[Caelum's Scrapbook] Use Your Words.

[Kavala]

This is getting weird. Maybe we should make this a prerequisite of the Cytali

[Alaia]

We so should! Only INFJ's and we'll know if you lie!

[Caelum]

The degree of available information is staggering. Between us, we can know what they want, what they intend, the history of objects they carry, and literally the details of their entire life plus past lives. And all of that? Is before Caelum starts wielding his intelligence and investigation skills. Oh, and god help them if they're kelvic, because Kavala will know all about what they're feeling too.

Can you tell I'm plotting?

[Kavala]

Nysel knows what hes doing, eh?

[Caelum]

A rainy day tangent. There hung a mirror in the front parlor of my grandmother’s house on St. Elmo’s Drive. It was rose colored by accident of questionable 1960’s design choices and spread the entire width of the white washed fire place from the mantel to the ceiling. My cousin Ashley and I spent a few minutes every day of our summers there tip-toeing up dining chairs to peer at our reflections in the glass. We thought we looked like our mothers in rose and it made the world feel safe and old. The parlor in the mirror was caught in an eternal dusk, the sunlight always yawning in descent and the wear on the furniture softened and eliminated. A chiming and heavy Chinese mantel clock squatted as the centerpiece, pressed back against white washed brick, and it clicked steadily over seconds but still managed to never tell the true time. My cousin emailed me a little bit ago to tell me the house was listed for sale. A few years after our grandmother succumbed to cancer, our grandfather moved into an assisted living facility where he would say all of his friends were helping him die happy. The house that had been the real home though never the primary residence to five often displaced grandchildren was cleaned out and sold. There was nothing particularly remarkable about it save for what it meant to us, but unfortunately the us were all still children if only older versions of ourselves. Our grandfather finished his great flirtation and has been dead for years. It still aches when I think about how he passed mere months before I met the man who is now my husband. At the time we were cleaning out the house, my mother asked me if there was anything in particular from there I wanted. The idea was that If it was not disputed by either of her sisters, then she saw no reason why I couldn’t have it. I wanted the mirror. It was not an unattached piece. It was a sheet of rose colored mirror glass drilled into the bricks of the fireplace. It was silvered and marbled at its borders, possibly due to that dubiously intentioned clock. Nevertheless, I wanted it. Inside that mirror were a thousand reflections of my childhood including the wraiths of memory that would remind me that I looked my mother who looked like her mother and we couldn’t grow old if we were already there, all of our blemishes eased and eradicated by the art of incorrect time telling and every woe of displacement gentled by an antique perspective. I never got the mirror, but of course I got what I wanted inside of it. It was never about the glass. -k.

[Caelum]

Character History I cut out Caelum’s original character history from his CS some while ago with the intent to edit and streamline it. It was poorly cobbled together as so very much was added via the fleshing out flashbacks since creation. The details haven’t altered so much as I feel they are now better explained. My next project will be to write a synopsis of his post-creation history as that is very revealing and potentially helpful to other players. But, for now, here’s his revised pre-creation history for your enjoyment. Oh, yeah. It's appropriately emo. You're welcome. - - - - - - Some people have lives that are more secret than story. He is one of them. The first time he fell, his enemies waited on the shore. The Ruvna lined up like crows and came over him like a nightmare, with fists and teeth, blades and blood. He was mere minutes old when he died in the shallows, nameless and alone, while Syna hid her face in storm clouds that wept in the sky. A few centuries later, his fury calmed in arms of his Bright Lady, he fell for a second time. It was the 91st day of fall in 503 A.V. and it stormed again. Lightning walked off the coast of Black Rock and thunder talked omens to the day. In it he forgot his name, forgot his reasons, forgot his gods and all of his lives as they shredded in his descent. They left him with nothing but his name, a perfect and crystalline series of sounds in the celestial language that was completely incapable of being uttered. The dimmest star in the sky that night he asked the name of from a sailor. It seemed as far away as the Goldenlands in the Ukalas he had called home. Caelum, the sailor told him, and so he calibrated the compass of his soul by it and went with her aboard Captain Rezar’s Bright-Eyed Mariner. They pretended to be honest maritime merchants more than they actually were, but their cheerful inequity suited him and he was reintroduced to the world. During these early hours a Priest of Rak’keli was hauled off the passenger list of a defeated competitor and in aiding him Caelum found himself returned to the path of healing. Shortly thereafter Caelum departed the company of Rezar’s crew in pursuit of all his impossible, impractical hopes. He wished to go home, an ambition torn from the salted earth of his soul, and to heal the hearts, minds, and bodies of the world badly wounded in the Valterrian. Ill omens dogged his dreams and life before his ascension as a Drykas Ankal before the Valterrian was barely recollected, a buckshot-like scatter of clips and phrases that trespassed upon his consciousness at the most inconvenient of moments. Determined to suss out the secrets of his past and sick with paranoia for the coming of another global doom, he crisscrossed Sylira and occasionally beyond. In the Spring of 505 A.V. Caelum stumbled across the slaughter of a traveling Konti family and hauled Lillis De'Nerys, the sole survivor, out of the horror. From that point forward, they were inseparable. They set up household in the city of Zeltiva and carefully sewed a life together from the scraps of themselves. They were a pair of ghosts really, lonely together. He kept the pieces of her from scattering like ashes, and she was the last lodestone summoning him home. It was love, and it was happiness too. Imperfect, but tangible. Flawed, but true. it was the closest either had come since tumbling from their respective heights. It would remain the closest for Caelum for years and years and years yet to come. Caelum continued to travel during these more merciful years, but he failed to do so too far or too often. His love for Lillis was deep, but his quest was unrelenting. Medicine. Herbalism. Glyphing. Archaelogy. Intelligence. The topics he sought and ultimately researched, having assigned himself as the architect, the cartographer and the physician to a crippled universe, spanned multiple hordes of knowledge. He gathered a small collection of friends over the region and maintained correspondence. Mostly, though, he sought, and prepared, and watched the sky for what he didn’t know but was sure yet to come. He would still be in Zeltiva, working at the university clinic and running a small and dusty oddities shop had not life been jilted and shattered, god-bombed once more. Ebonstryfe and the slaving ship's captain responsible for the slaughter of the De'Nerys family had joined fists with fate and knocked Caelum and Lills right back to their knees. Separated, enslaved, Caelum gnawed on his chains. The years in the shadow of Rhysol are a black hole pockmarked with soul thefts and mind melds as his jailers desperately sought to harness the power of the celestial language locked in his mind. It was a state of service that lacked integrity and pain that was empty of promise. His faith was ground to dust and shadow and he crumbled into a forsaken state. Therein his sins grew legion. It was not until the winter of 510 A.V. that with the aid of a member of the Rising Dawn he arranged his escape. It landed him far from Zeltiva, far from wherever Lillis whom he could only pray was yet living might be, and in his struggling to reform himself yet again, to pick back up his quest and add to it finding Lillis, the gods called him again.

[Caelum]

Uh, Caelum takes selfies?

[Caelum]

This guy does good selfies. Look, Caelum has blue eyes in real life!

[Eida]

I'm pretty sure you've made this. You guys must be best friends in real life!

[Caelum]

You're right. I should have told y'all a long time ago. I'm secretly a Portuguese male super model.

...now my secret is out.