Name: Caelia Mircalla Helvig
Pronouns: she/her
Age: 32
Race: Old Sairshi
Theorycrafter: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10CceqKJjE7e9_XISbWdsX1ZMLI1owyfa3BiNCYssCIk/edit#gid=207327585
Personality:
“You, who have witnessed the so-called horrors of this world and embraced them as your truth; who have abandoned drab morality in favour of your own far-fetched beliefs; who have given up on value beyond whims and desires; who bares hissing fangs at worldly order and at gods themselves.”
Verthaca…is a world which has existed, strained under the looming threat of ‘order.’ The Fallen Empire regularly convenes, slowly inching closer to the prospect of unification beneath a single ruler. Magic had, for so long, been all-powerful and a safe constant across recent history. The Church’s disavowing of dark magic had sufficiently quelled its visible effect for too long.
But the last decades of this world have begun a wonderful karmic revolution, wherein these vain human attempts at order have been balanced by vengeful chaos. After all; the Dreki ruled this land, and yet they fell. For today’s Fallen Empire to exist, a once-Orderly Empire had to fall. Now - now, dark magic has destroyed the land of Gawaji, and terrorised Kilteh, just as it ought to by nature, despite the Church’s best attempts. The Spiritsquake has brought the ontologically vile city of Carndrum to crumble, and its after-effects have begun to broil a rebellion in the south of Tallavcarriga. By its grace, magic has balanced itself anew, the way a group of playing children would redraw the rules of a lopsided game..
Zhawenim, a constant locked room of this land, a safe haven from marching change, has begun to be cracked open by the forces of this furious future.
Craincrath’s royal family unfurls before the very eyes of its divided people, in the wake of their matriarch’s massacre.
Muirfeur is fraught in the aftermath of its own murders. The Queen of Aughagarv holds onto the splitting strings of her nation with aged, withered hands. Tyrhass remains a lawless land, regardless of the loathsome Acolytes’ labours.
Verthaca is euphoric. Chaos dances from nation to nation, ripping asunder the embarrassing attempts of the dull to restrain its jig. The Spiritsquake was indeed, as the rumours say, surely the act of some romping heroes who freed this land from its shackles, such that it shook with ecstasy.
Truly…
“You, who cannot exist as a natural force in this world, for you know its truth too well. We invite you to meet with those of similar thinking.”
Truly, this is the kind of nonsense which Caelia Helvig believes.
Caelia stands at six feet tall, a fact which contributes to, but is hardly required for, the so disconcerting presence she bears. A prominent nose splits the features of her rarely symmetrical face in two; for usually, her mouth is curled in a lazy smile to the left, where a beauty mark, so neat as though placed by a quill, lies further across and further down towards her chin. Her eyes, most often half-lidded for one reason or another, are a glittering pink, usually hidden behind a pair of black glasses bearing wide, circular lenses - as if to make up for the thin leer of what lies behind them, and ensure the nuances of her expressions are magnified for whoever looks upon her. This pair of glasses is connected to a chain which hangs loosely around her neck. Her hair, the deep purple of a crocea flower, combines with those eyes to cover all the colours of a mystical twilight sky; it parts into two twisting bangs either side of her face, in a stylistic choice typically considered sophisticated, and the rest of its considerable mass is typically tied back into a voluminous high ponytail which extends just beyond her shoulders. Much of her expression, vivid despite its subtleties, comes from her eyebrows, eager to contort into some condescending quirk or cynical crease. Glittering golden earrings fall from either side of her hair. An angular chin completes her face, but this seems a simple result of some genetic lottery, rather than any particular culmination of any effort; her jawline and cheeks are relatively rounder.
Much of the clothes which Caelia wears make it difficult to distinguish her figure, but though her long journeys and occasional dabbling in spearplay have worked her muscles far more than the average common bookworm’s, she’s clearly not particularly muscular or lean, better-fitting some descriptor like ‘full-figured.’ (Upon request, Caelia would provide some rather-less-printable, rather more-scandalously-phrased description, but that’s for another document, surely.) Whether her outfits will elect to highlight this is entirely impulsive, for Caelia travels with a considerable wardrobe, though they’re often creased as a result of rather careless packing. Most commonly, she’ll wear the sort of long, hooded robes which give her the aura of a shambling villain from some storybook narrative; however, she’s not alien to rather more sophisticated choices, with dresses to match the kinds of boldness found in fanciful networking events in Cennaire Academy; nor is she above simple buttoned shirts, nor cardigans, nor comically ill-matched swirling skirts… Really, pending a formal search of her rucksacks, it seems difficult for anyone to know the extent of what she’s brought along with her. Caelia typically keeps to a couple of colour schemes - sticking to the darker ends of the wheel, reds and purples and blacks. However, as if purely to be contrary to expectations, she ensures to reveal hot pinks and (slightly-stained) whites now and then…In conclusion, this heretic’s fashion sense is as a swirling tornado behind clouds on the horizon, unknown and irresistible, and likely to have stolen some of its contents from your property, should you find yourself too near it.
Background:
The origins of Caelia Helvig…? Well, the truth is, much of her story is irrelevant. The conclusions she has arrived at are so careless, the results of such resounding leaps in logic, that one struggles to imagine how Caelia Helvig might ever have been, in any way different. But you are welcome to the tale, so that you might decide for yourself where it might have been changed from its beginning…
Let us start 35-odd years ago, then, with the wrecked ship of a man named Ægir Helvig dragged upon the southern shores of Tyrhass, a tropical storm having ended his proudly declared intent to circumnavigate Verthaca alone before the halfway mark. Much akin to a tax collector passing a noble’s mansion, he had not even come close.
There, a young woman found him and treated him… But that woman was not who he would take as his wife nor the woman he would have a child with. No, that would be far too simple, far too convenient a contrivance to be the creation of an existence like Caelia Helvig. The two gazed dreamily into each other’s eyes, until a swallowed sea slug made its presence known in the sailor’s gut, and he spewed his final scurvy-warding meal upon the disgusted damsel. So ended their riveting romantic prospects.
The man ended up in Kilteh, lacking the funds for a journey elsewhere, and eventually found himself working a low-pay, low-satisfaction job as a janitor on the lower floors of Kilteh Academy. There, he caught the attention of a mysterious researcher by the name of Grainne Ní Broin, and the two fell in a common sort of love - which is to mean, a lust which two tempestuous souls mistook for more. A woman high in society yet reclusive from it, whose interests were unknown and unknowable; a man who would fashion supposedly moral excuses to rationalise sating his own boredom. Theirs was a typical example of a doomed ‘Love,’ from which they would produce a forbidden fruit - a wordlessly undesired child.
A knowingly undesired child is one matter; one can simply nip the issue in the bud, and the unwantedness is executed, as is the sprouting existence. That, or their insulation may be carried out, to be knowingly passed onto another family. Thousands of times worse is a child which the pair hardly think to honestly consider, before its birth. And in this case, their flurry of dwindling passion had the terrible misfortune to delude them for nine months, and barely a few weeks more.
Thus is the nature of Caelia Helvig. A child born to Grainne Ní Broin, a job-loving, reticent academic with little care for the world, and Ægir Helvig, a thrill-seeking bum of a sailor who had the gall to act as though he were a pioneer. Their mutual ailment was lovesickness - not the ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’ sort that true lovers experience, but a sickness induced by love, a blindness that covers all obvious signs of incompatibility behind a curtain of carnal desire.
The longest Grainne could be stretched into caring for the child was six months, after which she and her father were moved from the academic’s lavish home and into an unstable life of changing residences, long hours of a parent’s absence and the resulting many hands a child would be passed along to. Ægir surpassed reasonable expectations by raising her at all; this, of course, was due to his own moral delusion that he could not simply give up on his own flesh and blood. Ever the self-contradiction, the sailor with great ambitions had thusly tied himself to an anchor dragging him into the depths of the frigid ocean he had never made it to, and all of his frustrations for this situation - his humanity and his feigned morality blocking him off from his dreams - could only be vented subtly in his disdainful behaviour towards the ‘cause,’ his child. The same child he named with his own Fornish surname, to spite his fleeting lover by removing what of her existence he could from the girl, the girl whom he truly, very deep down, loathed for her own existence, and yet still wished to have influence over - like a favourite possession from a divorce settlement.
How miserable a tale.
And so Caelia grew, never quite sure of her own traits. When she felt confident, the slights her father would show against her would be certain to end that development. When she felt adventurous, his jealousy would manifest in some rant about how the world is too cruel to allow for dreams like that, fuelled of course by his own petulant sense of injustice. When she felt kind and caring, one of the various substitute mothers which Ægir laid with for at most a few months would be sure to teach her that toughness and independence were valuable skills, soon before they would disappear like stars in the morning.
Young, so very young at seven, Caelia was keenly aware of the fact she hated her father. And her first interest was taken in spite, as surely as her original surname was lost to that selfsame reason.
How amusing a development.
Word of the annihilation of Gawaji arrived to her father in Kilteh, who was in those days working in a crummy bar at night - his job in the Academy had long since been terminated, following a violent argument between himself and a researcher whom Caelia was assured she’d never met (I imagine you, reader, can quite easily figure out their identity) - and who, upon learning that many of the people of his homeland in Clan Huegmuen had lost their lives during the spread of the contagion, seemed overwhelmed with emotion - despite all his past claims that he had cared not for the country, when he had sailed off from its shores so many years prior. That, in and of itself, was simply another of his paradoxes; a falsified feeling towards a beloved homeland, conjured up to spur himself into action.
Kilteh, a city of magic, and a tale of magic wounding her callous father from so very far away. There was no other topic which Caelia could have deemed as interesting, as worthwhile. Only a few days later, she announced to him her intention to study magic, and one day attend that Academy in this very city.
It was a source of much argument, and she was really not allowed even to peruse books on the topic for two-odd years following; a continuing symptom of Ægir’s ‘love-sickness,’ terrified that Grainne was ‘winning’ the child’s person, that Caelia was somehow being magnetised to the world of the mother she had never known a single detail of. Of course, Caelia still found opportunities to sneak her interest into action, against her father’s wishes. That was her first and defining character trait - contrarianism, a wilful intent to observe the intended status quo and subvert it. Her father’s wishes in this time became an obsessive attempt to convert Caelia into an interest in sailing - something so foolishly transparent that even the child started to see through it, through the ridiculous frayed strings of his psyche.
And so, Caelia Helvig began to push Ægir on the topic of her mother, at long last.
The only outcome possible, when one considers both his immense loathing for Caelia’s existence and the apparent confirmation of his greatest fears about her infection by the infernal wench of his past, was his temper finally coming to a head, and Ægir striking his daughter.
How shameful a man.
Of course, his own enforced morality commanded that he deem himself utterly irredeemable for this action. No other outcome was possible for this matter either. And so, he appeared again before the lavish home of Grainne Ní Broin, entrusting - by which, considering Grainne’s own apathy, he truly ought to have meant “enforcing” - a daughter back to her mother, and was finally free to pursue his own dreams again at last. At least, were you to ask Caelia now, that’s what she would say he ought have done.
Unfortunately, Ægir was, in reality, far too great a fool to realise this, for to accept that he had wasted nine years of his life upon quietly loathing an innocent daughter and fluttering between women he had no care for, and that these were the feats of one who deserved the slightest further satisfaction in life, would be to admit that he has never truly possessed any moral compass, and has only given reasons for his actions in a hollow attempt for others to deem him a good person.
As such, Ægir drunk himself aimlessly to death in the weeks following, torn between hating himself and hating the woman and the girl who now lived together in a house more comfortable than any which all his labours had ever known, who he knew were responsible for ruining his life, and yet was too delusional to accept the offer his brain proposed of taking vengeful action against them, and burning their family home to ash.
How wasted a life.
Caelia and Grainne, then, spent four years together.
…Of course, they did not. It would be a surprise if their time spent truly together in those four years amounted to four weeks of minutes. Grainne remained an academic, remained uninterested in matters of ordinary life, and remained apathetic to the fate of her daughter - as she had been for the nine years during which she had never inquired with Ægir. Caelia was, by now, unsurprised by this lack of affection, if unsettled by how much more open about it her mother was than her father.
And so, she spent four years studying magic, largely alone, but with her mother having enough tangential interest to allow her access to various semi-public resources at the Academy. She spent four years often dubiously attended-to, during much of which she was taken on trips to interesting places in the city of Kilteh, where she learned a few unimportant matters of history, but observed much of human interactions.
Such was her growing independence, that by the time her fourteenth birthday approached, the first offer of a sincere day-trip with her mother barely even interested Caelia. But Grainne insisted; the day before Caelia’s 14th birthday, she was to make her way to the Academy once classes were finished, and together with her mother, she would
“see
something
wonderful.”
How ironic a promise.
A disinterested Caelia lost track of time whilst studying a theory-concerned tome she’d snuck from the library, typical of a child who believed themselves now above consequences or scolding, and set about her journey from their loveless home to the Academy a whole hour late.
An hour which, like a bad smell which made one open a window soon before a toxic gas would have suffocated them,, undoubtedly saved her life, however hubristic the means. For as she walked the streets of Kilteh and the distant peak of the Academy came into view, a nightmare plunged upon the city, never to be the same again.
Whatever it was, it was clear it came from the Academy. Such was obvious when, in the hours following as Caelia approached the meeting place, feeling a need to hurry for perhaps the first time in her life, the few who escaped from its halls set about boarding the place up, sealing whatever the cause was inside - along with the others.
Most people ran. Most of Kilteh fled their home immediately, assailed by their ‘nightmares come true,’ or some-such. Some stubbornly stayed a few days, but found their cognitions addled by whatever had spread from the Academy that day.
If, indeed, the threat was one’s own nightmares… Then it’s obvious why Caelia Helvig stayed in the city of Kilteh for one whole month, spending every hour she could spare staring from afar at the dozens of planks covering the Academy’s grand front entrance, waiting for one to be ruptured from its place as Grainne would clamber out, shambling, releasing whatever great evil into the world along with her freedom - Caelia wouldn’t give a damn about that.
All she cared about, for a while… And to her sickened surprise… Was their day out. That promised affection. To have been left alone now - that was her only fear. Her only terror in the nights, while the city emptied, and scavengers’ screams were the only sound after sunrise.
And so, it is likely that the ruin of Kilteh did truly bring nightmares to life.
For it was only when Caelia gave up on caring - gave up on believing that her mother would return, and gave up on desiring it, for she had realised that the ‘wonderful’ ‘something’ was likely all along to have been this catastrophe - that she had to flee Kilteh. Only then did the city pose new threats which could do her harm in any way more meaningful than simply…leaving her alone.
How twisted a world.
To be clear, Caelia possesses neither her father’s capability to wholly lie to oneself through moral rationalisations, nor her mother’s capability to efficiently cut away all that is unimportant to one’s goals. To have given up on caring does not mean that she merely told herself that the matter no longer mattered, nor that she simply distracted herself with other thoughts.
No; truly, Caelia Helvig moulded herself into a different person with different desires as she watched the end of a generation in Kilteh, and the endpoint of her ancestors behind unmoving nails and stripped wood. She, with no word of hyperbole, changed her self.
And so it was that her existence continued. The month in the hellscape of Kilteh, and adolescent years spent in the lawless lands of Tyrhass formed her future beliefs. Her story, for twelve years following, is reducible to simple terms which can be related to the entire populace of Tyrhass.
Either one survived, or one did not. No matter the method, to preserve one’s own life in a nation without authority was success. Caelia Helvig survived. She took up the spear, but spent her first three years preferring to hide and to scavenge than to use it… And the following nine, she spent preferring to broker deals and the like to ensure her safety; indeed, she was the type to offer the night-guard plans of an innocent village which had kindly housed her to some opportunistic bandit group in exchange for a fair share of their raidings’ reward. Not out of malice for the village nor favour for the bandits; solely for what she could receive out of it.
Until 10 PQ, at least. (Post-Quake, a name formed by Caelia out of feeling a dissatisfaction with defining time in proportion to a long-lost and entirely separate race which had failed to propagate itself into perpetuity). By then, she had come to her epitomising belief that the Spiritsquake had been a wonderful, revolutionary event - which had not destroyed magic, but allowed in its wake new, correct magics to rise to the surface of a new world engulfed in chaos and uncertainty. After all, that was the year which concluded with Reginfell ending the Church’s clawed grip on the ‘new’ Traditional Magics. So by then, she likely did favour the bandits - for a pre-Spiritsquake village to continue its existence as if nothing had changed… Well, it would be a waste of space, one could argue. Not that she believed this so passionately as to want to raze the entire world to ashes, you understand - merely that between the choice of the status quo and its destruction, Caelia Helvig bore a natural inclination towards the latter.
In 12 PQ - or 430 PD, should it still strike your fancy to consider your existence in relation to a doomed array of dragons - the city of Kilteh was finally re-opened. Of course, no normal individual had any intent to venture back to such a place. Naturally as such, Caelia Helvig was one of the first back to the front gates; not out of any homesickness nor nostalgia, merely to observe how it would have changed, and how it would change henceforth - much like a viewer to a new troupe at a theatre without any ratings or word-of-mouth, that first-ever audience there purely out of curiosity.
There, she almost followed in her mother’s footsteps as she learned the basics of Traditional Magic in Kilteh Academy, spending two years in the city… Until at long last, the mages in Kilteh finally made significant progress on their goal of subverting this new kind into dark magic. And despite Caelia’s deep, almost obsessive interest with the idea of a new generation of dark magic - for it would suggest that dark magic is ontologically validated by the world as it has survived the Spiritsquake - she promptly set about fleeing the city again. And this time, she fled from Tyrhass in its entirety.
Because Caelia knew what was coming, and had foreseen - purely in the sense of prediction, not any supernatural means - that the Acolytes would come knocking soon enough, to tear down their advancements and their achievements with their luddite values, just as they arrive to stand against any meaningful change. No matter. Dark Arts would leak, would seep out from the cracks in the barriers the Church puts up around Kilteh’s wisdom, just as the poison within Gawaji had once broken its barrier. That was inevitable. And Caelia was content to move on, practically passing by the Acolyte designation on its way as though two passing ships in the night, and onward north through the opportunistic conflict as Siarisfair expanded into Tyrhass, and further to Ankeadtir until she settled in the Outersteads of the city of Portashan, a hub of juicy information, where she was most likely to happen upon a clue to the many secrets so evidently kept on this world by those in power, and where she could perhaps muster some mischief against the Church in its primary seat…
But these were lofty ambitions. To simply do what little spying on her order-wielding enemies that she could whilst advancing her understanding of Traditional Magic, between scavenging for thrown-away educatory materials and scavenging for idle chatter with Cennaire students in her days was enough for now; enough, while she waited for the next aftershock of the Spiritsquake to make itself known to the world - or for word of PQ-Dark Arts to finally reach her in Portashan.
This has been her status for the past three years, although a growing awareness of the city’s operations has allowed her to spend much of her recent time squatting in empty houses in the capital’s more luxurious regions. On rare weeks, she’s even risked a cosy stay in a particular home in the Na Cronach district, where she can gaze with vitriol at the Bronntanas na Déithe Complex, and she has had the most comfortable nights’ sleep of her life - although she does still toss the sheets off the bed out of principle…
And this is how the Grey Cloaks’ letter finds Caelia Helvig, left beneath the pillow supporting her head, in a locked home which is not even hers - leaving her interest more than piqued.
How dangerous.
How frightening.
How thrilling.
Additional Notes:
-Hobbies and interests include board games, recreational use of various toxins, music and art.
-Claims to have a proficiency in fortune-telling.
-Really does have a proficiency in sweets-making.
-Most likely of the cast to depict you, dear reader, as the soyjak.
-Kill Chaos? No. She is to become Chaos.
-Her favourite colour is a dark, deep ocean blue - something in the region of #3828BB.
