no longer will I ignore the man I'm meant to be

[ooc] unfinished library application

2025-11-11T15:57:09Z

Player Name: Lark
Player Contact: Discord: plagueheart.
Are you over 18? Yup.
Do you have any other characters in game?: No.
Who invited you?: NA

Character Name: Illarion of No Line
Canon: Original
Canon Point: Two years after he acquired his necromancy as a minion of the King of Eyes.
Age: mid-600s
History:
World info
Illarion's world -- Nephele -- has four major sapient species, two types of magic, and a single seat of phenomenal deific power: the Throne Above Thrones. A major driver of war on Nephele is the conflict of Princes -- people magically empowered by the devotion of their Courts of followers -- to become the Monarch upon the Throne and gain godlike influence over the world for a generation.

Illarion was born an elf in a time when elves were fading from the world. While they were immortal, they reproduced very slowly, so their tendency to fight in the wars of shorter-lived races was driving them extinct. Illarion's elven culture, iron elves, sought to perfect the arts of war so they could fulfill their oaths to "mortal" races without dying out.

Personal history

Illarion Cor Hydrae hatches from an egg sired on Domnika Cor Hydrae by her husband Iakinf. Said husband dies under mysterious circumstances a few years after his son's hatching.
Illarion's mother raises him isolated from his other family. This is creepy. He eventually leaves her to join the military and follow the banner of General Evdokim Nusakan.
Illarion rapidly climbs the ranks and becomes a confidante of Evdokim and his staunchest advisor, the Volkhv Esfir.
Concerned about elves' still-declining numbers, Evdokim proposes a magical ritual that, he believes, should give them greater fertility. Illarion and most other iron elves agree to this idea.
The ritual works but at horrendous cost: The participants have their lifespans dramatically shortened, the oldest die, and all the survivors are turned into extradimensional monsters that cause madness in themselves and others. They also gain a species-wide terror of world-destroying war.
The newly minted shrikes rebuild themselves into a working culture around Evdokim, now the Prince of Preservation, and sell themselves as terrifying mercenaries in a bid to manipulate and intimidate Nephele's cultures into not waging war anymore. Illarion becomes one of their warlords.
Illarion has a bunch of kids, mostly with Esfir.
The shrikes' plan doesn't work but they do well for themselves for centuries until an undead army smashes their home--the literal fist of an angry god, the King of Eyes. Evdokim dies in the attack.
Now at risk of permanent madness, the shrike survivors desperately turn to Evdokim's son for help. Said son leads them into a civil war due to a bad choice of allies. Illarion is executed as a traitor in the aftermath.
Illarion is raised as undead under the control of the King of Eyes. He spends three horrific years as a puppet--a torment that ends unexpectedly when he's pulled into the Library.

Is this character an AU? What type?: No.

Personality:
— Positive Trait: Loyal Illarion is nothing if not incredibly loyal to those he loves. He will move heaven and earth for the people he cares for and follow them into hell if they ask. Needless to say he'd also lay down his life--again--for anyone who'd won his loyalty, too, even if he holds his continued existence incredibly cheaply. While this tendency can blind him to faults in the subject of his devotion (once so thoroughly it led to his first death), it is tempered by his unwillingness to see those he loves stagnate or backslide on their chosen paths. In this his loyalty takes on the character of a burr: Nearly impossible to remove and maddeningly prickly, depending on where it's stuck to you.
— Positive Trait: Observant Living even briefly with a narcissistic parent has made Illarion incredibly, paranoidly attuned to details of the world around him because she would so often use those against him. It's served him as good stead as a shrike especially because he learned--much more quickly than other shrikes--to read the moods and attitudes of their higher-dimensional forms, learning tells that gave away the emotions (and susceptibility to madness) of his brothers and sisters. He has built on his youthful expertise with centuries more of additional experience in paying keen attention to the world and other people; so long as he is attentive, very little escapes his notice.
— Positive Trait: Pious The world is numinous: a dream of the Great God alive with lesser gods and spirits. Illarion grew up leaving parts of his kills on forest altars and offering salt and fruit to the house spirits when things went missing. As an adult and architect of shrike culture, he helped shape their patterns of private and public worship, and held sincerely as any of them to those practices. Reverence for the world both invisible and visible is graven deep into him, and it shows--not just in how he treats or entreats what he deems sacred, but in how he keeps his oaths, in his deep respect for the natural world and the persons of others. Dying and rising again as the King of Eyes' puppet suppressed his piety for years, but has not eradicated it; it remains a touchstone for him even as he tries to navigate the theologically uncomfortable space of being a dead thing enmeshed in the living world--somewhere he no longer belongs. So deep does his pious nature run that apotropaic practices he recognizes as meant to contain or avert the restless dead will often work on him even without any supernatural force behind them--he simply respects the message being sent.

— Negative Trait: Hollow As a consequence of undeath, Illarion has diminished capacity to recognize his own emotions. He consequently believes he does not experience them, and while this gives him a certain level of clinical detachment in stressful situations...it also gives him clinical detachment in every other situation as well. A combination of flattened affect and delayed or inappropriate empathy responses can make him uncomfortable to be around; his own realization of this without any concrete strategy to act "more normal" drives him to self-isolate. This tendency is only made worse by his rapid loss of motivation for tasks he can't frame as necessary to survival--he doesn't derive much hedonic pleasure from "fun" things and will quit them as pointless shortly after beginning them. This tendency can be very annoying when combined with his lingering streak of impulsiveness.
— Negative Trait: Impulsive It is simply the case that Illarion will act on whatever damn fool thought comes into his head, when he's in a certain mood. This is a consequence of his undeath more than his life; in life, his fey moods found limited expression in an odd sense of humor or practical jokes on his (tolerant) subordinates. Since resurrection, however, his self-control in this respect has wavered. He became known within the Locust Knights for provoking fights and taking rash action when on missions; "I thought it would be funny" and "I wanted to see what would happen" were his go-to excuses.
— Negative Trait: Cruel While in life, Illarion strove not to be a cruel man--insofar as his position as Warlord and the shrikes' peculiar scorched-earth philosophy of war allowed--he's always had the capacity for considerable cruelty. His empathy was a double-edged sword there, granting him insight into others' weaknesses and how he could exploit them to cause pain. In death, as the King of Eyes' puppet, any reticence he had about hurting people--emotionally or otherwise--was forcibly stripped away. Whether he willed it or not, he was frequently and floridly cruel during that time--something he could only soften or turn aside on rare occasions, when seizing on a moment of his master's inattention. Though he is free now of any external drive to cruelty, the habits of it have been graven deep into him; his first instinct when confronted with an opportunity to cause hurt is to lash out.

Powers and Abilities:
Natural traits:

Elven vision: Illarion has sharper daytime vision than a human, better able to resolve fine details at a distance. He also sees into the ultraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Hollow-boned: Illarion is lighter than a mammal of his size would be, from a combination of hollow bones and larger internal air spaces. (Though the latter don't help him as much now that he's dead and doesn't breathe regularly.)

Supernatural powers:

Undead: More resilient to physical damage. Doesn't need sleep or air, and only needs to eat flesh to repair his own injuries (he will not heal otherwise).
Necromancer: If there are corpses available, Illarion can raise them temporarily under his control. He can only manage a limited number at a time, with the amount variable on the size and complexity of the creatures he's trying to raise, and how fine-grained he wants his control over them to be.
Pillar-touched: Illarion exists in four dimensions of space, with the majority of his (monstrous) body tucked away into the fourth dimension. He is able to see and maneuver through the three-dimensional world as a three-dimension creature would move through a two-dimensional world drawn on a flat surface. In addition, his presence can cause mild-to-moderate eldritch distortion of the world, and prolonged contact with his unshielded gaze can rarely inflict supernatural madness on others.

Skills:

Diplomacy & negotiation
Conflict resolution
Firearms (circa a ~1910s tech level)
Hunting & woodcraft
First aid & triage
Armed combat (sword, knife, bayonet)
Unarmed combat
Animal handling (theropod dinosaurs)
Simple sewing, mending, and leathercraft
Small-unit tactics
Infiltration
Faerie prince contract law
Research
Observation
Polyglot
Storyteller

Inventory: Black uniform with various Unearthed insignia (skulls! bones!), steel-toed boots, sabertache, two combat knives, a service revolver, a rifle that eerily resembles an early-model Mosin-Nagant, ammo, kit for maintaining his weapons, flint and steel.

Sample: Illarion and Curze on the TDM.

When presented with a choice, is the character more likely to stick with tried and true methods? Or make something new up on the fly? If it's a choice he needs to make quickly, tried and true -- he's more familiar with the consequences of an "old" approach, compared to experimenting with something new in the moment. Which is not to say he inherently prefers solving problems through tried-and-true methods -- he is quite open to innovation on top of being naturally impulsive, and doesn't value "we've always done it this way" for its own sake -- but part of his role as a warlord was to think through potential high-order consequences of any action he took before taking it.

What is more important to your character, preserving the past or forging a future? At the instant in his own story that he's dumped into the Library, his natural inclination is to preserve the past. The overriding imperative being pushed on him, that he's been operating under for the past three years, is forging a future -- where everyone is dead. :) :) So he will err on the side of preserving the past.

How does your character influence their own story? What about the stories of others?
Prior to his death, Illarion had substantial influence over not only the course of his own life but the structure of his whole society and the fate of his world. (Most notably, he was involved in the ascension and then abdication of the Monarch of Sacrifice, events of exceptional religious, historical, and magical significance to Nephele. He can't remember any of it.) Post-death, he's had very little influence over his own story -- reduced to little more than a puppet who can still remember everything he's been forced to do.

Are you alright with your character’s canon being used as a Recommended Reading?: Yes! (I have introductory documents for it I wrote up for a plot in his setting in a previous game that I can share.)

comments

[singillatim app]

2024-08-23T22:49:48Z

PLAYER INFO

Player Name: Lark
• Player Contact: ~~all messages to me may be whispered to the new moon between the hours of 2 and 4am~~ plagueheart / discord: plagueheart
• Player Age: >>18
• Permissions: persimmons.

CHARACTER INFO

• Character Name: Illarion of no Line
• Character Age: mid-600s
• Character Canon: Original
• Canon Point: The instant when the King of Eyes' control of him breaks. The Aurora will heal the brain injury (and resulting blindness) that caused the break.

• Character History:
World info
Illarion's world -- Nephele -- has four major sapient species, two types of magic, and a single seat of phenomenal deific power: the Throne Above Thrones. A major driver of war on Nephele is the conflict of Princes -- people magically empowered by the devotion of their Courts of followers -- to become the Monarch upon the Throne and gain godlike influence over the world for a generation.

Illarion was born an elf in a time when elves were fading from the world. While they were immortal, they reproduced very slowly, so their tendency to fight in the wars of shorter-lived races was driving them extinct. Illarion's elven culture, iron elves, sought to perfect the arts of war so they could fulfill their oaths to "mortal" races without dying out.

Personal history

Illarion Cor Hydrae hatches from an egg sired on Domnika Cor Hydrae by her husband Iakinf. Said husband dies under mysterious circumstances a few years after his son's hatching.
Illarion's mother raises him isolated from his other family. This is creepy. He eventually leaves her to join the military and follow the banner of General Evdokim Nusakan.
Illarion rapidly climbs the ranks and becomes a confidante of Evdokim and his staunchest advisor, the Volkhv Esfir.
Concerned about elves' still-declining numbers, Evdokim proposes a magical ritual that, he believes, should give them greater fertility. Illarion and most other iron elves agree to this idea.
The ritual works but at horrendous cost: The participants have their lifespans dramatically shortened, the oldest die, and all the survivors are turned into extradimensional monsters that cause madness in themselves and others. They also gain a species-wide terror of world-destroying war.
The newly minted shrikes rebuild themselves into a working culture around Evdokim, now the Prince of Preservation, and sell themselves as terrifying mercenaries in a bid to manipulate and intimidate Nephele's cultures into not waging war anymore. Illarion becomes one of their warlords.
Illarion has a bunch of kids, mostly with Esfir.
The shrikes' plan doesn't work but they do well for themselves for centuries until an undead army smashes their home--the literal fist of an angry god, the King of Eyes. Evdokim dies in the attack.
Now at risk of permanent madness, the shrike survivors desperately turn to Evdokim's son for help. Said son leads them into a civil war due to a bad choice of allies. Illarion is executed as a traitor in the aftermath.
Illarion is raised as undead under the control of the King of Eyes. He spends several horrific years as a puppet--a torment that ends unexpectedly when an injury suffered on an infiltration mission blinds him and breaks Eyes' control.

• Character Personality:

— Positive Trait: Loyal Illarion is nothing if not incredibly loyal to those he loves. He will move heaven and earth for the people he cares for and follow them into hell if they ask. Needless to say he'd also lay down his life--again--for anyone who'd won his loyalty, too, even if he holds his continued existence incredibly cheaply. While this tendency can blind him to faults in the subject of his devotion (once so thoroughly it led to his first death), it is tempered by his unwillingness to see those he loves stagnate or backslide on their chosen paths. In this his loyalty takes on the character of a burr: Nearly impossible to remove and maddeningly prickly, depending on where it's stuck to you.
— Positive Trait: Observant Living even briefly with a narcissistic parent has made Illarion incredibly, paranoidly attuned to details of the world around him because she would so often use those against him. It's served him as good stead as a shrike especially because he learned--much more quickly than other shrikes--to read the moods and attitudes of their higher-dimensional forms, learning tells that gave away the emotions (and susceptibility to madness) of his brothers and sisters. He has built on his youthful expertise with centuries more of additional experience in paying keen attention to the world and other people; so long as he is attentive, very little escapes his notice.
— Positive Trait: Pious The world is numinous: a dream of the Great God alive with lesser gods and spirits. Illarion grew up leaving parts of his kills on forest altars and offering salt and fruit to the house spirits when things went missing. As an adult and architect of shrike culture, he helped shape their patterns of private and public worship, and held sincerely as any of them to those practices. Reverence for the world both invisible and visible is graven deep into him, and it shows--not just in how he treats or entreats what he deems sacred, but in how he keeps his oaths, in his deep respect for the natural world and the persons of others. Dying and rising again as the King of Eyes' puppet suppressed his piety for years, but has not eradicated it; it remains a touchstone for him even as he tries to navigate the theologically uncomfortable space of being a dead thing enmeshed in the living world--somewhere he no longer belongs. So deep does his pious nature run that apotropaic practices he recognizes as meant to contain or avert the restless dead will often work on him even without any supernatural force behind them--he simply respects the message being sent.

— Negative Trait: Hollow As a consequence of undeath, Illarion has diminished capacity to recognize his own emotions. He consequently believes he does not experience them, and while this gives him a certain level of clinical detachment in stressful situations...it also gives him clinical detachment in every other situation as well. A combination of flattened affect and delayed or inappropriate empathy responses can make him uncomfortable to be around; his own realization of this without any concrete strategy to act "more normal" drives him to self-isolate. This tendency is only made worse by his rapid loss of motivation for tasks he can't frame as necessary to survival--he doesn't derive much hedonic pleasure from "fun" things and will quit them as pointless shortly after beginning them. This tendency can be very annoying when combined with his lingering streak of impulsiveness.
— Negative Trait: Impulsive It is simply the case that Illarion will act on whatever damn fool thought comes into his head, when he's in a certain mood. This is a consequence of his undeath more than his life; in life, his fey moods found limited expression in an odd sense of humor or practical jokes on his (tolerant) subordinates. Since resurrection, however, his self-control in this respect has wavered. He became known within the Locust Knights for provoking fights and taking rash action when on missions; "I thought it would be funny" and "I wanted to see what would happen" were his go-to excuses.
— Negative Trait: Cruel While in life, Illarion strove not to be a cruel man--insofar as his position as Warlord and the shrikes' peculiar scorched-earth philosophy of war allowed--he's always had the capacity for considerable cruelty. His empathy was a double-edged sword there, granting him insight into others' weaknesses and how he could exploit them to cause pain. In death, as the King of Eyes' puppet, any reticence he had about hurting people--emotionally or otherwise--was forcibly stripped away. Whether he willed it or not, he was frequently and floridly cruel during that time--something he could only soften or turn aside on rare occasions, when seizing on a moment of his master's inattention. Though he is free now of any external drive to cruelty, the habits of it have been graven deep into him; his first instinct when confronted with an opportunity to cause hurt is to lash out.

• Character Skills: Does your character have any particular skills that might help them in game? Maybe they have knowledge of firearms, carpentry, fishing, maybe foraging or how to make clothes. List them here in bullet-point form:

* Hunting - bow & rifle, traps
* Foraging
* Woodcraft/Survival - tracking, building fires and temporary structures, navigation
* Firearms
* Knives
* First aid & triage
* Mending - cloth & leather
* Animal handling - birds & theropod dinosaurs
* Observation/scouting

• Character Inventory:

— ITEM ONE: A heavy, ornate hooded cloak with a veil sewn into the hood
— ITEM TWO: A rifle that eerily resembles, but is not, a Mosin-Nagant
— ITEM THREE: A handful of small religious icons on a meteor-steel chain

• Important Notes: Illarion is undead and non-human; some adaptation notes below.

Undead: As a consequence of undeath, most of Illarion's senses -- including his ability to feel temperature and pain -- are muted. He will feel cold (and heat) less severely than the living but will still suffer from frostbite and thermal injury exactly as they do. He does not need to breathe except when he is producing speech, but as a result has less air in his body and will not float well in water. He does not ordinarily need to eat, but will be unable to heal from injuries unless he eats flesh that directly corresponds to the injured tissue over the course of the wound-healing process (exactly as long as an average human recovery) -- e.g. he will need to eat brains, and a lot of them, to heal from a concussion. Animal flesh will make for a slower healing process than flesh from other sapients. He cannot "bank up" against the possibility of becoming injured by eating meat beforehand; if he is not currently healing it will just sit in his stomach and rot, poisoning him.

Baseline, he does not have to sleep and cannot dream; in Singillatim, he will find that he has to enter a period of unconscious torpor with the same frequency one of the living needs to sleep, with mental and physical consequences that parallel those of someone alive going without sleep if he tries to skip the torpor. He doesn't dream in this state except for when influenced by something supernatural (i.e., dreaming is necessary to plot participation).

Non-human: At baseline, Illarion is a weird extradimensional monster that mostly looks like a Nephele elf most of the time. He is losing all the extradimensional aspects except for a purely cosmetic insectile eye in the center of his chest, and very short talons on his hands and feet. His sense of vision, an elf's strongest sense, will be no sharper than a very keen-eyed human, and he will lose his ability to see into the ultraviolet spectrum.

• Writing Samples:

— SAMPLE ONE: TDM toplevel - subthreads with Kieren & Levi
— SAMPLE TWO: TDM thread with the Untitled Goose

comments

[ic] folkmore inbox

2024-07-28T15:05:29Z

[ you come to speak to a shrike? ]

comments

[folkmore] application

2024-07-27T12:39:26Z

❥ Character Information

Character Name: Illarion Albireo
Character Age: mid-600s
Character Species: Illarion is his world's equivalent of elf -- albeit Nephelian elves have avian/dinosaurian biology rather than mammalian -- with a lot of extradimensional horror attached. He is also undead, and is carrying over his blood type (Darkblood) from Deer Country.
Current Health: Fine?? He is undead but was picked up in good condition.
Outfit: His black leather and bone Hunter gear in fine Trench pragmatic style, with a little bit of gaudy Disciple bling around the edges. A seamless bracelet grown from bone wrapped around one of his extradimensional arms.

Character Canon: Original
History:
World info
Illarion's world -- Nephele -- has four major sapient species, two types of magic, and a single seat of phenomenal deific power: the Throne Above Thrones. A major driver of war on Nephele is the conflict of Princes -- people magically empowered by the devotion of their Courts of followers -- to become the Monarch upon the Throne and gain godlike influence over the world for a generation.

Illarion was born an elf in a time when elves were fading from the world. While they were immortal, they reproduced very slowly, so their tendency to fight in the wars of shorter-lived races was driving them extinct. Illarion's elven culture, iron elves, sought to perfect the arts of war so they could fulfill their oaths to "mortal" races without dying out.

Personal history

Illarion Cor Hydrae hatches from an egg sired on Domnika Cor Hydrae by her husband Iakinf. Said husband dies under mysterious circumstances a few years after his son's hatching.
Illarion's mother raises him isolated from his other family. This is creepy. He eventually leaves her to join the military and follow the banner of General Evdokim Nusakan.
Illarion rapidly climbs the ranks and becomes a confidante of Evdokim and his staunchest advisor, the Volkhv Esfir.
Concerned about elves' still-declining numbers, Evdokim proposes a magical ritual that, he believes, should give them greater fertility. Illarion and most other iron elves agree to this idea.
The ritual works but at horrendous cost: The participants have their lifespans dramatically shortened, the oldest die, and all the survivors are turned into extradimensional monsters that cause madness in themselves and others. They also gain a species-wide terror of world-destroying war.
The newly minted shrikes rebuild themselves into a working culture around Evdokim, now the Prince of Preservation, and sell themselves as terrifying mercenaries in a bid to manipulate and intimidate Nephele's cultures into not waging war anymore. Illarion becomes one of their warlords.
Illarion has a bunch of kids, mostly with Esfir.
The shrikes' plan doesn't work but they do well for themselves for centuries until an undead army smashes their home--the literal fist of an angry god, the King of Eyes. Evdokim dies in the attack.
Now at risk of permanent madness, the shrike survivors desperately turn to Evdokim's son for help. He leads them into a civil war due to a bad choice of allies. Illarion is executed as a traitor in the aftermath.
Illarion is raised as undead under the control of the King of Eyes. He spends several horrific years as a puppet, then a more horrific year as a collaborator when the mind control snaps but he stays with the Unearthed in a bid to rescue his daughter.
Illarion and many other undead -- his daughter sadly not among them -- are freed at the Battle of Sacrifice's Rest. They band together to form the Knights Pariah and pledge to protect the living at any cost

Canon Point: A year after the Battle of Sacrifice's Rest and the formation of the Knights Pariah.
Canon Iteration: Deer Country CRAU
Canon Iteration Explanation: ~~he is full of sparkly blackberry jam and has learned some important lessons about friendship~~

Deer Country gave Illarion an exit from a situation with the Knights Pariah he frankly didn't know how to deal with: He felt isolated even from that band of outcastes and was trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible despite his lifelong training to meddle with their forming organizational culture. (He'd sort it out in time.)

Instead he was dumped into a thriving society where no one knew who he was and he could make of himself whatever useful thing he wanted -- so he did, "despite" being cursed as undead and having broken emotional responses. He became Disciple of the Pthumerians and Hunter of Beasts to fulfill his religious obligations to the Waking World, and also somehow gained a whole replacement family in the process, who cared for him even with all his brokenness and faults. Through them he has begun to believe that maybe even an undead abomination has a place in the world.

Illarion retains his Darkblood powers and his Omen, Iskierka, on coming into Folkmore.

❥ Folkmore Roles & Attributes

Skills:

Diplomacy & negotiation
Conflict resolution
Firearms (circa a ~1910s tech level)
Hunting & woodcraft
First aid & triage
Armed combat (sword, knife, bayonet)
Unarmed combat
Animal handling (therapod dinosaurs)
Small-unit tactics
Infiltration
Faerie prince contract law
Research
Observation
Polyglot
Storyteller

Canon Abilities:

Undead - standard package of being more resilient to physical damage & needing less or no food/sleep/air
Necromancer - specifically a kind that raises a bunch of disposable zombies under his own control
Pillar-touched - he has a bunch of extra him in another dimension of space and can move around in weird ways (like entering closed rooms without using a door or breaking a wall); also mildly-to-majorly corrupts himself & the world around him

Role: Myth
Role Qualities/Attributes: A variable number of big gnarly horns, like a Jacob sheep; a long feathery archaeopteryx tail with lightless black feathers and gold peacock-eye markings. These will become more or less prevalent depending on how Mythic the role he is acting; the more he is putting on the "intimidating monster" role the more obvious they'll be.

He already has plenty of powers so he's not getting any of the abilities; I'm still on the fence about the mental/emotional effects--but recognizing that they're affecting him would be a good way for him to question his assumptions about how he is "supposed" to be a Myth. (See below.)
Role Reasoning: Illarion's cosmology has two pantheons of lesser gods -- black and white -- who operate under the aegis of a more distant creator deity. The black gods, while not evil as such, are more punitive, capricious, and destructive than the white -- representing all that is dangerous in the world, and all that will punish the wicked and foolish for their trespasses. In this sense, as Illarion already identifies himself as a servant of the black gods, he also sees himself as a Myth -- a monster that punishes those who are out of line. It is a role he is very comfortable with! But it's also a little across the grain of a Myth's selfishness and independence, which will give him cause to reflect...

❥ Personality

OPTION 2 QUESTIONS

What was the most traumatic experience your character endured? How did this change them?

The years Illarion spent as one of the Unearthed, after being raised to undeath, were far and away the most scarring of his life. One particular year stands out for its horror, though: The year he was forced to become a necromancer.

There are two kinds of magic on Nephele: The magic of devotion to Princes, and the magic of effort. Effort-magic comes to those who practice an ability until it sharpens into a supernatural gift. Even for the most obsessed (or desperate) would-be mages, this process takes a few years because a living individual can't practice a skill every hour of every day.

An undead one can, however--and the King of Eyes ruthlessly exploited this to make give the Unearthed thousands of new mages. Illarion is one such unfortunate, who spent an entire year mostly in one place endlessly practicing ripping his own soul apart to use the pieces to animate undead minions.

He did gain magic out of the bargain, but the entire year is shrouded in a gray fugue in his memory. Reminders of it have the rare power to drive him catatonic for a time as he relives the twilight horror of it.

If your character could change one thing about their past, what would it be and why? Or why not?

This would be a genuine quandary for Illarion -- because there are two equally horrible events he would want to change: The murder of his oldest son, Aleksandr (Sasha), and the death of his only daughter, Nadezhda (Nadya).

Sasha died a worse death for less reason -- kidnapped and killed by Illarion's mother's agents, to punish Illarion for daring to ask her permission to marry another woman -- and though no one sane would say it was Illarion's fault, he blames himself for causing it. Undoing that death would ease his guilt and more importantly, his boy would be alive.

Except, as far as Illarion and his family are concerned, Sasha is alive after a fashion -- he's been reincarnated as Illarion and his lover Esfir's youngest son, Aleksandr (Sashenka, "little Sasha"). Undoing that first death would mean Sashenka was never born.

Nadya, on the other hand, died cleanly defending her homeland against the Unearthed. It hurt, but it was not Illarion's to prevent -- she was a soldier, just as he was. Even so, she was the light of his life -- and when he learned, after his own death and resurrection, that she was also one of the Unearthed...

Well, initially, he felt almost nothing about it because he couldn't -- he wasn't permitted. But when the King of Eyes' hold on him snapped, he stayed with the Unearthed despite his trauma and horror over what they were doing because he needed to save her. He committed atrocities because he needed to save her.

Ultimately, if he could bring his own objectivity to bear, he'd save Nadya to spare her undeath -- and to give his past self the freedom to die again to escape his own undeath.

What famous folklore, legend, or myth would you associate your character with? Are they literally inspired by Snow White? Do they have similar struggles or energy as Red Riding Hood?

Illarion's people -- shrikes -- are a twist on Unseelie fae -- very careful about their names, very particular about contracts, potentially highly dangerous to treat with if you don't follow certain rules. They defy the archetype, though, by having their own sort of honor -- and their meticulous contracts are actually designed to avoid loopholes either side could exploit.

Illarion himself leaned into the "sinister faerie prince" vibes when he was the shrike Warlord responsible for dealing with humans -- a position more complex than the name implies, since it involved not only overseeing shrike military deployments in human conflicts but also liaising with human leadership to make and fulfill contracts, managing an intelligence network, and doing extensive background research on each potential contract offer to determine the justice of what they were being asked to do. Making himself an alien creature out of myth -- he went so far as to speak the common human language with an affected style despite having learned it perfectly -- kept petitioners off-guard. Some would be less likely to try and cheat or lie to him out of fear; others would be overconfident in the belief he didn't understand their language well enough not to be tricked by subtle uses of it. Both responses served him very well in that role.

What is a time where your character failed drastically at something and how did it impact them, what did they do about it?

Illarion learned a very difficult lesson about the difference between his empathy and his compassion when, as a very young iron elf, he tried to intervene in a bloody land dispute between two neighboring human villages. All he technically needed to accomplish was an equitable split of several disputed grainfields, but a young mother from one of the villages gave him a tearful story about how her children had starved in sight of the other village's full barns. His awful grief on her behalf led him to look only for evidence the second village already had enough food and to spare, and so assigned more of the fields to the first village.

The second village later lost an entire generation to starvation when their older fields failed and all their carefully maintained food stores ran out.

He is no longer so prone to listening to his heart over his head, but the tendency to be moved by strong emotion outside himself is still there. In part, the extensive work he put in -- and insisted others put in -- as a Warlord, to fully understand all sides and potential consequences of a conflict he intervened in, was a hedge against making such a mistake again.

❥ Player Information

Player Name: Lark
Pronouns: AM GIRL
Are you over 18?: Yes
Contact(s): Discord: plagueheart; plagueheart
Who Invited You?: Own invite; am current player.
Current Characters: Myrobalan Shivana
Permissions: Here
Writing Samples: 1 (tdm), 2 (tdm)

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[ooc] deer country thread tracker + cr

2021-11-12T03:19:14Z

i will totally make this pretty later lol whoop

CR GOES HERE, THREADS TRACKED IN COMMENTS

cr 2 track: ives, kaworu, bigby, varian, fern, nehan, luna, ... (heck)

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[ooc] info at-a-glance

2021-10-16T05:13:52Z

Normal form right, high-dimensional form left. Art by Zee Coshow.

Demographics:

Name: Illarion Albireo, neé Cor Hydrae¹
Nicknames: Larka, Hydraheart; see also this spreadsheet for real-time nickname tracking
Sex: Male
Species: Undead iron elf, ssp. shrike²
Age: ~650 prior to death, 3-4 years post-resurrection
Rank: Knight-Captain of the Knights Pariah special forces; Third in the Hecatomb
Languages: Shriketongue, Elvish argot, Mercsat, (Steppes) Common, Imperial Orcish, a smattering of the Siriran dwarf dialect

First impressions:

Physical: Short (5'8"), broad-shouldered, wiry-muscular (on average--his apparent weight and muscularity can vary from nearly skeletal to densely muscled). Proportions not quite human, with larger eyes, sharper facial features, a deeper chest and longer legs, and a tendency to walk and balance more on his toes than humans do. Long pointed ears, sharp teeth with pronounced lower-jaw fangs, large golden eyes with black sclera and no pupils. His hair (typically braided) and skin are both chalk-white, with the exception of blood-red stripes from under his eyes down to his jawline. His lips are perpetually chapped, his cheeks are hollow, and he does not breathe most of the time.
H̴̪̘̍̆i̵̼͝ǧ̴͔̘h̷̻͚͘-̵̼́̇d̷̢͎͒̕i̵̡̓̚m̸͔̙̓͝ȇ̸̢̜͝n̶͔̂͝s̷̛̻̕i̴̟͘o̴̦͑͗n̵̞̉ä̶̺́̀͜l̷̥̯̂̒: Individuals who can see more than three dimensions or who are otherwise attuned to higher planar realities can perceive that the short, pale elf is only part of Illarion's actual body. His high-dimensional "out-self" is covered in thick, light-absorbing feathers with a chitinous gleam to them; his ears are heavily tufted and he has a mobile crest like a harpy eagle's. He sports heavy talons on both fingers and toes. All of his plumage, and the indistinct bulk of the rest of his body, is studded with faceted golden eyes. At any given time he may have withered accessory limbs, plumed moth-like antennae or tentacles, or a bulky tail; the borders of his higher-dimensional aspect are slowly shifting and visibly accreting mass from some direction.
Medical: Undead on a non-mammalian base. No respiration (except feigned) or heartbeat, generally room temperature or colder to the touch. Externally, no body hair except on his head (elongated down feathers with interspersed filoplumes), no nipples, no navel. There are UV-bright markings on his throat, shoulders, and chest, while his malar stripes are UV-dark. Internally, pneumatic bones and extensive air sacs throughout his chest and torso, with no diaphragm. Unhealed death-wound on his chest, a sword-thrust that took him through the heart; cause of death was cardiac tamponade. He may have tumors or inclusions of other materials (glass, metal, paper, or less organized substances) scattered at random throughout his body tissue and internal organs.
Attire: Most commonly, a Knight Pariah infiltrator uniform in black and dark grays with a shoulder patch bearing the fanged-skull-and-taloned-phalanges insignia common to their shrikes. (Inspiration for the uniform base, though he carries less gear and is primarily armed with a long knife and pistol.) In civilian dress but outside a space of refuge, tight trousers, a t-shirt, boots, and a heavy, hooded long-coat. Lounging around at home, next to nothing but jewelry and a loincloth. He is nearly always veiled, obscuring his eyes.
In motion: Alert, closed in, keeps his limbs tucked close to his body and his head on a swivel whenever he's moving; while he can track on sources of noise and movement near him, it is quickly obvious he's unable to actually see what his eyes are pointed at. When he is still, he is very still, and does not tend to fidget or even blink. May be mistaken for a corpse if lying or sitting down. Does not emote much with his visible body unless he's very obviously acting out what he's feeling; his feathers are much better emotional tells if they can be seen. What demeanor he does project is usually relentlessly pleasant, even cheerful.
Voice: A middling tenor, pleasant, but without a lot of inflection or emotional range unless he really leans into it. Echoes and resonance typically do not match the spaces he's in. His transmissions over radio or magical devices frequently have interference or distortions to them. When singing, he can chorus with his own echoes, which isn't weird or anything. He has an excellent falsetto and is a very good mimic of birdsong.
Scent: Brackish saltwater, gunpowder, leather soap, decaying flowers.
Magical presence: Two flavors of wrong, undeath/necromancy and pure ź̸͈̣̓̆͆̔̍̈́͊a̸̱͍̱͙̤̎̈́͊͛͊̂͠͠l̸̰̠͉̾g̸̨̪̀̑o̴̗̬̥̓̇̓͝. He feels like something that both should not be walking around in this reality, and should not be walking around at all, to a sensitive individual.
Mindscape: Uncomfortable. Not only is he undead and not completely in consensus reality, he is also always in some degree of pain on top of an oddly distorted sensory experience of the world. His usual emotional state might be charitably described as "depressed fog" with occasional jags of extreme negative emotion. Accomplished telepaths may note he's wide open for attempts at mind control, seeming unable to shield himself from it.
Other: He does not give out his name on introduction and will instead ask for a new name from the person talking to him.

Abilities and proficiencies:

Altered nature. Illarion exists in more than three spacial dimensions. The part of him that is visible to most individuals in three dimensions is only a small cross-section of his larger true form, which is more physically robust and well-armed than he appears. He perceives purely three-dimensional objects as cross sections that he can interact with in the same way a three-dimensional individual could two-dimensional representations of objects. For example, he can move "through" solid three-dimensional walls as easily as stepping "over" them in the same way one can step over the lines of a maze drawn on the ground, or remove an object from a solid enclosing container by lifting it "out" without damaging either.
Combat training.
~~Courtier of the Forlorn Hope.~~
Diplomacy.
Heightened senses. In compensation for his total blindness, Illarion has developed a compensatory high-dimensional sense or senses that he perceives as a mix of touch, taste, and smell. This allows him to perceive the outlines (including internal outlines) of objects as well as a rough idea of their chemical composition. He is unaware of how this sense operates (via thousands of very long, very thin high-dimensional vibrissae) and why it is disabled when he "flattens" his high-dimensional form further into three dimensions.
Information-gathering.
Pillar conduit. As a conduit for a dead reality, Illarion constantly bleeds its influence into the surrounding world albeit at a very low level detectable only by those sensitive to reality distorting effects. During times of high emotion, the intensity of this bleed increases to a noticeable point and usually manifests in the following ways: Solid substances turning to tar-like "fluid" that behaves in un-fluidlike ways; black or gold eyes opening on surfaces or individuals within a short range of him; completely unknown colors appearing in rainbows or staining his environment. In addition, directly meeting his unshielded gaze--especially of his "true form's" accessory eyes--can cause emotional disturbance or outright supernatural madness in sapients (at player discretion). He has very little control over these effects but will position himself to make best (or worst) use of them in combat situations.
Risen legionnaire. Illarion's necromancy is a form of Nephelian effort-magic developed out of "voluntarily" fragmenting his soul. He can push pieces of it into dead bodies to animate them as automata under his direct control (if they are not already animate) or "heal"/empower them for a short time (if they are animate). He has a soft limit on the number of minions he can raise in this way, as fragmenting his soul too far will knock him unconscious and force the return of all the shards. Animating a body with more shards will give him finer control over it and allow it to appear more autonomous, though it reduces the number of other undead he can raise/control.
Storyteller.

Weaknesses:

Blind. Illarion suffers from complete cortical blindness and cannot perceive anything visually. His remaining senses, both high- and low-dimensional, allow him enough perception to fight, maneuver, and conduct most activities, but he cannot accomplish any tasks that require reading written text, color discrimination, or other uses of purely visual cues.
Cracked mind. Illarion has little ability to resist direct telepathic mind control. The best he can do is fly into a frenzy and attempt to kill his assailant, or himself, before he inevitably loses the fight.
Dulled senses. Illarion's natural sense of touch is reduced though he receives some compensation from his high-dimensional senses. Similarly, his senses of taste and smell have been replaced by their high-dimensional equivalents; under circumstances where he does not have access to his high-dimensional senses, he has very limited ability to taste or smell things.
Emotional flattening. Nephelian undead experience a severe reduction in their emotional range on resurrection, either feeling a limited set of (negative) emotions much too keenly, or having all their emotions muted. Illarion suffers from the latter. He can remember the emotion he should feel in most circumstances, and even how that feeling would move him to act, but his actual experience is greatly diminished or non-existent.
Locusts' hunger. An affliction particular to Unearthed bound to the Court of the Prince of Locusts. Illarion experiences a compulsive need to cause harm or destruction. This can range from things as minor as small acts of vandalism or irritating another sapient (which mitigate, but do not sate the compulsion), to destroying buildings or committing murder. The longer he ignores the compulsion, the more difficult it becomes to act against it when presented with an opportunity to destroy something. Destruction of objects or entities that are "more valuable" or "more useful" on some axis is more satisfying to the compulsion, e.g. weeding a garden full of edible vegetables and burning the weeds is not as satisfying as pulling up and burning the vegetables so no one can eat them; cutting down a two-year-old softwood tree is not as satisfying as cutting down a 300-year-old redwood. It is possible for him to satisfy the compulsion without knowing what exact act caused the harm required for its satisfaction, but it needs to have been an act deliberately committed with the intent to cause harm, e.g. insulting someone via text over a network until they burst into tears without him knowing will satisfy the compulsion, but informing someone a beloved relative has died (causing them to burst into tears) will not.
Prince-bound.
Sensory overload.
Undead.
Unworldly.

Abbreviated personality: Dead, tired, and a lot more sad than he lets on. But He's Trying.

1. His full line name is much longer, but he kept Cor Hydrae perpetually at the end of it as an act of protest.
2. Iron elves are a specific elven subculture, while shrikes form an actual elven subspecies that still identify themselves with that subculture.

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[ooc] opt-out

2021-10-07T02:31:05Z

Power opt-out
One of the weirder aspects of Illarion's extra-dimensional nature is that he perceives things residing in only three dimensions like you or I would look at a two-dimensional schematic drawing. That's to say, he has full perception of the "insides" of objects--and people--and can tell what you've got in your pockets, what you've eaten for lunch, where your organs are positioned, and how many extra toes you have if you're within ~thirty feet of him (the blind version) / in his line of sight (the sighted version). (Or anything else you might imagine someone who could literally see right through you could pick up on.)

Needless to say, this is an awful lot of information for him to take in "at a glance," as it were! While he will almost never talk about anything he's observed using this ability, he will act on what he can sense/see, especially if it's a matter of someone's safety. Therefore, I'd like to let people opt out of him using the ability--totally or in part--if it would make you uncomfortable to have that much information passively known about your character (or their stuff).

I've included two different opt-out forms. If you just want your characters to be totally opaque to Illarion, use the total opt-out. If you'd like some but not all traits to be hidden from him (or if there's something you absotively, posolutely want him to pick up on and react to), the conditional opt-out is the way to go.

Total power opt-outPlayer: Character(s): <big>I do not want Illarion's perception abilities to work on my character(s).</big>

Conditional power opt-outPlayer: Character(s): Things I don't want Illarion perceiving about my characters: Things I DEFINITELY want Illarion perceiving: 

Note: This does not apply in settings where he is power-nerfed to become a regular ol' three-dimensional ~~object~~ elf again; no need to worry about it there!

Character opt-outs
Illarion's past contains a hefty helping of war-time trauma, child abuse (directed at him), and sundry other uncomfortable subjects like traumatic brain injury, cannibalism, undeath, suicidal ideation, mind control, near genocide, and so on. He is also very undead himself and not at all shy about that.

I will try to flag all threads I'm in where sensitive subjects might come up, but if you'd like to me totally refrain from mentioning certain subjects when playing with you, I absolutely can do that. Alternately, if you'd just rather not interact with Illarion at all, please let me know here!

Comment screening is on.

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[ic] deer country inbox

2021-10-07T00:21:02Z

[ voice | text | video | omen ]

25 FEB 2022 - EARLY MAY 2022: illarion was missing from trench. his Omen was taking messages in his absence.

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[ooc] persimmons, permissions

2021-10-05T05:12:52Z

[OOC]

Backtagging: My bread and butter, though I can get slow with much older threads. Hit me up via PM/Discord if there's something you'd like me to focus on.

Threadhopping: Please!

Threadjacking: Non-private network threads: COME AT ME. Other non-private threads: Just check in with me but generally I'm cool with it!

Fourthwalling: Absolutely fine, though he's an OC, so ???

Content I absolutely need warnings for, but can still play: Companion animal abuse and death; pregnancy loss.

Content I absolutely need warnings for and can't play: Serious injury or death of toddlers and infants.

Content warning for my character: Child abuse and emotional manipulation (directed at him), cannibalism, graphic descriptions of injuries and disease, traumatic brain injury, mind control, war crimes, low-key suicidal ideation and suicidality. Please see my opt-out post here.
Note for handwaving: Illarion does not give out his name and will ask for someone to nickname him if they need something to call him by. Totally fine to skip through introductions as long as that's kept in mind!

[IC]

Physical affection: Please. He is so touch-starved even if he will not admit it.

Physical violence: ...Fighting is also a kind of touching...

Romance/flirting: He will absolutely flirt back if flirted with. Romance may be a trickier subject to navigate when he's still carrying a torch for his girl back home and emotionally crippled.

Sexual content: He's very dead and a shambling extra-dimensional abomination to boot. You be the judge of whether it's a good idea to go to Bonetown. (FTB if it gets there; be aware he'll take some convincing to try it even if he'll flirt like no one's business.)

Telepathy/mind reading: Go for it. Mindreading can make him cranky or violent, though, and the interior of his mind is Distressing. Caveat emptor.

Magic/powers: Absolutely fine! Hit me up if you're unsure how they might interact with his Everything; mostly, reality-warping powers can get weird with him involved.
Killing: For games without permadeath and minimal consequences: Murder him. Otherwise: Let's talk!

Offensive subjects/triggers: Broad caveat for Illarion having endured a great deal of trauma and also coming from an insular monoculture with odd opinions on the world. He is not easy to offend and isn't shy about frankly discussing uncomfortable subjects, but has sore spots around the treatment of children and soldiers that he can become unexpectedly upset about. Also prickly about forced truth-telling.

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[ooc] [writing] a little bit of a framing story

2021-09-27T13:54:22Z

( plip )

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