I know almost nothing about her and yet I'm pretty sure Ildinia Kills-With-Words is my favorite.
Oh thank you so much! Yeah I like her, too!
What an excellent excuse to post more lore and art!
There was a human once, a century ago, named Bonnie Hawthorne. This human lived in an age of change. She saw the birth of modern bureaucracy and the proliferation of motorways. She had a love, who was then taken from her by an Imperator in a way she had no way to comprehend.
Only a year later, she received a notice of condemnation of her property. It should not have been. Her home was neither condemned, nor her property, nor did the letterhead point to any government office she had ever heard of.
Reading the letter proved torturous. The lines of text were wavering, the meaning unclear except for their hostility. There was no end to it. There was always another page and she knew then that everything was wrong.
From that day she could no longer interact with systems of government and administration in a normal way. Her life went up in smoke in a flurry of misfilings. She was arrested for impossible crimes. They lost her before she could even make it to court, somehow, in a desert. She only made it out alive due to a lucky run-in with a passing motorist.
Death was coming. In desperation, she wrote letters to any agency, court and office she could think of, pleading to be removed from their records.
Instead, she was removed from the world altogether.
Before she became the "Cool Mom" we know and love, Ildinia — as most Strategists do — participated eagerly in the Bellum Magnum. Her greatest skill is and always has been sneaking into the impossible archives and twisting storehouses of the Ineffable Bureau of Ninuan and exploiting her knack for its systems to gain access to tools, weapons and information that don't exist.
Back then, Ildinia's identity was threadbare, less leader and more force-multiplier, moving like a shadow through void and world alike, infiltrating her corruptive influence wherever she could.
And then, alas, she met someone who mistook her for a loved one, a Sovereign Power, no less. Ildinia pursued a relationship to further worm her way into Creation's defenses, but this Power, alas, was wonderful. And Ildinia fell tragically in love.
When Tancrecine was born, both Ildinia and her love knew they had gotten in way too deep. For the child's sake they would have to go their separate ways, to keep her safe from the viper pit that is the Society of Flowers.
Ildinia has undergone an agonizing transformation to be the best mother to her child she could be. Unfortunately she's still quite bad at it. And in fact she is quite bad at almost everything that doesn't relate to her void magic.
She is also notably incredibly lonely. She misses her one true love whom no one must ever find out about. She'd love to date her best friend Besslinda, who is unfortunately dying of Love. So she tries to fill the hole in her heart with an endless string of mortal lovers she cannot actually make herself care about.
I think that's enough for tonight!
