PETRA CORMORANT
Seeker After Truth
Full Name: Petra Sophia Cormorant
Race: Human
Sex: Female
Age: Nineteen
Height: 5'2
Weight: 119lbs
Birthdate: 25 Searing, 100
Birthplace: Hahseu, Kalzasi Middens
Profession: Magical Researcher, Red-Robed Circle Mage
Housing: Petra lacks the sort of wealth that might allow her a fashionable address in the Guilded Expanse, but she has made the best of what her meager allowance and scant royalties have produced. She is installed in a one-room apartment in a complex just above one of the small outposts of the Baker’s Guild. Running water and a feather bed are more than welcome, and the security of the Guilds comforts her when her worries overtake her. The scent of fresh bread waking her every morning is quite the bonus.
It’s far from spacious, but Petra has written her personality into the decor. When it doesn’t smell of fresh bread, the apartment smells of rotting paper and old leather from the heaps of borrowed books that decorate the corners and sprawl over the ink-stained table. Manuscript paper and half-finished scrolls are never far from the hand, with expensive ink carefully tucked onto the high shelves that Petra can only barely reach.
Otherwise, it is a riot of color. An old pre-sundering rug she found in a flea market hangs on one wall, a complex and eye-catching pattern of faded carmine and thin cerulean hiding the cracks running up the plaster. Her blankets are gifts from a dyer’s apprentice she knows, and splash indigo and violet into the room, and occasionally hang off the well-lathed table and chairs from which Petra does most of the work she does not leave at the Tower.
Partners: It is not so much that Petra has been unlucky in love, than she has never had time nor circumstance to pursue it. The dark slums of the Midden have little enough romance within, and by the time she might have had a concept of partnership or love, she was gone. Tucked into a foundling’s school where, even amongst the detritus which washes up Kalzasi’s shores, she was of undesirable and low-class parentage. Foreigner, pauper, Midden-walker. Friends were few, and attention scant.
After her education, her work consumed her time. Work, and experimentation, as her Cardinal Rune came to life. Money would buy her food, and paper, and access to libraries, while romance could buy her a broken heart or a moment’s reprieve. A far worse investment, in her immature mind.
Then, the circle. Her Trial. The lure of power. Only now is there room in her life for someone else, and while she does not necessarily intend to find someone, she is also not free from the usual human desires. Who does not wish, while on the border of awareness and sleep, for someone to hold them?
Titles: Initiate of the Circle of Spells, Apprentice Summoner of the Red Robe
Factions: Circle of Spells
Fluencies: Taught common from birth, it is Petra’s native tongue, but as time goes on her familiarity with Kathalan starts to rival it. After all, the Gelerians have just as great a literary output as anyone else, and for a woman who lives amidst paper and words, it is only natural that they be the primary conduit for language. Her spoken Kathalan is mediocre at best, but she reads and writes it with just as much understanding and nuance as she does common at this point.
Appearance
Petra has never been happy with her body. She was always shorter than the other girls, always a few inches behind, never as well developed, never as beautiful. Her failings are doubtless the product of her poverty - the well-fed, healthy, cared for girls will always stand above her, and she always below. She is not some rare statuesque woman for which wars are fought, she is not even a woman to draw admiring eyes or make men and women swoon with her passing. She stands below most, always looking up. She is athletic, lithe and well-toned, hardly a shred of fat on her - a dancer’s body and a gymnast’s frame, for all the good it has done her. She cuts a slim and unassuming figure, one bereft of voluptuous curves or a powerfully feminine disposition. Yet with sharp cat’s eyes, a smooth curve to her jaw, full lips and lustrous hair, she is indubitably feminine.
Her voice redeems her. It is so rarely heard, a treasure when it is, when it can be dragged from her by circumstance or persuasion. She has the voice of a songbird, light and flitting, but can so quickly turn to the bugle of exhortation, trumpets of war. It is high, melodic, authoritative without effort, lightly and variously accented, and always cutting through the noise to find the attention it often deserves.
She moves with the smooth poise of someone who is completely sure of themselves. Each action is purposeful, each decision intentional, and all backed with a natural dexterity and athleticism that makes every motion flow like water. She walks with a steady gait, purposeful and decisive. Her eyes rarely wander, rarely leave but to circumspect, never free of that hint of paranoia. Her wasted motion comes from nervous habits, little twitches that never leave her entirely still. She taps fingers against her leg, moves her feet as though conducting music only she can hear, brushes hair from her eyes that was hardly visible, adjusts gloves and straightens coats.
She dresses conservatively, practically, never one to titillate or push boundaries. She shows almost no skin in as a rule: coats bought from pawnshops and often cut in a masculine, military fashion garb her, accompanied by collared shirts and almost always her dark, thin gloves. It is as if she is afraid of sight, as if the air itself is dangerous to her. Better to keep herself covered, better to leave herself what ambiguity she can muster and not broadcast her mediocrity to a world always ready to judge.
Her expression bears as little adornment as her body: her smiles are small, her frowns imperceptible. Her laugh is most often a sharp exhalation of breath rather than a girlish titter, though the lilting peals of mirth can come when earned. She plays her hand close to her flat chest, keeps her heart off her sleeve, gives little and sees so very much. A small woman of small gestures, small expressions of emotion, few words with great meaning, a quiet edifice against a roiling world.
Personality
Petra is a woman of action instead of words. She is decisive, stubborn, quick to act when she sees a course ahead of her. She takes her moment, considers the eventualities, but when it is time to put rubber to road she does not hesitate. She is not a woman to leave possibilities unexplored, not a woman to leave questions unasked. She does not shy away from violence, but never rushes to it, has never truly sought it, despite the inarguable thrills it offers. It is a means to an end, like all others. Like it, knowledge is useful, only in so far as it teaches her how to act, how to behave.
She is a woman of regret and perfectionism. Nothing she does is ever quite good enough for Petra, she has never measured up to her own standards. When everything is a learning experience, everything is critiqued and every flaw examined. She has made more mistakes than she would care to admit, more than she can remember. They haunt her, stick with her, drive her through a range of emotions she wishes she could cordon off and stay well clear of. She blames no-one but herself for her actions, at heart. She is the only thing she can truly control, and she has seen the possibilities that can be achieved with willpower and determination, wit and talent. For the world to not be just as she would like it is a sin on her shoulders, one heavy enough to trouble Atlas.
Emotions have never been something Petra has controlled. They rule her, though she so rarely shows them. She loves fiercely, hates passionately, enjoys to the fullest. Friends are valuable to her, but trust is limited. With a heart so sensitive, walls must be built, great thick edifices of stone and ice that drive others away. She is cautious in her relationships, as paranoid with them as she is with everything else. Within her rests a human soul, beneath the porcelain and steel, and it is just the same as any other: doubtful, fearful and lonely.
To her, knowledge is more valuable than gold. Secrets are her treasure, understanding her drug. She has no time for knowledge without application, but she has yet to find morsels of wisdom which cannot be turned into scalpels or hammers with which to shape the world to her liking. She is brilliant, quick-witted, with an insatiable and often-distracted mind, one which longs for activity when there is none and relishes in the novel or unique. The world is a great puzzle, and Petra will discover it all or die trying. To know the world is to be free of its constraints, to be able to make it one’s servant, and above all this is what Petra craves: freedom, self-mastery, the ability to follow her dreams without having to bow to the orders of nature or man. The ignorant are condemned to the yoke of Tyrants, and Petra dreams of escaping this cloying destiny.
For Petra, every day is a day to improve, every day one step closer to the grave. Her time is spent, invested, and she guards it carefully, but is always ready to bet on the novel, the unexplored, to take the road less traveled through a wintry evening and burn her candle at both ends to light up brighter, but snuff out to smoke and ash all the quicker.
And yet, for all of her self-possession and confidence, she is lonely. Terrified, nervous, shy, lost. Her greatest fear is to be too mundane for notice, to not be worth the time of others, and strives to be too good to ignore or forget, and yet to open herself up to those who might truly value her is the greatest of trials. She feels emotions strongly, but bottles them up, lets them stew until they explode out in a violent wave; she is afraid to drop that veneer of cool command, lest someone see that she is less than she claims to be, but at the same time she yearns to have someone willing to see her for who she is. At her core lies ambition, a desire for love, glory and success, to make something of herself and become what she wants to be. What makes her cry soft tears when no-one can see her is the smouldering fear that those goals: the woman she wants to be, the woman she is, and the woman she wants to be loved as, are all different.
Where does one turn, when they are too petrified to turn inwards?
History
Part 1: The Midden
She doesn’t know where her parents were from. She never thought to ask. Born in Hahseu in the very bowels of poverty, her childhood was one defined by what it did not have. Safety, comfort, nutrition, peace, a mother. Petra killed one parent on her way into the world, and her father never let her forget it.
She lived on barley and potatoes - bread and rice were luxuries above their station. Meat was a distant dream, and vegetables rare enough to be treats. Her father scavenged, and brought Petra with him to the refuse heaps in lieu of leaving her alone. Perhaps it was there that her curiosity sparked. Perhaps her search for knowledge is just a wealthier form of her trawling for scrap metal and unbroken glass - the overturning of the worthless to find valuable treasures.
She has no siblings, no family. Her first five years were solitary - that is her chief memory of them, besides the cuts and bruises that came from scrapping for the off-cuts of a wealthier society. Her childhood ended as so many do in the Midden - with an invasion from the Warrens.
Petra doesn’t remember the monsters clearly. Bone and metal and teeth. She remembers only the scratch of the long knife on her shoulder. The fire of the cut that dug into her skin was painful, but what came next was far worse. The wizard, for it must have been a wizard, cut the Cardinal Rune of summoning on her. Perhaps he cut it on many children there - she is the only one who survived.
She remembers her soul lighting on fire. She remembers the voices howling in her ear. Her body writhed on a dirt floor, her limbs twisted in ways they were never meant to. She clawed at her face when her eyes burned like hellfire, and she scratched at her abdomen when the monsters she heard in her mind threatened to tear their way out.
A neighbor found her, and helped her. No more father, no more home. Petra woke slowly from her nightmare, alive and well. The casualties were heaped and burned - she can still taste the smell of cracking bones and melting skin.
Her father never had much, but now he needed nothing. Clothes sold, food pawned, hovel exchanged, everything given to the vultures - Petra collected the sum her father never could, but liquefying everything that had sustained them. She bought a day’s passage into the upper city, tasted fresh air, and found her way to a registry. Citizenship was given to her, at long last.
Such a terrible thought, to judge the horrors worth it, in the end. The guilt still makes Petra hurt.
Part 2: Awakening
The foundling schools are hardly where Kalzasi pours its money. Without ties to noble houses, or even guild allegiance, the children with whom Petra was grouped were a meager lot. The children of bricklayers and porters and the workhouse poor. Still, they were taught.
Petra excelled. She learned to read and write quickly, loving the idea of words. Stories made up of lines on paper - it fascinated her, captivated her. She could hear the voices of a thousand people in a thousand times, hear their voices in her head. They were good replacements for the whispers she felt in the back of her mind, the latent magic which threatened always to boil over, but which spent years biding its time.
But it was mathematics that truly gripped her. Equations and laws, clear formulae and rational rules. There was no ambiguity, only a set of tools laid clear before her. They were clean, precise, and unemotional. A reflection of her, perhaps, and a reflection of how she wished the world to one day be. How it never had been, before.
Her years progressed, living on the charity of the city. She blossomed in an early puberty, but stopped growing sadly short. She earned a scholarship to a secondary school, but worked for her bread and her lodging with all her spare time. She was an apprentice scribe, for a time, and then finally employed as a sub-clerk for the Confectioner’s Guild. Enough to pay her way through more school than someone of her background should ever have.
Perhaps that is a life she could have led - doing other people’s sums and spending other people’s money. But on her sixteenth birthday, her magic blossomed. She reached out in her dreams, and from the Land of Nod found the thread that she could pull to manifest the voices in her head. The fire sprite she summoned nearly torched her bunkhouse, but Petra couldn’t possibly contain her glee.
She quit her education, abandoned her job. She spent her savings on food and water and devoted her time to studying herself. She spent a year experimenting, very nearly losing her life more than once. She let seasons pass hesychastic, looking ever inwards to explore what she could do, what she was and could be.
Part 3: Ascent
A few months shy of her eighteenth birthday, she approached the Tower of Lore. She had no idea what to expect. She barely understood her own magic, let alone the deep mysteries of the Tower. She was welcomed skeptically, but her Rune gave her access. It welcomed her into a place of hot water and hot food, of smiling neophytes and servants at her beck and call.
She had no idea she was already in her Trial.
On her third day, the doors locked. No exit from the tower, no escape. Water stopped flowing. Food needed to be rationed. The masters were gone, of course - just Petra and a horde of neophytes, initiates, and a few adepts. Petra worked to maintain stability, dedicated herself to the existing hierarchies.
Then on day 5, the monsters started coming. A hole into the Warrens, of course. People were butchered by the monsters that Petra had seen cull her shanty-village. Stores were raided, monsters in need of tracking down. Petra volunteered for front-line service. Fear, the mind-killer, rendered her sharp and skittish, but it did not sway her.
She summoned fire sprites and motes of ice. She gave her blood to rituals and took part in research for any way to close the breach.
Floor by floor, the tower succumbed. Floor by floor, the retreat continued, and Petra was given more and more authority. The older, wiser, stronger magi died, and people began to look to her.
She flourished. She devised choke points and marshalled resources. She organized food and water and rallied spirits. She fought, and bled, and suffered. She watched friends die, torn to pieces. She dug through their spattered organs for what could be used, when the monsters were finally forced back.
It was in her most desperate moment, with hulking monstrosities looming over to her, that she reached out in desperation. The voices in her mind had always kept her awake and invaded her nightmares - why couldn’t they, at last, invade the real world?
She called, and the demons answered. The other spirits had clung to ideals, or limited themselves in scope. They had refused rationality or scorned the foibles of humanity. The demons answered her. Clear bargains and rational exchanges. Self-interest and profit, the laws of ambition made clear.
Petra gave her ring finger, and a demon of song appeared to sing the monsters to an endless sleep.
She gave her tongue for a demon of violence to paint the walls red.
She gave her power to walk for a demon of dust. She gave her ability to love to a demon of ascension. She gave her ability to be touched to a demon of revenge.
The tower ran with carmine, and Petra stood between the monsters and her fellow students.
To the final demon, she gave her restraint. Nothing would hold her back. In answer - Yesod, Demon of Foundations. A mannequin with a hole in its chest that leads to paradise, with a bauble that contains the lifeblood of the universe. She handed over her fear of progress, her hesitancy before ambition, her shyness before divinity, and Yesod gave her power.
The monsters abated. The Trial ended. Petra was given her robe, and mantled an Initiate of the Circle.
But Yesod remained by her side. Their contract was real, even if nothing else in the illusion was. Their bargain is permanent - partners in a dream of progress.
Part 4: Paraclete
It has been two years since her trial. Petra is a researcher in the tower, and a seeker after truth. She has studied the deep mysteries, and delved what lore she can. Every day, she finds something new. Every night, she dreams of hell. The brass and fire warm her, and the breaking of chains prepares her for the next day.
Yesod is by her side, her Aidolon and closest confidante. They are not friends, not exactly. They are comrades, explorers of power and its possibilities. Petra is the embodiment of his ambition, and he is the tool of her will.
She has learned much, come far. She studies, and trains, and prepares. She ventures from the tower, and takes what jobs she thinks will make her better.
Her desire is clear. Mankind is fantastic, glorious, and beautiful. The wonders of mankind are legion, and the potential of all races is superb. She does not want to change the world, not really. She wants to make it beautiful, and in doing so, resurrect or create the knowledge needed to enable the exceptional to do their part.
She is a contractor of demons, a developer of lore, and a purveyor of power. And now, at long last, she can look outwards from her tower with eyes unclouded and the see the world as it is meant to be seen.
As clay, in the hands of the sculptors of history, in whose ranks she is determined to someday stand.