Setting: Medieval
Name: Arytrea of Flyndeval
Age: 84
Species: Witch
Alignment: Neutral
Profession: Entertainer, belly dancer, singer, fortune teller, all with a traveling caravan of gypsies.
Singing voice similar to: Loreena McKennitt
Appearance
Violet eyes, thick wavy brown hair. 5'7" tall. Her appearance had stopped progressing in age since her 30s.
Personality
Being truly neutral means she does not interfere with most events and rarely goes out of her way to help everyone. It does not mean that she does not care about people's lives, but more that she can't afford to save everyone without having to pay the price.
However, she does strongly protect those she cares about, which are most exclusively the other bohemians she has bonded with, making them her current family.
Because of the way she bound herself to magic, she has to constantly keep balance between actions that will bring about positive and negative energies, the equal price to pay for each. Though she doesn't consider her actions good or bad, she does understand the balance of the world and testing people's alignments is part of establishing that balance.
Abilities
The only limitations to what she can do is with how much she's capable of paying in return in the allotted time.
It took her years to follow the legends to bind herself to magic, but she finally completed the trials that would connect her to all branches of magic without restraint. Though each spell normally requires a price immediately paid, she can pay it back later in separate shares.
Bound to mana doesn't mean her body can withstand channeling it to immense levels. As mana crystals would break if depleted too quickly, so would her body feel the repercussions of channeling so much magical energy without processing it safely. Like an abundant river overflowing from a rainstorm would destroy a wooden dam in its course.
(Based on my own version of the Spheres of Magic HERE)
Background
Growing up in a small village with a younger sister, Matilda, and two older brothers, Gary and Francis, their family were hard working people. Her mother was a seamstress and weaver, while her father was a merchant. Her older brothers did labor work throughout the village. In her early years she knew she had a connection to magic, innately able to cast minor spells. Although magic was badly viewed in their religious community, as something to do with the devil, her parents still tried to find her a tutor to help her better understand and control what she could do.
In one of his travels to the big city, her father befriended a mage, by the name of Ekton Hurman, who would eventually be the one to secretly teach her the arts of magic. Mages were respected, viewed as prestigious intellectuals that used crystals to channel their mana, while witches/sorcerers were vile people that gained power through pacts with demons. Which was true for the mages, but false for the most part about witches.
Prior to reaching the teaches of offensive magic, as the Mage did not want her to learn before she achieved a certain emotional maturity, tragedy happened. While away at the Mage's tower to study, her village got attacked by raiders. The peasants had been unaware of any political feud their King and Lords might have had with neighboring kingdoms, entirely taking them by surprise. By the time she got home, the raiders had passed but she found her parents and sibling dead, slaughtered in their home like most of them. Arytrea was only 14 at the time. The Mage, witnessing the carnage, knew he had to alert the college of mages so that the King could be informed of their enemy's move and see if Mages would be summoned to interfere.
He took Arytrea with him to the college where she would be sheltered. She would live there for two years, continuing her study of magic under her mage tutor but not with the entire approval of the other mages. Not feeling welcomed, looked down on by the scholars, her emotions were getting harder to keep in check and her bursts of anger would eventually cause several incidents. That kept her constantly reprimanded and even bullied by the other students in their attempts at getting her expelled from the facility.
When she first began to learn the intricacies of magic, her tutor had lead her to believe that magic defied the laws of the physical world and that it could achieve the impossible. Having learned to read during those studies, she spent most of her time at the college library, trying to find solutions to her grief. As a teenager in pain, she eventually found a way to access a locked collection of books that spoke of forbidden magic. The solutions were all there and when she dared to bring them up to her tutor, he shut her down with the word: impossible. She had been lead to believe there were practically no limitations to magic, that the price to pay for each spell would be the only thing that restrained a mage from achieving greatness. If with magic she could go back in time and prevent the village from being raided. If with magic she could go back to her family's grave and bring them back to life, not as zombies, but with a fully healed body and their intact souls back. Her tutor not only shut her down but punished her for even reading those forbidden books.
At this point, she didn't want to stay at the college anymore and had lost faith in the Mage's teachings, but not in the possibilities of magic. The turning point that made her leave was when she found out that a legend mentioned in one of the forbidden book was referred to again in a variety of other books. It spoke of a series of trials that would test the balance of positive and negative energies a spellcaster could reach with the ultimate goal to bind themselves to the magical essence of the world. Ultimately, it meant the achievement of these trials would allow the spellcaster to delay the price of each spells normally requiring an equal amount of mana aka magical energy and let the spellcaster choose to split the payment in parts. In the end, when normally a spell to bring the dead back to life with its original soul and body regenerated would require as payment for another person to die, could be paid in less drastic measures at a later time.
And so she left the college one night at 17 and went on this journey in search of all information she could find about these trials. For the next 10 years she performed the trials, doing amazing and horrible things that kept putting her determination to the test. By the time that she had finally completed the pilgrimage to the last trial and completed her journey, she realized that bringing her family back to life was pointless. That what happened in the past could not be undone without causing countless of other events to change, that they were happier in the afterlife and that things would never go back to how they were.
Name: Arytrea of Flyndeval
Age: 84
Species: Witch
Alignment: Neutral
Profession: Entertainer, belly dancer, singer, fortune teller, all with a traveling caravan of gypsies.
Singing voice similar to: Loreena McKennitt
Appearance
Violet eyes, thick wavy brown hair. 5'7" tall. Her appearance had stopped progressing in age since her 30s.
Personality
Being truly neutral means she does not interfere with most events and rarely goes out of her way to help everyone. It does not mean that she does not care about people's lives, but more that she can't afford to save everyone without having to pay the price.
However, she does strongly protect those she cares about, which are most exclusively the other bohemians she has bonded with, making them her current family.
Because of the way she bound herself to magic, she has to constantly keep balance between actions that will bring about positive and negative energies, the equal price to pay for each. Though she doesn't consider her actions good or bad, she does understand the balance of the world and testing people's alignments is part of establishing that balance.
Abilities
The only limitations to what she can do is with how much she's capable of paying in return in the allotted time.
It took her years to follow the legends to bind herself to magic, but she finally completed the trials that would connect her to all branches of magic without restraint. Though each spell normally requires a price immediately paid, she can pay it back later in separate shares.
Bound to mana doesn't mean her body can withstand channeling it to immense levels. As mana crystals would break if depleted too quickly, so would her body feel the repercussions of channeling so much magical energy without processing it safely. Like an abundant river overflowing from a rainstorm would destroy a wooden dam in its course.
(Based on my own version of the Spheres of Magic HERE)
Background
Growing up in a small village with a younger sister, Matilda, and two older brothers, Gary and Francis, their family were hard working people. Her mother was a seamstress and weaver, while her father was a merchant. Her older brothers did labor work throughout the village. In her early years she knew she had a connection to magic, innately able to cast minor spells. Although magic was badly viewed in their religious community, as something to do with the devil, her parents still tried to find her a tutor to help her better understand and control what she could do.
In one of his travels to the big city, her father befriended a mage, by the name of Ekton Hurman, who would eventually be the one to secretly teach her the arts of magic. Mages were respected, viewed as prestigious intellectuals that used crystals to channel their mana, while witches/sorcerers were vile people that gained power through pacts with demons. Which was true for the mages, but false for the most part about witches.
Prior to reaching the teaches of offensive magic, as the Mage did not want her to learn before she achieved a certain emotional maturity, tragedy happened. While away at the Mage's tower to study, her village got attacked by raiders. The peasants had been unaware of any political feud their King and Lords might have had with neighboring kingdoms, entirely taking them by surprise. By the time she got home, the raiders had passed but she found her parents and sibling dead, slaughtered in their home like most of them. Arytrea was only 14 at the time. The Mage, witnessing the carnage, knew he had to alert the college of mages so that the King could be informed of their enemy's move and see if Mages would be summoned to interfere.
He took Arytrea with him to the college where she would be sheltered. She would live there for two years, continuing her study of magic under her mage tutor but not with the entire approval of the other mages. Not feeling welcomed, looked down on by the scholars, her emotions were getting harder to keep in check and her bursts of anger would eventually cause several incidents. That kept her constantly reprimanded and even bullied by the other students in their attempts at getting her expelled from the facility.
When she first began to learn the intricacies of magic, her tutor had lead her to believe that magic defied the laws of the physical world and that it could achieve the impossible. Having learned to read during those studies, she spent most of her time at the college library, trying to find solutions to her grief. As a teenager in pain, she eventually found a way to access a locked collection of books that spoke of forbidden magic. The solutions were all there and when she dared to bring them up to her tutor, he shut her down with the word: impossible. She had been lead to believe there were practically no limitations to magic, that the price to pay for each spell would be the only thing that restrained a mage from achieving greatness. If with magic she could go back in time and prevent the village from being raided. If with magic she could go back to her family's grave and bring them back to life, not as zombies, but with a fully healed body and their intact souls back. Her tutor not only shut her down but punished her for even reading those forbidden books.
At this point, she didn't want to stay at the college anymore and had lost faith in the Mage's teachings, but not in the possibilities of magic. The turning point that made her leave was when she found out that a legend mentioned in one of the forbidden book was referred to again in a variety of other books. It spoke of a series of trials that would test the balance of positive and negative energies a spellcaster could reach with the ultimate goal to bind themselves to the magical essence of the world. Ultimately, it meant the achievement of these trials would allow the spellcaster to delay the price of each spells normally requiring an equal amount of mana aka magical energy and let the spellcaster choose to split the payment in parts. In the end, when normally a spell to bring the dead back to life with its original soul and body regenerated would require as payment for another person to die, could be paid in less drastic measures at a later time.
And so she left the college one night at 17 and went on this journey in search of all information she could find about these trials. For the next 10 years she performed the trials, doing amazing and horrible things that kept putting her determination to the test. By the time that she had finally completed the pilgrimage to the last trial and completed her journey, she realized that bringing her family back to life was pointless. That what happened in the past could not be undone without causing countless of other events to change, that they were happier in the afterlife and that things would never go back to how they were.