Death's Amor

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The Six Kingdom's most prestigious university and the de facto cultural capital of Anaxas.

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Bernadette Seymor
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2018 4:55 am
Topics: 6
Race: Passive
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Writer: Lantern
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Fri Aug 10, 2018 8:15 am

5th Roalis 2718
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THE GOOD LUCK OF THE GATED

People in Brunnhold often found it safe to assume that Berna could be trusted to stay stable and not derail to diablerie.

The servant had after all been working in the city for fifteen years and nothing had happened. Her track record was clean. Perfect. It said that she worked diligently and faithfully and did her best to behave just like a servant was expected to behave. She was patient. She was polite. Every time a galdor happened to look at Berna she was working hard, as all gated servants should.

It had started to seem like she might be the right stuff for a servant position of higher rank than housemaid.

The galdori generally felt that the gated passives probably were grateful for having been given a life as servants. They never lacked housing and food. It was so much better than being abandoned on the streets of some other city out there to meet a cruel fate as best they could. Street children use to be rounded up either by factory owners who weren’t averse to exploiting them as workers under prison-like conditions, or by criminal who didn’t hesitate to exploit them for criminal ends. Some also wound up as beggars or sellers of small things like for example candlesticks and died of starvation or froze to death in the snow. There were also plenty of tales about how those sometimes left life in an explosion of diablerie and took other people with them.

Brunnhold with its firm but proper treatment of gated servants was fortunately better off. The passives mostly arrived as ten years old children who had recently been galdori who hadn’t passed the tests. They had already received a basic training in good behavior and most of them adapted to their new role in society, eventually. Despite that they were cursed they were actually seen as more trustworthy than humans and wicks. They had after all been galdori once upon a time, their families in the past had been galdori, and it was assumed that they still felt loyal with their former race. They were preferred for the more demanding servant positions.

In short, the gated passives had been lucky. They had everything they needed and it was even possible for them to pursue a career.

One day, thought Berna, one day I will rise and become way more than I am today. Ambition and hard work will take me to the top. Even though I am a passive, I will become famous and my name will mean something. Nobody will dare to call me “scrap” again, when I reach the pinnacle of what a passive can become.

What are they really, those galdori who must work by endlessly complicated “conversations”, or the wicks with their “chatting”, compared to the passives? They are blind babblers. We passives need no words. We don’t command the Mona, the Mona commands us. I think we can be seen as the envoys of the Mona itself and serving the Mona is our only true servitude.

We are channels of the power of magic itself. There is no higher position to reach in servitude.

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Bernadette Seymor
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2018 4:55 am
Topics: 6
Race: Passive
Character Sheet: Character Sheet
Plot Notes: Plot Notes
Writer: Lantern
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Contact:

Sat Aug 11, 2018 5:07 am

5th Roalis 2718
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DIABLERIE DREAMS

Career ... the galdori ambition was still alive in Berna, who had once upon a time been Bernadette Seymor. She was ready to jump at any opportunity fate would send her way. Any! Berna couldn’t afford to be picky if she wanted to rise in the ranks of the cursed.

Passives who had been home-raised had an advantage, as they had been given more training. Nobody called it education as that was illegal. Instead it was called servant training, which of course was something totally else, or so it seemed.

Appearance was kept up and nobody called the cards. It was useful with well-trained servants who were supposed to be loyal to their betters and grateful for being taken care of. Unfortunately the home-trained servants were hard to compete with and Berna had never succeeded to advance above housemaid. She had been a housemaid for ten years now. All signs pointed to her being stuck in the position until her dying day.
Berna resented this. It had made her turn bitter. A toxic brew of hate and need of revenge was festering silently behind the perfect housemaid façade she always kept up at all cost. She mulled over the unfairness of her fate all the time while she went about her housemaid tasks.

Her bitterness and hate wasn’t aimed at all galdori in general. There were galdori who didn’t call her “scrap” and didn’t harass her at all. She felt no hostility to those ... the opposite. Like many other passives Berna was susceptible to friendliness from the people she had once belonged to.

When a galdor was nice to her it could temporarily make her feel the loyalty she was assumed to feel. It touched upon the impossible dream she had buried deep inside: the dream of redemption. She never allowed herself to think of it consciously, because she knew that there was no way back. The dream prevailed in silence, like a never healing wound she had suppressed and knew nothing about anymore. Denied to live, it became the zombie of a dead dream, the source of the mental rot that slowly permeated Berna’s mind and made it fertile soil for other and more deadly dreams of uprising and revenge.

She liked to imagine that they day would come when those who had put her down would be brought low , while she would rise above them and do to them what they had done to her. Impotent daydreams ... the galdori were magicians and it would hardly be possible for a passive to lord it over them. No matter how powerful the diablerie she was cursed with might be, she couldn’t use it, because passives didn’t use diablerie, the diablerie used them.

Berna had never experienced it. She didn’t even know what her personal kind of diablerie was. She feared that it would be something enormously destructive. She also feared that it would be something laughably lame. The latter had eventually started to seem worse, because it was like being cursed for nothing. Cursed in vain. She had come to feel that if she had to be a cursed woman and had to yield uncontrollable diablerie she at least wanted it to be an impressive and monumentally dangerous kind of diablerie that could destroy the whole world.

While she swept floors and cleaned windows she fantasized about destruction on megalomaniac size. What could it be? Perhaps she would be a spreader of an incurable plague which only afflicted the galdori and made all of them die in a grotesque and painful way. That vision had its benefits, but it also felt blind and aimless. No, not that ... Berna felt that it would be better if the diablerie would be selective and hit those who deserved it the most, in proportion to what they had done. Yes. She liked the idea. It enabled her to daydream that the small scale petty acts of revenge she meted out for specific people was diablerie under her control.

She would be nice to the nice. People just had to be nice to her.

And the others? The snooty racists who strut around priding themselves for having passed a bloody test when they were children? I’d curse them all if I could!
User avatar
Bernadette Seymor
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2018 4:55 am
Topics: 6
Race: Passive
Character Sheet: Character Sheet
Plot Notes: Plot Notes
Writer: Lantern
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Wed Aug 15, 2018 10:29 am

5th Roalis 2718
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THE INNOCENCE OF THE CURSED

Unfortunately (or fortunately, for some) Berna wasn’t able to curse anybody. The diablerie that rested deep inside her wasn’t hers to command. She didn’t even know what it was or what it would do. It was wild magic, raw Mona, obeying only the Mona itself.

Berna was just a passive channel for this power. There was nothing for her to train, nothing to master by hard and diligent studies, nothing to control and bend to her own will by complicated conversations or even simple chatting. She was like a mindless minion to the Mona, a tool, or perhaps even just a fissure from which magic could happen to randomly leak into the world without any intention at all. One day it might rise all of a sudden and consume all it hit, also Berna herself.

Living with the constant awareness that she carried within her a curse that could awake and kill her any second had eventually made many other things seem secondary. Berna was alive here and now. She had to make the most of life before the diablerie would get her. This moment was her only time, before the future would count her to the uncountable numbers of those who had gone before her. It made her feel increasingly reckless. Nowadays she was prone to take risks she hadn’t taken in the past. What did risks matter to the already doomed who lived with their death hovering over their shoulder every day and night, every hour, minute and second?

Not much! As Mary says, we who are cursed can as well have some fun as best we can, in this cursed world where unknown powers rule us and direct our fate. ¨

Mary Lambert, Berna’s bunkmate, was a convict. After being abandoned by her horrified parents she had spent most of her life in Old Rose Harbor. Eventually she had been accused of financial crimes. She had never confessed any guilt and still claimed to be innocent. There hadn’t been any clear evidence either, but as she was passive she had been convicted to servitude in Brunnhold. According to what Mary told Berna when the two of them were alone, Mary was merely a natural born financial genius. She had made “big money”. It was probably some competitor who had framed her with false accusations. Right now she was just waiting for new good business opportunities to arise, she said.

It was impossible for the gated passives to leave Brunnhold, so Berna supposed those “business opportunities” would have to be something Mary could come up with inside Brunnhold. The woman was older than Berna and had already found out that her personal diablerie was a harmless smoke screen. At least it had been harmless to Mary. Some careless enemies had happened to misstep and fall out from an airship when they stumbled around in the fog, but it had been their own fault, Mary hadn’t done anything. The diablerie had struck on its own accord. A passive could hardly be blamed for the Mona’s deeds. Thus they were innocent, always.

That was how Mary reasoned. It was comforting to Berna to think of it. Whatever happened when and if her own diablerie would ever strike it would be the will of the Mona. Berna herself would be totally innocent and free of guilt. This made sense to her. A puppet on strings cannot be blamed for what the puppet master does. It’s just an innocent subordinate who obeys orders it can’t question.

Just like the predators in the wilds are innocent animals who just live their lives the way they were made to be, the passives are innocent people who just live the lives they were made to live. Whatever the diablerie will do it will not be my doing. I will always be above reproach. Always innocent. Always good. Unlike the galdori, who must have an intent when they use magic, a passive never has an intent. Things happen, simply. We passives don’t use the magic, the magic uses us. Only galdori and wick are able to use magic for evil ends.

Thus I’m good.

My conscience will always be clean.

User avatar
Bernadette Seymor
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2018 4:55 am
Topics: 6
Race: Passive
Character Sheet: Character Sheet
Plot Notes: Plot Notes
Writer: Lantern
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Contact:

Sun Sep 02, 2018 5:21 am

5th Roalis 2718
Image
THE NAMESONG

N
ow, this very day, Berna was cleaning in a place that was very special and precious to her.

It was the room in the university where she had been cleaning windows ten years ago when she had heard a bird sing outside and the sounds had reminded her of the name that had been once been hers, in her childhood as galdor, Bernadette Seymor.


The birdsong had sounded like berna-dette, berna-dette, berna-dette, or so she had imagined. The memory of that moment still glowed in her mind like a blindingly luminous lantern of insight. Berna was totally convinced about its truth and reliability. It stood out to her like a flash of magic. She found it immensely meaningful, not that she was able to pinpoint exactly why, or explain it in words even to herself, but she felt it with her whole heart and soul.

After that experience she had sometimes been sent to this room again, to clean it again, year after year, this time of the year. Berna had never told anybody about how special that room was to her. She feared that the task would be taken from her if others would know how important she found it. Every time she was ordered to go there to clean floors and wash windows she rejoiced in her heart, but she always kept a straight face and acted like it was nothing else than the normal drudgery to her.

The architecture of the room was not spectacular. It didn’t differ from many other of the plainer rooms in the university. The room had also gone dimmer with each year, like they had borrowed lamp after lamp in order to better illuminate other and more often utilized rooms and leave this room to the shadows. The room itself was absolutely not the reason for Berna’s obsession with the place. It was like the rough shell of a clam, the drab container of a secret glowing pearl embedded in the living being hidden inside it.

The first thing she focused on was the birdsong outside the open windows. Oh, how she longed to hear that bird sing her name once again, like it had done that only time so many years ago! She always went straight to the windows and opened them and then she worked with her hearing tensed and focused to its maximum, but her hope to hear that one and only special song emerge again from the chaotic choir of birdsong had been in vain during all the years that had passed.

Berna’s housemaid uniform was as proper as proper comes, where she stood on a sturdy old chair with a high back of beautifully carved wood. The front hem of her sensible black dress had been lifted and tucked in under the string that encircled the white apron. This would definitely have looked risqué if somebody had seen it, but as she was facing the windows she was cleaning and it was on a higher floor in the building a bypasser would only see an impeccably proper housemaid in a black dress, a white apron and a ruffled white headpiece on top of her head.

Only if she would turn around to face them would they see a girl with rebellious red locks of hair that had escaped from the headpiece to a life in freedom on her brow, dressed in and a scandalously short skirt ending above her knees. There was only very seldom any bypasser there though, so it was nearly a hypothetical risk. Berna believed so because it was her eleventh time working in this room and she had mostly been all alone there ten times before. The very few people who had passed by had never made any comments whatsoever. They hadn’t seemed to see her at all. Berna felt it was safe to allow herself the luxury of opening several buttons in the bodice in order to be more comfortable. Nobody would ever know.

What I’d give to hear that song again! It was the sound of who I truly am, but perhaps the birds will only sing it one single time and never more. When I heard it, it was like waking up from a blurred nightmare to a bright clear summer’s day and come alive again, reborn. I felt I knew who I am and whatever they do I have dreams they can never take away.

I am Bernadette Seymor.

Here, now, in this room where hardly no one goes, I can be the one I am.

And I do as I like!


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