold Steps. Thinking now, we did not grasp the gift’s enormity. Still with mirth, I recall my first awkward attempts: marsh mud refusing to reject my paw prints, my bewilderment at the loss of my shadow. But I eventually grasped first of the three, the Trackless Step. By it no foe could follow our trail.

Then came the Blurred Step, more difficult. Numerous times, I toppled, my body quivering from exertion. My daughters watched, eyes wide, knowing the art’s importance to our survival. But after many trials, I learned how to obscure our numbers, our paths. How to force the world to miscount us.

Last came the step, confounding and frightening me. The Hidden Step of the Valiant Perdu. Valiant, I am not. A good eye for study, and that is all. Feeling I might vanish from even my own awareness, its practice framed the world as boundless and empty. But by that step we gained the means to travel where we willed, even through enemy territory wholly unseen — an oddity of presence and absence, of paws touching earth, leaving no whisper, no trace.

Merely hiding could not save us. The giant knew this. Upon a great river stone — the one still standing high in Dewfall’s market, it carved the Ways of the Velvet Paw. First true words of our language, writ. Slowly its hand moved, etching glyphs like the steady waxing of the moon. The teachings on that erudite pillar spoke of armor, walls, of turning the enemy’s power against itself. Of warfare and deterrence. Of the three inner battles we must face — mind, body, spirit. Of drifting paws, dancing in flowing tension. Remembering that first time I seized a foe, awestruck but casting it gently yet soundly aside. A brief contact — yet it bought my kin precious moments.

It did not teach us to kill.

That we learned on our own.


— To offer, but not compel.

Muttering “little revenant”, fingers lingering on the bulge of my womb, I know the life that lies within me. I know the lies it needs told. That my body will decay, that it will nurture new growth in a strong, female child; a woman fearing not the dimnatar’s low burn.

Here on Leth, lessons begin before birth.

Poignant as it is wretched, I begin my story, its dissonance risking uncomeliness. Knowing not whether it is true or false, I fear, I pause. Unformed proof of womanhood, without name, for your unborn sake I beseech the barren-wombed that it be false. Truth is not a construct of words; it is experiential, it is life itself. A tongue moves to deceit, always; spittle intermingling with toxic venom. We learn this early, we learn not to trust words. Actions alone matter. To speak only lies, to know all spoken is deceit, conceit — that is hate’s death, war’s ignoble husk.

An ersatz drone seizing my throat’s sanguine flute in the troubadour tradition of Leth, I place one’s mind into another — my words their thoughts, their vision my fable. Thirst harrows the flesh of my throat, my dry, split lips parting, my mouth forming words, and I feel by shape, by pain, the blister of memory containing what I must utter:

I am reborn as something terrible.

Now a man, one of the last men. A leader. I know best the needs of others. Knowing is my burden, my right, pure and divine. Men’s percept, if men choose to affirm their greatness. Others do as I say, or they don’t survive. I will it and it is so, for I — my might, my strength embodies their needs, their justice.

Last city of man, Ef; waxing carmine, fiery. Before the Dawn-Fiend reforged our chronological writ, before walls and markets by *It* were unmade — it was then, at the height of it all. Leth’s wicked women reveling in climax, in genocide, two-hundred phases of our spilt-water moon adjunct the new calendar. Craven, marrow-weak we all, we men, lamentable, tossing our rule aside in fear, fleeing their blood-quenched obsidian spears. Flinching at tomes jacketed in our comrade’s flesh, hissing with curses those womb-fiends spit, their filed nails dragging sputum in strange, perverse glyphs and obscene nether scrawls.

Burning, feverish, I scratch an itch in a scab covering my shoulder, wrapping strong, curving muscle and bone. Peeling it back, I see meal maggots, healing. Sustenance. I pluck one, dropping it down my gullet. Reducing us to this, the war which they by rabid temerity deem holy. No more. We depart from Ef, we abandon Leth’s mania. I — we recognize our dire need, our all too brutal plight.

Weird, bent, its birthright hidden in Ef’s vast sewers, we grow the Falaun Kethulri .2egth; my ship, my vessel fit our destiny long among the stars, warning others of Leth’s prophecies, its doom of perpetual, cosmic jihad. Long, narrow its hull, its colossal two vaults fuse as a single entity; nurturing a single stone to greatness. Protruding gaunt from its flanks, ribs bend exquisite in fusing agony and ardor, supporting its superstructure — fleshen armor folding, sinking around them.

Hope and boldness quickening our path, we board. Navigating wends and slits in Leth’s crust, we secure our escape. Glinting before us for the first time in our brief, odd lives, we see them — the stars. Strange in their far-flung, sinister beauty. That is my reckoning, my certainty. Exceeding the reach of Leth’s false goddess, we will find peace, control; in some corner of the firmament, our regret will firm to peace.

Faltering in my veins, I see our failure — my hope deficient, wavering, the same as all the other weak men in whom it has heretofore failed.

Erupting from a vein in Leth’s crepuscular globe, a rod impales our ship, breaking our will; igneous, existing in that hastening cusp before matter transcends to light. Spine fracturing, the Falaun Kethulri .2egth’s engines mute, her course warping, sliding back and sidelong into the perilous, consuming light of our star-god, Pafagola. Along with my crew, I now see my future in crushing, flaming finality.

Breathing, accepting — I close my eyes, feeling on my shoulders the hands of my crew.

Accepting, brooding — a miracle occurs, a test of faith.

Walking the nebulous edge between what might and what must be, a figure of soothing light manifests where we gather. Corridor failing around them, they lift a hand — time ceases to unfold, forgets its purpose, its meaning. Collapsing ribs of the ship’s superstructure hang motionless, motes and debris linger unnaturally long. Even my fears quiet, and so too it is with the men around me, all of us marveling in the soothing amber moment unable to advance.

Lifting its hand, this Light-Weaver presents us with a path, a narrow seam bright with the gift of escape. Leading from our ship, from genocide. A path away from our haunting doom, otherwise inescapable. A way out, for which we sense no tithe, no demand.

Exchanging glances warily, we feel it must be false; hallucinatory, untrue. Whispering without breath, our words furtive, vapor, in suspense in our mouths, we are in accord; I, their captain, they, my crew. All of us share the same treacherous doubt. Surely this is a scheme, an act viciously luring us back to shadow, back to servitude. Our hearts know it is so, most of us; the rest stand, content in the stubborn, malevolent solace of despair.

In the next moment, I deem we are fools; too late.

No plea, no coercion. Meekly bowing in assent, the Light-Weaver departs. I watch; I and my crew. We see in the flicker of its light-wrought soul the infliction of a wound deeper than the fracture in our ship’s hull. Vanishing, space collapses behind them, time rushing forward and trampling the lost moments in its haste to grasp its present.

Lights guttering out, we hear the collapsing, feel gravity straining and the coronal fire licking along the cracks in our vessel, our tomb — then it folds, a question collapsing to its ruinous consequence.

Name ⸬ Dolveine

Age ⸬ late
Gender ⸬ male
Height ⸬ middling
Weight ⸬ lean
Race ⸬ human (Luminera‑born)

Natal ⸬ Martis Declines in the 3rd Court

Tier ⸬ low

Appearance ⸬ In the mirror of thought I remember myself as gaunt, and strict. My posture rigid — accustomed to a vigilance largely indifferent to its own paranoia, its own faults. My tortile hair is full and sweeps like spills of ink across my pallid brow, my sloping shoulders. My long, brushed, oiled beard is as good as any nobleman’s rank. By stress, it streaks cobalt but wan. Not the bright cobalt of my miotic, searching irises. Eyes that saw war, but only as it hobbled back from indistinct, obscure carnage. While of average height I may be, a narrow reed strikes taller than an ample shrub. In the robes of my profession, that is a good thing. For I am an Inquisitor. I keep the law, and carry it in a little broad tome inside a folded void of my simple linen robe, an iron chain securing its binding to my gnarled amberweave cincture. In the cavity of my breast, glass irritates skin and the black tuft descending from my suprasternal notch down my trunk. A funerary phial, it is an empty and critical token of how even wizards are doomed to die.

About ⸬ I, Dolveine, entered the Scriptorium Annex of Luminera as a tyro bereft of great promise, but the world requires the mediocre so that it might exalt the mighty. There was the war when I was born, and the war when I died of stubborn old age. How could I conceive it as anything other than normal, lasting four millennia as it did? Curse the Linearity, and the profanation of technology — the terminus of nature’s immaculate order. It does not nurture, it synthesizes. It does not commune, it dictates. I, not by talent but by common necessity — a filler for empty boots — climbed to the rank of Inquisitor in the Mystic College. Some minds are learned in the arts, keen as mana blades; mine was not one such. What I possessed was an ear for lies, an eye for deceits. If rat I was, I knew my mind. To scent out the true heretics. What mattered to me in life, and in inescapable extinction was loyalty to the source of mystery that is our core and founding dogma.

Abilities

Solemn Inquiry ⸬ Catching myself between breaths, I pause — focusing outward on the discipline, posture, and the sequence of time and the events it grasps. Potent inside that hold, I sense the falsehoods in others; even sometimes before spoken. A lie is but its own shadow. To contain it, I recite the simple but potent binding spells written in my tome of law. Deception is everywhere, in and outside of itself. Its self-contradictory nature inevitably succumbs to exposure — a hesitant voice, a stiff gesture, a resonance in a crafted object that strays the course, a hidden door, an empty wall. While I cannot compel truth, I attend to it, fastidious in my vigil.

Items

Regulus Tome ⸬ Rapt vision raining across serpent-bound vellum given over to me by the art hereditary, I call forth from its marginalia and deliberate, minute ink scrawls the doctrine of my way, its thesis and antithesis. These are but some incantations of the Mystic Order, a primer to magic. Critically, in it are the Mystic’s edicts. My aptitude as a student merited no more and my loyalty no less, as is conspicuous along the margins in my cramped, benighted annotations. If anything, I all but regret their presence. Exposing the weakness of my mind, the slow pace by which I learned. Notes, especially my own, are often contradictory, rife with errors. I was young, then.

Funerary Phial ⸬ Wearing this on an iron neck chain, even dead I feel its deep roots, the stains and pulse from when it held my father’s essence. Ages ago in the midst of the long war. A long, narrow seam traces the glass like a serpent in torment from when I dropped it, a hurried fool. I know it is used but once a lifetime, and that briefly. On my neck, it hung empty. For not a long while it held me, the remnant of my soul.