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Forejudges

:TANAGA"

Some say life is prominent

Life is full of puzzlement

But other treat forejudgement

Because life is unfrequent

Depression insanely strong

Sad emotion got headstrong

Happiness fading lifelong

Lonieliness feel side belong

But confidence can state mind

If you keep rising you’ll find

Cultivates fucos behind

Positive of vibes refind

I am completely divine

Equipped all the descipline

Problem should always decline

So that you can slay headline

Remove all of the fearness

Use the word trust,prayfulness

Make a change and feel witness

The beauty of you softness

💙  THIS FUCKING SONG right HERE is made for my forever forejudged babies; Damian and Jason  💙

💘 enjoy; my bad ass children  💘

vasylia  •  the wheel of fortune skeleton  •  application  •  connections

age: thirty-five, appears twelve years younger

pronouns: she/her

status: a loyalist in search of stability; advisor-in-training and apprentice to the high priestess

abilities: necromancy, limited by her own inexperience

faceclaim: anya chalotra

tw: death, child death, murder, blood, self harm, disassociation

blood and marrow  •  personality types

zodiac sign: virgo  /  virgos are always paying attention to the smallest details and their deep sense of humanity makes them one of the most careful signs of the zodiac. their methodical approach to life ensures that nothing is left to chance, and although they are often tender, their heart might be closed for the outer world. 

element: water  /  water people are emotional, intuitive, deeply creative, empathetic, spiritual and psychic. water allows people to emotionally connect with others. and yet, water people are so sensitive that they often have a hard time unplugging from life’s chaos. consequently, many water people suffer from addiction as they grapple for distraction from life’s pain. thus, water people tend to be secretive and private.

temperament: melancholic  /  the melancholy naturally wants to do things right, and is quality-oriented. melancholies are not trying to be right, they are driven to figure out what is right. they have a cautious, tentative response designed to reduce tension in an unfavourable environment. the melancholy’s second response is often to become aggressive to restore peace in an unfavourable situation. they influence their environment by adhering to the existing rules, and by doing things right according to predetermined (and accepted) standards.

moral alignment: true neutral  /  a neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. she doesn't feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. most neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. such a character thinks of good as better than evil-after all, she would rather have good neighbours and rulers than evil ones. still, she's not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way.

enneagram: the investigator  /  fives are alert, insightful, and curious. they are able to concentrate and focus on developing complex ideas and skills. independent, innovative, and inventive, they can also become preoccupied with their thoughts and imaginary constructs. they become detached, yet high-strung and intense. they typically have problems with eccentricity, nihilism, and isolation.

mbti: intj, ‘the architect’  /  an architect (intj) is a person with the introverted, intuitive, thinking, and judging personality traits. these thoughtful tacticians love perfecting the details of life, applying creativity and rationality to everything they do. their inner world is often a private, complex one.

soul type: the scholar  /  being so focused on information and its logical implications means that scholars are naturally introspective and contemplative. they like to have time alone to fully process their experiences and observations internally, before trying to articulate their thoughts.

tree type: willow  /  willow signs are bursting with potential, but have a tendency to hold themselves back out of fear. your powers of perception will ultimately allow your true nature to shine, and will lead you to success in life. willows pair well with birch and ivy.

bones and lungs  •  a genesis

i. the fool, upright innocence, new beginnings, free spirit

The first thing a child sees in its life is its mother, and you are no different. The first thing you know is her, penniless enough that your infanthood would have been nothing short of unremarkable but provided for enough that she could have kept you if she’d wanted to. She has had children before, and she’s felt the billowing warmth that childrearing lends her, but you are stealing something from her. Your mother cannot quite place the feeling, cannot understand what it is you’re doing to her, but when she holds you in her arms she feels her limbs growing heavier, her muscles deaden. You must be, she determines, a punishment - so she resolves to rid herself of you. More important than that, she resolves to make an offering of you. The woman makes the long, arduous journey from Tyrholm, averts road bandits and street beggars and pardoners swearing by religious forgeries; she pushes herself halfway across Markholm with only her conviction to drive her. She commits you to the Temple of the Undying, and this is something she wants known. She wants the great, bipartite deity to know that this largesse of hers is an immolation, a symbol of her devotion. In return, she would have the punishment lifted. And you never see your mother again.

The temple names you Vasylia, assuming the role of a strange, distant mother who plucks the word from between the stars. You have no surname and therefore no genesis, nothing to remind you where you come from and who you are. Of course, as you well know now, none of that matters. As soon as you pass the threshold of that sacred place, it forges an identity for you.

(Your heritage is a secret that tucks itself away from you, like a shadow that shies from the light. You are the result of a union between a travelling merchant and a beautiful, beautiful woman, and this is all your mother has to protect her in life. Those who covet beauty, who wish to steal it away and display it among their wares, are always equipped with a lie or two. The lie is this: he loves her, he does; devotedly, honestly, purely, and he wants her to join him. To travel with him over pale waves and into the cove of pirates. Perhaps he’d believed in that at first, but it ends as all things end; in fiction. He leaves her as all men leave her, with an enormous pouch of gold. Your mother settles in a village at the border of Volkan Forest. You do not live there long. You never learn your mother’s name. Her name is Estrid.)

Life at the Temple is, for the most part, simple. Dull, pedestrian, but simple. Abandoned, you are raised as one amongst many, a single child amidst a whole throng of neglected children. It quickly becomes clear to you that some wield magical abilities, shielded from a world which harshly forejudges them, and some arrive with nothing to them at all. Like you: not even a name. Some of them are sickly, a few of them are malnourished, and far too many of them are the reluctant offspring of poverty, charily offered to the Temple by parents who lament of their penury. But you are not sickly or malnourished or magical, even. You wail out in the dark of night for a mother who doesn’t want you, but which child here does not? At least at first, there is nothing particularly special about you. You are still a child waiting to grow into yourself, and, well, there is nothing unusual about that fact.

Your childhood is, in a word, unremarkable. The Temple does its best to inspire loyalty in the offspring yielded to them - you are, after all, an opportunity for life-long indoctrination. Your earliest days are structured by a conformity which they shake into your bones: the Temple teaches you of the wolves and the snakes and the annihilating body they make as one. On magic, their position is less clear. Messages are mixed. Necromancers are a chosen, sacred few. But the other magi are being punished, cursed for a cycle of blasphemy and adultery and theft and anything else they can conjure up. As with all children, you assume the first thing you hear as gospel, but as the years gallop past you, you find yourself cordoned off by a low drone. The Temple is not so united as it seems, and there are people who whisper in disagreement. You think you are beginning to notice the resentment growing around you, but you are still a child - you know nothing. You determine that it is safer to be ordinary.

You cannot quite be called pious, but you rise with the morning light. You work hard. You devote time to your prayers and you comply with the codes of silence which linger between them. You restock ink and parchment for the Clerics working sedulously at translation. You trim the rose bushes at the edge of the forest. You are untroublesome and, for the most part, amenable; shapeable. You offer a hand to help wherever it may be required, because that is what you’ve always been taught to do. You are nothing much like some of the other children, boisterous and ambitious, hungry for stories of politics and warfare. Hankering to feel the weight of a bronze rapier in their hands, to run their fingers through enemies’ blood and call it an act of cleansing. The Temple is not cruel, but it is cyclical, and the pattern is not enough - for them or for you. But you do as you’re told, your life moves in a progressive rhythm, because what else is there?

You have always needed a hand to guide you.

When life drifts in a sequence it all blurs into one, so you find solace in the small things. You revel in the sanctuary of the forest. Its trees keel into spirals, bent by the weight of their branches. You like the stillness of the air, the way that the birds settle on the branches so completely at peace - unaware of the eyes watching them. You learn that silence is not solitude, that the reticences observed by the Temple do not always bring you peace. In fact, they rarely ever bring you peace, and at times they have the tendency to strangle you. You marvel at the way the water refracts in the moonlight, bending with the shape of its brilliance. It moves furtively and secretly, as if beneath the surface there is buried a whole other world that it hopes to keep concealed. You are never the sort of girl with fantasies mirrored from the vellum of a fairytale book, and you never touch things so delicately that you look to be afraid of them. You would never call yourself a dreamer, but there’s an intensity to you which makes it hard for you to stop staring at things. There are only a couple of children in the Temple you ever feel particularly close to, and when you think back, they are the only things you feel are worth remembering here. Curled up on a stony ledge, watching a religious darkness fall over the ancient rock. Organising altars and scrubbing floorboards and observing silences with a dash of humour. You have never truly felt like you belong anywhere, except when you lay down in the grass or you sit on the cold stone and run your fingertips through the water, imagining that you are somewhere else. It makes this place feel a little less dull.

ii. the hierophant, upright education, knowledge, beliefs

It is perhaps no coincidence that it’s during your sixteenth Summertide that you first raise an animal from the dead, completely by accident. A butterfly, crushed beneath the weight of a snow which is only now beginning to thaw. You cannot describe what brought you to pick it up. Beauty? You have always looked beneath the surface. Macabre as the very idea of it may be, you cannot not help but take it into your hand. You feel its limp body balance in your palm like parchment: you want it to be beautiful again. And as if by magic, it shifts in your palm, it wakes. Half-amazed and half-afraid, you watch how its wings unfurl themselves and its body cracks and distorts itself back into shape. But you are overcome by something strange: the insect sits in the centre of your palm, learning about the world again, but if you were blind you wouldn’t know it. You can’t feel it there. By instinct you clasp your hands around it and bring it into the Temple and, perhaps foolishly, you show them what you have done.

The Temple determines that it is no coincidence that your gift for rebirth, the very echo of Summertide, should reveal itself now. It’s an ancient celebration of renaissance. Fate twists, and the Temple has two Necromancers already, devoted to the craft and resolved to educate you. Educate perhaps puts it generously: they test you, push you, assign you tasks to complete without any tangible goal in sight. They never teach you what it takes, what you must sacrifice, what it truly means to excavate that void between life and death. This is the truth of it: you have been chosen by the Undying Herself and this gift is yours to own, but as with all things we take, it demands sacrifice. A piece of you, snapped off from bone; it lingers there at your side. They teach you that you are different, you are special. The other magi can manipulate solid matter and regenerate limbs, but you are sacred. They will not see twenty-five years, but you? You can live for hundreds of years.

Your schooling begins small. Insects, mice, small woodland creatures. But it’s a demanding, exhausting process -  still, you continue to work hard. When you’d brought back that butterfly on the third day of Summertide, it had seemed so easy. A case of simply wishing and being. But things are not so easy now. You find it difficult to pour that same longing into the creatures put down in front of you; you are more sophisticated, less candid. But you do as you’re told, make as many successes as you do failures, and for whatever end goal the Necromancers have in mind for you, you progress.

Then, as if you have not already experienced enough change, the world spins carelessly on its side. You are eighteen and you have been under the tutelage of the Necromancers for just under two years. You feel you are drifting away from the green beauty of that first instance, the first time you bartered with the universe and it chose to answer you. But you are still just a child and your teachers have lived for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, you learn that Necromancers are dangerous, they’re volatile, they’re lethal, and that includes you. It takes little more than the impetuosity of a boy sat next to you at dinnertime, for him to waggishly swipe the bread roll from your plate - as children are mischievously wont to do - for you to wreak tragedy. The action irritates you, infuriates you, even, because you have less patience for things now. You snatch the roll from his hands. Without warning, he collapses, body limp on the floor. You are puzzled at first, you’d scarcely touched him, but as the Brethren roll his body over on the stone, you realise what you have done. The boy is dead. The boy is dead, and you’re learning your emotions have consequences. But this you’ve forgotten. You’ve scrubbed it from your skin raw, as if that will absolve you.

Things are accelerating. You perform your lessons largely in isolation. You are kept away from the other children, particularly those who hope to take vows, because you are dangerous, you cannot be contained. Your tutors take the opportunity to teach you more diligently, more industriously. Your accomplishments are growing: frogs, small birds, rabbits. But the hours are slipping away and you don’t understand what it’s all for, bringing back forest animals contentedly buried beneath the moss. Nevertheless, you move forward. You think you are getting better at this. When you have lived for twenty years, they bring you live animals; they show you how to drain them, how to cleave to your youth. The work you are performing is an honour.

You have always needed a hand to guide you.

Something has changed in you. The forest recedes from you. You wake and you learn and you perform and you dream empty, hollow dreams in an unbroken cycle. More often than not you lie awake for hours, allowing your eyes to rest on a rotting mark in the corner of the ceiling. You smile still and you try to laugh, but as each chuckle worms its way up your throat you feel it strangle you in the process. Sometimes you cough up blood, thick and hard, and you stare at the red spot in confusion. One day, you catch your hand on a piece of shattered glass and feel nothing. You don’t even flinch. At the wound you simply stare and, out of curiosity perhaps, or a pointed desire to hurt at something, you pick up a shard of glass and feel the weight of it in your fingers. And with all the force you have, you burrow it into your flesh. That, you feel. You drop the glass, wincing, and a hot tear rolls down your cheek.

You lie in your bed and wish on a comet for somebody to steal you away from this place. You whisper it into existence. But in the morning you wake and everything is the same. A blur settles into your bones. Things are a cycle, so much more so than when your life had begun. But you know nothing else. You stay.

iii. the wheel of fortune, upright change, cycles, inevitable fate

In your life you have learned much. How to raise animals from the dead. How to canalise energy away from the living and into your bones. You have learned that things change, of course they do, but they also stay the same. For people like you, life motionlessly moves from one event to the next. You remember the day that your life had spun so carelessly on its axis once again with such precision that, at times, you are sure that you are back there. You think that you are back at the Temple, raising rabbits and drawing the lifeforce from dandelions. You think that the clouds are weeping into the earth with salted rain, and the chill of your salvation buries itself into you.

By now, you know she is not your deliverance. There is nothing holy in her but power, and how she revels in it. The woman alights on the Temple without a horse, without a thing to carry her here, and if you had ever been a foolish sort of girl you might have assumed she’d undertaken the journey on foot. But you have never been a fool. You are twenty-five years old. A solemn cold which seems to swell in her at once brings you a much-desired quiet and chills you to the bone. To your surprise, all bow to her. Cower from her. Even your teachers are beneath her. With purpose she pulls you aside, ungloves your hands and takes them in her own, and she promises you that the two of you are the same. She does not fear you, and you have no cause to fear her. You are cut from the same dust and made from the same bones - there’s divinity in that. Like you, she can raise the dead, and what’s more: she’s good at it. Perhaps for the first time in your life you are asked what it is that you want. You feel like the decision is yours. She offers you an ultimatum: remain here, raise rabbits and mice and crows, be nothing; or join her, learn the craft, study beneath her, become something. While you are torn between your desire to flee this place and a thick, breathless lump which lingers at the back of your throat unexplained, it is never really a question. It is an answer. You pack up everything you own: garments, mementos, fear and desire, all. You accept willingly, unthinkingly, blindly. You pass through the egress and step into a shimmering new world.

Even now, that is the only way you can think to describe this place. This new world you have chosen for yourself coruscates beneath the light as if in dance. It’s a world that winks like glitter - Castle Tyrholm is so unlike anything you’ve ever known. By now you are so accustomed to rough hems and the bland taste of food on your tongue that you have forgotten there was anything else. You only know things bland and bloodless, humble devotions. But here? Here, they dress lavishly. Here, they eat lavishly. Here, they live lavishly. You stand at the fortress’ great, impressive windows and you contentedly watch the way the pale waves lick at the black stone, the way the castle bends over the waves and balances on top of the rockline. It’s more than regal: it’s thunderous, luxurious, rich. Of course, you know a little better now. You know that glitter catches in the corner of your eye. It has the tendency to blind you, to force you to look at things between the sequins of a kaleidoscope, all twisted and torn out of shape.

You have been under The High Priestess’ tutelage for two years now, and you feel your life bisecting into two distinct worlds. You must reconcile yourself to that. Statesmanship has very little in common with religion, and unfortunately, that’s all you know. Religion is devotion, fidelity, constancy. Whatever fidelity you see before you has been rigorously shaped, re-wrought in the shadows for years, and that is the only constant here. Still, it does not shake you. Your first lesson is this: you must cut the history of yourself out into stone. You do. You become a silhouette which cleaves to your mentor’s side, a thing that can’t be shaken. Like a shadow you observe the way your mentor manoeuvres; the way she holds her tongue and the way she weaponises it; the way she plumes and crows and deceives as if she’s been doing it for a thousand years. You watch the way that King Septimus’ hands move with hers, shifting in mirrored gestures - like she has attached strings. You become an accepted prerequisite at her side, a creeping outline which follows her devotedly. Part of your status, you brush shoulders with some of the king’s most trusted advisors - you attend assemblies, convocations gathered in the throne-room. You are so far from home now; wherever your home is, wherever it was. You are beginning to learn the meaning of diplomacy: one keeps a knife permanently unsheathed beneath their cloak.

Your instructor resolves to fill in the gaps that the Temple left barren: you learn what you must give up for this gift, you learn of all the grief it has caused you. This is a magic you watch her lean into so deeply at times you think she’ll splinter apart - but, of course, she never has. Never will. This is a truth that lies uneasily in your stomach. It lies heavily on your lungs and it chokes you. You can feel your heart climbing up and down your windpipe - you aim to seize it in your hands, to still it, but you can only retch at it. You’ve lost count of all the creatures you’ve poured yourself into, and you wonder where all those pieces of you are now. The fading feeling of your bones makes sense now, at least; the universe is a glutton and it has been stealing from you. You never even knew the rules of the game.

The king’s physician brings you animals to practice upon. The High Priestess teaches you the most painless portions of yourself to sacrifice: you learn the things you need and the things you can go without. Your abilities are growing, and with that you feel the weight in your chest shift a little - things are becoming easier to swallow. You learn the importance of giving back: to creatures, to people, but also communities, dynasties. Yours are regular faces in the Farmlands which edge on Tyrholm. Here, you resurrect animals, livelihood; they are indebted to you both. One day, a farmer’s son slips from a ladder, cracks his skull open on the coarse ground. The High Priestess takes the opportunity to teach, to have you bring him back. But too much of you clings to the Temple, the way its cold was settling into your bones. The High Priestess’ dissatisfaction is evident. You’ve been studying beneath her for three years now, and still you have not raised a body. She wants you to look at this world without Necromancy directly in the eye: destruction, death, misery. You cast your eye down to the boy and swallow the lump growing in your throat. Grief. As painless as breathing, your teacher brings their son back. The world is better with Necromancers, she has resolved. Dutiful, devoted, you have resolved that as well.

You have always needed a hand to guide you.

As part of your schooling, you ride out with your mentor and Tyrholm’s great military army. To squash rebellion, to quell revolt. The two of you are never far from each other - you are a shadow clinging to a shadow. There’s something about the way that you both sit, regal and harrowing above your white horses, lingering like death at the rear of Septimus’ forces. You are a lethal sight, but your power is not enough. Not yet. You arch over the body of a fallen soldier, but something is stopping you. You try, you really try, but you fail. Half-alive, he blinks back at you. A lungful vibrates at the back of his throat. His chest rises and falls with air, but is nothing in his eye to suggest he recognises the figure bending over him. It is half a failure - but half a failure is still a failure. You have given him nothing human. As if flowing over water, your mentor dismounts her horse and puts an end to her experiment. She doesn’t look at you. You don’t look at you. Sometimes, you can’t bear to.

But your failures do not last forever. When you are thirty-two, you animate a body. At last. It has taken you seven years, seven long years of unlearning the Temple’s way, but at last, success. Of all the places you manage it, it is on the battlefield, and you are in your element. Surrounded by blood and warfare and death - ah, always death. You are getting better at this. At night, you rest your head down on your pillow and you dream. You dream of your hands, reaching out. The Undying God reaches back. You feel you are becoming one with Her.

iv. the high priestess, reversed repressed intuition, confusion, dissonance

You are a vault of fears, but you have spent these last ten years bent on throwing away the key. For the last decade you have been following your mentor indiscriminately, almost blindly, and while you are finally beginning to make progress, you are also beginning to feel that haze gather around your fingertips, weighing down your wrists. You feel yourself swallowing the sensation at times. You don’t like to close your eyes. If you do, you think you are back at the Temple, raising creatures injudiciously, feeling your soul taunt you in the air between you. A cold is settling into your bones again. Your dreams turn themselves inside out and empty themselves when you finally fall asleep, and when you wake in the morning you are confronted with a sense that your emotions have slipped out of you in the night. That you have slipped out of you in the night.

Your fingers pressed to rotting flesh, you decide that the bodies you have brought up in halves are warnings. As their eyes roll demonically back into their skull and the listlessness of their breath catches at the back of their throat, you cannot help but think that your half-failures are warning you. That this is what awaits you should you consider to amble down this narrow path. Not death, but instead life: long, death-defying, rotten life. A life of nullity stretches out in front of you, like a void that opens its black mouth and eats you raw. Impassibility is creeping into you, settling into the spaces between your bones and lungs. The taste of blood in your mouth has recently returned to you, though you only notice it when you can taste at all; you cannot determine whether being able to feel it flip thickly over your tongue brings you a sense of peace or horror. When you slip your rings over your fingers, heavy with all the ore you could never have afforded when you were young, you can’t feel them there. You feel ancient impressions dig their way into you.

Perhaps you have been foolish. You have been believing that carefully handpicking the parts of yourself to sacrifice can go on forever; that you will never feel the weight of your earliest years again. And while that’s true, you have been slicing off the most unforgiving parts of yourself and offering them up to the Undying God, you feel yourself recede from Her. They are determining that these pieces of you are not enough, and They would have you offer more. When you travel out with Septimus’ forces to quell revolts you feel eyes on you: The High Priestess’ eyes, impatient. In the battlefield you are anxious to stop your hands from trembling. Perhaps you can’t bear the pressure. Perhaps you can’t bear yourself. Your teacher is always left to clear up your mess, always left to do the brunt of the work, but she is never cruel about it. Sometimes you wish she was. Then, you might be better.

And yet, you are not all failure. In the last two months you have successfully resurrected five bodies, breathing and seeing and living, and that in itself is commendable. The High Priestess brings you to orphanages, and it is there that you set about your reanimations. While, like always, your mentor bears the brunt of the work, you manage to resurrect four bodies. Three girls, three children, and a boy who has been bound to these walls for too long. At Koldam, much to your own mystification, you bring back another. A Lieutenant, a real piece of chainmail in the king’s military armour. When his undead eyes finally settle upon your face, noticing the way that you lip quivers at your achievement, he breathes a sigh of relief. He looks at you as if you’re an angel, sent from the Undying God to rescue him. You are sent by Her, this you concede, but you are no angel.

Whispers of a coup have been present for as many years you have been beneath The High Priestess’ care, but they are thickening now - they are becoming more difficult to ignore. Still, you ignore them, as you must. You are not ready for Septimus to be toppled, you are not ready for the throne to keel over into the pale waves beneath the black rock. You don’t want to watch it drown, you don’t want to watch it to be torn apart like some; more than anything, you want it to stay put. Every time you squash a rebellion, every time a coup fails, you allow your heart to settle in your chest again. But it only lasts a moment, because treason is always being whispered, mutiny is always being accounted for. What you think of Septimus is irrelevant: you aren’t strong enough to fight for a place in whatever new world results from it. There’s still so much you can’t do, so much you don’t know if you want to do, and even now all you want is balance. It is a line you have toed your whole life and it has always got the better of you: religion and politics; life and death; permanence and impermanence; the girl you were and the girl you are becoming. You want the world to stop spinning. You want stability. You can’t know what you want if everything you know keeps changing.

You are only loosely beginning to learn the sort of vacancy you have inside you. Perhaps if you knew better, if you were better at knowing what you want, you would say: the world is creeping away from me, I am creeping away from me.

Do you still need a hand to guide you?

heart and soul  •  a making

METAMORPHOSIS: What she wants is stability. If she will live for centuries, she must have something to endure with her. Vasylia’s loyalty is very intricate. She doesn’t quite block out the throne’s transgressions in the same way that Temperance does, but there’s still a degree of selfishness to her fealty. She calls herself a Loyalist not because she believes Septimus is genuinely deserving of her love, but because her body cannot bear the instability. I’d like to see that shift very gradually, though. She can’t cling to this dream of stability forever, not when the path she’s chosen is so weathered by impermanence - and the dream will only become more impossible to uphold if Septimus grows in cruelty. I’d like her to realise that slowly. It begins small: she focuses her attention on those who bear the brunt of his mistreatment. I can see The Star, The Hermit or even The Hierophant factoring into this. And then it grows - whispers intensify. The king’s mistakes become impossible to ignore. Maybe he orders heads to be put on spikes on the castle barracks. Turncoats are beaten and hung as if crucified in the main hall. Equally, it could have nothing to do with violence at all. She may simply determine, like her mentor, that the throne doesn’t suit him. Either way, I’d like Vasylia to move with the developments of the game. She wouldn’t fight for Septimus, but she does tend to ignore whispers of coup. Right now, she is trying to balance the parts of herself she feels at war with; she can’t handle another one. Nevertheless, I want her to be forced to grapple with the fact that this is bigger than her and that she may have to act. I don’t know whether she’s likely to have confided in Vasylia of her intentions (depending on the player), but should the divergence become evident, questions of loyalty would certainly be pulled into the fore. Would she follow her mentor into revolt? There’s an opportunity here for conflict - but also for growth. Growing into the person The High Priestess wants them to be: willing to fight, to take, to reconcile yourself to your powers, hardened to the consequences. I want to see her really become a part of this war rather than hesitating at the edge of it.

NO MORE FALSE HEAVENS: The High Priestess never hesitates, she leans into this gift as deeply as her body is able without prying itself apart, and Vasylia believes that this has always been her way. The same can hardly be said for her, though. She is hesitant, at times she has misgivings, and the sight of a corpse almost always makes her tremble. The High Priestess has been guiding her for ten years now and in that time she’s discovered a lifetime’s worth of arcane knowledge, twice as much power as the Temple ever bequeathed her, but there is still so much she can’t do. What causes her to fail is hesitation, placing one foot in the art and one foot out of it. I suppose this is an alternative to plot #1, depending on which way things develop, but I’d like to see Vasylia turn away from The High Priestess. When she looks at her, at The Sun, she recognises what she might become. It is a fate she wishes to escape, and if she is truly committed to that, she may be forced to act. It’s no easy feat to kill a Necromancer, even one as wavering as herself, but severing ties with The High Priestess could breed disaster. She has always needed a hand to guide her in life, but it’d be fascinating to see her break away from that. The world opens its jaw and waits to swallow her whole, and The High Priestess is certain that without her guidance she’ll falter, but she needs to make herself more than what other people have made her. I’d like to develop her self-sufficiency, her willpower, but most importantly, I’d like to explore her desperation, to develop the recklessness which would no doubt begin to grow. Leaving The High Priestess’ tutelage is a make or break moment: and unless something considerable changes within her, it is likely to be the latter. Over time, she needs to determine whether she wants to be a Necromancer or a human-being. How far is she willing to go to excavate that small part of her, and is the act her genesis or her epilogue?

THE DARK MARK OF ME: As a Necromancer, she’s used to instilling at least a bit of apprehension in others. The Lovers’ eyes scan Vasylia’s skin for evidence of a pulse, a suggestion that, even now, she is alive. More importantly, though, The Emperor goes out of his way to make himself available to listen to her. Listen maybe isn’t the right word, to have his curiosity sated is probably more apt, and in moments of weakness, her secrets spill out of her like a river. He’s used to getting what he wants, and she will not stand in his way. But the very act of this is dangerous; it could breed conflict, consequences, even bring about Vasylia’s death (!?) should information fall into the wrong hands. I don’t think Vasylia has shared her hesitancy to continue down the path that The High Priestess has forged for her with her mentor - there’s no need to, it’s as easily distinguishable as ink spilled on skin - but there could be disastrous consequences should her concerns spill out. Not from The High Priestess, I don’t think, because I don’t see her as having an aim in mind to destroy Vasylia. Her resolve at least appears to be motivated by cutting away the thorns and making space for her prodigy to grow. Yet, Vasylia’s vulnerability is a weakness, and weaknesses can be exploited. While the dynamic between The Emperor and The Wheel of Fortune is… by far one of my favourite character dynamics you’ve written, perhaps The Emperor’s player would like to use this to his advantage in some way. The Emperor certainly isn’t The High Priestess’ first choice for the throne. So, I’d like to see these words come back to bite Vasylia, to further complicate her oscillation between this path or that. She’s no fool, but she by no means has the experience of her mentor. She studies underneath The High Priestess and lauds her propensity for manipulation and schemes, and while in her experience she’s picked up more than enough tricks, her hesitancy is weakness. She sacrifices her feelings and anxieties freely - because he coaxes it out of her, but also because she needs to purge. Over time, I’d like to see Vasylia’s actions breed consequences, over and over and over, to the point that she can’t run from them. She can only follow them blindly down a path she was always meant to.

SKIN AND TEETH: Maybe this is less of a personal plot point and more of a worldbuilding idea, but given that Necromancers have the ability to kill, I’d like Vasylia to dabble in that in the future. It’s something The High Priestess can do as second nature, as if she was born with the gift, and while Vasylia is better at drawing life into her than pouring herself into things, it’s not something she’s easily reconciled to. Still, I’d like to develop her skill here, figure out if it could be of use to The High Priestess or Septimus (because she serves the former first, the latter second). There’s an opportunity here to flesh out a dynamic between Vasylia and The Sun, who of course kills for a living, but I certainly think it’d be an irreversible path for her to walk down - one that, should she give herself over to it, solidifies her fate.

TRICK BOXES: If The High Priestess is the type to gather secrets in her plotting against Septimus, it could be interesting to have Vasylia drop by places such as The Rosewood Maiden in disguise. To gather secrets in a place where secrets are spilled like blood. She wouldn’t even need to disclose her plans to Vasylia if the player didn’t want her to, but I’d love an opportunity to branch out beyond the castle. Much of her life has been limited, either by the Temple or Castle Tyrholm, and it’d be interesting to feel her form an opinion on the ‘outside’ world; to get an idea of the sorts of people she’d be fleeing to should she leave The High Priestess’ care. Alternatively, it could be a good way to turn Vasylia away from her neutrality/loyalty and into the company of revolters.

A PLACE OUT OF MIND: Depending on how things shape up, I’d love to see Vasylia finally become an advisor. Perhaps not to the same degree as her mentor, but in some shape or form, I’d like to have her officially offer advice to the Crown. While The High Priestess’ intentions in extracting her from the Temple are, of course, ambiguous, it’s what she’s been training towards. What would make this even more interesting is: who will she be advisor to? To Septimus? Well, that spot is already taken by her mentor. The Emperor? Well, that depends whether his father can hold onto the throne until he dies. The Chariot? The World? Two vastly different options, but I suppose it depends which of them The High Priestess hopes to install on the throne. Vasylia is already quite content with the notion of serving The Emperor, and that could breed conflict, but it could also change.

WRITTEN IN THE FLESH OF US: While Vasylia is getting better at nominating the more sacrificable parts of herself every time she uses it, the sickness is spreading. She’s heard rumours, though. Rumours of a mage with the inexplicable ability to draw from two bodies of magic. I think The Moon could be a source of real fascination for Vasylia. If she fears anything, it’s that she’ll turn herself so irreversibly over to Necromancy that she loses the essence of who she is. Given that The Moon’s abilities lie in healing, I’d like Vasylia to investigate. If there is a possibility of regeneration, she wants it. It could be an opportunity to rehabilitate her self-image, to reconcile herself to this fate of hers, or even to break away from it - depending on what she discovers.

“Magic”—Yennefer, her eyes fixed on the sky above the hills, rested her hands on the pommel of her saddle—“is, in some people’s opinion, the embodiment of Chaos. It is a key capable of opening the forbidden door. The door behind which lurk nightmares, fear and unimaginable horrors, behind which enemies hide and wait, destructive powers, the forces of pure Evil capable of annihilating not only the one who opens the door but with them the entire world. And since there is no lack of those who try to open the door, someone, at some point, is going to make a mistake and then the destruction of the world will be forejudged and inevitable. Magic is, therefore, the revenge and the weapon of Chaos. The fact that, following the Conjunction of the Spheres, people have learned to use magic, is the curse and undoing of the world. The undoing of mankind. And that’s how it is, Ciri. Those who believe that magic is Chaos are not mistaken.”

Spurred on by its mistress’s heels, the magician’s black stallion neighed lengthily and slowly made his way into the heather. Ciri hastened her horse, followed in Yennefer’s tracks and caught up with her. The heather reached to their stirrups.

“Magic,” Yennefer continued after a while, “is, in some people’s opinion, art. Great, elitist art, capable of creating beautiful and extraordinary things. Magic is a talent granted to only a chosen few. Others, deprived of talent, can only look at the results of the artists’ works with admiration and envy, can admire the finished work while feeling that without these creations and without this talent the world would be a poorer place. The fact that, following the Conjunction of the Spheres, some chosen few discovered talent and magic within themselves, the fact that they found Art within themselves, is the blessing of beauty. And that’s how it is. Those who believe that magic is art are also right.”

On the long bare hill which protruded from the heath like the back of some lurking predator lay an enormous boulder supported by a few smaller stones. The magician guided her horse in its direction without pausing her lecture.

“There are also those according to whom magic is a science. In order to master it, talent and innate ability alone are not enough. Years of keen study and arduous work are essential; endurance and self-discipline are necessary. Magic acquired like this is knowledge, learning, the limits of which are constantly stretched by enlightened and vigorous minds, by experience, experiments and practice. Magic acquired in such a way is progress. It is the plough, the loom, the watermill, the smelting furnace, the winch and the pulley. It is progress, evolution, change. It is constant movement. Upwards. Towards improvement. Towards the stars. The fact that following the Conjunction of the Spheres we discovered magic will, one day, allow us to reach the stars. Dismount, Ciri.”

Yennefer approached the monolith, placed her palm on the coarse surface of the stone and carefully brushed away the dust and dry leaves.

“Those who consider magic to be a science,” she continued, “are also right. Remember that, Ciri. And now come here, to me.”

The girl swallowed and came closer. The enchantress put her arm around her.

“Remember,” she repeated, “magic is Chaos, Art and Science. It is a curse, a blessing and progress. It all depends on who uses magic, how they use it, and to what purpose. And magic is everywhere. All around us.”

Andrzej Sapkowski || Blood of Elves

“Champion’s dawn”

Chapter 20 - “Those who left”

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A travel through the Mountains of Shadows was easier than Oropher expected. He feared the darkness lurking there would bite him and gnaw viciously until he won't sumbit from exhaustion, which sooner or later could happen. Then the shadows would finally consume all of him in malicious clouds and his tracks would be wiped from the ground - he would be lost to the word, with no chance to find his way back among the mist and no one would have ever found him. Eren Wethrin was not a way to be traveled - ruthless darkness spied on traveler's every step waiting for a slight wave of doubt to attack unrelently.

But the darkness scattered when it faced too bright light of the orb and only grey mist still lingered around rising above the groud and rocks. Oropher passed the mountains safely, but even on the other side he saw no tracks indicating that the army station somewhere nearby. Oropher frowned, knowing that the enemy had its ways to hide evil forces, but he had to push forward - he could not come back to Doriath with nothing. Those dark clouds he saw Changes ago, rising above the westen land, were but a preludium of what awaited them from the hands of the Dark Lord. Oropher needed to find the army of the enemy.

Oropher quickly passed the flat lands towards another mountains range where he found a passage to the land of Lammoth. He left his horse, when they entered the forest, under safe care of the ash tree. He wished to scout around on his own and maybe hunt something as it was long since he made a fire and roasted a hare or a bird. During his travel, Oropher mostly gathered nuts, berries and fruits as it was easier and faster than lurking somewhere and waiting for an easy prey - hunting was occupying and Oropher couldn't afford to loose so much time. And so, Oropher was forced to eat greens for all this time and he had to admit that for now he had enough of this kind food - he would give anything for a pheasant or a simple duck.

But animals were elusive and he had no situation to shoot anything. Somewhere around he clearly heard quails, but he couldn't detect where the birds were and he had not found any traces or signs that turkeys or gooses lived in those forests. And adding to his hunger for meat, Oropher was a bit thirsty. Though he tried to spare his water it ended pretty fast and for a long time now he had not encountered any river, stream or lake where he would be able to refill his waterskin and he didn't want to risk drinking any water that came down from the Mountains of Shadows.

Oropher strolled through the woods vigilant and observant, keeping an eye on any potential danger and any prey that would spring up from the bushes all of sudden. He had his bow in hand and arrow on a string, ever ready to release it in swift and precise shot. Though, he started to become distracted as he started to sense mix of feeling that lingered in the woods - there was a vibe in the forest he had never experienced before. And the trees knew of it too and they acted much differently as if confering something with each other – their rustle of leaves and moves of branches were clear message to him, some said to be careful, while the others coaxed him to go forth.

The border of the forest was long way behind and in front of him there was still no end to this forest, yet he still didn't hear many animals around. Most of the birds were quiet during this strange time of half-darkness when another bright orb shone dimming the stars - it was pale and gave no warmth while the first one was almost yellow, so bright unlike Oropher ever experienced. And now when the pale orb was shining those were mostly owls that Oropher heard and from time to time he noticed a bat manouvering between the barks. Leaves of the trees were much darker in this light, but beams popped between them and illuminated still cold soil.

Then Oropher stopped his tracks lead by unmistakable hunch that was only strenghtened by warning calls. He looked around at nearby trees paying most attention to the trunks. There was a danger ahead, this lone thing he knew and minding his steps Oropher got a bit closer to one of the trees. He made no sound as he moved and only delicate wind made any sound in the quiet forest. Then Oropher saw it – a well hidden but clearly present tick holding a trap. A well made trap if someone asked him and unpracised elf would have not noticed it, facing the consequences of stepping into it.

Yrch were more than good in handling such traps. Even on his way to the forest in Lammoth, Oropher uncountered many other traps either set for foot soldiers or horseback riders. It never foretold anything good, but at least now he was sure he was getting closer to what he was looking for.

Oropher stepped back deciding to get above the dangerous ground. It was very well known that yrch were not good climbers and trees did everything to prevent the evil creatures to get on the higher ground. By this, Oropher could be sure he would be able to pass safely in the tree branches – yrch couldn't set traps in the trees.

He placed an arrow back in the quiver and bow landed on his back. Right now there were other matters at hand than searching for an easy prey and after he took care of his weapon, Oropher climbed the nearby oak tree and proceeded to carefully move forward. The trap seemed to be a new one and he must be careful to not trigger it. It was hard to decide whether new or old traps were more dangerous - a new trap will always be triggered, while the old one was unpredictable and could be set into motion even by a slight wind or not to be triggered at all.

Oropher was more than worried to encounter yrch camp somewhere nearby, but he could be sure that this is exactly what he will see. On the other hand it was better sooner than later to see the forces of the enemy and get as close to their camp as possible, especially that he was not long in those woods and yrch won't sense him coming closer which will give him definately more time for safer observation.

He briskly made his way from the oak to a beech tree and then went ahead to get on a tall chestnut tree when a treacherous sound of relieved string made his muscles tense instantly. Spear-like spike shot up immediately and characteristic sound of loosed chain was heard as well. The trap was triggered and the stregth of the trap's throw was enough to reach Oropher without a problem. There was no chance to dodge – before Oropher could react the spike striked him between the ribs, sending a single powerful bolt down his whole body. The chain pulled him down and Oropher fell to the forest ground with a thud.

Silence in the forest was only perturbed by nervousness of trees around. The wind sent forth their words of what happened but it was of no use – there was no one around to help.

Still dizzy, Oropher rised himself delicately immediately feeling a pulsing sensation that prevented him from getting up. Yrch never used traps like this, this was something he had never encountered before, which didn't change the hopelessness of his situation. Oropher reached to the spike embeded in his body – there was no way to get it out without wounding himself even more.

Damn it all! Oropher grimaced with anger, but instead of cursing himself he needed to find quick sollution for this situation. He couldn't get the spike out or else he will bleed out almost instantly. Even if he will call his horse and then somehow he will detatch a chain from the spike and then manage to climb on Luin, he won't ride far. And there was no chance for him to reach Doriath on time.

Constant pain pulsating in his side was not pleasant at all and he could be sure the wound was already swollen. Oropher wondered how much time it will be before the predators would sniff up blood and easy prey. Surely there were wolves in those woods, lynxes as well.

He shook off this thought quickly and gritting down stinging pain, Oropher forced himself to crawl under some bushes to not be on sight in open space. He tried to not make much noise and he prevented groans of pain cumulating down his throat. The chain bruisingly heavied pulling at the spike, but Oropher managed to hide himself a bit and then he congealed listening intently to his surroundings.

Then he laughed at himself in his mind. What good was this hideout? He will be found sooner or later, dead or alive. His faith was forejudged.

Oropher closed his eyes slowly with each passing moment being more and more aware about the hopelessness of his position. He misjudged the situation and underestimated his enemy – now he was paying for it. It was his mistake to take for granted that yrch were not developing their skills and traps. And he will pay for this mistake with his own life. He will die in this wilderness, long way from home and no one will know what happened to him. Oropher will be one of those who were lost and never returned, leaving his family with nothing more than memories. At a lone thought of his father holding to tiny thread of hope that he will return, Oropher's heart burned with ache. He could almost see Erthor collapsing and fading away as centuries passed by, until this thin threat would burst softly with realization that Oropher will never come back. He closed his eyes with all his strenght preventing a bump in his thoat to rise.

His mistake was unforgivable. Well done, general. Your great skills are showing off now. He was always quick to chasten Arvellon and Halloth, Amrun and Tinnu alike and now, despite all his experience, he did such stupidity. But there was no one to scold him for it and no one will have a chance to.

Long time has passed since the bright orb, fresh melted gold, was shining on the land with strength of thousand forges. The heat was hard to withstand and Oropher was at the very thin line of loosing conciousness. He knew if he let this happen he will not wake up.

It was a second time the orb was rosing, casting weak beams on the land and illuminating the sky. And for all this time, not even for a tiny moment a rain poured from the sky nor even a dew appeared on the plants. Oropher's thoat was so dry he was sure he could not say a word. As he lied in his hideout, he managed to find few berries in the bushes, but it was not enough food to keep him up. He was well dehydrated and he slowly he bled out, it was unavoidable. During the time he layed there, Oropher's strength faded and he found it hard to even move, so he lied motionless under the bushes, awaiting his time.

The wound swollen horribly. Blood and suppuration poured from it lurring only more vermin and flies. By now for sure the wound stinked as if something already died, but his senses were not sharp enough to smell this. At the beginning Oropher had strength to wave the flies away and cover his wound, keeping it away from dirt and soil as much as it was possible. But now his vitality faded and he suffered long and painful death.

The air was heating up and once more it held a terrible grip on his fading conciousness. And Oropher's eyesight failed in it's clearance and sharpness, most of the times he held his eyes closed, trying to rely on his hearing, but he was not able to focus his senses enough. Oropher breathed as deep as he could and as much his body let him. He needed to cool down a bit, though he was not sure anymore if he felt too warm or too cold - it changed too often for it to be normal and just then Oropher felt shivers going down his body. It won't be long now, he knew it and with this came a strong wave of regrets. He wished to see little Nimloth again. He wished to see her grow up, witness her first steps and words. He had not yet finished a teddy otter for her. His family was waiting for him – he remembered Celeborn's determination to not let him go alone and Galathil was right to be worried. It was Oropher who was wrong – he won't come back home this time.

Only after a long moment he realized he heard incoming voices and now he clearly heard steps on the forest ground. They must be close if he sensed it in the state he was in. Someone had finally come back for his prey, but yrch knew no mercy nor remorse – Oropher should have been wiser to end his suffering long ago.

The voices were within reach now, but Oropher didn't listen carefully to what they were saying. He only felt a brief wave of hunter's satisfaction that they cought something in their trap. Maybe yrch will finish him off immediately, he was too weak after all to survive moving to their encampment and they won't have any use of him. Oropher had not fought when someone grabbed a long chain and pulled at the spike at the same time bringing him out of the bushes. It hurt horrendously, but the spike was wedged well and kept still in the body.

As fast as it started, in a moment he was stopped being dragged by the chain. As much as Oropher was relieved, it didn't help now at all with pulsating pain that started anew and dimmed every other stimuli. It was said that before death there is no pain nor sadness. Did it mean he had a chance to survive?

Oropher repeated himself over and over that he needed to crawl back under the bushes, but nothing came out of it as he was not able to move. He briefly felt a bright beams boring into his eyes painfully and burning his skin. He was lost. But before he will leave he must say his farewall and hope that the trees will carry it as far as Doriath. He hoped his father will know how sorry he was.

Steady, but still delicate hands rised his head carefully, but Oropher could not focus on the person above him. He was saying something Oropher could neither hear clearly nor understand, but he admitted it sounded familiar. His blurry vision showed a face of a dark skinned elf – with the last waves of conciousness, Oropher knew it was an elf and not an evil creature of the Dark Lord. The other hunter clearly tried to detach a chain from a spike, while the elf above him kept saying something to him and Oropher was not able to respond anyhow. And then a blessed fresh water was poured on Oropher's lips and he couched weakly, not really improving his state, but he was still grateful for this small relief.

The chain was taken away and he clearly felt the loose of this weight, but his reprieve didn't last for long. This time water was poured in delicate gush on his wound. It hurt madly, though the water was a bit cool it felt like a boiling lava, but Oropher could not move to escape this. Besides, he was not aware of this now, but the wound needed to be cleaned from maggots and filth, the sooner the better.

By those moments, Oropher lost the track of passing time. He still felt burning sensation even when they stopped pouring water on his wound, but unpleasant feeling lingered there with constant movement and biting. He was rised a bit higher and his whole chest belt was detached and taken away, though he barely registered it and before Oropher knew he was rised up and held against the chest of the strange elf and taken somewhere away. Oropher realized his horse stayed behind. They needed to ccome back for the steed, Luin couldn't stay in the woods on his own.

Oropher realized he lived longer than he expected. Strangely, those were no yrch who found him - instead he encountered those elves who decided to help him. But where were they taking him? Will he come back from there?

Most likely, he was drowsing off while the elf carried him and Oropher was not sure for how long they walked, but the orb became more orange and the hotness clearly passed, taking away the headache that made Oropher pass out. He felt strong enough to stirr in elf's arms, but his vision was still blurred and he could not rise his head properly.

'Who are you?' he asked or more whispered, because his voice didn't sound properly and could not leave his dried throat. But he asked again for as much as there was strength left in him. 'Who are you?'

He was answered with more words he didn't understand and then he swayed again in the state of half conciousness. He was at the mercy of those strangers and hundreds possibilities flourished in his mind. Could those elves be the ones who left the March just before the Sea and lived on the verge of the continent for all those centuries? But why they stayed near the shore and didn't move deeper into Beleriand or even to Doriath? Maybe those were the elves who were said to be lost after being captured by shadows and darkness. They were said to be lost until the word's end, could it be possible that they were those who Oropher encountered? And also, there were stories of the tribes of the Dark Elves who had fallen into darkness and ackowledged the Dark Lord as the Power over the world. Where was he taken now? What awaited him on the end of this path?

A loud call brought him back from unconciousness. From his smudgy vision, Oropher could see he was now in some kind of encampment, away from protective trees and brief wave of their desperate calling reached Oropher immediately. But he was taken away from them and there was no way to know where he was exactly. The outlines and shapes of the elves around merged, but Oropher was sure there were many of them. All sounds fused as well and he could not guess what was happening around.

It was not long when the brightness was lost in the light grey inside of some tent and the darker surroundings brought Oropher relief and more security. The golden orb was not natural with its heat and pleasant coolness of very well known shadows overwhelmed him bringing more reprieve and awareness. He was all alone among strangers, vulnerable and almost helpless.

He was placed on some soft material and just for a bit of moment there were no prying eyes at him. Only the elf who carried him stayed some distance away and watched him closely, but Oropher could not focus back on him. He lied down letting pleasant darkness strenghten him, breathing as heavily as he could minding the spike that was still embeded in between his ribs. It was much harder to breathe and constant stinging prevented him from taking bigger hausts of air, but his body needed to cool down. He had not drink in a long time and loss of blood and the heat from the outside had not helped at all.

A flow of conciousness sharpened his senses, but he truly wished it didn't. He groaned at the awful feeling of crawling maggots around and inside his wound, groveling and biting festering flesh. There were constant shivers and vibrations with overwhelming need to get rid of the maggots crawling in his body. He was eaten alive by those vermins and the small amount of water that was poured before have not helped in cleaning this horrible wound.

Oropher became more concious of his surroundings and his eyesight was a bit clearer. He lied peacefully on the bedding, preventing groans of pain and grimaces entering his face. He was aware that he was not alone, but neither he felt threatened by the elf being enough distance away from him. He realized weapons on his back were taken away from him and quiver was detached from his waist as well. But he still had dagger at belt - even in this state he will fight if he will feel threatened. If captured, a wolverine tries to escape for the sake of freedom, often killing itself in the process.

The elf moved and poked out of the tent to look outside and Oropher knew he must take his chance and leave. Nothing on those side of the mountains was peaceful nor helpful and he will do well to leave the encampment as fast as possible. Oropher stirred again trying to rise himself on elbows, but his strength was not as great as he thought it was and his wish to spring from the tent vanished in weakness. The elf at the tent's entrance rised up in clear protest and stepped closer to him trying to prevent him from moving.

Oropher could not get a single word from his language and he was not sure to let the elf get any closer to him. He stared at the elf with green eyes of a shining tempest targeting him like a downed wolf – still dangerous despite its wounds.

'Stay back!' he growled savagely, but a burning sensation of bursting skin made him grimace. The pain of this was horrendous that his eyes almost teared up. The elf, though, halted and rised his hands in calming gesture, while Oropher's strength faded as quickly as it appeared and not even precious darkening sky could help him stay awake. He fell back on the bed, heavy like a rock and his eyesight was again smudged in unclear vision.

Someone entered the tent and immediately directed eyes at him. And then among the words he spoke only one came out clear – Sindel. Yes, so he was. A Grey Elf of the Land Beyond.

Closing his eyes Oropher now understood why the strange language was familiar to him. His beloved father tought him the most of it, though Erthor never managed to teach him to speak with the right accent and until now Oropher have not heard anyone to speak Quenya so naturally.

It was Quenya. The poetic language of their kin. The Noldor came back home they abadoned long ago.

While studying the Bible, this particular Bible verse caught my attention. It's because my husband and I have noticed that as we share the plan of Salvation with various people and counseled them regarding their life choices. However, their responses have been, it's my life, and I'm going to live it. Now, I'm not forejudging anyone, so I won't be judged (Matthew 7:1). Nevertheless, as Pastors, It's what certain people have replied when we offer the plan of Salvation. Ergo, as Ministers of God, it's our Heavenly duty to sow spiritual seed in them, and the Holy Spirit reaps the reaps harvest. 🧡 #Food4Thought, (at 162 Gerard Bronx NY) https://www.instagram.com/p/COvaqJmA8lBzXPp1g2CxWQqPnJeMn2ZeN7uX500/?igshid=1128ysr46mwzh

Congratulations, CAS! You’ve been accepted for the role of THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE with the faceclaim of ANYA CHALOTRA. What is there to say, really, about Vasylia? What isn’t there to say? She’s marvelous. She’s everything I wanted in a WOF app that I felt was necessary to display their conflict, which is centric to who they are as a character. You hit every point, you crossed every T, and you sure did dot every single I you came across. I kept on thinking that it couldn’t get any better, but the farther I scrolled, it did. You have put, on full display, someone who is rotting from the inside out and is helpless to do anything save for watch, and I am genuinely overjoyed to have you with us. Vasylia has such a broad stroke of potential -- I can’t wait to see what you do with her.

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OOC NAME: Cas PRONOUNS: She/her AGE: 22 TIMEZONE, ACTIVITY LEVEL: BST / I tend to work during the day and write at night, but that suits me since everyone else tends to be a good five hours behind me TMZ-wise. As I’ve recently learned, I’m not actually very... quick when writing haha but I log in every day and try to post a reply at least once every other day. Always around and contactable on Discord for plotting and chatting! I’d say 7/10. TRIGGERS: N/A ANYTHING ELSE?: I tried to write around The High Priestess as much as I could but given they’re responsible for The Wheel of Fortune’s way of life it was difficult to avoid her, so happy to revise any details with the player. Also my background is so long I’M SORRY but tysm for reading uwu This application includes mentions of death, child death, self harm, blood, strangulation and suicide ideation.

IN CHARACTER SKELETON: The Wheel of Fortune NAME: Vasylia FACECLAIM: Anya Chalotra, Diana Silvers, Victoria Pedretti (in order) AGE: 35 (appears 12 years younger) DETAILS: I think what drew me to The Wheel of Fortune was that it would be easy to make their character all about Necromancy. About this sickness they can slowly feel settling into their bones. But they’re a person too, with a name and a history. Their relationship with magic is more complex than feeling the ache of it and the decision to stop it. There’s a heaviness to their story, a burden that they must carry, and I had fun experimenting quite how far that extends beyond the weight of their abilities. I believe it’s important for them to be a person before all this, because they have to have something to return to; there has to be something pulling them back from numbness, from giving the pieces of themselves away. The skeleton is a mirage of contradictions: numbness and intensity; resignation and sheer will; anxiety and power; death and life. I’m always enamoured by characters who inherently contradict themselves. Who, try as they might, cannot reconcile themselves to a single thing. The Wheel of Fortune has clearly shifted between these opposites their entire life, sometimes without even knowing it, and in spite of this dizzying dance from one extreme to another, there are moments where they feel paralysed. I find that so compelling, because as a card The Wheel of Fortune is all about movement, change - and yet, I can’t think of a better way to characterise them. Dealt upright, the card is chance, opportunity, destiny. Reversed: misfortune, disappointment, the loss of one’s way. All these facets are scattered in their body, and this will continue to be so until they carve out their way. They are always in the grip of a power they can’t quite reconcile themselves to, seized by the piercing thought that only lifetime after lifetime of static numbness awaits them, and that they must endure it alone. This power of theirs is a balancing act, and balancing requires commitment, devotion. They’re a conduit, almost, for this raw energy to pass through, and it takes its toll. Already, they have carved out a space in their own heart and, very slowly, it is being filled in with black, rotting dust. You’d have to be a monster not to feel for them; after all, they spent much of their childhood spilling their soul into things that didn’t matter because they were told to. Because they had no idea of the consequences. Necromancy in this world is such a profound experience, at once ingrained in the very essence of humanness and the severing of any real feeling. It goes beyond that, even; some lose their fingers, their limbs, and some are forced to drag their body across this world until the Undying God finally takes them. What does it feel like to feel the movement of life, the very energy that creates animals and people and worlds, the soul of everything, pass through your fingers? It must be one of the most intense feelings in the universe - and yet, it’s deadening. After a while, that raw power can no longer be felt merely in your hands. It’s floating in your body, your hands cut from you, and now all you feel is the heaviness of it, with nowhere to store it except between your chest. This skeleton really resonated with me. I really believe that without passion and heart and intense feeling, the world would be a very dull place. I like the idea of The Wheel of Fortune being totally stifled by this process, swallowed up by uncertainty and receiving very little support to navigate that. It’s a fate they accepted for themselves, willingly, and just as Necromancy lingers hesitantly at their fingertips, they’re not sure they have the strength to pull away. Even further, they are not even certain that’s what they want. Out of gratitude or for their own sake, this is the path they’ve chosen, and it is one they feel obligated to complete. That is the truth they choose to stomach: learn, without sacrificing who you are. Be both. But they’re slipping through the cracks; hesitation hangs at the back of their throat and chokes them. It’s a frightening thought to think that you must simply swallow the void, because all of this must be weathered. All of it must be endured, because that is the price you pay for power. Tldr; they’re a deeply tragic character but, like their card, there is opportunity for change. Their soul has been chipped away, bit by bit, and the weight of their power is beginning to settle into their bones. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The beauty of The Wheel of Fortune is that, with enough tenacity, their future is their own. Stay, leave; give in, break away. All depends on which way the cards are facing! BACKGROUND: I. THE FOOL, UPRIGHT innocence, new beginnings, free spirit The first thing a child sees in its life is its mother, and you are no different. The first thing you know is her, penniless enough that your infanthood would have been nothing short of unremarkable but provided for enough that she could have kept you if she’d wanted to. She has had children before, and she’s felt the billowing warmth that childrearing lends her, but you are stealing something from her. Your mother cannot quite place the feeling, cannot understand what it is you’re doing to her, but when she holds you in her arms she feels her limbs growing heavier, her muscles deaden. You must be, she determines, a punishment - so she resolves to rid herself of you. More important than that, she resolves to make an offering of you. The woman makes the long, arduous journey from Tyrholm, averts road bandits and street beggars and pardoners swearing by religious forgeries; she pushes herself halfway across Markholm with only her conviction to drive her. She commits you to the Temple of the Undying, and this is something she wants known. She wants the great, bipartite deity to know that this largesse of hers is an immolation, a symbol of her devotion. In return, she would have the punishment lifted. And you never see your mother again. The temple names you Vasylia, assuming the role of a strange, distant mother who plucks the word from between the stars. You have no surname and therefore no genesis, nothing to remind you where you come from and who you are. Of course, as you well know now, none of that matters. As soon as you pass the threshold of that sacred place, it forges an identity for you. (Your heritage is a secret that tucks itself away from you, like a shadow that shies from the light. You are the result of a union between a travelling merchant and a beautiful, beautiful woman, and this is all your mother has to protect her in life. Those who covet beauty, who wish to steal it away and display it among their wares, are always equipped with a lie or two. The lie is this: he loves her, he does; devotedly, honestly, purely, and he wants her to join him. To travel with him over pale waves and into the cove of pirates. Perhaps he’d believed in that at first, but it ends as all things end; in fiction. He leaves her as all men leave her, with an enormous pouch of gold. Your mother settles in a village at the border of Volkan Forest. You do not live there long. You never learn your mother’s name. Her name is Estrid.) Life at the Temple is, for the most part, simple. Dull, pedestrian, but simple. Abandoned, you are raised as one amongst many, a single child amidst a whole throng of neglected children. It quickly becomes clear to you that some wield magical abilities, shielded from a world which harshly forejudges them, and some arrive with nothing to them at all. Like you: not even a name. Some of them are sickly, a few of them are malnourished, and far too many of them are the reluctant offspring of poverty, charily offered to the Temple by parents who lament of their penury. But you are not sickly or malnourished or magical, even. You wail out in the dark of night for a mother who doesn’t want you, but which child here does not? At least at first, there is nothing particularly special about you. You are still a child waiting to grow into yourself, and, well, there is nothing unusual about that fact. Your childhood is, in a word, unremarkable. The Temple does its best to inspire loyalty in the offspring yielded to them - you are, after all, an opportunity for life-long indoctrination. Your earliest days are structured by a conformity which they shake into your bones: the Temple teaches you of the wolves and the snakes and the annihilating body they make as one. On magic, their position is less clear. Messages are mixed. Necromancers are a chosen, sacred few. But the other magi are being punished, cursed for a cycle of blasphemy and adultery and theft and anything else they can conjure up. As with all children, you assume the first thing you hear as gospel, but as the years gallop past you, you find yourself cordoned off by a low drone. The Temple is not so united as it seems, and there are people who whisper in disagreement. You think you are beginning to notice the resentment growing around you, but you are still a child - you know nothing. You determine that it is safer to be ordinary. You cannot quite be called pious, but you rise with the morning light. You work hard. You devote time to your prayers and you comply with the codes of silence which linger between them. You restock ink and parchment for the Clerics working sedulously at translation. You trim the rose bushes at the edge of the forest. You are untroublesome and, for the most part, amenable; shapeable. You offer a hand to help wherever it may be required, because that is what you’ve always been taught to do. You are nothing much like some of the other children, boisterous and ambitious, hungry for stories of politics and warfare. Hankering to feel the weight of a bronze rapier in their hands, to run their fingers through enemies’ blood and call it an act of cleansing. The Temple is not cruel, but it is cyclical, and the pattern is not enough - for them or for you. But you do as you’re told, your life moves in a progressive rhythm, because what else is there? You have always needed a hand to guide you. When life drifts in a sequence it all blurs into one, so you find solace in the small things. You revel in the sanctuary of the forest. Its trees keel into spirals, bent by the weight of their branches. You like the stillness of the air, the way that the birds settle on the branches so completely at peace - unaware of the eyes watching them. You learn that silence is not solitude, that the reticences observed by the Temple do not always bring you peace. In fact, they rarely ever bring you peace, and at times they have the tendency to strangle you. You marvel at the way the water refracts in the moonlight, bending with the shape of its brilliance. It moves furtively and secretly, as if beneath the surface there is buried a whole other world that it hopes to keep concealed. You are never the sort of girl with fantasies mirrored from the vellum of a fairytale book, and you never touch things so delicately that you look to be afraid of them. You would never call yourself a dreamer, but there’s an intensity to you which makes it hard for you to stop staring at things. There are only a couple of children in the Temple you ever feel particularly close to, and when you think back, they are the only things you feel are worth remembering here. Curled up on a stony ledge, watching a religious darkness fall over the ancient rock. Organising altars and scrubbing floorboards and observing silences with a dash of humour. You have never truly felt like you belong anywhere, except when you lay down in the grass or you sit on the cold stone and run your fingertips through the water, imagining that you are somewhere else. It makes this place feel a little less dull. II. THE HIEROPHANT, UPRIGHT education, knowledge, beliefs It is perhaps no coincidence that it’s during your sixteenth Summertide that you first raise an animal from the dead, completely by accident. A butterfly, crushed beneath the weight of a snow which is only now beginning to thaw. You cannot describe what brought you to pick it up. Beauty? You have always looked beneath the surface. Macabre as the very idea of it may be, you cannot not help but take it into your hand. You feel its limp body balance in your palm like parchment: you want it to be beautiful again. And as if by magic, it shifts in your palm, it wakes. Half-amazed and half-afraid, you watch how its wings unfurl themselves and its body cracks and distorts itself back into shape. But you are overcome by something strange: the insect sits in the centre of your palm, learning about the world again, but if you were blind you wouldn’t know it. You can’t feel it there. By instinct you clasp your hands around it and bring it into the Temple and, perhaps foolishly, you show them what you have done. The Temple determines that it is no coincidence that your gift for rebirth, the very echo of Summertide, should reveal itself now. It’s an ancient celebration of renaissance. Fate twists, and the Temple has two Necromancers already, devoted to the craft and resolved to educate you. Educate perhaps puts it generously: they test you, push you, assign you tasks to complete without any tangible goal in sight. They never teach you what it takes, what you must sacrifice, what it truly means to excavate that void between life and death. This is the truth of it: you have been chosen by the Undying Herself and this gift is yours to own, but as with all things we take, it demands sacrifice. A piece of you, snapped off from bone; it lingers there at your side. They teach you that you are different, you are special. The other magi can manipulate solid matter and regenerate limbs, but you are sacred. They will not see twenty-five years, but you? You can live for hundreds of years. Your schooling begins small. Insects, mice, small woodland creatures. But it’s a demanding, exhausting process -  still, you continue to work hard. When you’d brought back that butterfly on the third day of Summertide, it had seemed so easy. A case of simply wishing and being. But things are not so easy now. You find it difficult to pour that same longing into the creatures put down in front of you; you are more sophisticated, less candid. But you do as you’re told, make as many successes as you do failures, and for whatever end goal the Necromancers have in mind for you, you progress. Then, as if you have not already experienced enough change, the world spins carelessly on its side. You are eighteen and you have been under the tutelage of the Necromancers for just under two years. You feel you are drifting away from the green beauty of that first instance, the first time you bartered with the universe and it chose to answer you. But you are still just a child and your teachers have lived for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, you learn that Necromancers are dangerous, they’re volatile, they’re lethal, and that includes you. It takes little more than the impetuosity of a boy sat next to you at dinnertime, for him to waggishly swipe the bread roll from your plate - as children are mischievously wont to do - for you to wreak tragedy. The action irritates you, infuriates you, even, because you have less patience for things now. You snatch the roll from his hands. Without warning, he collapses, body limp on the floor. You are puzzled at first, you’d scarcely touched him, but as the Brethren roll his body over on the stone, you realise what you have done. The boy is dead. The boy is dead, and you’re learning your emotions have consequences. But this you’ve forgotten. You’ve scrubbed it from your skin raw, as if that will absolve you. Things are accelerating. You perform your lessons largely in isolation. You are kept away from the other children, particularly those who hope to take vows, because you are dangerous, you cannot be contained. Your tutors take the opportunity to teach you more diligently, more industriously. Your accomplishments are growing: frogs, small birds, rabbits. But the hours are slipping away and you don’t understand what it’s all for, bringing back forest animals contentedly buried beneath the moss. Nevertheless, you move forward. You think you are getting better at this. When you have lived for twenty years, they bring you live animals; they show you how to drain them, how to cleave to your youth. The work you are performing is an honour. You have always needed a hand to guide you. Something has changed in you. The forest recedes from you. You wake and you learn and you perform and you dream empty, hollow dreams in an unbroken cycle. More often than not you lie awake for hours, allowing your eyes to rest on a rotting mark in the corner of the ceiling. You smile still and you try to laugh, but as each chuckle worms its way up your throat you feel it strangle you in the process. Sometimes you cough up blood, thick and hard, and you stare at the red spot in confusion. One day, you catch your hand on a piece of shattered glass and feel nothing. You don’t even flinch. At the wound you simply stare and, out of curiosity perhaps, or a pointed desire to hurt at something, you pick up a shard of glass and feel the weight of it in your fingers. And with all the force you have, you burrow it into your flesh. That, you feel. You drop the glass, wincing, and a hot tear rolls down your cheek. You lie in your bed and wish on a comet for somebody to steal you away from this place. You whisper it into existence. But in the morning you wake and everything is the same. A blur settles into your bones. Things are a cycle, so much more so than when your life had begun. But you know nothing else. You stay. III. THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE, UPRIGHT change, cycles, inevitable fate In your life you have learned much. How to raise animals from the dead. How to canalise energy away from the living and into your bones. You have learned that things change, of course they do, but they also stay the same. For people like you, life motionlessly moves from one event to the next. You remember the day that your life had spun so carelessly on its axis once again with such precision that, at times, you are sure that you are back there. You think that you are back at the Temple, raising rabbits and drawing the lifeforce from dandelions. You think that the clouds are weeping into the earth with salted rain, and the chill of your salvation buries itself into you. By now, you know she is not your deliverance. There is nothing holy in her but power, and how she revels in it. The woman alights on the Temple without a horse, without a thing to carry her here, and if you had ever been a foolish sort of girl you might have assumed she’d undertaken the journey on foot. But you have never been a fool. You are twenty-five years old. A solemn cold which seems to swell in her at once brings you a much-desired quiet and chills you to the bone. To your surprise, all bow to her. Cower from her. Even your teachers are beneath her. With purpose she pulls you aside, ungloves your hands and takes them in her own, and she promises you that the two of you are the same. She does not fear you, and you have no cause to fear her. You are cut from the same dust and made from the same bones - there’s divinity in that. Like you, she can raise the dead, and what’s more: she’s good at it. Perhaps for the first time in your life you are asked what it is that you want. You feel like the decision is yours. She offers you an ultimatum: remain here, raise rabbits and mice and crows, be nothing; or join her, learn the craft, study beneath her, become something. While you are torn between your desire to flee this place and a thick, breathless lump which lingers at the back of your throat unexplained, it is never really a question. It is an answer. You pack up everything you own: garments, mementos, fear and desire, all. You accept willingly, unthinkingly, blindly. You pass through the egress and step into a shimmering new world. Even now, that is the only way you can think to describe this place. This new world you have chosen for yourself coruscates beneath the light as if in dance. It’s a world that winks like glitter - Castle Tyrholm is so unlike anything you’ve ever known. By now you are so accustomed to rough hems and the bland taste of food on your tongue that you have forgotten there was anything else. You only know things bland and bloodless, humble devotions. But here? Here, they dress lavishly. Here, they eat lavishly. Here, they live lavishly. You stand at the fortress’ great, impressive windows and you contentedly watch the way the pale waves lick at the black stone, the way the castle bends over the waves and balances on top of the rockline. It’s more than regal: it’s thunderous, luxurious, rich. Of course, you know a little better now. You know that glitter catches in the corner of your eye. It has the tendency to blind you, to force you to look at things between the sequins of a kaleidoscope, all twisted and torn out of shape. You have been under The High Priestess’ tutelage for two years now, and you feel your life bisecting into two distinct worlds. You must reconcile yourself to that. Statesmanship has very little in common with religion, and unfortunately, that’s all you know. Religion is devotion, fidelity, constancy. Whatever fidelity you see before you has been rigorously shaped, re-wrought in the shadows for years, and that is the only constant here. Still, it does not shake you. Your first lesson is this: you must cut the history of yourself out into stone. You do. You become a silhouette which cleaves to your mentor’s side, a thing that can’t be shaken. Like a shadow you observe the way your mentor manoeuvres; the way she holds her tongue and the way she weaponises it; the way she plumes and crows and deceives as if she’s been doing it for a thousand years. You watch the way that King Septimus’ hands move with hers, shifting in mirrored gestures - like she has attached strings. You become an accepted prerequisite at her side, a creeping outline which follows her devotedly. Part of your status, you brush shoulders with some of the king’s most trusted advisors - you attend assemblies, convocations gathered in the throne-room. You are so far from home now; wherever your home is, wherever it was. You are beginning to learn the meaning of diplomacy: one keeps a knife permanently unsheathed beneath their cloak. Your instructor resolves to fill in the gaps that the Temple left barren: you learn what you must give up for this gift, you learn of all the grief it has caused you. This is a magic you watch her lean into so deeply at times you think she’ll splinter apart - but, of course, she never has. Never will. This is a truth that lies uneasily in your stomach. It lies heavily on your lungs and it chokes you. You can feel your heart climbing up and down your windpipe - you aim to seize it in your hands, to still it, but you can only retch at it. You’ve lost count of all the creatures you’ve poured yourself into, and you wonder where all those pieces of you are now. The fading feeling of your bones makes sense now, at least; the universe is a glutton and it has been stealing from you. You never even knew the rules of the game. The king’s physician brings you animals to practice upon. The High Priestess teaches you the most painless portions of yourself to sacrifice: you learn the things you need and the things you can go without. Your abilities are growing, and with that you feel the weight in your chest shift a little - things are becoming easier to swallow. You learn the importance of giving back: to creatures, to people, but also communities, dynasties. Yours are regular faces in the Farmlands which edge on Tyrholm. Here, you resurrect animals, livelihood; they are indebted to you both. One day, a farmer’s son slips from a ladder, cracks his skull open on the coarse ground. The High Priestess takes the opportunity to teach, to have you bring him back. But too much of you clings to the Temple, the way its cold was settling into your bones. The High Priestess’ dissatisfaction is evident. You’ve been studying beneath her for three years now, and still you have not raised a body. She wants you to look at this world without Necromancy directly in the eye: destruction, death, misery. You cast your eye down to the boy and swallow the lump growing in your throat. Grief. As painless as breathing, your teacher brings their son back. The world is better with Necromancers, she has resolved. Dutiful, devoted, you have resolved that as well. You have always needed a hand to guide you. As part of your schooling, you ride out with your mentor and Tyrholm’s great military army. To squash rebellion, to quell revolt. The two of you are never far from each other - you are a shadow clinging to a shadow. There’s something about the way that you both sit, regal and harrowing above your white horses, lingering like death at the rear of Septimus’ forces. You are a lethal sight, but your power is not enough. Not yet. You arch over the body of a fallen soldier, but something is stopping you. You try, you really try, but you fail. Half-alive, he blinks back at you. A lungful vibrates at the back of his throat. His chest rises and falls with air, but is nothing in his eye to suggest he recognises the figure bending over him. It is half a failure - but half a failure is still a failure. You have given him nothing human. As if flowing over water, your mentor dismounts her horse and puts an end to her experiment. She doesn’t look at you. You don’t look at you. Sometimes, you can’t bear to. But your failures do not last forever. When you are thirty-two, you animate a body. At last. It has taken you seven years, seven long years of unlearning the Temple’s way, but at last, success. Of all the places you manage it, it is on the battlefield, and you are in your element. Surrounded by blood and warfare and death - ah, always death. You are getting better at this. At night, you rest your head down on your pillow and you dream. You dream of your hands, reaching out. The Undying God reaches back. You feel you are becoming one with Her. IV. THE HIGH PRIESTESS, REVERSED repressed intuition, confusion, dissonance You are a vault of fears, but you have spent these last ten years bent on throwing away the key. For the last decade you have been following your mentor indiscriminately, almost blindly, and while you are finally beginning to make progress, you are also beginning to feel that haze gather around your fingertips, weighing down your wrists. You feel yourself swallowing the sensation at times. You don’t like to close your eyes. If you do, you think you are back at the Temple, raising creatures injudiciously, feeling your soul taunt you in the air between you. A cold is settling into your bones again. Your dreams turn themselves inside out and empty themselves when you finally fall asleep, and when you wake in the morning you are confronted with a sense that your emotions have slipped out of you in the night. That you have slipped out of you in the night. Your fingers pressed to rotting flesh, you decide that the bodies you have brought up in halves are warnings. As their eyes roll demonically back into their skull and the listlessness of their breath catches at the back of their throat, you cannot help but think that your half-failures are warning you. That this is what awaits you should you consider to amble down this narrow path. Not death, but instead life: long, death-defying, rotten life. A life of nullity stretches out in front of you, like a void that opens its black mouth and eats you raw. Impassibility is creeping into you, settling into the spaces between your bones and lungs. The taste of blood in your mouth has recently returned to you, though you only notice it when you can taste at all; you cannot determine whether being able to feel it flip thickly over your tongue brings you a sense of peace or horror. When you slip your rings over your fingers, heavy with all the ore you could never have afforded when you were young, you can’t feel them there. You feel ancient impressions dig their way into you. Perhaps you have been foolish. You have been believing that carefully handpicking the parts of yourself to sacrifice can go on forever; that you will never feel the weight of your earliest years again. And while that’s true, you have been slicing off the most unforgiving parts of yourself and offering them up to the Undying God, you feel yourself recede from Her. They are determining that these pieces of you are not enough, and They would have you offer more. When you travel out with Septimus’ forces to quell revolts you feel eyes on you: The High Priestess’ eyes, impatient. In the battlefield you are anxious to stop your hands from trembling. Perhaps you can’t bear the pressure. Perhaps you can’t bear yourself. Your teacher is always left to clear up your mess, always left to do the brunt of the work, but she is never cruel about it. Sometimes you wish she was. Then, you might be better. And yet, you are not all failure. In the last two months you have successfully resurrected five bodies, breathing and seeing and living, and that in itself is commendable. The High Priestess brings you to orphanages, and it is there that you set about your reanimations. While, like always, your mentor bears the brunt of the work, you manage to resurrect four bodies. Three girls, three children, and a boy who has been bound to these walls for too long. At Koldam, much to your own mystification, you bring back another. A Lieutenant, a real piece of chainmail in the king’s military armour. When his undead eyes finally settle upon your face, noticing the way that you lip quivers at your achievement, he breathes a sigh of relief. He looks at you as if you’re an angel, sent from the Undying God to rescue him. You are sent by Her, this you concede, but you are no angel. Whispers of a coup have been present for as many years you have been beneath The High Priestess’ care, but they are thickening now - they are becoming more difficult to ignore. Still, you ignore them, as you must. You are not ready for Septimus to be toppled, you are not ready for the throne to keel over into the pale waves beneath the black rock. You don’t want to watch it drown, you don’t want to watch it to be torn apart like some; more than anything, you want it to stay put. Every time you squash a rebellion, every time a coup fails, you allow your heart to settle in your chest again. But it only lasts a moment, because treason is always being whispered, mutiny is always being accounted for. What you think of Septimus is irrelevant: you aren’t strong enough to fight for a place in whatever new world results from it. There’s still so much you can’t do, so much you don’t know if you want to do, and even now all you want is balance. It is a line you have toed your whole life and it has always got the better of you: religion and politics; life and death; permanence and impermanence; the girl you were and the girl you are becoming. You want the world to stop spinning. You want stability. You can’t know what you want if everything you know keeps changing. You are only loosely beginning to learn the sort of vacancy you have inside you. Perhaps if you knew better, if you were better at knowing what you want, you would say: the world is creeping away from me, I am creeping away from me. Do you still need a hand to guide you? PLOT IDEAS: METAMORPHOSIS: What she wants is stability. If she will live for centuries, she must have something to endure with her. Vasylia’s loyalty is very intricate. She doesn’t quite block out the throne’s transgressions in the same way that Temperance does, but there’s still a degree of selfishness to her fealty. She calls herself a Loyalist not because she believes Septimus is genuinely deserving of her love, but because her body cannot bear the instability. I’d like to see that shift very gradually, though. She can’t cling to this dream of stability forever, not when the path she’s chosen is so weathered by impermanence - and the dream will only become more impossible to uphold if Septimus grows in cruelty. I’d like her to realise that slowly. It begins small: she focuses her attention on those who bear the brunt of his mistreatment. I can see The Star, The Hermit or even The Hierophant factoring into this. And then it grows - whispers intensify. The king’s mistakes become impossible to ignore. Maybe he orders heads to be put on spikes on the castle barracks. Turncoats are beaten and hung as if crucified in the main hall. Equally, it could have nothing to do with violence at all. She may simply determine, like her mentor, that the throne doesn’t suit him. Either way, I’d like Vasylia to move with the developments of the game. She wouldn’t fight for Septimus, but she does tend to ignore whispers of coup. Right now, she is trying to balance the parts of herself she feels at war with; she can’t handle another one. Nevertheless, I want her to be forced to grapple with the fact that this is bigger than her and that she may have to act. I don’t know whether she’s likely to have confided in Vasylia of her intentions (depending on the player), but should the divergence become evident, questions of loyalty would certainly be pulled into the fore. Would she follow her mentor into revolt? There’s an opportunity here for conflict - but also for growth. Growing into the person The High Priestess wants them to be: willing to fight, to take, to reconcile yourself to your powers, hardened to the consequences. I want to see her really become a part of this war rather than hesitating at the edge of it. NO MORE FALSE HEAVENS: The High Priestess never hesitates, she leans into this gift as deeply as her body is able without prying itself apart, and Vasylia believes that this has always been her way. The same can hardly be said for her, though. She is hesitant, at times she has misgivings, and the sight of a corpse almost always makes her tremble. The High Priestess has been guiding her for ten years now and in that time she’s discovered a lifetime’s worth of arcane knowledge, twice as much power as the Temple ever bequeathed her, but there is still so much she can’t do. What causes her to fail is hesitation, placing one foot in the art and one foot out of it. I suppose this is an alternative to plot #1, depending on which way things develop, but I’d like to see Vasylia turn away from The High Priestess. When she looks at her, at The Sun, she recognises what she might become. It is a fate she wishes to escape, and if she is truly committed to that, she may be forced to act. It’s no easy feat to kill a Necromancer, even one as wavering as herself, but severing ties with The High Priestess could breed disaster. She has always needed a hand to guide her in life, but it’d be fascinating to see her break away from that. The world opens its jaw and waits to swallow her whole, and The High Priestess is certain that without her guidance she’ll falter, but she needs to make herself more than what other people have made her. I’d like to develop her self-sufficiency, her willpower, but most importantly, I’d like to explore her desperation, to develop the recklessness which would no doubt begin to grow. Leaving The High Priestess’ tutelage is a make or break moment: and unless something considerable changes within her, it is likely to be the latter. Over time, she needs to determine whether she wants to be a Necromancer or a human-being. How far is she willing to go to excavate that small part of her, and is the act her genesis or her epilogue? THE DARK MARK OF ME: As a Necromancer, she’s used to instilling at least a bit of apprehension in others. The Lovers’ eyes scan Vasylia’s skin for evidence of a pulse, a suggestion that, even now, she is alive. More importantly, though, The Emperor goes out of his way to make himself available to listen to her. Listen maybe isn’t the right word, to have his curiosity sated is probably more apt, and in moments of weakness, her secrets spill out of her like a river. He’s used to getting what he wants, and she will not stand in his way. But the very act of this is dangerous; it could breed conflict, consequences, even bring about Vasylia’s death (!?) should information fall into the wrong hands. I don’t think Vasylia has shared her hesitancy to continue down the path that The High Priestess has forged for her with her mentor - there’s no need to, it’s as easily distinguishable as ink spilled on skin - but there could be disastrous consequences should her concerns spill out. Not from The High Priestess, I don’t think, because I don’t see her as having an aim in mind to destroy Vasylia. Her resolve at least appears to be motivated by cutting away the thorns and making space for her prodigy to grow. Yet, Vasylia’s vulnerability is a weakness, and weaknesses can be exploited. While the dynamic between The Emperor and The Wheel of Fortune is… by far one of my favourite character dynamics you’ve written, perhaps The Emperor’s player would like to use this to his advantage in some way. The Emperor certainly isn’t The High Priestess’ first choice for the throne. So, I’d like to see these words come back to bite Vasylia, to further complicate her oscillation between this path or that. She’s no fool, but she by no means has the experience of her mentor. She studies underneath The High Priestess and lauds her propensity for manipulation and schemes, and while in her experience she’s picked up more than enough tricks, her hesitancy is weakness. She sacrifices her feelings and anxieties freely - because he coaxes it out of her, but also because she needs to purge. Over time, I’d like to see Vasylia’s actions breed consequences, over and over and over, to the point that she can’t run from them. She can only follow them blindly down a path she was always meant to. Maybe this is less of a personal plot point and more of a worldbuilding idea, but given that Necromancers have the ability to kill, I’d like Vasylia to dabble in that in the future. It’s something The High Priestess can do as second nature, as if she was born with the gift, and while Vasylia is better at drawing life into her than pouring herself into things, it’s not something she’s easily reconciled to. Still, I’d like to develop her skill here, figure out if it could be of use to The High Priestess or Septimus (because she serves the former first, the latter second). There’s an opportunity here to flesh out a dynamic between Vasylia and The Sun, who of course kills for a living, but I certainly think it’d be an irreversible path for her to walk down - one that, should she give herself over to it, solidifies her fate. Again, more worldbuilding, but if The High Priestess is the type to gather secrets in her plotting against Septimus, it could be interesting to have Vasylia drop by places such as The Rosewood Maiden in disguise. To gather secrets in a place where secrets are spilled like blood. She wouldn’t even need to disclose her plans to Vasylia if the player didn’t want her to, but I’d love an opportunity to branch out beyond the castle. Much of her life has been limited, either by the Temple or Castle Tyrholm, and it’d be interesting to feel her form an opinion on the ‘outside’ world; to get an idea of the sorts of people she’d be fleeing to should she leave The High Priestess’ care. Alternatively, it could be a good way to turn Vasylia away from her neutrality/loyalty and into the company of revolters. Depending on how things shape up, I’d love to see Vasylia finally become an advisor. Perhaps not to the same degree as her mentor, but in some shape or form, I’d like to have her officially offer advice to the Crown. While The High Priestess’ intentions in extracting her from the Temple are, of course, ambiguous, it’s what she’s been training towards. What would make this even more interesting is: who will she be advisor to? To Septimus? Well, that spot is already taken by her mentor. The Emperor? Well, that depends whether his father can hold onto the throne until he dies. The Chariot? The World? Two vastly different options, but I suppose it depends which of them The High Priestess hopes to install on the throne. Vasylia is already quite content with the notion of serving The Emperor, and that could breed conflict, but it could also change. While Vasylia is getting better at nominating the more sacrificable parts of herself every time she uses it, the sickness is spreading. She’s heard rumours, though. Rumours of a mage with the inexplicable ability to draw from two bodies of magic. I think The Moon could be a source of real fascination for Vasylia. If she fears anything, it’s that she’ll turn herself so irreversibly over to Necromancy that she loses the essence of who she is. Given that The Moon’s abilities lie in healing, I’d like Vasylia to investigate. If there is a possibility of regeneration, she wants it. It could be an opportunity to rehabilitate her self-image, to reconcile herself to this fate of hers, or even to break away from it - depending on what she discovers. CHARACTER DEATH: It depends on when, but yes! Given there’s opportunity for development. WRITING SAMPLE (This can be purely hypothetical if it doesn’t fit into character interpretations and histories, I just really like the idea of Vasylia being at Koldam and bringing someone back on the battlefield!) The air rings with the song of swords, each clang and crash a melodic note copied from a manuscript soaked in blood. Koldam’s men fall like flies and Vasylia watches them from a distance: stumbling backwards, defending themselves clumsily, raising their swords above their heads in such a sweeping motion that she can only think them pitiable as The Emperor’s men bend beneath them. She watches how, as if in dance, Tyrholm’s forces encroach upon their wildly underprepared assailant with efficiency and onslaught. One by one, in a diagonal line, the soldiers thrust their swords into bellies, eyes, hearts, throats. She watches the revolters cry out in pain for a moment and then fall, limply, to the grass as corpses. The grass here has been dry for some time, Vasylia can feel it. It’s been reaching out to her, entreating her, but now it can drink at last. It feasts on blood and looks all the better for it.        “You were right,” Vasylia muses, as if she had ever doubted it, her words melding with the sound of clanging horseshoes and battle. The two women hang at the back of Tyrholm’s defence ahorse, side-by-side. There aren’t many of them in the field, only thirty or forty of The Emperor’s most trusted paladins thrust into the fray. The magi will lend a helping hand should it at all be asked of them. Vasylia would try to lend a hand. She would try to wash past failures from her mind, she would try to think of only life and death and the space that lives between it. “You were right,” she repeats, “Some of them are only boys. The Emperor will bring the King of Koldam’s head to the block and strike it from him.” Her words don’t warrant a response. It’s a statement, an echo, even, of words already made sensible to her. For a moment, The High Priestess is silent. She only reins her horse into a step and around the edge of the battlefield, lingering like the stench of rotting flesh. The woman has been grimly quiet this campaign, like the muscles she no longer feels in her face are holding something back. A thought, a point. Vasylia thinks nothing of it. It’s not unusual. By way of nature, like a shadow she follows.        “That is what you get without careful preparation,” The High Priestess answers, not quite to her apprentice. An ode to the fallen men, a lament to blood staining grass and gore hanging from swords. An afterthought dedicated to the revolters who deigned to dream. By now, Vasylia is well acclimated to her teacher’s manner of speech. There is a sense that her words are not made for the likes of men and mortals, that they’re fashioned for the Undying God, cut out by her tongue like a knife. But the two of them have not ridden out with The Emperor’s forces to remark retrospectively on shortfallings of men, on dead husbands and sons and lovers. There will be enough time for that. What remains of Koldam will pen songs to parchment with their legionaries’ blood and perform them to a pile of ashes and rubble. They are here to resurrect. To bring back what few men they expect to lose, to ensure that such a resounding victory is marred by nothing, not even death. Vasylia has been doing this for years, now, hovering with her mentor at the rear of a military army like two prophets of death. Watching over men who breathe their last breath, selecting those who will rise up from the dirt again. Vasylia supposes that neither of them are much needed here: while they’ve ridden out to clashes of arms that have certainly relied upon life made anew for victory, the swing of bronze here is decisive. Still, The High Priestess had insisted. She has eyes everywhere, but sometimes there are none better than one’s own. Vasylia is familiar with battle by now. Somewhat absently, running her fingers through Hel’s pale white hair, she watches as the blood alloys with the air and she ruminates on her failures. It’s a shortfalling of hers, she thinks. She’s been getting better at raising bodies, at blowing her own breath into the mouths of corpses and watching them animate. The last body she’d brought back had only been an orphan; a girl. As it were, she’d seen a piece of herself in her. A fragment, locked into the body of somebody else, long gone from her. Vasylia’s mind turns; towards failure, towards her own incompetence. She had been in a battlefield not too much unlike this one once, her hands earnestly pressed to the chest of a soldier long gone from this world, blood still seeping from his porous body. One might call it a half-success, she supposes. He’d lived, technically. But what is life when you are nothing more than marrow and bone, flesh and muscle and blood? She had watched in horror as his white eyes rolled up into the back of his skull, how they stared at nothing in particular: the way the clouds had swept through the sky that day and cut into it like an executioner’s knife, opening up a rain which poured down on the earth in judgement. Half-alive, Vasylia was bringing back bodies and never souls, and for a time that simply looked to be her way. The fighting would go on until Koldam was broken and mastered, the hooves of their war horses galloping on the dirt until the ground became a wasteland of torn earth. This is what it takes to hold on to a crown, she thinks. This is what it takes to keep Septimus on the throne, she rephrases, fitting the words into her mouth. Vasylia hopes that such an unambiguous victory would bring her some peace, some balance. But the throne seems to swing perpetually off the bank of a precipice; as if it delights in the sensation of feeling the world ripped from underneath you, suspended in the air. She would pray for Septimus to keep his throne, for The Emperor to inherit it on his death. There was a sense of permanence in that, in things being passed down in natural succession. Vasylia stares in the distance as The Emperor slams an enemy with the flat of his sword in one hand, winding him, while slitting the throat of an enemy with a knife in the other. He’s a strong fighter, a strong warrior - she hopes that when his time comes he’ll be a strong king, too. The air shifts. Out of the corner of her eye, Vasylia watches one of their Lieutenants pierced through the chest with a long blade of steel. Rolling from his horse, he falls motionlessly into the dirt. Something stirs in her. Patriotism? Determination? Grief? Whatever it is, she feels a strange sensation inherit her body and, as if predestined, she dismounts from Hel with such sheer force that the horse almost bolts from her. Vasylia feels the hem of her dress drag through the dusty dirt and, by the time she has reached the man, well, he’s no longer a man at all. Whoever he was, he’s nothing more than a body. Vasylia feels the stare of The High Priestess sear into the back of her head like molten iron. She is watching her, as she always is. Curving over his body, Vasylia breaks apart the chainmail which covers the stab wound, tears at the linen beneath it. She presses her hands to the torn flesh, trembling. On contact they still themselves a little, as if this is where they’re meant to be. She winces as she feels a piece of herself crawl out of her lungs, up her throat, like a sharp, piercing thing with black lacquered claws. When she raises her hands from the corpse they’re painted red in blood, but she has achieved nothing. Determinedly but, as always, with hesitation, she pushes her hands into his chest and tries again. She feels the same claws ladder in her throat, but this time its nails are ice cold, as if turning her insides fleetingly to stone. Is this magic or is it hesitation? Vasylia falls silent for a moment, her hands still planted in the breastbone. She feels the stare of her mentor still burrowing its way into her skin. But then: a splutter of red, a gasp of air which extends infinitely into lungs, eyes, flinching open. Vasylia rolls the body over in the dirt to avoid the soldier from choking, keeled over the body, breath bated. The soldier takes a moment to naturalise himself, for his eyes to come to terms with this foreign world again, for them to peer past the blur and see her. As if by divine providence, a heavy rain descends upon the site and Vasylia feels the thick mud form around them. When the soldier looks at her, blinking away the rain, really takes her in - he does not seem afraid. As a matter of fact, he sighs in relief, allowing a weak chuckle to escape his throat. He takes her wrist in his calloused hand, non-threateningly, as a silent moment of appreciation. Of gratitude. His grey eyes look at her as if she’s an angel, as if she had descended from the Heavens to become his deliverance. But, she thinks, what sort of angel has black wings?        “Lady,” he says, “You ought to cover yourself. You’ll catch a cold.” Vasylia cants her head to meet his gaze through the slit of his helm, eyes the colour of gunmetal grey. She’s drenched in rain; she smells like salt. There’s something animal about the way the salt of his tears creates a tincture with sweat and blood, and though she has seen it many times before, it provokes something in her still. Vasylia is stirred from a pithy moment of intimacy by the tolling of swords and shields, the metallic ringing of warrior’s voices calling for blood. By now, almost all of Koldam’s forces have fallen. Her vision blurs a little as she makes out the figure of The Emperor, whetting his sword on stone. One of his soldiers strangles Koldam’s king at the neck, towing him through the dirt. His crown had fallen from his brow long ago, buried by the bodies of his own men. Vasylia turns her head back to the Lieutenant. She has felt things colder than this. She feels it now. “No,” she hums in response. “It’s only water.” EXTRAS Pinterest board here and mock blog here. Any headcanons which involve other characters are purely suggestions and can be adjusted or removed if they don’t fit! I was gonna make a playlist too but ran out of time but just… just know that I listened to Florence + The Machine’s discography over and over while writing this. The only info u need to know. 01. When Vasylia stands, she does so straight and imposing, but her posture lacks the peremptory impression of The High Priestess. Nevertheless, when she walks through a sea of people they tend to part for her, hesitant to brush hands with Death Herself, perhaps, but this all depends on the vanity of the pool she is passing in. Vasylia’s mannerisms have always been subtle, and that hasn’t changed. You must look closely at her body language to interpret her: wooden shoulders when she’s paying attention, a cant of her brows when she’s interested, the twist of a half-smile when she’s amused. The way that she wrings her wrists at the side of her thighs when they tremble. Many consider her perplexing, at times even inscrutable, as if buried beneath dirt. The High Priestess is perhaps the only person cognisant enough to truly read her, to truly translate her, but for many she emits an air of strangeness. For the most part she keeps to herself, but exceptions have been known. Her language is at its most colloquial when she speaks with her mentor, but it never loses its inflected formality; having lived a life first of religion and second of statesmanship, she has always been like this. When she points things out she rarely indicates with a finger, but rather nods her head towards her subject. Eye contact with Vasylia has the tendency to feel intense, as if her bright eyes are burning into you, but this isn’t a corollary of her magic; this has always been her way. When she speaks, she has the tendency to tap her feet in uncertainty, and when quiet falls between them her breath grows almost silent. More imprudent nobles may have cause to wonder if she’s still breathing. At her most nervous, Vasylia bites at the dead skin of her lip, but this is never done in the public eye. She wears lipstick at all times: red in battle, pinks for stately events, and neutrals in-between. When she passes you by, you think you detect the scent of bergamot following her; only slightly, never distinctly, as if day-by-day the fruit shrinks in size. 02. Marking five years under her tutelage, The High Priestess bestows Vasylia with a glass pendant, shaped to look like a coffin. Inside is a rose which moves cyclically between life and wilting and death entirely of its own accord. The High Priestess reminds her the sequence is an echo of their power, the ability to make and unmake life as easily as breathing. The rose itself is the ensign of Undeath, a blend of snakes and wolves. Vasylia wears it around her neck at all times, as devoutly as a married woman wears a ring, and it marks out her powers.  +  This is something The High Priestess’ player is more than welcome to discard if they don’t see it fitting their interpretation, but I think The High Priestess could be so much more to Vasylia than a mentor. Her motivations in stealing her away from the Temple are clearly self-serving - the possibility of shaping a Necromancer from their youth, making them in some way indebted to you, is just too delicious - but I could see her attempting to make the connection between them more intimate at least. Whether that’s borne out of narcissism or something akin to affection (as much as she’s still capable of the feeling) could be something we could discuss. 03. Vasylia is only able to syphon energy from plants, animals and human beings through touch. Perhaps this is something The High Priestess can do as easily as breathing, as simply as being around life and feeling its energy burrow itself into her, but Vasylia isn’t so capable. She has to make physical contact with her source. It’s what made her mother’s bones feel so heavy when she held her in her arms, it’s what caused her mother to surrender her child. It comes easier to her than raising the dead, than sacrificing a piece of herself and returning it to the universe, but she still has much to learn. 04. For the last ten years, Vasylia has ridden out on the same horse to join The High Priestess and Tyrholm’s military forces: a pale white horse named Hel. She wears a saddle and bridle of deep blues and golds, Valmont’s grassy sigil ironed into the side. The horse learns quickly but stirs at danger - still, she’s been a constant, a companion to her these years under The High Priestess’ tutelage, and she’s fond of her. She thinks her thing worth sacrificing a piece of herself should she ever need to. 05. Vasilya certainly feels the damage sustained to her body, but it’s slight. She occasionally loses the sense of taste; when she coughs she has the tendency to choke up a little blood with it, and this is an effect which has only recently returned to her since her tutelage at the Temple. Vasylia’s sense of touch is at times limited, but it returns as quickly as it leaves her. Her tear ducts aren’t completely dried out, but sometimes in a fit of melancholy her face scrunches up as if in tears but no water flows. Her sight, sense of smell and hearing are all unaffected, and she bears no physical disabilities or wounds. At night sleep often evades her and she rarely manages to achieve more than four hours or rest per night. She feels a great big hole carved out in her, and while that is a sensation she cannot ignore, it isn’t a permanent development. She endures enough that the consequences of the path she’s chosen for herself becomes evident, flaring up to remind her, but she has not lost herself. Not yet. 06. In the Temple, as a result of the incident in the dining hall, Vasylia was forced to wear gloves. Not out of cruelty, but for all their holiness, children blessed with the gift of Necromancy are dangerous. The gloves are made of leather and they protect other members of the Temple from her touch. As she’d quickly learned, emotions have consequences - they would ensure that she wouldn’t have to pay for any more of them. When The High Priestess steals her away from the Temple, she strips her of them. She teaches her never to limit her power, but to control it. 07. In her more introspective moments, Vasylia is wont to visit the castle’s Greenhouse, sitting amongst the foliage. For practice, or perhaps simply by habit, she pushes the blossoms around her over the barrier and back through it, watching them fluctuate between death and life. They’re a small, insignificant feat, thus they rarely sap much from her. Sometimes she simply sits, admires the growth of life. Here, she can think of everything and nothing, and she answers to no-one.

Ethical Problems In Marketing To Other Demographics

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What is the concept of prejudice definition and examples Prejudice legal definition of prejudice

A decision resulting in prejudicial error substantially affects an appellant's legal rights and is often the ground for a reversal of the judgment and for the granting of a new trial. A forejudgment; bias; partiality; preconceived opinion. A leaning toward one side of a cause for some reason other than a conviction of its justice. A juror can be disqualified from a case for being prejudiced, if his or her views on a subject or attitude toward a party will unduly influence the final decision. When a lawsuit is dismissed Without Prejudice, it signifies that none of the rights or privileges of the individual involved are considered to be lost or waived. The same holds true when an admission is made or when a motion is denied with the designation without prejudice. A dismissal without prejudice permits a new lawsuit to be brought on the same grounds because no decision has been reached about the controversy on its merits. The whole subject in litigation is as much open to a subsequent suit as if no suit had ever been brought. The purpose and effect of the words without prejudice in a judgment, order, or decree dismissing a suit are to prohibit the defendant from using the defense of Res Judicata in any later action by the same plaintiff on the subject matter. A dismissal with prejudice, however, is a bar to relitigation of the subject matter. PREJUDICE. To decide beforehand; to lean in favor of one side of a cause for some reason or other than its justice. A judge ought to be without prejudice, and he cannot therefore sit in a case where he has any interest, or when a near relation is a part, or where he has been of counsel for one of the parties. Vide Judge. 3. In the civil law prejudice signifies a tort or injury; as the act of one man should never prejudice another. Want to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, or visit the webmaster's page for free fun content. We have had some Experience of it: Several of our young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all your Sciences; but when they came back to us they were bad Runners ignorant of every means of living in the Woods, unable to bear either Cold or Hunger, knew neither how to build a Cabin, take a Deer or kill an Enemy, spoke our Language imperfectly, were therefore neither fit for Hunters Warriors, or Counsellors, they were totally good for nothing. Having frequent Occasions to hold public Councils, they have acquired great Order and Decency in conducting them. The old Men sit in the foremost Ranks, the Warriors in the next, and the Women & Children in the hindmost.... View more ...

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Lux played today's #LongestWord: FOREJUDGE for 108pts, def'n at https://t.co/qd4FF1zUPV #game #scrabble #playmath pic.twitter.com/HdCV23Fesu

— Anadrome (@anadromeo) August 21, 2018

https://founders.archives.gov/?q=Date%3A1792-09-17%20Author%3A%22Jefferson%2C%20Thomas%22&s=1111311111&r=3 Footnote: "The injunction from another quarter refers to Washington’s 23 Aug. 1792 letter to TJ." To Thomas Jefferson from George Washington, 23 August 1792 "How unfortunate, and how much is it to be regretted then, that whilst we are encompassed on all sides with avowed enemies and insidious friends, that internal dissentions should be harrowing and tearing our vitals. The last, to me, is the most serious—the most alarming—and the most afflicting of the two. And without more charity for the opinions and acts of one another in Governmental matters, or some more infalible criterion by which the truth of speculative opinions, before they have undergone the test of experience, are to be forejudged than has yet fallen to the lot of fallibility, I believe it will be difficult, if not impracticable, to manage the Reins of Government2 or to keep the parts of it together: for if, instead of laying our shoulders to the machine3 after measures are decided on, one pulls this way and another that, before the utility of the thing is fairly tried, it must inevitably be torn asunder—And, in my opinion the fairest prospect of happiness and prosperity that ever was presented to man, will be lost—perhaps for ever! My earnest wish, and my fondest hope therefore is, that instead of wounding suspicions, and irritable charges, there may be liberal allowances—mutual forbearances-and temporising yieldings on all sides. Under the exercise of these, matters will go on smoothly, and, if possible, more prosperously. Without them every thing must rub, the wheels of Government will clog—our enemies will triumph—and by throwing their weight into the disaffected Scale, may accomplish the Ruin of the goodly fabric we have been erecting..." https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-24-02-0300