[OOC] Fade Rift App

PLAYER

Name: Lark
Age:  OLD
Contact: Plagueheart#0051 on Discord; PM.
Other Characters: None yet.
Interests: Honestly I am interested in just about everything on-offer in the game and been having heckuva fun with the test-drive meme. It's been a pleasure to dig into a new canon and explore a variation on an old character, so I'm up for doing whatever in the world of Thedas.

CHARACTER

Name: Myrobalan Shivana
Canon/OC: OC
Journal: faithlikeaseed 
Race: Elf
Nationality: Marcher (Hasmal)
Occupation: Amateur theologian, hobbyist beekeeper, magical nuisance
Division: Research
Mage or Not: Mage
Age: 29

History

9:14 -- Born in the Hasmal alienage to a Tevinter refugee and native Marcher. His mother wasn't much interested in raising him and left him to the keeping of his father and older half-brother.

9:21 -- Manifested as a mage. His mother took this as a personal affront to her and all but threw him into the Templars' arms to get rid of him. His father was outraged.

       -- Began training with the Hasmal Circle. Received word shortly thereafter (via his brother) that his father had been executed for crimes committed against a human noble.

9:26 -- Founded a Chant-discussion group with a group of other mages his age (mostly elves) to argue over theology and their place in the world. Remained friends with many of them going forward.

9:33 -- Received permission to train as a knight-enchanter after surviving his Harrowing. This was a crowning joy in his lifelong attempt to emulate the templars (and perhaps redeem himself for being born a mage).

9:40 -- Stood with the templars and other loyal Circle mages during the uprising to prevent the rebels' escape. Targeted by a Horror spell while in a magically induced Sleep, his vulnerable mind shattered under the strain. He saw things mortals should not and tore out his own eyes to stop the visions.

       -- Spent the months after the uprising in a black depression. Eventually, iron commitment to his duty--and the fact the Hasmal Circle needed every pair of hands it could get for rebuilding--got him back on his feet.

9:40-9:42 -- Learned to live with his blindness over the intervening three years. Dug deep into creation magic or anything else that could oppose an entropy mage, even going so far to bother the templars about their ability to assert the world against the Fade. Didn't give up on his knight-enchanter training regimen either; it kept him busy and in shape.

9:43 -- When things became too precarious for Myr's Circle to stay in Hasmal, he left with the others to join the Inquisition.

Personality

Outwardly, Myrobalan is friendly, curious, more than a little contrarian--and very, very dedicated to Andraste and the Maker. He's built his life around the twin pillars of faith and magic, believing wholly in the truth of the Chant and its authority to guide his life--including the tenet that magic was made to serve man rather than rule over him. There's no question, when talking to him, that mages were part of the Maker's plan and placed on Thedas that they might benefit others with their gifts. While the Circles are far from perfect, they are a necessary boundary drawn to protect mages from the world and allow them room to grow.

Inwardly, he's not always so convinced as he appears. The text of the Chant and the practice of its followers don't often match up; the Circles have been the deaths of more mages than they've saved; to all appearances the Maker may never turn His face to the world again; and he, like every other mage, is an irredeemable monster from birth. At times he can only cling to the promise of the Chant and fight for it with all he's got--that the Chantry, rightly ordered, is the best hope for all of Thedas until the blessed day the Maker returns and all wrongs can be made right.

Somewhere, down under everything, there is a bitter furious resentment at the injustice of the world, the recognition that things really aren't the way they ought to be. Because he can't do anything about it with main force he squashes it and focuses on mending what he can. He's had years of practice at swallowing his anger and despair in the face of provocation--contesting regularly with body-snatching demons in his dreams gives him many opportunities to learn--but he's still not perfect at it. His native stubbornness stands him in good stead here: If his usual solutions to something that's angering him won't work, he'll keep prying away at the problem from all angles until he fixes it (or can come to grips with it being unfixable).

Despite all of this, he loves freely--both in the sense he's very giving of his romantic attentions and the sense he genuinely, affectionately cares about most people he meets. Even if every other part of his faith is subject to hidden internal doubt and revision, he takes the tenet that the Chant must be sung from all corners of Thedas before the Maker will return very seriously. As he's never seen anyone truly convert to the faith out of fear--in fact it seems to have exactly the opposite of the effect desired--that leaves gentle persuasion as the only option, which requires getting to know people and love them enough that they can be convinced of the rightness of Andrastianism.

At least, that's the goal; in practice, he's as prey to anyone else to failures of patience and petty annoyances and prejudices and misunderstandings. Nevertheless, he tries his damnedest; it's what he's here to do.

Opinions & Affiliations

The Chantry: Guardians of the true faith and fellow-seekers after the Maker. For all the doubts that gnaw at Myr's heart, he believes wholly that the Chant is true and the Chantry is worth remaining in and rebuilding from the inside.

Circle Mages: Any Chantry-loyal Circle mage might as well be part of Myr's family.

Rebel Mages: While he won't shy away from what other mages have suffered, Myr cannot believe that their proper place in the world is somewhere completely removed from the Maker's faith. Magic is a gift and needs to be used in the correct, appointed way. ...But he understands why they rebelled all too well.

The Templars: The templars of Hasmal Circle were good to their charges, and it wasn't hard for a scared little elven boy to latch on to these models of selfless service to the Maker as being worthy of emulation. Even though he's learned better by now that particular templars rarely live up to their reputation, Myr still has an unshakeable admiration for the ideal of a templar. It's what led him to begin training as a knight-enchanter in the first place, and he still gravitates to them out of admiration and respect.

The Mage/Templar War: How would you feel about the event that destroyed your world as you know it?

Tevinter: Among the many things Myr inherited from his devoutly religious father was the idea that the Imperium was a horrible place and the Tevene way a sickening inversion of the Maker's intended order of the world. He doesn't question it much.

Thedosian race relations: Myr takes that whole thing about the Chant being sung in all corners of Thedas Very. Seriously. That means not being a bunch of assholes to each other.

Adaptation Notes

Myrobalan is an adaption of a Warcraft OC I've played for a while, a blood elf death knight named Larkspur Plagueheart. Any mapping to the world of Dragon Age has to be pretty inexact, given the totally different social roles of elves in the two settings and the lack of any real equivalent to death knights on Thedas, but I wanted to see if I could come up with a character who's substantially similar in terms of his philosophy and approach to the world. Paring the character down to his essentials--social pariah devout to a faith that names him an abomination and struggling to serve others at all costs--I thought a faithful Circle mage with some unusual interpretations of the Chant fit nicely. The self-induced blindness, floral naming, and family issues are thematic elements I carried forward to link Myr with his progenitor.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths

-- Myr was only months from completing his training as a knight-enchanter when the Hasmal Circle tore itself apart and he blinded himself. He'd completed his spirit blade, learned the combat proficiency required to use it, and mastered much of the barrier magic and manipulation of the Fade that makes a knight-enchanter so feared on the front lines. He retains all of the magical as well as the physical ability and has kept up his training as he can, making him theoretically formidable in front-line combat...if he could only see to fight.

-- Creation was Myr's second school of magic and one he sunk all his energy into after the rebellion. The barrier and bolstering magic isn't so unlike what a knight-enchanter does, and he's taken to glyphs and swarm-summoning with ferocious zeal. Owing however to the presence of numerous more talented healers in the Hasmal Circle, he entirely neglected that part of creation's kit; he could, maybe, if he absolutely had to, keep someone from dying in a pinch--but don't count on it.

-- Socially adroit; he likes people, they (generally) like him, and he's good at negotiating with them so that everyone gets what they want.

Weaknesses

-- He's completely blind. While he's spent the last three years learning compensatory skills, it's difficult to live in a sighted world and there's still much he has to adapt to. It's only made worse by the fact he's now in an unfamiliar environment.

-- Following on that, while he can still summon a spirit blade, he'd be hopeless with it in combat. Without the wisps in it drawing magic from his living opponents, he's limited to powering his abilities as a knight-enchanter from his own personal reserves. Which means he can't cast very many barriers or power them for long, so he's got to keep all that in reserve for a moment of real desperation.

-- Having only very recently left the Circle he was raised in, he is not particularly world-wise. There's very dangerous gaps in his practical knowledge of how to stay safe in a world that's hostile to both elves and mages, and the problem's only compounded by how he trusts people a little too much.

Inventory

-- Mage staff
-- A hilt for a spirit blade
-- Slightly threadbare robes in the style of Hasmal Circle
-- A few books
-- Two copies of the Chant: a well-loved, well-marked version without the Dissonant Verses, and a newer but equally note-riddled New Cumberland edition
-- For sale: Knight-enchanter armor, never used

Motivation

When the remaining mages and templars of the Hasmal Circle finally found it impossible to stick it out in the ruins of their tower, they departed to join Inquisition. Myr went with them; not only were they all he had left in Thedas, but he heard the whispers of holy awe surrounding the endeavor, naming it the work of Andraste and the Maker. If this was Their chosen instrument to reform the world, how could he give anything less than all he had?

SAMPLES

Sample 1 -- Myrobalan and Vandelin talk mage freedom sometime before the rebellion.

Sample 2 -- Myr goes for a walk in the Hightown forest. This was probably a bad idea. (Multiple threads.)