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Iezabel Sadonna | Original Setting OC
Sep. 1st, 2015 10:55 amP L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Malarkey
OOC Journal: metempsychotic
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: No.
Email + IM: jcmalarkey@gmail.com
Characters Played at Ataraxion: None.
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Iezabel Sadonna
Canon: Original
Original or Alternate Universe: N/A
Canon Point: ~50 years after the Deposition
Setting:
The region of the Dawning Realm from which Ieza hails exists at a technological level roughly equivalent to the early Renaissance, with powder weapons not having quite driven traditional arms and armor into obsolescence. Magic is a trans-cultural practice, though each culture has its own methods and notions about its nature and how best to deploy it, with the most influential centers of magical practice being the Hlydar Schola in the southern hemisphere, and the Calith Academy in the north.
As a world on the knife's edge of pre-modernity, it is riven by various conflicts, with old grudges frequently being resurrected to justify new grievances. This is particularly true of Ieza's homeland - Messothaia, or the 'Middlelands' - a realm whose history is marred by colonial struggle. Ever since the arrival of the grey-sailed ships of the Syl colonizers, there has been antagonism between the descendants of the Syl overlords and their Anuman subjects. Ieza herself is the product of the inevitable commingling of these groups - her family name is that of lower Syl nobility, but her hair is a distinctive Anuman-red - and while clear ethnic distinctions have all but disappeared, the notions of race, and its attendant class associations, are still mobilized to justify violence both on the parts of both the powerful and the dispossessed.
It has been long centuries since the Old Syl Empire reigned in the Middlelands, but during most of Ieza's lifetime the northern half of the Old Empire has reformed into a self-styled 'Restored Syl Hegemony' which, while resembling the Old Empire only superficially, emerged from and further fostered a renewed fascination with the traditions of the Old Syl, as well as re-stoking ethnic and economic tensions. Its proponents see the New Empire as the Middleland's best chance to regain the prosperity and stability of the Quinsaeculum Syliandrum, the five-century-long era of piece under the Selda dynasty; its detractors either suggest the 'restored' Selda Anassa is merely a puppet of bureaucrats and barons, or, for the truly paranoid, the return of the tyranny of the Serpent Queen under a new guise.
These tension have played out most notably with the New Empire's southern neighbor, the Second Revolutionary Republic, with each nation having historical claim to the territory of the other, a pragmatic point of conflict sustained by ideological differences between the parliamentary confederacy of the Republic and the administrative monarchy of the Empire. Each has doubled down on their founding premise: the New Empire on the traditional of stability embodied in the memory of the Old Empire, the Second Republic on the progressive ideals born in the deposition of the Serpent Queen half a century ago. Liberal republicanism and entrenched oligarchy tangle with traditional monarchy, while increasingly radical workers' movements gain traction. It is a troubled time, with past, present and future commingling by way of recovered traditions, new demands, and immediate antagonisms.
History:
Born to mid-ranking Syl gentry, and marked as mixed-blood by her red hair, Ieza was guaranteed a life of protection and privilege, if not necessarily a career in politics. Luckily she evinced no interest in courtly intrigue, preferring instead studies of history and naturalism. Fascinated by the Old Syl ruins that lay near her family's holdings in Lorith, at the northern border of the Middlelands, from an early age Ieza was uncommonly interested in the lost empire of centuries past, more deeply and intensely than the 'fashionable' interest that thrived in the wake of the New Empire's establishment.
Her magical talents were identified at a fairly early age, and with her family connections it was a foregone conclusion that she would end up at the Academy in Calith. Magic is revered and respected in the New Empire, though also carefully regulated, and a great deal of oversight is applied both by the faculty and representatives of the hegemonic government. At first, Ieza's interest in the traditions and practices of the Old Syl was greeted with enthusiasm by both academia and hegemony - what could be more timely, and more proper for a scion of an (admittedly minor) Syl house? Focused and talented, Ieza showed tremendous promise and was given extensive access to the surviving archives of the Old Empire. All expectations were that she would find a comfortable place within the Academy, or even within the hegemony itself.
This honeymoon period ended once Ieza's results began to coalesce. Her research brought her again and again to the same conclusion: that the Old Syl had relied heavily on the practice of nekrodidascalon- what is commonly referred to by the pejorative 'necromancy', widely distrusted and officially prohibited in the New Empire. Her thesis - that both Old Syl nobility and soldiery were frequently preserved as revenants, allowing for remarkable continuity of governance and thus in part responsible for the Old Empire's prosperity and power - was met with a scorn and censure for which she was totally unprepared, and while she was not refused the honors of graduation, the hopes of legitimate job placement evaporated. Ieza found herself suddenly and unexpectedly guilty of the crime of uncovering an unpalatable truth - or at least an unpalatable account of the truth - and thus without a reliable way to ply the craft she had spent her adolescence and adulthood acquiring.
Too proud to slink back to her family's holdings in Lorith, she remained in Calith, making money as best she could. Taking advantage of the persistent vogue in Old Syl culture, Ieza began an ironic practice of pretending to use the very magic she actually possessed, performing false spiritual summons for aspirant nobles, assuring them of their high-blooded lineage. Humiliating though it might be personally, it saved her the trouble of returning home in public disgrace.
Then, one day, the hegemony came calling; not openly or publicly, but with the discretion of the official unofficial. Her research hadn't been crazy or wrong-headed, it had merely been politically inconvenient, and suddenly a need arose for someone who understood those murky aspect of the Old Empire that did not fit into the official narrative. Enlisted to track down a powerful necrodidactic relic - a book called The Remembrance - Ieza was once more in the midst of a project that truly inspired and challenged her. Moreover, hope was held out that she might - in payment for her services - finally be granted the legitimacy she had longed for, albeit within the shadowy back corridors of hegemonic power.
But it had always been her inclination to delve too deep, to go too far in the tasks assigned to her. As she reconstructed the scattered pieces of the Remembrance, she established a rapport with the fragmented consciousness contained within it- the ancient revenant of Shildro Vakis, one the last great necrodidacts of the Old Empire, one who survived its collapse and sought to use his powers to 'resurrect' it, animating entire armies in order to preserve imperial law and order for a few more decades after the Old Empire's sudden and disastrous Fall. Swept up in his vision, Ieza travelled to the keystone of Vakis' project, a crumbling Syl fortress built deep within a great forest. There she joined herself to the great mechanism of Remembrance - a complex of tome, fortress, and necrodidact - briefly ascending to a near-divine level of power and perception.
This could only last so long, however - vying forces from the Republic intervened, disabling the nekrodidactic machine Ieza had set into motion and ripping Ieza from her reverie. When she was forced from her ecstatic immersion, Ieza found that she had suffered a life's worth of nekrodidactic practice in a startlingly short amount of time, acquiring an acute case of 'total necrosis'; to wit, her body 'died' yet her spirit remained, haunting her own form. While her personal knowledge and power has been considerably expanded - for in taking part in the Remembrance, many secrets of the Old Empire flooded into her living mind, including a deep impression of Vakis himself - her physical form now requires constant care and attention, tending as it does towards decay and dissolution. Luckily, such practices were never so refined as in Vakis' time; soon Ieza was masked, wrapped and robed in the manner of the Old Syl revenants, an exemplar of the truth she was disgraced for discovering.
Personality:
Since an early age, Ieza has been a pensive and solitary creature, dominated by curiosities that bordered on the unseemly, at least by the standards of her society. Closer to her confidant and instructor, Tutor - a transplanar entity know as an 'Azad', a kind of creature frequently employed by the nobility as wardens for their children - than to her often-absent parents and older sister, her path to the academic seemed foregone even before her magical talent manifested. Her relationship with Tutor was as complex and antagonistic as that of any sire/charge relationship, complicated further by the employer/employee dynamic, with Ieza slipping from frank admiration at Tutor's vast knowledge, and petulant frustration when Tutor failed to provide a sufficiently satisfying answer. The central split between them was one of sensibility. Tutor presented everything as second hand - 'such and such writes' and 'this and that was written' - making no claims on the truth of history. Ieza, fascinated by the Old Syl ruin that lay on her family's property, enamored of its realness, its solidity, its certainty, longed always for immediate knowledge. To wit, long existence had made Tutor into a historian and philosopher, posing questions, whereas Ieza was a young and eager scientist, demanding answers.
Despite their differences, she learned a great deal, and some of her worst inclinations towards sheer brattiness were worn down by the otherworldly composure of the Azad (though entitlement is still bred deep in her). Not a tyrant, she became more of a hermit, preferring books to playmates, study to make-believe, only her world of interior fantasy was constructed from the comparably firm blocks of historical record rather than the cloudy stuff of whimsy. She spent what time she was not studying out in her family's grounds - frequently carrying a parasol to protect her delicate complexion - imagining what it had been like in centuries past, trying to find traces of it in the present. She lives much of her life in her mind, and her mind is a carefully curated museum. As a result she can be very bad at parties, though she becomes remarkably animated if subjects of interest emerge, switching from near-absence to penetrating interest with startling speed.
Her intelligence is her more prized quality, and she will bristle if it - or the expertise she's fostered with its help - is questioned; her experience at the Academy has left her particularly touchy when it comes to her conclusions being challenged. She will also volunteer information she thinks is 'helpful' or merely 'pertinent', with all the eagerness of the lifelong student. By and large she is difficult to goad, prone to giving a thousand-yard stare rather than allow someone to get a 'rise' out of her, though while rejuvenated her physiological/emotional state will be accordingly heightened. She's most easily incensed by denseness and stupidity, and will lose patience very quickly if her interlocutor seems unable or unwilling to keep up; she would make for a very poor teacher, incapable of effectively transmitting knowledge unless that student were sufficiently gifted.
Hence her particular fury at her ignominious treatment by the Academy. To Ieza, the position of the faculty could only seem like the most obdurate denseness, a suspicion confirmed when she was enlisted in the hunt for the Remembrance. The bitter seed planted in those last days at school grew into a gnarled resentment. It's fruit: a former-day mad doctor complex. How else to account for the frankly insane decision to become the catalyst for the nekrodidactic machine, than to deliver the most extreme sort of 'I told you so'?
The irony of her becoming the unliving proof of her studies' validity is not lost on Ieza, particularly as a consequence of precisely that reckless and defiant gesture. But while she has a great deal more perspective now, her being a revenant itself makes altering her predispositions all the more difficult. As a spiritual and psychic remembrance, she maintains presence through consistency, something which perforce is not taken to change. She can still learn, still reorganize herself, all the better if her body sustains a living state and thus can materially produce more memories, but the more deathly she becomes, the more static, a mental rigor mortis. She is no longer prone to the same level of naive defiance, but neither has she uprooted that knotted tree that has grown in her gut.
While not strictly amoral, Ieza does not suffer from quite the same compunctions as common people; she is driven more by her idea of the sensible and functional rather than the just or proper, more interested in how and why things work, not whether or not they are 'right' or 'wrong'. In undeath, this ambivalence extends to valuations of life and death, which is not to say she does not value life as life - far from it, she is in a unique position to appreciate all life has to offer as it slides away from her - but that she is disinclined to see any sharp distinction between the two.
Already prone to idealizing the past, Ieza tends to find immediate passions and engagements in the 'problems of the moment' either boring or unsettling. Profoundly apolitical, at least in intention and interest, Ieza will tend towards her version of 'the long view', one based typically on her idea of history and its cyclical repetition. This has been exacerbated by her fusion with Vakis' revenant, whose raison d'etre was/is the resurrection/perpetuation of a long dead historical entity. Never exactly filled with fellow feeling, her disjuncture from the world is more pronounced than ever. She is also now rather less furtive about her nekrodidactic practices, pragmatic where once she was theoretical, and will be all the more so when removed entirely from the world where her historical interests have any bearing. Indeed, she may well be compelled to develop her own methods and practices, to forge her own tradition, in tune and tempo with the life/death of her new home.
Death has made Ieza mordant, prone to the chilly humor of the fatalist. Her present state is a kind of uncarefully-granted wish, mingling the fulfillment her dearest and deepest hopes with profound unpleasantness. What scholar hasn't wished for the cessation of niggling physical needs? What academic wouldn't give all they had for such a profound encounter with her object of study? Yet such an existence is not living, nor properly, and her stasis makes her numb, quite literally disconnected from the world. She is capable of brief spells of 'living', during which her senses are restored, but this is at the price of inevitable redeath and decay, a process which makes eventual insensitivity appear something of a blessing.
Her arrival on the Planet, particularly her injection with healing nanites, will likely produce a flurry of interest and the emergence of a hope that she had until now foreclosed. Formerly resigned to live as a a walking mummy, upon awaking on a verdant, seemingly untamed world, she may well take to sapping the life out of local flora and fauna in order to sustain a properly living state while she investigates how she might permanently reverse her condition or, better yet, learn to control it. The technological sophistication of the Tranquility wreckage will further pique her interest, though her understanding will be hobbled by her arcane training, more used to working in ritual and metaphor than with the scientific method. Not that this will stop her from pursuing an understanding in spite of her handicap; ruins and artifacts fascinate her, all the more if they appear unfathomable at first.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
Ieza is a revenant, a spirit haunting her own body. Her momentous encounter with Vakis' great Remembrance severed her spirit from her physical form, leaving her body to wither and die while remaining mobile and cognizant. She is a corpse now, or rather she tends towards death at an accelerated pace, and must resort to various means and methods to preserve her body, while hiding evidence of her condition from the world. She is functionally immortal, in her deathly way - she no longer ages, nor suffers illness, nor hungers, nor thirsts, nor sleeps - but she is not invincible. Were her body destroyed, she might persist briefly as a disembodied spirit, but without a physical body to 'remember' her, she will dissipate into true death. Indeed, in some sense her mortality is more constantly immediate, a possibility hovering at the horizon of every moment as she drifts - frail yet numb, fragile yet insensate - through the world.
She retains her own knowledge and necrodidactic power, as well as some of the voluminous experience of Vakis. The Syl necrodidascalon is a discipline of memory more than anything else, 'undeath' merely the state of a body remembering and re-enacting its previous functions. It can be applied variously, to restore a body to its previous state (a kind of healing), to revisit or relive past experiences (effective psychometry), to 'jump ahead' in a physical process such as aging or decay, and - that most disturbing and definitive of necrodidactic powers - the reanimation of dead bodies.
As such she is capable of rejuvenating herself for brief periods of time, provided she can leech vitality from a living source. She will appear to be properly living during this time, the duration dependent on the amount of energy she extracts, and on the translational quality of that energy (another human makes for a better source of vitality than does a simpler life-form, or a non-animal life form such as a tree) though as the effect fades her body will begin an accelerated process of decay, prompting her to either seek more vitality or to repeat her careful self-embalmment. The injection of nanites combats this otherwise inevitable decline, extending her periods of hard-won vitality, though unless their functioning is augmented this will remain a losing battle as her dying accelerates past the reconstructive pace of the nanites.
She also retains some of the gifts inherent to someone with magical talent, albeit muffled by her new level of remove from the physical world. She is capable of limited auracular sight, a fancy way of saying she is capable of getting a read on someone's emotions and intentions, usually by way of a metaphorical impression or image. As such, the telepathic powers granted upon her awakening will not be startling- rather she will assume they are proper to her natural gifts, upon which they effectively expand. She is also quite capable of learning - to a greater or lesser extent - the aspects and practices of new magical traditions, provided that said tradition is not profoundly alien.
Inventory:
Linen bandages
Embalmer's scalpal
Embalmer's shears
Embalmer's saw
Waterproofed pig leather gloves
Hooded black robe, wool
Porcelain death-mask
Blank vellum codex
Notched swan bone pen
Slate inkstone
Species/Race:
Human, for all intents and purposes. She most resembles a mix of haplogroup R1b (Celtic, standing in for her Anuman ancestry) and J2 (Phoenician, standing in for her Syl ancestry).
Appearance:
In life Ieza was a pretty young women with pale Syl skin and eyes and red Anuman hair. In death, she is a withered corpse, preserved through a mix of magic and specialized embalming processes. When her necrotic condition is allowed to advance sufficiently, her eyes become sunken and milky, her lips livid, her hair brittle. She habitually hides her body as entirely as possible, preferring long hooded robes, gloves and masks. When possible she follows the Old Syl fashion of binding her shriveled form with linen bandages and dried rose petals, covering the dry-rot smell with the sweetness of flowers.
A living Ieza will resemble a considerably less cheerful-looking and well-made-up Bryce Dallas Howard.
Age: 28 years.
AU Clarification: N/A
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
If I ever see you again I’ll have you brought before the magistry for defilement of the dead.
Freidrich Fettenschlick’s threat hounded Ieza, fear and shame mingling with her self-pity as she passed from the clean cobblestones of the southern slope, down to the shabby tenements where she eked out her meager existence. She’d never wanted this life for herself. She was not a trained charlatan. Ieza was a scholar and a practitioner of arts which in the Old Empire had been viewed with great honor. But so few knew what she knew, and fewer still cared. Suspicion was her lot now- even her association with the Academy hadn’t changed that.
If this were the Old Syl Empire, Ieza reflected, she'd have been tried in a special court - a magistry in the original sense - in deference to her learning. Then again, as she was only a quarter Syl by blood, in the Old Empire she never would have received Academy training in the first place.
From her grim little perch in the Ramshackle she couldn’t even see the high spire of the astrolocus that crowned the Academy. The Academy: where she’d poured so much of herself into her work, the labor of long years and sleepless nights and dust-dry knuckles seared by midnight candlewax. But it’s doors were closed to her now, just as were the Fettenschlicks’.
The night was thickening, and it wouldn't do to be out past curfew. She kept her hood up and her head low as she wove her way back to the cramped tumult of the Ramshackle. With practiced care she lifted the hem of her robe to avoid the mounds of horse excrement left in the now-deserted ragmarket. The dung-gatherers would be through soon enough. The Charity district was not esteemed, no, but at least she still had a place to rest her head. At least she wasn’t sleeping in a canal lock or under a bridge.
Yet when she turned off Patience Lane onto the rambling row of Mercy she spied three, no- four swordsmen in silver and grey, their shields and tabards emblazoned with roses cradled in the low pale bowl of a crescent moon. These were Hegemonic insignia, marking them as the Magistrate's men, and they were standing guard right outside Ieza's tenement.
Could Friedrich have reported her already? She’d left quickly enough, or so she’d thought. The guardsmens’ auras were distant and thus indistinct, but mundane eyes were all she needed to discern their watchfulness.
She’d never get past them, no matter how subtly cast her misdirection. Were it a mist-heavy night she might try her luck, but the sun-filled sky was a bottomless blue, barely streaked by faint and feckless clouds.
Indecision twisted inside Ieza. She knew she should escape while she still could; she might be able to barter her talents for a place in a caravan. There was always her family's holdings up north in Lorith-country - they might give her asylum, even after all this time; they were her kinsfolk after all. Or she could head west and try her luck in Xorith- she’d heard that Duke Sophonax had his own set of rules, outside the oversight of the Imperial magistrates. If they never found her, they could never revoke her right to practice. The prospect of leaving Calith had never been more appealing, not since her bitter graduation.
Just one sticking point kept Ieza pinioned - she wasn’t going to leave her treatise behind, and it was presently pressed between mattress and bed frame, up the stairs and past that guarded door.
Head kept low and face hidden like a mendicant, Ieza ducked into the cramped alley that ran alongside her tenement. Once safely ensconced in shadow, she peered up at the row of third-story windows. They were a set of grimy, glass-less portals that did little besides provide little breeze from seed to harvest, and which had to be shuttered and padded from late fall all the way past first thaw.
At first Ieza tried to clamber up, brick by uneven brick, to her window, which - as it was midsummer - she’d left hanging open just enough to keep her room from becoming a baker’s oven. After four aborted attempts she managed to scale her own height without slipping, only to find the second story had been constructed with more care than the first, and that her scraped palms had nowhere else to grasp. Her careful descent was marred by a muddy boot’s betrayal, and Ieza landed hard on one leg and teetered for a pain-laced moment before falling back onto her rump.
After a few minutes spent sitting in filth and nursing her ankle, and a few more spent pacing until she was sure she’d done herself no lasting harm, Ieza’s eyes fell upon the dirty conglomeration of dried grey-white feathers and bleached bones that had once been a seagull, lying near the pile of refuse left by one of Ieza’s fellow tenants. An idea flared into being within her, one which made her scrambles of moments ago seem particularly foolish. So long without proper practice, she was forgetting what it meant to be an arcane practitioner.
With careful hands she turned over the bird remnant and spread its brittle wings. Its bone structure was mostly intact, suggesting maggots had done most of the work, though she spotted a few marks on its broken ribcage indicative of the needle-like teeth of dock rats. It was also missing its head, skull, beak and all. Still, enough of it appeared intact, enough for her purposes at least.
She smoothed the wings, first one and then the other, before plucking out one of the longest and least tattered feathers. Running it through her fingers, Ieza murmured the incantation in Syl and then blew a stream of breath along the feather. As its barbs rustled, the once-gull she’d taken it from twitched its desiccated wings in sympathy. It remembered.
Yes, Ieza thought, this would do.
Comms Sample:
[ A glimpse of dappled canopy caught in a wobbling frame suggests that this user is still getting the hang of the communicator. Soon enough the frame settles into place, capturing a face. No- not a face: a mask of pale porcelain with tinted lenses for eyes and painted indigo lips pursed in an expression of ceaseless pensive consideration. Its features are androgynous, but from behind this mask emerges a voice - however rough and dry - that is distinctly female. ]
I am… collecting information about the denizens of our new home. Assistance is welcome.
[ Reasonable, on the face of it. Life should take interest in life. Not that the masked woman looks or sounds particularly lively. Indeed, the breath she takes between pronouncements sound dreadfully deliberate for an involuntary action, like brittle bellows being filled. ]
Samples, living or dead, are welcome. Any information as to migratory habits would also be welcome. Assessment of capacities, dangerous or otherwise, would be welcome.
[ A pause, and a shake of the frame suggest this might be the whole of her communication. Then, as a seeming afterthought, she steadies the frame and amends: ]
I am sure everyone could benefit from a careful investigation. I will provide compensation- as best I can.
Your Name: Malarkey
OOC Journal: metempsychotic
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: No.
Email + IM: jcmalarkey@gmail.com
Characters Played at Ataraxion: None.
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Iezabel Sadonna
Canon: Original
Original or Alternate Universe: N/A
Canon Point: ~50 years after the Deposition
Setting:
The region of the Dawning Realm from which Ieza hails exists at a technological level roughly equivalent to the early Renaissance, with powder weapons not having quite driven traditional arms and armor into obsolescence. Magic is a trans-cultural practice, though each culture has its own methods and notions about its nature and how best to deploy it, with the most influential centers of magical practice being the Hlydar Schola in the southern hemisphere, and the Calith Academy in the north.
As a world on the knife's edge of pre-modernity, it is riven by various conflicts, with old grudges frequently being resurrected to justify new grievances. This is particularly true of Ieza's homeland - Messothaia, or the 'Middlelands' - a realm whose history is marred by colonial struggle. Ever since the arrival of the grey-sailed ships of the Syl colonizers, there has been antagonism between the descendants of the Syl overlords and their Anuman subjects. Ieza herself is the product of the inevitable commingling of these groups - her family name is that of lower Syl nobility, but her hair is a distinctive Anuman-red - and while clear ethnic distinctions have all but disappeared, the notions of race, and its attendant class associations, are still mobilized to justify violence both on the parts of both the powerful and the dispossessed.
It has been long centuries since the Old Syl Empire reigned in the Middlelands, but during most of Ieza's lifetime the northern half of the Old Empire has reformed into a self-styled 'Restored Syl Hegemony' which, while resembling the Old Empire only superficially, emerged from and further fostered a renewed fascination with the traditions of the Old Syl, as well as re-stoking ethnic and economic tensions. Its proponents see the New Empire as the Middleland's best chance to regain the prosperity and stability of the Quinsaeculum Syliandrum, the five-century-long era of piece under the Selda dynasty; its detractors either suggest the 'restored' Selda Anassa is merely a puppet of bureaucrats and barons, or, for the truly paranoid, the return of the tyranny of the Serpent Queen under a new guise.
These tension have played out most notably with the New Empire's southern neighbor, the Second Revolutionary Republic, with each nation having historical claim to the territory of the other, a pragmatic point of conflict sustained by ideological differences between the parliamentary confederacy of the Republic and the administrative monarchy of the Empire. Each has doubled down on their founding premise: the New Empire on the traditional of stability embodied in the memory of the Old Empire, the Second Republic on the progressive ideals born in the deposition of the Serpent Queen half a century ago. Liberal republicanism and entrenched oligarchy tangle with traditional monarchy, while increasingly radical workers' movements gain traction. It is a troubled time, with past, present and future commingling by way of recovered traditions, new demands, and immediate antagonisms.
History:
Born to mid-ranking Syl gentry, and marked as mixed-blood by her red hair, Ieza was guaranteed a life of protection and privilege, if not necessarily a career in politics. Luckily she evinced no interest in courtly intrigue, preferring instead studies of history and naturalism. Fascinated by the Old Syl ruins that lay near her family's holdings in Lorith, at the northern border of the Middlelands, from an early age Ieza was uncommonly interested in the lost empire of centuries past, more deeply and intensely than the 'fashionable' interest that thrived in the wake of the New Empire's establishment.
Her magical talents were identified at a fairly early age, and with her family connections it was a foregone conclusion that she would end up at the Academy in Calith. Magic is revered and respected in the New Empire, though also carefully regulated, and a great deal of oversight is applied both by the faculty and representatives of the hegemonic government. At first, Ieza's interest in the traditions and practices of the Old Syl was greeted with enthusiasm by both academia and hegemony - what could be more timely, and more proper for a scion of an (admittedly minor) Syl house? Focused and talented, Ieza showed tremendous promise and was given extensive access to the surviving archives of the Old Empire. All expectations were that she would find a comfortable place within the Academy, or even within the hegemony itself.
This honeymoon period ended once Ieza's results began to coalesce. Her research brought her again and again to the same conclusion: that the Old Syl had relied heavily on the practice of nekrodidascalon- what is commonly referred to by the pejorative 'necromancy', widely distrusted and officially prohibited in the New Empire. Her thesis - that both Old Syl nobility and soldiery were frequently preserved as revenants, allowing for remarkable continuity of governance and thus in part responsible for the Old Empire's prosperity and power - was met with a scorn and censure for which she was totally unprepared, and while she was not refused the honors of graduation, the hopes of legitimate job placement evaporated. Ieza found herself suddenly and unexpectedly guilty of the crime of uncovering an unpalatable truth - or at least an unpalatable account of the truth - and thus without a reliable way to ply the craft she had spent her adolescence and adulthood acquiring.
Too proud to slink back to her family's holdings in Lorith, she remained in Calith, making money as best she could. Taking advantage of the persistent vogue in Old Syl culture, Ieza began an ironic practice of pretending to use the very magic she actually possessed, performing false spiritual summons for aspirant nobles, assuring them of their high-blooded lineage. Humiliating though it might be personally, it saved her the trouble of returning home in public disgrace.
Then, one day, the hegemony came calling; not openly or publicly, but with the discretion of the official unofficial. Her research hadn't been crazy or wrong-headed, it had merely been politically inconvenient, and suddenly a need arose for someone who understood those murky aspect of the Old Empire that did not fit into the official narrative. Enlisted to track down a powerful necrodidactic relic - a book called The Remembrance - Ieza was once more in the midst of a project that truly inspired and challenged her. Moreover, hope was held out that she might - in payment for her services - finally be granted the legitimacy she had longed for, albeit within the shadowy back corridors of hegemonic power.
But it had always been her inclination to delve too deep, to go too far in the tasks assigned to her. As she reconstructed the scattered pieces of the Remembrance, she established a rapport with the fragmented consciousness contained within it- the ancient revenant of Shildro Vakis, one the last great necrodidacts of the Old Empire, one who survived its collapse and sought to use his powers to 'resurrect' it, animating entire armies in order to preserve imperial law and order for a few more decades after the Old Empire's sudden and disastrous Fall. Swept up in his vision, Ieza travelled to the keystone of Vakis' project, a crumbling Syl fortress built deep within a great forest. There she joined herself to the great mechanism of Remembrance - a complex of tome, fortress, and necrodidact - briefly ascending to a near-divine level of power and perception.
This could only last so long, however - vying forces from the Republic intervened, disabling the nekrodidactic machine Ieza had set into motion and ripping Ieza from her reverie. When she was forced from her ecstatic immersion, Ieza found that she had suffered a life's worth of nekrodidactic practice in a startlingly short amount of time, acquiring an acute case of 'total necrosis'; to wit, her body 'died' yet her spirit remained, haunting her own form. While her personal knowledge and power has been considerably expanded - for in taking part in the Remembrance, many secrets of the Old Empire flooded into her living mind, including a deep impression of Vakis himself - her physical form now requires constant care and attention, tending as it does towards decay and dissolution. Luckily, such practices were never so refined as in Vakis' time; soon Ieza was masked, wrapped and robed in the manner of the Old Syl revenants, an exemplar of the truth she was disgraced for discovering.
Personality:
Since an early age, Ieza has been a pensive and solitary creature, dominated by curiosities that bordered on the unseemly, at least by the standards of her society. Closer to her confidant and instructor, Tutor - a transplanar entity know as an 'Azad', a kind of creature frequently employed by the nobility as wardens for their children - than to her often-absent parents and older sister, her path to the academic seemed foregone even before her magical talent manifested. Her relationship with Tutor was as complex and antagonistic as that of any sire/charge relationship, complicated further by the employer/employee dynamic, with Ieza slipping from frank admiration at Tutor's vast knowledge, and petulant frustration when Tutor failed to provide a sufficiently satisfying answer. The central split between them was one of sensibility. Tutor presented everything as second hand - 'such and such writes' and 'this and that was written' - making no claims on the truth of history. Ieza, fascinated by the Old Syl ruin that lay on her family's property, enamored of its realness, its solidity, its certainty, longed always for immediate knowledge. To wit, long existence had made Tutor into a historian and philosopher, posing questions, whereas Ieza was a young and eager scientist, demanding answers.
Despite their differences, she learned a great deal, and some of her worst inclinations towards sheer brattiness were worn down by the otherworldly composure of the Azad (though entitlement is still bred deep in her). Not a tyrant, she became more of a hermit, preferring books to playmates, study to make-believe, only her world of interior fantasy was constructed from the comparably firm blocks of historical record rather than the cloudy stuff of whimsy. She spent what time she was not studying out in her family's grounds - frequently carrying a parasol to protect her delicate complexion - imagining what it had been like in centuries past, trying to find traces of it in the present. She lives much of her life in her mind, and her mind is a carefully curated museum. As a result she can be very bad at parties, though she becomes remarkably animated if subjects of interest emerge, switching from near-absence to penetrating interest with startling speed.
Her intelligence is her more prized quality, and she will bristle if it - or the expertise she's fostered with its help - is questioned; her experience at the Academy has left her particularly touchy when it comes to her conclusions being challenged. She will also volunteer information she thinks is 'helpful' or merely 'pertinent', with all the eagerness of the lifelong student. By and large she is difficult to goad, prone to giving a thousand-yard stare rather than allow someone to get a 'rise' out of her, though while rejuvenated her physiological/emotional state will be accordingly heightened. She's most easily incensed by denseness and stupidity, and will lose patience very quickly if her interlocutor seems unable or unwilling to keep up; she would make for a very poor teacher, incapable of effectively transmitting knowledge unless that student were sufficiently gifted.
Hence her particular fury at her ignominious treatment by the Academy. To Ieza, the position of the faculty could only seem like the most obdurate denseness, a suspicion confirmed when she was enlisted in the hunt for the Remembrance. The bitter seed planted in those last days at school grew into a gnarled resentment. It's fruit: a former-day mad doctor complex. How else to account for the frankly insane decision to become the catalyst for the nekrodidactic machine, than to deliver the most extreme sort of 'I told you so'?
The irony of her becoming the unliving proof of her studies' validity is not lost on Ieza, particularly as a consequence of precisely that reckless and defiant gesture. But while she has a great deal more perspective now, her being a revenant itself makes altering her predispositions all the more difficult. As a spiritual and psychic remembrance, she maintains presence through consistency, something which perforce is not taken to change. She can still learn, still reorganize herself, all the better if her body sustains a living state and thus can materially produce more memories, but the more deathly she becomes, the more static, a mental rigor mortis. She is no longer prone to the same level of naive defiance, but neither has she uprooted that knotted tree that has grown in her gut.
While not strictly amoral, Ieza does not suffer from quite the same compunctions as common people; she is driven more by her idea of the sensible and functional rather than the just or proper, more interested in how and why things work, not whether or not they are 'right' or 'wrong'. In undeath, this ambivalence extends to valuations of life and death, which is not to say she does not value life as life - far from it, she is in a unique position to appreciate all life has to offer as it slides away from her - but that she is disinclined to see any sharp distinction between the two.
Already prone to idealizing the past, Ieza tends to find immediate passions and engagements in the 'problems of the moment' either boring or unsettling. Profoundly apolitical, at least in intention and interest, Ieza will tend towards her version of 'the long view', one based typically on her idea of history and its cyclical repetition. This has been exacerbated by her fusion with Vakis' revenant, whose raison d'etre was/is the resurrection/perpetuation of a long dead historical entity. Never exactly filled with fellow feeling, her disjuncture from the world is more pronounced than ever. She is also now rather less furtive about her nekrodidactic practices, pragmatic where once she was theoretical, and will be all the more so when removed entirely from the world where her historical interests have any bearing. Indeed, she may well be compelled to develop her own methods and practices, to forge her own tradition, in tune and tempo with the life/death of her new home.
Death has made Ieza mordant, prone to the chilly humor of the fatalist. Her present state is a kind of uncarefully-granted wish, mingling the fulfillment her dearest and deepest hopes with profound unpleasantness. What scholar hasn't wished for the cessation of niggling physical needs? What academic wouldn't give all they had for such a profound encounter with her object of study? Yet such an existence is not living, nor properly, and her stasis makes her numb, quite literally disconnected from the world. She is capable of brief spells of 'living', during which her senses are restored, but this is at the price of inevitable redeath and decay, a process which makes eventual insensitivity appear something of a blessing.
Her arrival on the Planet, particularly her injection with healing nanites, will likely produce a flurry of interest and the emergence of a hope that she had until now foreclosed. Formerly resigned to live as a a walking mummy, upon awaking on a verdant, seemingly untamed world, she may well take to sapping the life out of local flora and fauna in order to sustain a properly living state while she investigates how she might permanently reverse her condition or, better yet, learn to control it. The technological sophistication of the Tranquility wreckage will further pique her interest, though her understanding will be hobbled by her arcane training, more used to working in ritual and metaphor than with the scientific method. Not that this will stop her from pursuing an understanding in spite of her handicap; ruins and artifacts fascinate her, all the more if they appear unfathomable at first.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
Ieza is a revenant, a spirit haunting her own body. Her momentous encounter with Vakis' great Remembrance severed her spirit from her physical form, leaving her body to wither and die while remaining mobile and cognizant. She is a corpse now, or rather she tends towards death at an accelerated pace, and must resort to various means and methods to preserve her body, while hiding evidence of her condition from the world. She is functionally immortal, in her deathly way - she no longer ages, nor suffers illness, nor hungers, nor thirsts, nor sleeps - but she is not invincible. Were her body destroyed, she might persist briefly as a disembodied spirit, but without a physical body to 'remember' her, she will dissipate into true death. Indeed, in some sense her mortality is more constantly immediate, a possibility hovering at the horizon of every moment as she drifts - frail yet numb, fragile yet insensate - through the world.
She retains her own knowledge and necrodidactic power, as well as some of the voluminous experience of Vakis. The Syl necrodidascalon is a discipline of memory more than anything else, 'undeath' merely the state of a body remembering and re-enacting its previous functions. It can be applied variously, to restore a body to its previous state (a kind of healing), to revisit or relive past experiences (effective psychometry), to 'jump ahead' in a physical process such as aging or decay, and - that most disturbing and definitive of necrodidactic powers - the reanimation of dead bodies.
As such she is capable of rejuvenating herself for brief periods of time, provided she can leech vitality from a living source. She will appear to be properly living during this time, the duration dependent on the amount of energy she extracts, and on the translational quality of that energy (another human makes for a better source of vitality than does a simpler life-form, or a non-animal life form such as a tree) though as the effect fades her body will begin an accelerated process of decay, prompting her to either seek more vitality or to repeat her careful self-embalmment. The injection of nanites combats this otherwise inevitable decline, extending her periods of hard-won vitality, though unless their functioning is augmented this will remain a losing battle as her dying accelerates past the reconstructive pace of the nanites.
She also retains some of the gifts inherent to someone with magical talent, albeit muffled by her new level of remove from the physical world. She is capable of limited auracular sight, a fancy way of saying she is capable of getting a read on someone's emotions and intentions, usually by way of a metaphorical impression or image. As such, the telepathic powers granted upon her awakening will not be startling- rather she will assume they are proper to her natural gifts, upon which they effectively expand. She is also quite capable of learning - to a greater or lesser extent - the aspects and practices of new magical traditions, provided that said tradition is not profoundly alien.
Inventory:
Linen bandages
Embalmer's scalpal
Embalmer's shears
Embalmer's saw
Waterproofed pig leather gloves
Hooded black robe, wool
Porcelain death-mask
Blank vellum codex
Notched swan bone pen
Slate inkstone
Species/Race:
Human, for all intents and purposes. She most resembles a mix of haplogroup R1b (Celtic, standing in for her Anuman ancestry) and J2 (Phoenician, standing in for her Syl ancestry).
Appearance:
In life Ieza was a pretty young women with pale Syl skin and eyes and red Anuman hair. In death, she is a withered corpse, preserved through a mix of magic and specialized embalming processes. When her necrotic condition is allowed to advance sufficiently, her eyes become sunken and milky, her lips livid, her hair brittle. She habitually hides her body as entirely as possible, preferring long hooded robes, gloves and masks. When possible she follows the Old Syl fashion of binding her shriveled form with linen bandages and dried rose petals, covering the dry-rot smell with the sweetness of flowers.
A living Ieza will resemble a considerably less cheerful-looking and well-made-up Bryce Dallas Howard.
Age: 28 years.
AU Clarification: N/A
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
If I ever see you again I’ll have you brought before the magistry for defilement of the dead.
Freidrich Fettenschlick’s threat hounded Ieza, fear and shame mingling with her self-pity as she passed from the clean cobblestones of the southern slope, down to the shabby tenements where she eked out her meager existence. She’d never wanted this life for herself. She was not a trained charlatan. Ieza was a scholar and a practitioner of arts which in the Old Empire had been viewed with great honor. But so few knew what she knew, and fewer still cared. Suspicion was her lot now- even her association with the Academy hadn’t changed that.
If this were the Old Syl Empire, Ieza reflected, she'd have been tried in a special court - a magistry in the original sense - in deference to her learning. Then again, as she was only a quarter Syl by blood, in the Old Empire she never would have received Academy training in the first place.
From her grim little perch in the Ramshackle she couldn’t even see the high spire of the astrolocus that crowned the Academy. The Academy: where she’d poured so much of herself into her work, the labor of long years and sleepless nights and dust-dry knuckles seared by midnight candlewax. But it’s doors were closed to her now, just as were the Fettenschlicks’.
The night was thickening, and it wouldn't do to be out past curfew. She kept her hood up and her head low as she wove her way back to the cramped tumult of the Ramshackle. With practiced care she lifted the hem of her robe to avoid the mounds of horse excrement left in the now-deserted ragmarket. The dung-gatherers would be through soon enough. The Charity district was not esteemed, no, but at least she still had a place to rest her head. At least she wasn’t sleeping in a canal lock or under a bridge.
Yet when she turned off Patience Lane onto the rambling row of Mercy she spied three, no- four swordsmen in silver and grey, their shields and tabards emblazoned with roses cradled in the low pale bowl of a crescent moon. These were Hegemonic insignia, marking them as the Magistrate's men, and they were standing guard right outside Ieza's tenement.
Could Friedrich have reported her already? She’d left quickly enough, or so she’d thought. The guardsmens’ auras were distant and thus indistinct, but mundane eyes were all she needed to discern their watchfulness.
She’d never get past them, no matter how subtly cast her misdirection. Were it a mist-heavy night she might try her luck, but the sun-filled sky was a bottomless blue, barely streaked by faint and feckless clouds.
Indecision twisted inside Ieza. She knew she should escape while she still could; she might be able to barter her talents for a place in a caravan. There was always her family's holdings up north in Lorith-country - they might give her asylum, even after all this time; they were her kinsfolk after all. Or she could head west and try her luck in Xorith- she’d heard that Duke Sophonax had his own set of rules, outside the oversight of the Imperial magistrates. If they never found her, they could never revoke her right to practice. The prospect of leaving Calith had never been more appealing, not since her bitter graduation.
Just one sticking point kept Ieza pinioned - she wasn’t going to leave her treatise behind, and it was presently pressed between mattress and bed frame, up the stairs and past that guarded door.
Head kept low and face hidden like a mendicant, Ieza ducked into the cramped alley that ran alongside her tenement. Once safely ensconced in shadow, she peered up at the row of third-story windows. They were a set of grimy, glass-less portals that did little besides provide little breeze from seed to harvest, and which had to be shuttered and padded from late fall all the way past first thaw.
At first Ieza tried to clamber up, brick by uneven brick, to her window, which - as it was midsummer - she’d left hanging open just enough to keep her room from becoming a baker’s oven. After four aborted attempts she managed to scale her own height without slipping, only to find the second story had been constructed with more care than the first, and that her scraped palms had nowhere else to grasp. Her careful descent was marred by a muddy boot’s betrayal, and Ieza landed hard on one leg and teetered for a pain-laced moment before falling back onto her rump.
After a few minutes spent sitting in filth and nursing her ankle, and a few more spent pacing until she was sure she’d done herself no lasting harm, Ieza’s eyes fell upon the dirty conglomeration of dried grey-white feathers and bleached bones that had once been a seagull, lying near the pile of refuse left by one of Ieza’s fellow tenants. An idea flared into being within her, one which made her scrambles of moments ago seem particularly foolish. So long without proper practice, she was forgetting what it meant to be an arcane practitioner.
With careful hands she turned over the bird remnant and spread its brittle wings. Its bone structure was mostly intact, suggesting maggots had done most of the work, though she spotted a few marks on its broken ribcage indicative of the needle-like teeth of dock rats. It was also missing its head, skull, beak and all. Still, enough of it appeared intact, enough for her purposes at least.
She smoothed the wings, first one and then the other, before plucking out one of the longest and least tattered feathers. Running it through her fingers, Ieza murmured the incantation in Syl and then blew a stream of breath along the feather. As its barbs rustled, the once-gull she’d taken it from twitched its desiccated wings in sympathy. It remembered.
Yes, Ieza thought, this would do.
Comms Sample:
[ A glimpse of dappled canopy caught in a wobbling frame suggests that this user is still getting the hang of the communicator. Soon enough the frame settles into place, capturing a face. No- not a face: a mask of pale porcelain with tinted lenses for eyes and painted indigo lips pursed in an expression of ceaseless pensive consideration. Its features are androgynous, but from behind this mask emerges a voice - however rough and dry - that is distinctly female. ]
I am… collecting information about the denizens of our new home. Assistance is welcome.
[ Reasonable, on the face of it. Life should take interest in life. Not that the masked woman looks or sounds particularly lively. Indeed, the breath she takes between pronouncements sound dreadfully deliberate for an involuntary action, like brittle bellows being filled. ]
Samples, living or dead, are welcome. Any information as to migratory habits would also be welcome. Assessment of capacities, dangerous or otherwise, would be welcome.
[ A pause, and a shake of the frame suggest this might be the whole of her communication. Then, as a seeming afterthought, she steadies the frame and amends: ]
I am sure everyone could benefit from a careful investigation. I will provide compensation- as best I can.
