Category: 2011

#30 – Baerr’a’Him’Eiren’al

“They don’t have Tunen there, Sal,” Leandra shook her head quickly.

“No Tunen?” Salvitore blinked in confusion, “No guilds?”

Leandra shrugged helplessly.

“No wonder the boy is so confused,” Salvitore mumbled

Kendric growled, “I’m not confused! You all just make things too complicated, and you ignore what IS complicated!” He threw down the tail of the rope as he finished the net he’d made to accommodate the lodestone Salvitore had grown by merely touching. With and additional the rock tied securely around his waist, the lodestone was finally tethered evenly. “The islands are alive, they’re a delicate ECOSYSTEM! All you landers don’t understand, that’s why we don’t invite you up! You fish without farming, you farm without watching, and you watching without understanding!”

“I would very much like to understand… just give me a chance,” Salvitore sighed. “Life is my calling. Please,” Salvitore pleaded to Kendric with a stuttering whisper, “please let me see the Isle with my own eyes…”

The final character for this month. The isle of Himmerd itself. Within the realm of Issendoth and beyond, there are a myriad of fae, elementals, spirits, creatures, etc. Summoners are well known for seeking the words of the world, to summon, contain, capture and control the various lifeforms outside of humanity. What everyone had been missing before the current story was that the fabled isle of Himmerd was ITSELF alive. It was a large and complicated creature that couldn’t easily be compared to a rabbit anymore than a human, but it was alive. It had feelings, desires, interests, and it could love. It held a deep affection for the creatures and humans who lived on its surface, and it grow and breathed like any other creature. From its kin the lodestones formed and were pushed to the surface, like pearls to a clam or sweat on a horse’s back. Throughout its body were caves, channels, even water and other strange liquids. Plants, flowers, and growth of all kinds sprung up from its surface ever season the eons ago when it was thrust out of the world’s crust, and a spark of life first ignited within its rocky core. But like most large creatures, it’s birth was slow, and it’s mind was even slower to form. It isn’t until the second battle on its back that it reaches out to find someone to whisper its name to. The one it finally tells it to is Kendric, as the first Wizard to speak the word kindly to it. As the first child it had reared who had grown to know magic. But it also told Kendric its name out of fear, because it would rather have someone kind and dutiful like Kendric know it’s name, then a sinister and powerful man like Drahomir know it.

And so it whispered to him, “I am the child of earth, born in the sky, Baerr’a’Him’Eiren’al”

#29 – Master Bernard Julius II

Bernard is the current headmaster of The Academy, though it doesn’t do much for him. He became the headmaster by being appointed by the previous headmaster, and because the rest of the Wizards had no interest in leading other (cats) Wizards around by the nose. Bernard was never particularly aggressive or much of a leadership candidate, but the centuries spent organizing the contents of the castle and arranging treaties with nearby Dutchies and nobles have given him a sense of the size of the world, the chaos of his fellow man, and a feeling that work is never done. The trials of surviving the catacombs contained under the building, various poorly labelled components scattered around the campus, and the jabs and spells thrown at him by his fellow Wizards has kept him on his toes, and he is the most well-rounded of the Wizards at the academy, equally proficient in mending a bone or a book, at growing a lightningstorm in an afternoon or taming a unicorn (provided he can enlist a local town maiden for a few hours)

He has also become the owner of one of the most extensive and varied collections of trophies from around the world, including a vast array of dragonscales and one head from a particularly ornery Chimera (who somehow escaped loosing his other heads). He uses his collection and variety of skills to subdue the machinations of his fellows as well as keep a thriving bartering system goign amongst his colleagues and his contacts amidst the Hansa and nobility that has kept him well taken care of through the years.

#28 – Sillesia Portent

Sillesia is a beautiful young girl. tall for her age of sixteen, with subtle curves, a bright smile, dark eyes and pale, smooth golden hair. Thadeua Schnagel had taken a liking to her right away, and Sillesia, being a rather naive girl despite having grown up amongst Wizards, took to his affections since he was the first man to ever approach her directly about his feelings. It wasn’t long before those feelings took a more physical bent, though, and Thadeus began manipulating her mind.

The manipulations weren’t clear at first. The other Wizards did not even take note of them, since she was still as cheerful energetic as ever, though she was upset when they forced Thadeus to turn her away for a new apprentice. She met Leandra then, after Thadeus went through yet another appprentice, and she was eager to hear word of how her old ‘mentor’ was doing. Leandra and Sillesia actually got along rather well right away, which eve nsurprised Sillesia. Leandra hadn’t had many friends, and wasn’t used to an earnest interest from other girls her age. They began studying together, and Sillesia was happy for a time to have someone more diligent than herself to bounce ideas off of, grab notes from, and chat about the little tidbits of the life of a young girl that you can’t just keep inside.

In return, Sillesia taught Leandra a few spells to tame her hair and clean her clothes. Sillesia’s specialties had always tended towards domestic tasks. She figured if she was dusting a room or expelling the grime of years with magic, it was still respectable and extaordinary, even if one of the usual maids could have done the same thing in an afternoon with a mop and bucket.

But as Leandra’s apprenticeship began to strain with Thadeus, he found Sillesia again, and coaxed spells into her mind again, so subtly that Sillesia didn’t think about the changes at first. Thadeus didn’t look at her or touch her the way he used too. Too many of the other Wizards were watching him for him to ever have Sillesia the way he used to, but he had so much pent up frustration that he took it out by turning others against Leandra. Soon Sillesia found herself criticizing Leandra for her ill-temper towards Thadeus, and even snubbing their usual times together to ‘teach her a lesson’.

Her ties to Thadeus had been roped in so well by the time the incident happened with Thadeus, that Sillesia openly attacked Leandra in rage that her friend could have attacked the man she ‘still loved’.

The most terrible part of the whole matter is that Sillesia really did have a spark of love for Thadeus deep down. He had showered her with gifts and attention, and she had enjoyed that attention until it was pulled away by her elders. But Thadeus pushed and enhanced that love until it burned like a bitter ember in her stomach, and Maria had to work for years to try and undo the damage. By the time her mind was straightened out, she had grown neutral to Leandra, and couldn’t fathom why she had ever been concerned with the bookish young woman, even though, at the time, those feelings had been the only genuine thing in her life.

#27 – Madam Herringbone

Madam Herringbone was a somewhat tall and very guant woman in her early sixties, with thinning black hair and thin wrinkled lips that seemed to always be held in a relaxed but sullen expression. Due to some magical impairment no one has been fully able to explain, her eyes have slowly deteriorated over her lifetime despite Maria Toella’s best efforts. She is the only Wizard known to be forced to wear glasses, and has a tendancy to squint at people sideways when they are causing her trouble (the people, not the glasses).

She considers many people in life to be ‘a great deal of trouble’ and has spent many afternoon tea hours kibitzing with Maria over the laziness of this generation, the unruliness of teenagers and the immorality and generally weak stock of the current generation of adult Wizards.

What she is not, though, is a fake. She is a very astute Wizard, with a keen sense of pronunciation, and a vast vocabulary of Words. What she lacks in arcane strength she makes up for in fluidity in constructing incantations and the variety of spells at her disposal. Her particular interest is in investigation. Words and phrases to find who a person’s lover is, or to see if it will rain in a month, or whether a new plant is poisonous without having to feed it to the cook’s pet cat. She passes some of this rational examination of life on to Leandra while she was at school, and wishes more of her students were as quiet and respectful as her  (though even she admitted that the girl’s attentiveness bordered on neurotic nervousness at times)

#26 – The Eldest-Mother

The isle of Himmerd is ‘ruled’ by the oldest woman alive at the time, unless she chooses to default to someone else (which has happened quite often), with the consent of a council of four others who are voted in based on daring or voluntary actions recognized by the community. Currently a woman named Patra Madrigal is in charge, and her biggest problem is keeping the scattered refugees from the attack together across a handful of sky-kraft that have had to be retrofitted for water-travel since most are too heavy with people to stay in the air long. Between that and the conflicts between the council members and scuffles breaking out from the assortment of stresses put on everyone involved, she has had her hands full, and only wishes that the town’s doctor and her supply of tea hadn’t been left behind on the island.

#25 – The Mystic Smithy

The mystic smithy is a tough sinewy little old man. His head has since expelled all but a thin ring of curled unruly white hairs (only along the back of his neck, and a few stray curls from his neck that still pretend to be a beard). So now his bald head shines with a glisten of sweat at most hours, since he has devoted his life to the production of magical artifacts. His life is part master inventor, part master Wizard, but mostly that of an eccentric hermit. He lives up in a cave amongst the Alppen-range, conversing with fire sprites about the temperatures for perfectly marbled steel, and having tea with wood spirits to make dispensations to acquire the trace minerals he needs for his alloys without harming their lands (or angering them. Nothing ruins your sleep like a dryad kicking your door in with her hooves to berate you on trampling her gardens).

He had put himself in his chosen seclusion for a number of reasons. The other Wizards tired him. They didn’t want to listen to the specifics of his lessons. They just wanted to get the end results. He found too many customers across the known lands, but all they seemed to want were weapons or ways to overpower their rivals. He wanted to find bliss in the pure pursuit of creation, and though he had a wife for a time, she eventually left him when it became obvious he enjoyed his work more than the time he spent with her. Their parting with amicable, and he left her with a recommendation and a kind word written for any children she might have who found The Word, and that she come to him if she need of worldly possessions.

But over time, he grew to understand the real reason in his heart that he left. He was an elementalist himself. He never lost full use of The Word, but his ability to shape metal make certain of that, since he was the inventor of the dampener-bracelets that have become a standard of the few Elementalists known in the world. Since he has made them himself, he has a tendancy to continuously tweak his over time, and adjusted them to aid in his crafting whether he needs more fluidity or the stability of the Word at the moment.

When all has come to pass in the current story, Kendric comes to him requesting apprenticeship. The smithy gladly accepts after he hears of what had happened to Leandra, chuckling that he wouldn’t have told the Wizards about her even if she had come to him.

“But what is done is done, events have passed and cannot be captured again.”