#talxin

Mint, with all the silence deep focus can muster, waved them over a little hill towards a hollow at the bottom of a tree. In the shadows, there lay a little dog, curled up and whining softly. Its breathing was ragged, and its ribs showed through the patchy fur on its sides.

“Ohhh,” Tangerine said quietly, moving towards the dog with careful footsteps.

“Shh!” Mint crept forward, and reached out a cautious hand towards the huddled animal. It looked up at him, its eyes wide and glassy, but did not flee. “It’s all right,” he murmured softly. “We’re here to help you.”

With careful coaxing, the little dog stood on shaking legs and stumbled into Mint’s arms. Even this small movement was slow and painful. When it reached him, Mint stroked its fur with a gentle touch that didn’t suit his big soft body, and Tangerine leaned over to watch. Red hung by the edge of the hollow, afraid to go too close.

“He’s hungry,” Mint said. Tangerine dug through her pockets and offered it a ratty-looking piece of jerky. The dog snatched it with desperate speed.

“Can you fix him?” Tangerine asked.

“I will.”

Mint closed his eyes, and called down the magic. It fell upon him in shivers of green. The woods refracted around the edges of him, a little brighter and warmer through the film of power, and Mint brought his hands together to bring it into focus. The magic wobbled.

“Are you sure about this?” Red asked. He could see the pieces falling together before him. It didn’t feel right.

“I’m fixing it!” Mint insisted. “I learned the spells, I know how…” The magic flickered, and juttered, churning into a filmy mist around Mint’s shaky hands as he pulled it in and shaped it. “Just… focus… and find the hurt… I said, find the hurt…”

“We should get the teachers,” Red said. “We, um, if we tell them we found it in the garden, they can help—”

“No!” Mint doubled down, resting his hands against the dog’s ribcage.

“What’re you doing?” Tangerine asked, leaning in to watch. Green magic coursed through the dog’s veins from Mint’s hands, shining in the folds of its body. Its fur grew, ever so slightly, but the way its flesh rippled as Mint worked didn’t match the structure of the bones beneath.

“I’m healing,” Mint said. “Just wait, it’ll work.”

“I, um, Mint—”

“You what? You didn’t have to come!” Mint snapped.

“—I don’t think it’s helping,” Red stammered. “This doesn’t feel right.”

“What do you know about healing? Back off, I’ve almost got it.” And Red did back off, but his nerves jangled. The dog whimpered again. He fought the instinct to reach out, memories of skeletons and operating tables and watching the medics work flooding out of the back of his mind.

“Mint?” Tangerine asked. Mint drew down another surge of magic. The dog shuddered.

“He’s messing me up!” Mint let go, pointing at Red, who flinched. “He’s doing something. You’re doing something!”

“I’m, I’m not, I don’t, it’s not—” Red stammered helplessly, backing further away. “I’m not doing anything!”

“Red?” Tangerine had joined Mint in the retreat. She was slower, steadier, but she had the same look in her eyes. “Red, you’re…”

He looked down. Faint scarlet light pooled in his fingertips. He balled up his fists.

“I didn’t do anything,” he repeated, swallowing hard. Mint snatched the dog up from the ground, ignoring its weak yelp of shock, and squeezed it in an emerald vice.

And Red’s own color poured over his eyes.

“Mint, you have to stop,” Red said, trying to keep his voice from trembling. “You have to stop doing that.”

“Oh gods,” Tangerine murmured, her eyes fixed on the dog. “Mint?”

“You have to stop,” Red said. “Please.”

Mint clutched the dog tighter. Its legs kicked numbly against the air, its joints too stiff, its flesh swollen and distorted with strange pulsing lumps as the green coursed ever faster through its body. Mint didn’t seem to hear the whimpers anymore.

“You need to stop!” Mint insisted. “I’ve got it, I know how to fix it, you’re just messing it up! I’m the green paladin, I can do this, if you just stop it with that horrid death magic—”

“Mint, let go, you’re hurting it!” Tangerine gasped. “You’re hurting him!”

“I can’t, I’m the healer, I’m making it better!”

“Let go!” Tangerine rushed forward and tried to pull the dog out of Mint’s grip, but when she touched him, her skin rippled all the way up her arm, and she jumped back as if she’d been shocked. “Mint!”

“Please,” Red repeated. “Please.”

“It’s your fault!” Mint shouted. In the sinking light, his eyes glimmered with desperate tears and single-minded focus.

Red’s voice wouldn’t work. He still saw the dog’s ribs, around the awful growth, and his own ribs felt like grasping hands around his chest. He had to, couldn’t, didn’t—he lurched towards Mint. Mint flinched.

“Mint, stop!” Tangerine said. As Red staggered forward, she ducked behind Mint, trapping him between them.

“I have to fix it!” he said. “I have to, it’s my job…”

“Maybe you can’t!”

Mint went silent. Red was breathing hard, the tension in his lungs snapping back around him. He made it to the center, almost in arm’s reach of the other boy. They met eyes.

“You don’t know what I can do,” Mint said slowly, when it took too long for Red to catch his breath. The green gave him a terrible bright aura. Red had almost forced the scarlet out of his fingertips. With the sunset at his back, the red magic was fully eclipsed in emerald.

“You have to let go,” Red said. “You tried enough. We all know you tried. You’re hurting him.”

“I can fix it.”

“You can’t.”

“I have to keep trying.”

Red stepped forward, and took the dog out of Mint’s grasp. He had to fight not to notice the tears. Mint didn’t stop him.

“I have to,” he repeated. His arms fell numb by his side.

Red carried the dog back into the hollow, and knelt down, resting him gently in the fallen leaves. The poor creature was hardly recognizable, swollen as it was with whatever strange thing Mint’s magic had done.

“Is he going to be okay?” He felt Tangerine behind him before he saw her. She sat next to him, and gently stroked the dog’s forehead. It shuddered.

“I…” He swallowed, and shook his head. “...I don’t think it was something Green could heal.”

“What do we do? We’ve gotta get the teachers, right? Maybe they can help?”

She went quiet, and they looked down at the little dog. Its breathing was labored. It struggled to turn its head to look at them.

Red reached out a hand and stroked the dog’s ears, and Red-the-archetype showed him the only answers.

“I have to…”

“Don’t,” Mint said before Red could finish. “You can’t. It’s gonna get better.”

“But it won’t.” Tangerine’s little intake of breath was barely audible, but Red continued on. “It… it’s not something Green can fix. He might… might live a few months, like this. Maybe a year. It’ll hurt.” Red paused, his face sinking. “I think it already does.”

“No. You can’t.”

“Mint—” Red started.

“I won’t let you! It’s cruel, it’s cruel and awful!”

“...There’s really no way to fix him?” Tangerine asked. “You’re really sure?”

“He was already dying,” Red said softly. “I think… I think before we ever came here. He’s been… too hungry, too long… too alone… and, and I’ve seen what green magic does. When you do too much.”

“No,” Mint said. The dog whimpered. It pulled itself to its feet, looking past Red and Tangerine to the place where Mint stood on top of the rise. Red followed its gaze. Mint’s back was turned. “No. You can’t.” He wouldn’t look.

The dog collapsed when it tried to go to him.

Tangerine beckoned it back with a soft click of her tongue, and scratched its ears when it managed to stumble to her lap. And Red reached out and held it. Tangerine watched him for a long moment. He swallowed, and tried to even his mind.

What he did was simple. He kept breathing.

“It’s going to be okay,” he murmured. “You did good.”

And the red came to him, soft in his fingertips, and the dog curled up to sleep as he pet it slowly until it went still.

He wrapped it in his cape, and tucked it in the hollow at the bottom of the tree. Tangerine stacked a couple stones beside it.

“Oh, about that,” Talxin said. He lowered his voice, but only just. “How many generations before someone grows tired of you? You never earned that wealth, you stole it with the labor of the unjustly-imprisoned peasantry. How do you imagine it would feel, to be overthrown by those people? Eventually they’ll outnumber you and yours. Perhaps they’ll do with you what you’ve always done with them--force you into service, sell the lives of your parents and children and grandchildren with you for profit as you all waste away doing their menial chores. Even then, though, it wouldn’t be the same--they would have earned it with you. They’re all complicit in your crimes. Most of us never did anything wrong.” 

A servant slunk into the parlor, delivering drinks to the tea-table and refusing to make eye contact. Talxin accepted a teacup, stirring it slowly, but his eyes never left the count’s increasingly slack-jawed face. 

“And that’s if you’re lucky,” he continued. “If you were to be truly punished, hung by the neck, guillotined... or executed in the way you deal with redmages here, when they’re strong enough to be deemed a threat. That would be fittingly ironic, after how many deaths you’ve ordered. Keeping yourself well-fed and happy in a world with generations of immortals implicitly starves a hundred others who cannot even die, that’s a far worse crime than painting a few skulls or spreading a bit of plague. Diseases can be contained, quarantined, healed. You could be burned alive from the toes upward, hanging by the wrists from a public pedestal, a list of your crimes carved into the skin of your chest with a rusty knife. Before they light the fires, they pluck your finger- and toenails off and put spikes carved of animal bone in their place, as a reminder of what they foolishly believe Red means. Sometimes they cut out your tongue, so you can’t even scream--but they never touch the eyes. They want you to see what they’re doing to you. For multiple charges of murder by red magic, even done in the quick easy way without any plagues at all, they’ll skin your hands and feet too. Have you ever seen a degloved body? When I was little, they made me help in the prison infirmary. Part of that work was ensuring nobody died before they were meant to. It’s common to pass away of blood loss before the burning starts, you see,” Talxin said. “Or shock. The sight alone, of your own body shaved down to just the barrier between skin and muscle, that can be enough to cause death by psychic trauma. Never mind the sheer agony. In a world without Red, there is no death. No one can die of these things. But pain.... pain was never the domain of any single god.” 

“I--I won’t bow to petty threats from an uppity redmage,” the count said. “You may be protected, but this is my territory. You don’t scare me.” 

“Of course not,” Talxin said. “Because you’re an upstanding gentleman, aren’t you? You’ve never done anything to warrant such retribution. You would never provoke the wrath of your people. You would never mistreat your servants. You would certainly never abuse the courts and generational penal system to further your own interests under the table, perhaps to gain more free labor for your estate and factory industry. Such honest, good-hearted people such as ourselves have nothing to fear.” He sipped his tea. 

“We’ll continue these negotiations later,” the count said, swallowing. He stood up and fled the room, slamming the parlor door behind him. 

The silence must have lasted the better part of a minute after. Talxin’s hands were shaking. He realized when a few drops of tea splashed over the side of his teacup, leaving brownish stains in his snow-white shirtsleeve. He put the cup down again, and the worst of it ended, but his little finger continued to shudder. 

Nyrene is.... kooky. In the words of the immortal TVTropes, she’s a cloudcuckoolander. Ny is weird and unabashedly so, partially because she’s actually Like That and partially as a tactic to unnerve and disarm the people around her. That’s why I think she’s a Slytherin, her entire gimmick is deception. People don’t lie well when they’re faced with something (or someone) that completely contradicts their understanding of reality. Ny’s one of my oldest non-fairy OCs and her original characterization was a direct manifestation of my most infamous ADHD-fueled manic episodes, if that gives you any idea of what we’re working with here. She probably does have actual ADHD but there’s more to her weirdness than that, she’s deliberately exaggerating stuff and she’s also just a super dramatic person. Very smart, surprisingly emotionally mature, but sometimes flips out over random stuff. Her ethics are questionable. 

Underneath the kookiness, Nyrene’s incredibly clever. Her main power as purple paladin is the ability to manipulate time, typically by traveling through closed loops. This takes a ton of coordination, memory, and clever improvisation. She’s constantly keeping a record of everywhere she goes, everything she touches, everything she sees and hears, so that she doesn’t overlap herself by mistake. Paradoxes are potentially lethal, after all. As a result, she can be a bit spacey, which reinforces how weird she is... but you can’t underestimate her. She’s paying attention to everything. Like, she’ll miss being spoken to or miss random information for the sole reason that she’s too busy memorizing everything else. The proof of her intelligence is the fact that she does this successfully and hasn’t broken reality yet. No dead timelines allowed here. In theory, she could jump forward through time or even pause it, but she’s never tried--it’s not safe to mess around with that stuff, the consequences could be even more devastating than those of the closed loops she currently works in. 

Way back in the day when I first made these characters, Nyrene and Syzyga had a really close relationship--sometimes I shipped them romantically, sometimes they were just platonic BFFs, but they were always stuck together as a duo. In the current iteration of the story they’re still very close, I think Syz is the only person who really gets what Nyrene’s deal is. Anlied knows in theory that Nyrene’s smarter than she looks, but Syzyga gets it. Syz is also pretty good at making Nyrene calm down when Ny loses her temper or just freaks out about something. They play well together. 

Another big part of why Nyrene’s Like That is her origin story, she’s from Nemmonay. Nemmonay is the weirdest setting in the Nymiaverse, it’s basically just one island off the coast of Kelrie, but it’s walled up and has survived attacks by all three of the other realms on the continent. Nemmonay’s  home to a lot of pirates and criminals, anyone fleeing the law in another country or who just doesn’t buy into the “system” of normal society. There’s a whole little hierarchy and social order to it, but the Nemmonese system grows out of pure anarchy and things could tip over at any time. Nyrene grew up there as the daughter of a major Nemmonese power family. Her mom is even smarter and more ruthless than she is, Pagala Enkeli is on another level of badass. Pagala also raised Nyrene with um.... with a really questionable set of ethics. I mean, they’re anarchist pirate gangsters, some of that’s just to be expected. Nyrene got her goofball act from her mother and took it up to 11, Nyrene also got her intelligence from Pagala--Pagala’s a chessmaster type and Nyrene is chessmaster junior. Ny knows a ton of different ways to kill people, pick pockets, manipulate a fight, and just generally get what she wants. What she’s lacking in is a sense of social awareness. She reads people like a book but doesn’t understand that she shouldn’t always do that, she has strong battlefield instincts but doesn’t always realize that she can’t punch or time-loop all her problems away. that’s why Syz is good for her. Pagala tried to teach Nyrene manipulation and social savvy, but Ny’s just not that good at it. Everyone’s bad at something. 

Soenya’s different...so she comes from a pretty remote area up in northern Sapir. The Sapiran Empire is the biggest realm of Nymia by far, but most of it is very sparsely populated because of how barren and cold it is. Sapir’s got a lot of mountains, a lot of tundra, and only a small handful of places where people could reasonably expect to live the year in one place. I want to take inspiration from IRL northern cultures to start building these remote settlements, I’m still deciding if I want to lean more towards Siberian cultures or American indigenous groups in terms of reference. Either way, the point is, Soenya’s from a tiny place up on the northern Sapiran coast that’s very small and close-knit and cold. Before the Academy she had very little exposure to anything beyond her village/group, and she was one of the only magic users she knew. 

She’s uh... she’s enthusiastic about people. Soenya’s a constant flirt, wants to get in everyone’s pants, and if she’s not attracted to you then she’s peppering you with random questions about whatever’s on her mind. She’s nosy and can’t mind her own business. She and Nyrene butt heads a lot because they’re both very strange people, but in different ways--Nyrene is reclusive and likes to be enigmatic for effect, where Soenya is nearly impossible to unnerve, at least not in the way Nyrene likes to unnerve people. Ny doesn’t know what to do when she genuinely can’t freak someone out? And of course Soenya’s noticed this and uses it to mess with Nyrene right back... Soenya’s pretty clever. She’s not that book smart (for reasons explained) but she’s good with people and has strong intuition. She’s got that good good folksy knowledge. She’s also pretty competitive, and she tends to provoke Nyrene’s competitive instincts whenever she gets going, because they just cannot STAND each other. Nyrene doesn’t like that Soenya won’t react to her weirdo act, Nyrene doesn’t like that Soenya keeps flirting with her (and everyone else). Soenya doesn’t like that Nyrene won’t give her a straight answer, and Soenya thinks Nyrene’s behavior means she’s a medical oddity--who’s ever heard of a person going senile by the age of 20? 

Soenya’s the paladin of yellow and that gives her some serious trickster instincts. She can control weather (within reason), talk to animals once in a blue moon (elk/deer and rabbits are the easiest bc she grew up around them), and she gets a power boost when somebody underestimates her or doesn’t take her seriously. She’s super annoying in a fight. 

I’m still developing Soenya as a character, because her role in the story has changed a lot since her creation--originally she was an antagonist, being mind controlled by the villain from the very beginning and fucking with the heroes all the time. she was also banging the villain (which given the context and character ages is gross and creepy, @past me WTF!!!), and then I deleted her entirely from the story for a while because I didn’t want to deal with the baggage of that original character dynamic. I’ve brought her back because she’s a really fun character and I like her, I want her to be part of the good guy team now, but I’m still figuring out who she is. You know? So pretty much everything I’ve said here could change. All I’m sure about is that she’s still a flirt, just with people worth flirting with, and she really hates Nyrene. (It’s mutual.)

Of the three you asked about, Talxin’s probably the most thoroughly developed, just because he’s a little more straightforward? He’s a beaten-down guy who’s been through shit and who’s fighting to make sure nobody else has to suffer the way he did. Archetypal antihero stuff. He’s brave, and stubborn, and smarter than he looks. He’s also impulsive and reckless, leaving him vulnerable to the darker side of his powers. Talxin’s what you get when I rewatch the Star Wars prequels and get pissed about how cool and morally ambiguous Anakin deserved to be. 

Talxin’s small, and for most of these characters’ early development he stays that way in his friends’ minds. Fair warning, his backstory is HEAVY and really dark, and one of the things I’m most worried about in terms of actually executing this story well. He grew up basically enslaved--Elcrin has a really really broken system of generational punishment. Talxin’s grandfather committed a crime, what he did is irrelevant, and so the family line got stuck as “indentured servants” to pay for the crime. Talxin’s dad Temerius was supposed to earn his freedom at age 20, but the owner of the farm where they all worked framed Temerius for another offense to lengthen the sentence and trap his children with him. So Talxin grew up in a horribly broken system, being told that this was justice, while his parents raised him worshiping the colorgod Red as a champion of true justice--all things equal in death. That later became Talxin’s mantra as a paladin. When Talxin was chosen as the red paladin in early childhood, he was attacked by the lord of the farm for having heathen magic, and he panicked and caused a ton of destruction. He got arrested and taken to an actual jail (this all when he was like four years old), escaped a few years later, and he’s been in and out of prison. Being called to the Academy for formal paladin training was a respite, and in his eyes, a chance for a fresh start and the tools to free his family. And then the Academy fell apart and he got sent right back to where he came from.

So what you end up with, after all of this, is a kid with a horribly fucked up traumatic history and a massive amount of power at his disposal. Because redmages are rare and persecuted, Talxin proportionally has a LOT more magic than the other paladins, he’s the strongest one of the lot. He’s got a strong sense of justice and he’s very much willing to kill to make things right--all things are equal in death, after all, and his patron deity is a god of plague and decay as well as justice. And he’s fixated on getting vengeance for the cruel and unjust treatment of his family, who’ve been scattered on the winds during the few years he was at the Academy. 

Talxin’s... really, really brave. Brave enough that when he’s sent back to Elcrin after the Academy falls apart he goes right back to the system and starts breaking it apart, rescuing people from the law and stealing shit from the corrupt government and making a big loud mess. In a demon AU I once nicknamed him “frog Robin Hood.” He’s also smart enough to get away with it. He’s a minor antagonist for a little bit, even... he winds up losing control of his magic and going way too far. All of the colors have minds of their own to some degree, and Red is vengeful and destructive and bent towards revenge. Talxin goes on a killing spree, which is fine when he’s killing people who deserve to burn in hell, but he starts hurting innocents too in the process. He loses sight of why he’s fighting, the ideals and morals and drive for justice that led Red to choose him above anyone else. Plagues don’t just stop spreading once they’ve done away with your targets, famines hit the people he wants to protect so much harder than the people he wants to hurt. The other paladins have to step in and talk him down before he starts something he can’t stop. I feel like he’s stuck between Gryffindor and Slytherin in my head because although he’s so daring and brave, he’s also ambitious and willing to do some very unchivalrous things when pushed to the line. He’s got a difficult goal to reach but nothing’s gonna stop him. 

As you’d expect from a character with this kind of life story, he’s pretty serious. He’s quiet and keeps to himself, he’s always watching and listening... the main word I’d describe him with is intense. But at the same time, he’s got a great sense of humor when he feels safe enough to express it! He’s sweet and goofy, and he cares so so much about his family and friends and acquaintances and any random stranger on the street who looks sad enough. He also plays fantastic elaborate tricks on people who fuck with him, like, in a modern AU he’s the one who sneaks into your nasty ex’s house just to steal all their toilet paper and the batteries from the TV remotes. And then he leaves the doors open so they waste money on heating. He’s the god of April Fools’. When it comes to his primary objective, he takes himself and everything else very seriously, he’s willing to put aside minor moral issues for the greater good. But if you get him to come out of his angst shell and just be a person for a little while, he’s a genuinely good guy. He’s not quite at Batman levels, there’s still hope for him yet. He’s just lonely and angry and desperate for affection. 

Talxin’s very close with Nyrene and Syzyga, out of everyone at the Academy he probably trusts those two the most, but he gets along great with Pariya too once she shows up. He wants to like Soenya but he doesn’t trust her, something about her sets off his internal alarm bells. Anlied scares the living shit out of him. He may or may not have dated Syzyga at some point in the past, they were a couple in past versions of this story but I’m not sure their current iterations are compatible. He’s got an older sister named Elysia, Lyss for short, whom he hasn’t seen since he was very small. He’s been trying to reconnect with her ever since the Academy caved in but she’s nowhere to be found. Nyrene actually finds her first. 

So yeah! Those three! They’re a LOT, Talxin in particular is really fascinating to me. Nymia doesn’t really have a protagonist in the traditional sense, but I think Talxin’s the closest to playing that role, as his personal arc drives so much of the story so far. Whether he’s the hero or not, he exerts a major force of change on the world of Nymia, and everything he does is important. The others influence things, sure, but Talxin’s.... he’s that. He’s a big deal. He’s a symbol.