#the consideration

Saw a little guy sitting on Artemis, so I offered my hand and he jumped right to me. I let him go free next to my chair, and 20 minutes later he turned up again. So the second time I set him free on a sapling near my back door and turned around to find my good old boy on the frame.

NAME. Celaya AGE & BIRTH DATE. 30 & October 17th, 2994 GENDER & PRONOUNS. Cis Female & She/her NATIONALITY. Iskaran SPECIES. Witcher FACTION. N/A OCCUPATION. N/A FACE CLAIM. Lindsey Morgan

biography

( tw child abuse, war, death, injury )

Fear was the little death - and under the litany of stars, those which pierced the moon blotted sky, a young child willed for such fears to settle and pass. Celaya was only seven, cosmic runes and ancient ruins surrounded her home, the helm of the Westlands. Her parents were of the very scholars within the mystic runescape, their livelihoods dedicated to the swirling mists and depths which shrouded them. Celaya grew up amazed, a beacon of hope, a vestige of potent storms and willpower. She was strong like her mother, had the same freckles and rampant ambitions that could not be so easily quelled with realism. But she was seven now, seven and half-dead already, as a weaver did what was to be done. If her parents had been so enamored with the mysticism of the Mistveil Mires, why would they let fear overcome them when their daughter’s own ancient magic came to its rightful apex? Celaya knew this answer, understood it well; witchers prowled, they hunted and extinguished, and there was no mercy even for one as free-spirited as she. 

Fear was the mind killer - it would be the incremental loss of her very being if she did not stand tall as the witchers swarmed her home. Spirited hope was wilted lightly as her parents did little to protect her from the manacles which wrought her new fate. A criminal whereas she’d never once stolen a crumb of bread or told a bolden lie. Celaya had known what fate would await her if she had been to weave, but she had done so anyway - it had not made this ascension any easier. 

Fear was what brought total obliteration and Celaya stood tall and mute amidst the journey to the Northlands, to the Witchers Watch. The mind commands the body and the body obeys, the mind could order itself and meet resistance but submerged within the Witchers Watch, trembling alongside Lake Dökkvatn, she was wily and unassuming. Her voice in life was not conjured until long after she was given agency in her new vision as a witcher, but such a summit would come later. For now, a once foolhardy child folded in on herself as frightened eyes peered around the small group of children that each spoke of something similar to her. One wrought the same freckles, another held the same sleek hair that wrapped tightly in a braided bun. Each recoiled in the same afflicted agony as poison was administered, the special brew that would strip away the core of their magic. Fear was the mind killer but sometimes one submitted to it - watering eyes, an acrid taste on her tongue as vomit fell from her lips and Celaya dropped and convulsed. The First looked down at her, sneering and chuckling; they’d seen such violent affairs many times before and was immune to the cruelty of the practice, did little to aid her as guttural screams involuntarily escaped her lips. 

A process could not be understood by stopping it and as Celaya went limp, fire melding with her veins, the screams stopped as she was taken alongside the others to be placed on bedrest until 72 hours had passed and consciousness would reclaim her. The one with the braided bun and another who’d spat at the First’s feet would not be there when Celaya first sat up and it painted the wretched truth to what was only the beginning of her freshly carved story. Understanding moved with the flow of the process and though her fate was carved in the flesh of brutality, Celaya learned to surmount it. Her back stood a bit straighter, she learned the weighted hilt of each weapon adorned in calloused palms and her ferocity came upon the urge of survival. Cruelty was not innate in her pursuit but it became a kindred part of her; a spitfire only tamed by High Witcher Gunnhild herself, and much like the first Celaya would resist against any blinding light which tried to take her. 

The people who can destroy a thing are those which control it and it was any wonder why they all answered to any barked command the High Witcher reported. The Final Trial had her sit within the mountains of Valkyrie’s Rest and though she could see the illuminated lights of her home off within Westreach, the soon to be witcher felt nothing which resonated within her towards it. Celaya’s graduation, alongside the six others who advanced alongside her, came with a bellowed warcry as blades were cracked together, staffs and hilts were pounding against the floor and the head of an Armanite lounging at her feet - whatever terrors had once infused Celaya towards the plight of survival, they were all forgotten as the poison saddled a new identity and purpose. Her braid, woven by the High Witcher herself, was wrapped tightly in a bun as Celaya left Lake Dökkvatn behind. Whatever teeth of childhood, blood and bruises of adolescence, and the resistance of her youth which once festered there had died; nothing had been immune to the alchemy of transitioning to a fully blooded witcher. 

Her first trek across Iskaldrik had brought her to the earthy rust of the Ironwoods. Her training served her well and Celaya learned to brush off any gaze of hatred or vision of fear cast upon her; the world had not wrought a comforted journey for her so why should she be kind in return? One would only be foolish to think they were above the mast of cruelty and Celaya engrossed herself in the profession; she had no parents to strive after and so she looked at the vision that was the First and grew frantic to reach it. By the time she was twenty, Celaya had lost track of how many she had personally sent to the mines but she never lost track of how many scars gouged her frame or twisted a snarl on her expression. 

Fear was the little death - and she’d had so many since she’d been seven, small and unassuming, taken to the frigid embrace of Lake Dökkvatn. Each little death repurposed her; she’d been seven and it only took seven years for the body to purge old cells completely. How many lives had she lived since she’d been that small, weaving child hellbent on leaning into her powers? How many little deaths chipped away at her soul until she was merely alchemist poison and violence? Years could biologically strip away what made up her very being but it would not change the choice - how Celaya chose to perpetuate the very violence of their kind each and every time. If she did not rest nor falter then she could not lament on what could have been. No titles, no land, no children; fear was the total obliteration of her entire self and she refused to grant it absolute power over her. If Celaya was to be in possession of anything it was the stability to endure, the strength in her disposition and the glee of becoming one with the mind of a huntress, a killer. 

Survival was the ability to swim in strange waters - change was this perpetual ebb and flow and just as swiftly as she had found paramount comfort in being the monster to hunt monsters, the entirety of her world was flipped. Aetheron attacked, the magic they spun and wove had called to her as this beacon, and as a moth to a flame, Celaya ran towards the battlefield, a last line of defense for Hrafntun. They’d been pushed back to Runestorm Keep as the watchtower fell, a mighty sea of acrid flames, the pungent flavor of magic wiping the glacial slate of Iskaldrik clean. Plumes of magic equivalent to hellfire rained down on her and the others, bodies of her allies fell beside her and it seemed in tandem foes would multiply in potency. Perhaps this was everything Celaya had been trained for, the ultimate foe, this mighty bastion of magic that seemed unyielding as the smell of mottled flesh filled the air and the anguished screams of Iskaran-born protectors fell. Without change something sleeps inside us and as Celaya watched everything go up in flames she ran; abandonment was not like her, but there was nothing left of Hrafntun, of Runestorm Keep. They had become skeletal vestiges of what she once remembered and in order to fight another day, she turned towards the monstrosity that was the sea. 

A remnant piece of the watchtower served as her buoy; the sea should have taken her, a massive entity with its own mind, but it was the raiders who first swept upon her. Her rations, her weaponry, Celaya was left with only the sharpness of her mind, but it did little to assuage the fact that she was now a prisoner of the sea. The spraying foam and hidden entities that lay waiting in the water would be kinder than the raiders who had hoisted her aboard and as rampant storms took hold of the Veiled Sea, Celaya managed to slip away into the waters as though it was her only chance. Starvation took hold quickly, exhaustion a secondary affliction as hunger caused her muscles to still and freeze. No matter the adeptness her trajectory in life had warranted, no one was any match for the ruthlessness of the sea. The miasma of rot and salt followed her, infected wounds and a dampened spirit allowing her to be this willing entity that was tossed from wave to wave. A merciless journey, one forged from the desperation of the storm inside her and the cruelty of the storm around her. 

Her body washed up on the shores of Borderreach, a husk of what once was. Whatever branded her a witcher had been pried from her identity, stripped from her by the brine of the sea and pilfered by wretched raiders awaiting their next score. The musk of survival pervaded the senses as one looked upon Celaya and wondered how it was any miracle one survived the wrath of the sea. The fates above could grant that she was instead granted the mercy of it, however scant such mercy was. A bastion of vigilance and defense greeted her under the command of Lady Severian, whatever similarities resounded in the watchtower were lost upon blank eyes as Celaya attempted to piece together who she could have ever been. Hardy folks looked upon her with hesitance; these were the protectors of this rugged expanse and it seemed their personality was to match it fluidly. Two weeks lost under the brine of the sea was enough to make any seasoned warrior weak, but from the look of Celaya’s rags and the peak of exhaustion in her gaze; Lady Severian scoffed at the idea that she could be devised as a threat to their borders.

Celaya permitted her fears to pass, allowed herself to overcome any prospective what-ifs and stepped into the refuge of Lady Severian’s home. It allowed her the first hot meal she’d had in ages, willed the exhaustion to expel itself from her bones, and salved the wounds she’d endured from what seemed to be the innate violence of the sea. Celaya had no wiseness to the war that brewed in her home Kingdom, the violence she once perpetuated, and the lethality that was hidden inside her and nothing Lady Severian attempted seemed to be successful at drawing these truths to the surface. Her body had not only reverted to survival mode it had transformed into a will of potent trauma masked by the need to endure.

Fear was the mind-killer, it had been the little death, and if she was to carve a new identity for herself then Celaya would step willingly forward into this new land that embraced her, no matter the cost to her past. 

personality

+ Ambitious, Plucky, Valorous – Cruel, Abrasive, Intolerant 

THE CONSIDERATION ~

NAME. UTP AGE & BIRTH DATE. UTP SPECIES. Witcher FACTION. UTP OCCUPATION. UTP

Aetheron attacked and it was everyone for themselves. You saw the proud Kingdom you’d always known go up in flames in almost a single night. Laid to waste, you fled towards the sea and the tides, but storms and raiders struck the tragedy-ridden with an even worse fate. Tossed about by the churning rifts of salt and foam, fate intervened and washed you upon the shores of Borderreach in nothing but rags. In Lysara a witcher would face a cruel fate, but you had no memory of who you were or where you had been. The trauma of your youth, the chaos of the fall, the desperation of the storm, and the brutality of your survival painted an empty slate as your body did what was needed to protect itself. The home of the faiman Lady Severian welcomed you in, she opened her hall to you, her table, and she pressed for what might have transpired. No magic could recall the past, no efforts could piece together what would happen. Perhaps time would lift the veil that hung over your past, or perhaps it would be lost to you forever - now was the time to start over.

CONNECTS

N/A

NOTES