Sabriel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bindsthedead) wrote2021-06-21 07:22 pm
bindsthedead) wrote2021-06-21 07:22 pm
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OOC
Name: Sarah
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
sarahthesilent
Other characters: N/A
IC
Name: Sabriel
Canon: The Old Kingdom
Canon point: Post Sabriel (by about two weeks, so she's had a little bit of time to recover)
Age: 18
History: here
Personality:
Positive
Determined When Sabriel sets her mind on a task, she does not give up. Finding her father means trekking through a zombie infested kingdom, with an array of mundane and magical threats arrayed against her? She'll grit her teeth and keep going. Her father's dead and she needs to face off against a monster that her family's failed to kill for two centuries? She'll weep for her father, then jump into a magical paper airplane to go finish the job. Even when she is dying from being impaled the main thought in Sabriel's head is trying to defeat her opponent. It's not that she's ignorant of danger, free of doubt and uncertainty, or afraid of what might happen to her, but Sabriel either ignores her fear or uses it to push herself towards her goal.
Observant Sabriel pays attention. She has an excellent memory, and her magical training has emphasized spotting small discrepancies, often as a matter of survival. When she encounters a Charter spell she notices all the component marks, and when she encounters Mogget, a spirit that takes to form of a cat, she immediately spots that his shadow isn't always in the shape of a cat, and spots a Dead creature by noticing that a man is wearing oddly heavy clothing for being in a hot, crowded room. Even outside of more supernatural pursuits, Sabriel is fairly good at judging people's emotional states and the general vibe of a situation.
Compassionate For all that Sabriel can put up a stoic front, she cares deeply about people. From resurrecting a rabbit because a little girl was sad her pet died to immediately wanting to rescue children being used as bait for the Dead, when she sees someone in distress, Sabriel's first instinct is to help. Her time spent as a prefect, looking after younger students, makes this tendency especially pronounced with children. Sabriel's necromantic training means that she sees treating corpses respectfully as an act of compassion. Even when she's short on time, she'll try to administer the final rites so their bodies and spirits can't be enslaved and used for evil. For all that Sabriel knows intellectually that Death is a natural part of Life, she still finds people dying- particularly in ways that are unfair or avoidable- deeply upsetting. For all that the powers she uses can sometimes be outright horrifying, she isn't a cruel person.
Negative
Reckless The flipside of Sabriel's determination and compassion is that she can easily act without fully considering the consequences. For example, deciding that showing off her magic when surrounded by on-edge soldiers would be a good idea. Or sending a message to get her cousins to flood a major river without fully considering what that meant for everyone else until the water was rushing by. Or having to be restrained from jumping into a fight where she and her allies were vastly outnumbered and likely to lose because children were being enslaved and used as bait for the Dead. She's compassionate, but she'll focus on dealing with the immediate problem, rather than looking at the big picture or the consequences of her actions beyond "I'm helping someone". And even when she's aware of and acknowledges risks, she's still likely to take them, believing that it's better to do something rather than nothing.
Not as mature as she thinks she is while Sabriel is in some ways far more mature than other people her age, and is able to cope with death, danger, and horrific monsters just fine, in other ways, she's still clearly a teenager. Argue with her and she'll snap and roll her eyes, and she can be petty and snippy. She's prone to jumping to conclusions, and was ready to cry when she thought her crush was with someone else. She can be awkward in strange situations, and will lean on her etiquette training to try to disguise that, resulting in her coming off as an incredibly formal snob... or an upper class teenager out of her depth.
Naive Sabriel's training in both necromancy and general Charter magic has left her familiar with death as a general concept, and given her the capacity to deal with supernatural evil without blinking. But when it comes to more mundane evil, she's easily blindsided, and she hasn't seen or heard a human die before the events of Sabriel. While she's fought undead monsters before the start of the story, she never had to feel someone die or deal with fresh corpses until the events of her canon, and dealing with those things shakes her. She went to a fancy boarding school for upper class girls and it really shows. If she's annoyed with someone, she'll speak to them like they're a servant or an underclassman.
Powers/Abilities: Hoo boy. First, please note that I will be putting up a permissions post for her powers, and will plot with any potentially affected players before using them. I am totally fine with nerfing/adjusting them to fit the setting.
Sabriel's magical abilities can be divided into two categories- her necromancy, tied to her status as Abhorsen, and her Charter magic.
The Abhorsens are a magical bloodline, who carry one of the Great Charters in their blood. What Great Charters are is never exactly explained, but they are described as part of the Charter's foundation, and their destruction or corruption would weaken it. The Abhorsens have an affinity for Death, and are able to use both necromancy(a subset of Free magic) and Charter magic in their task of battling the Dead and Free magic creatures and sorcerers.
Free magic is... complicated, but the important thing to note is that it's chaotic, and that normally, it's inherently opposed to the Charter, making the Abhorsens unique in their ability to use both.
As Abhorsen, Sabriel is able to use necromancy in conjunction with Charter magic. Unlike Charter magic, necromancy relies on willpower channeled through music, and even without her bells Sabriel can exert a limited amount of influence over the Dead, can sense the presence and relative strength of Dead, and can detect where deaths have happened, whether those deaths were violent, and how long ago it happened. She can also determine if a corpse has been moved from where it died, as well as how long ago it died. Finally, Sabriel can also send her spirit into the realm of Death, leaving her body frozen solid until she comes back to it.
Death is a spiritual realm- no physical substance can enter it, and thus, nothing physical can be taken from it (With a handful of exceptions, namely one type of undead and apparently some types of magical artifacts, given how Sabriel's father sent her the sword and bells, although it should be noted these items aren't from Death, just passing through it.). Spirits may pass between it and Life, if they're able to fight the current, but Death itself is a cold, dangerous place. Its nine precincts hold a variety of dangers, with the one constant being the cold and the constant current, which tries to drag everything in Death to beyond the Ninth Gate, beyond which nothing returns.
Most of Sabriel's necromancy is worked through a set of seven magical hand bells, with their powers listed here.
Ranna is called the sleeper, and forces the listener to fall asleep.
Mosrael is called the waker, and in her own world, acts as a seesaw, pulling the listener into Life and dragging the ringer into Death. A bell Sabriel is highly unlikely to use.
Kibeth is called the Walker, and can grant freedom of movement, or force the listener to walk where the ringer wills- including commanding a spirit to walk back into Death. It also seeks to sound on its own, and can be hard to control.
Dyrim is called the speaker, and its powers are fairly straightforward- it can grant speech to those who have lost it, or take away the capacity to speak.
Belgaer is called the thinker, and can restore free will and memories, as well as restoring the personality a Dead spirit had in life. It can also be used to erase these, shattering minds and memories. Like Kibeth, it will try to ring on its own accord.
Saraneth is called the Binder, and binds the Dead to the ringers will. This is the bell Sabriel uses most often, binding the Dead to her will to force them to truly die.
Astarael is called the weeper, and when rung, sends all who hear it deep into Death- including the ringer. This is considered a weapon of last resort in canon and will only be used with prior communication with the mods, as part of a plot.
Charter Magic is the branch of magic Sabriel's likely to use most of the time. It's magic that's worked through symbols- they can be spoken, signed, whistled, written, or sometimes just visualized. It can be used for a lot of things, but it has some limitations, including: No space/time manipulation in general, no creation of matter, no unaided flight (although some mages have created magical aircraft, Sabriel does not have the knowledge), no shapeshifting (Again, technically possible, but Sabriel doesn't have access to this knowledge, and doesn't even know it exists). Mental manipulation seems to be restricted to calming people down and either erasing or manipulating recent (like, within a day or so) memories. Finally, Sabriel has some familiarity with weather magic, although her track record of using it is... mixed.
Charter Magic has other restrictions- Sabriel needs to visualize the symbols and mentally arrange them, meaning her magic isn't instantaneous and requires focus- and powerful spells take some time to cast. Break her concentration and the spell will fizzle out or go out of control. Also, powerful spells place a strain on her body- even with precautions, she'll exhaust herself after using a few, and without those precautions, she'll kill herself or be too drained to cast much magic for at least a week. Minor spells are less draining, but if she uses a lot of them, she'll eventually run out of energy. Sabriel can give this power to others via baptism, but they will need to learn and study, and even simple spells will be exhausting for them at first.
The spells Sabriel is most likely to use frequently include various forms of binding/warding, combat magic that includes both destructive force as well as incapacitating her opponents through either blinding, disorienting, or immobilizing them, and healing. Healing magic in the Old Kingdom universe is useful, able to purge drugs and poisons from the body as well as heal even life threatening injuries, but serious wounds require the person being healed to take a few days of bed rest or light activity afterwards, or the spell will be disrupted and the woulds will reopen. Sabriel cannot repair injuries that have already healed over but healed wrong, she can't fix chronic conditions, and her capacity to regrow lost tissue is limited to what the body can repair on its own- she can't regrow missing limbs or organs.
By using Charter magic to repair the body and necromancy to summon the spirit back, Sabriel can resurrect the very recently dead to true life. In canon, she's only done this once, on a bunny, but in theory she could do it to a person (And her father did something very similar to her when she was a baby)- she just feels she shouldn't, as it goes against her family's philosophy of making sure the dead pass on. This ability will not be used without significant prior plotting.
Both types of magic Sabriel uses have a tendency to make technology stop working, a tendency that grows more pronounced the stronger the magic used. Within Ximilia, this tendency will be restricted to only the strongest spells, the kind that will drain her to exhaustion with the use of only one or two. If people playing robots/cyborgs don't want to deal with this, I will run with an alternate interpretation- that if a character is metaphysically 'alive' magic will treat them as alive, rather than as technology. (So magic won't break them, healing spells will work on them, and they'll be able to learn how to use Charter magic).
Regret: Her classmates dying in the battle against Kerrigor. Given that she was the one who made the choice to ask for their help, Sabriel feels responsible for their deaths. It's unclear how many died, but I'd put the number at around fifteen out of the thirty-five girls she said had the skills to help them.
Inventory:
Her bells (powers detailed above, stored in a leather bandolier)
Abhorsen's sword (A longsword, imbued with spells to make it an effective weapon against the Dead and other supernatural entities. Also can be used as an aid to casting Charter Magic, like a magic wand you can stab people with.)
The Book of the Dead, a necromantic grimoire.
Two Charter magic spell books.
Sample: Here
Name: Sarah
Contact:
Other characters: N/A
IC
Name: Sabriel
Canon: The Old Kingdom
Canon point: Post Sabriel (by about two weeks, so she's had a little bit of time to recover)
Age: 18
History: here
Personality:
Positive
Determined When Sabriel sets her mind on a task, she does not give up. Finding her father means trekking through a zombie infested kingdom, with an array of mundane and magical threats arrayed against her? She'll grit her teeth and keep going. Her father's dead and she needs to face off against a monster that her family's failed to kill for two centuries? She'll weep for her father, then jump into a magical paper airplane to go finish the job. Even when she is dying from being impaled the main thought in Sabriel's head is trying to defeat her opponent. It's not that she's ignorant of danger, free of doubt and uncertainty, or afraid of what might happen to her, but Sabriel either ignores her fear or uses it to push herself towards her goal.
Observant Sabriel pays attention. She has an excellent memory, and her magical training has emphasized spotting small discrepancies, often as a matter of survival. When she encounters a Charter spell she notices all the component marks, and when she encounters Mogget, a spirit that takes to form of a cat, she immediately spots that his shadow isn't always in the shape of a cat, and spots a Dead creature by noticing that a man is wearing oddly heavy clothing for being in a hot, crowded room. Even outside of more supernatural pursuits, Sabriel is fairly good at judging people's emotional states and the general vibe of a situation.
Compassionate For all that Sabriel can put up a stoic front, she cares deeply about people. From resurrecting a rabbit because a little girl was sad her pet died to immediately wanting to rescue children being used as bait for the Dead, when she sees someone in distress, Sabriel's first instinct is to help. Her time spent as a prefect, looking after younger students, makes this tendency especially pronounced with children. Sabriel's necromantic training means that she sees treating corpses respectfully as an act of compassion. Even when she's short on time, she'll try to administer the final rites so their bodies and spirits can't be enslaved and used for evil. For all that Sabriel knows intellectually that Death is a natural part of Life, she still finds people dying- particularly in ways that are unfair or avoidable- deeply upsetting. For all that the powers she uses can sometimes be outright horrifying, she isn't a cruel person.
Negative
Reckless The flipside of Sabriel's determination and compassion is that she can easily act without fully considering the consequences. For example, deciding that showing off her magic when surrounded by on-edge soldiers would be a good idea. Or sending a message to get her cousins to flood a major river without fully considering what that meant for everyone else until the water was rushing by. Or having to be restrained from jumping into a fight where she and her allies were vastly outnumbered and likely to lose because children were being enslaved and used as bait for the Dead. She's compassionate, but she'll focus on dealing with the immediate problem, rather than looking at the big picture or the consequences of her actions beyond "I'm helping someone". And even when she's aware of and acknowledges risks, she's still likely to take them, believing that it's better to do something rather than nothing.
Not as mature as she thinks she is while Sabriel is in some ways far more mature than other people her age, and is able to cope with death, danger, and horrific monsters just fine, in other ways, she's still clearly a teenager. Argue with her and she'll snap and roll her eyes, and she can be petty and snippy. She's prone to jumping to conclusions, and was ready to cry when she thought her crush was with someone else. She can be awkward in strange situations, and will lean on her etiquette training to try to disguise that, resulting in her coming off as an incredibly formal snob... or an upper class teenager out of her depth.
Naive Sabriel's training in both necromancy and general Charter magic has left her familiar with death as a general concept, and given her the capacity to deal with supernatural evil without blinking. But when it comes to more mundane evil, she's easily blindsided, and she hasn't seen or heard a human die before the events of Sabriel. While she's fought undead monsters before the start of the story, she never had to feel someone die or deal with fresh corpses until the events of her canon, and dealing with those things shakes her. She went to a fancy boarding school for upper class girls and it really shows. If she's annoyed with someone, she'll speak to them like they're a servant or an underclassman.
Powers/Abilities: Hoo boy. First, please note that I will be putting up a permissions post for her powers, and will plot with any potentially affected players before using them. I am totally fine with nerfing/adjusting them to fit the setting.
Sabriel's magical abilities can be divided into two categories- her necromancy, tied to her status as Abhorsen, and her Charter magic.
The Abhorsens are a magical bloodline, who carry one of the Great Charters in their blood. What Great Charters are is never exactly explained, but they are described as part of the Charter's foundation, and their destruction or corruption would weaken it. The Abhorsens have an affinity for Death, and are able to use both necromancy(a subset of Free magic) and Charter magic in their task of battling the Dead and Free magic creatures and sorcerers.
Free magic is... complicated, but the important thing to note is that it's chaotic, and that normally, it's inherently opposed to the Charter, making the Abhorsens unique in their ability to use both.
As Abhorsen, Sabriel is able to use necromancy in conjunction with Charter magic. Unlike Charter magic, necromancy relies on willpower channeled through music, and even without her bells Sabriel can exert a limited amount of influence over the Dead, can sense the presence and relative strength of Dead, and can detect where deaths have happened, whether those deaths were violent, and how long ago it happened. She can also determine if a corpse has been moved from where it died, as well as how long ago it died. Finally, Sabriel can also send her spirit into the realm of Death, leaving her body frozen solid until she comes back to it.
Death is a spiritual realm- no physical substance can enter it, and thus, nothing physical can be taken from it (With a handful of exceptions, namely one type of undead and apparently some types of magical artifacts, given how Sabriel's father sent her the sword and bells, although it should be noted these items aren't from Death, just passing through it.). Spirits may pass between it and Life, if they're able to fight the current, but Death itself is a cold, dangerous place. Its nine precincts hold a variety of dangers, with the one constant being the cold and the constant current, which tries to drag everything in Death to beyond the Ninth Gate, beyond which nothing returns.
Most of Sabriel's necromancy is worked through a set of seven magical hand bells, with their powers listed here.
Ranna is called the sleeper, and forces the listener to fall asleep.
Mosrael is called the waker, and in her own world, acts as a seesaw, pulling the listener into Life and dragging the ringer into Death. A bell Sabriel is highly unlikely to use.
Kibeth is called the Walker, and can grant freedom of movement, or force the listener to walk where the ringer wills- including commanding a spirit to walk back into Death. It also seeks to sound on its own, and can be hard to control.
Dyrim is called the speaker, and its powers are fairly straightforward- it can grant speech to those who have lost it, or take away the capacity to speak.
Belgaer is called the thinker, and can restore free will and memories, as well as restoring the personality a Dead spirit had in life. It can also be used to erase these, shattering minds and memories. Like Kibeth, it will try to ring on its own accord.
Saraneth is called the Binder, and binds the Dead to the ringers will. This is the bell Sabriel uses most often, binding the Dead to her will to force them to truly die.
Astarael is called the weeper, and when rung, sends all who hear it deep into Death- including the ringer. This is considered a weapon of last resort in canon and will only be used with prior communication with the mods, as part of a plot.
Charter Magic is the branch of magic Sabriel's likely to use most of the time. It's magic that's worked through symbols- they can be spoken, signed, whistled, written, or sometimes just visualized. It can be used for a lot of things, but it has some limitations, including: No space/time manipulation in general, no creation of matter, no unaided flight (although some mages have created magical aircraft, Sabriel does not have the knowledge), no shapeshifting (Again, technically possible, but Sabriel doesn't have access to this knowledge, and doesn't even know it exists). Mental manipulation seems to be restricted to calming people down and either erasing or manipulating recent (like, within a day or so) memories. Finally, Sabriel has some familiarity with weather magic, although her track record of using it is... mixed.
Charter Magic has other restrictions- Sabriel needs to visualize the symbols and mentally arrange them, meaning her magic isn't instantaneous and requires focus- and powerful spells take some time to cast. Break her concentration and the spell will fizzle out or go out of control. Also, powerful spells place a strain on her body- even with precautions, she'll exhaust herself after using a few, and without those precautions, she'll kill herself or be too drained to cast much magic for at least a week. Minor spells are less draining, but if she uses a lot of them, she'll eventually run out of energy. Sabriel can give this power to others via baptism, but they will need to learn and study, and even simple spells will be exhausting for them at first.
The spells Sabriel is most likely to use frequently include various forms of binding/warding, combat magic that includes both destructive force as well as incapacitating her opponents through either blinding, disorienting, or immobilizing them, and healing. Healing magic in the Old Kingdom universe is useful, able to purge drugs and poisons from the body as well as heal even life threatening injuries, but serious wounds require the person being healed to take a few days of bed rest or light activity afterwards, or the spell will be disrupted and the woulds will reopen. Sabriel cannot repair injuries that have already healed over but healed wrong, she can't fix chronic conditions, and her capacity to regrow lost tissue is limited to what the body can repair on its own- she can't regrow missing limbs or organs.
By using Charter magic to repair the body and necromancy to summon the spirit back, Sabriel can resurrect the very recently dead to true life. In canon, she's only done this once, on a bunny, but in theory she could do it to a person (And her father did something very similar to her when she was a baby)- she just feels she shouldn't, as it goes against her family's philosophy of making sure the dead pass on. This ability will not be used without significant prior plotting.
Both types of magic Sabriel uses have a tendency to make technology stop working, a tendency that grows more pronounced the stronger the magic used. Within Ximilia, this tendency will be restricted to only the strongest spells, the kind that will drain her to exhaustion with the use of only one or two. If people playing robots/cyborgs don't want to deal with this, I will run with an alternate interpretation- that if a character is metaphysically 'alive' magic will treat them as alive, rather than as technology. (So magic won't break them, healing spells will work on them, and they'll be able to learn how to use Charter magic).
Regret: Her classmates dying in the battle against Kerrigor. Given that she was the one who made the choice to ask for their help, Sabriel feels responsible for their deaths. It's unclear how many died, but I'd put the number at around fifteen out of the thirty-five girls she said had the skills to help them.
Inventory:
Her bells (powers detailed above, stored in a leather bandolier)
Abhorsen's sword (A longsword, imbued with spells to make it an effective weapon against the Dead and other supernatural entities. Also can be used as an aid to casting Charter Magic, like a magic wand you can stab people with.)
The Book of the Dead, a necromantic grimoire.
Two Charter magic spell books.
Sample: Here