#kingdomsmp

SOME CONTEXT BEFORE I GET INTO IT:

I've vaguely mentioned it before, but many of the characters featured on my YouTube are from role play servers me and my friends created as early as 2020. Naturally, that means most of their writing was improvised, and very little was planned ahead of time. Aine and Illusionist were made for Whispers and Kingdom, respectively. Whispers happened very organically out of a survival minecraft server, so a lot of the decisions about Aine's backstory were made on the fly. Kingdom's creation was a lot more deliberate, but Illusionist was retroactively fitted into Aine's backstory, so she shares the same writing quirks that come from improvised storytelling. ALL OF THAT TO SAY, these characters were made purely for fun. They aren't my best work when it comes to cohesive writing; They're a little convoluted, a little messy, but they were a lot of fun to play, and that was the goal :)

THE GETTING INTO IT:

Way before the events of Whispers, there was a sleepy little town where a young woman named Erena lived. That town was razed in the middle of the night, and she was drowned in a river after being fatally wounded by none other than Amadeus, the Soldier [ jojenis on instagram]. Erena woke up at the bottom of the river, dead. Her soul had died, and she became a vengeful ghost. She was nothing more than the memories of her old life, but she had every intent to come back and return the favor to the monster that killed her. 

Her plans were immediately halted. She watched as a fae  - named Jophiel, the Lover [also jojenis] - picked up her dead body, and brought it to a hidden bunker. Jophiel successfully found Erena's lost soul, but could not return it into the dead and broken body. Instead, she tenderly placed the soul and the body into the roots of the largest surviving tree in the village.

It should have brought Erena back to her body, but the spell was incomplete. Jophiel was unaware of the ghost already haunting the village and only pulled the soul from death. 

Without the soul's memories... The newly born Dryad became a blank slate. Erena's soul is living a new life without her in it.

Years passed, and Erena learned two important things:

1) she was physically tethered to the Dryad, so she couldn't leave or control anything, and

2) the Dryad was an oblivious idiot.

Erena has been quietly haunting this forgetful Dryad, but she couldn't see or hear Erena. She could instill emotions - dread, fear, sadness, or rage - into her, but nothing coherent enough to explain anything to the Dryad. She always just chalked it up to a deep seeded intuition that she couldn't quite grasp.

Then, the events of Whispers unfold. 

The Dryad finally uncovers the truth of her origins through Amadeus's first hand account, and an old dusty journal that once belonged to Erena...

and the Dryad ignored it.

The Dryad read about Erena, talked to Amadeus, and experienced every bit of rage, fear, and sadness Erena wanted her to feel, but Dryad wanted to define her own life. She wanted to become her own person, and assume her own identity. She knew she was no longer the person that died all those years ago. She didn't have the experiences that made Erena who she was. Without knowing about the ghostly figure haunting her, Dryad decided to move on without looking any deeper into her past. Later down the line, the Dryad would finally become her own person, and pick her name: Aine. 

This enraged Erena. After years and years of trying to communicate with the Dryad, she is just discarded. Erena didn't care that Dryad couldn't possibly know that she was still around. the Dryad decided that Erena's life was unimportant.

She had to sever herself from the Dryad. If her own soul wouldn't help her get revenge on the man that took her life away, then she would make her own...

Erena spent so much of her afterlife sifting through Dryad's head, she figured her influence must stretch beyond just Dryad's mindscape. 

and it did. 

Over the years, as the Dryad forged her own identity, the tether tying the two together began to decay. Aine was no longer part of Erena: she had become her own person, while Erena was still stuck as the girl that drowned in the river. 

Eventually, after the tether disintegrated, Erena found a way to travel in-between realms through the Void (evil worldbuilding shenanigans, just go with me for now). 

She successfully left the realm she used to call home, and ended up settling in Illador, where Kingdom takes place.

She spent her time hopping from mindscape to mindscape, learning about her newfound abilities. She learned she had a particular affinity with nightmares since her dip into the Void, and noticed she began to feel more present, more focused, and more powerful with every new victim.

She kept haunting people's nightmares until she crossed paths with a young Midas [@peitalo]. He proposed a deal that if she helped murder his father, the ruling king of Illador, he would help make her a new body that would be hers. No Dryad, no soul. Just a vessel to possess.

She accepted the deal. She killed his father, killed his mother, and aided in the murder of his older brother, leaving Midas to be the sovereign of Illador. As promised, King Midas helped conjure a vessel that would become a physical shadow that she could control. 

She would don a porcelain mask, and would adopt many names:

The Night terror, The Cleric, The Queen of Illador...

But "The Illusionist" was always her favorite.