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Caelum we walk on the roof of hell gazing at flowers. - kobayashi issa - |
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Basic Information Male ethaefal of Syna Fell 91st Day of Autumn, 503 A.V. Physical Description
By Day: This worshipper of Syna stands at six feet, one inch in height, made up of long, lean muscle and a noble bearing. The sun catches in deep tones within his flesh and seems to be echoed in his eyes, almost as though he swallowed that golden star. His hair and the elegant curve of his horns shift in colors with the seasons. Summer 515 AV: His hair is a pale auburn touched with gold and his horns are ivory tipped in gold.  By Night: Beauty fails, Caelum believes, as the moon rises, draining the sun's fire until he is the image of the Drykas he once was. The embers in his hair vanish, leaving only darkness behind, possessed of endless reams of intricate knots and braids. and his features grow more broad. His skin pales, becoming thoroughly littered with winding tattoos, the dark windmarks curving about his right eye only to reappear again at the throat and yawn down the remains of him. Shorter now, and with the scars of a grasslands healer.  The Chevas mark shared by Lillis and Caelum remained unfaded where it coiled down the forsaken's throat. In fall of 511, it vanished, leaving a Lacun mark on his chest where a love should still have been. Character Concept It is often said, the brighter the soul, the darker the Forsaken. The universe shattered, Caelum still believes, when the sky shattered, spitting him into the waters of the Suvan Sea which only shattered next. Broken and embittered, he crawled his way back to earth, and broken and embittered, he walked it for years. He is a driven creature, endlessly questing for an impossible, impractical hope -- a way back home. He wishes to heal the Ukalas if, indeed, there is even a rift in them to heal. That goal still as out of reach as the stars, he strives instead to heal the bodies, hearts, and minds of a world badly broken in the Valterrian. For all the cold the loss of his sun left behind, his temper yet flares swift as sparks into conflagration. While he is occasionally viciously aloof, his existence is nonetheless scattered with blazingly bright moments of kindness, of patience, of goodness. There are rich shadows still clinging to him, seeping out of his past as one of the Forsaken, but he has evolved largely beyond their reach. |
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Character History - Pre Creation Some people have lives that are more secret than story. He is one of them. The first time he fell, his enemies waited on the shore. The Ruv'na lined up like crows and came over him like a nightmare, with fists and teeth, blades and blood. He was mere minutes old when he died in the shallows, nameless and alone, while Syna hid her face in storm clouds that wept in the sky. A few centuries later, his fury calmed in arms of his Bright Lady, he fell for a second time. It was the 91st day of fall in 503 A.V. and it stormed again. Lightning walked off the coast of Black Rock and thunder talked omens to the day. In it he forgot his name, forgot his reasons, forgot his gods and all of his lives as they shredded in his descent. They left him with nothing but his name, a perfect and crystalline series of sounds in the celestial language that was completely incapable of being uttered. The dimmest star in the sky that night he asked the name of from a sailor. It seemed as far away as the Goldenlands in the Ukalas he had called home. Caelum, the sailor told him, and so he calibrated the compass of his soul by it and went with her aboard Captain Rezar’s Bright-Eyed Mariner. They pretended to be honest maritime merchants more than they actually were, but their cheerful inequity suited him and he was reintroduced to the world. During these early hours a Priest of Rak’keli was hauled off the passenger list of a defeated competitor and in aiding him Caelum found himself returned to the path of healing. Shortly thereafter Caelum departed the company of Rezar’s crew in pursuit of all his impossible, impractical hopes. He wished to go home, an ambition torn from the salted earth of his soul, and to heal the hearts, minds, and bodies of the world badly wounded in the Valterrian. Ill omens dogged his dreams and life before his ascension as a Drykas Ankal before the Valterrian was barely recollected, a buckshot-like scatter of clips and phrases that trespassed upon his consciousness at the most inconvenient of moments. Determined to suss out the secrets of his past and sick with paranoia for the coming of another global doom, he crisscrossed Sylira and occasionally beyond. In the Spring of 505 A.V. Caelum stumbled across the slaughter of a traveling Konti family and hauled Lillis De'Nerys, the sole survivor, out of the horror. From that point forward, they were inseparable. They set up household in the city of Zeltiva and carefully sewed a life together from the scraps of themselves. They were a pair of ghosts really, lonely together. He kept the pieces of her from scattering like ashes, and she was the last lodestone summoning him home. It was love, and it was happiness too. Imperfect, but tangible. Flawed, but true. It was the closest either had come since tumbling from their respective heights. It would remain the closest for Caelum for years and years and years yet to come. Caelum continued to travel during these more merciful years, but he failed to do so too far or too often. His love for Lillis was deep, but his quest was unrelenting. Medicine. Herbalism. Glyphing. Archaelogy. Intelligence. The topics he sought and ultimately researched, having assigned himself as the architect, the cartographer and the physician to a crippled universe, spanned multiple hordes of knowledge. He gathered a small collection of friends over the region and maintained correspondence. Mostly, though, he sought, and prepared, and watched the sky for what he didn’t know but was sure yet to come. He would still be in Zeltiva, working at the university clinic and running a small and dusty oddities shop had not life been jilted and shattered, god-bombed once more. Ebonstryfe and the slaving ship's captain responsible for the slaughter of the De'Nerys family had joined fists with fate and knocked Caelum and Lills right back to their knees. Separated, enslaved, Caelum gnawed on his chains. The years in the shadow of Rhysol are a black hole pockmarked with soul thefts and mind melds as his jailers desperately sought to harness the power of the celestial language locked in his mind. It was a state of service that lacked integrity and pain that was empty of promise. His faith was ground to dust and shadow and he crumbled into a forsaken state. Therein his sins grew legion. It was not until the winter of 510 A.V. that with the aid of a member of the Rising Dawn he arranged his escape. It landed him far from Zeltiva, far from wherever Lillis whom he could only pray was yet living might be, and in his struggling to reform himself yet again, to pick back up his quest and add to it finding Lillis, the gods called him again. |
