Draiocht Dubh

About

Name Pronounciation: DRAY-oct Dove
Nickname: Dove
Accent: definitely there, but subtle and unknown
Age: unknown

History:

Draiocht Dubh can’t remember a time when shadows and darkness didn’t beckon to her. Walking in the dappled light of the wild wood, wonder after wonder would emerge from the shade to reveal itself in the light before retiring. She soon recognised shade and shadow as the birthplace of all beauty. Dark caverns were full of crystals and water that shimmered down long stone fingers to splash into the depths of pools beneath them where rings of light raced toward her. Light revealed the splendour of a bird’s wing or the muscles raging under the hides of fighting bucks. But both would sink back into the shadows while she was still hungry for more.

Draiocht Dubh was taught that some darkness was especially wrong, evil. All the children had been warned not to peer too closely into the secrets that her clan had guarded for millennia in ruins made by a people long forgotten. The clan guarded against intruders and, at most, checked the ruins to ensure no one had slipped in unnoticed. Places where a wall had cracked open needed instant repair. And Draiocht Dubh made sure to mend those enticing openings well enough that she was thought to have a gift for it work and chosen to take it on when the need arose. And, if she slipped through the cracks to explore, no one was there to see her.

In the dim purple glow of the fungus that grew in that dark realm, she would stare at the engravings and the murals. Run her finger over chiselled words that had no meaning in her tongue. Visions arose in her mind, dark and subtle, but vanished before she could trap them in understanding.

But her senses told her that, somewhere in those dark chambers, a deeper darkness pulsed. Powerful. Sure. A darkness that had swallowed the Kings of Old and their followers until only her clan remained in their positions outside what had been the Citadel in the Forest, but was now a tomb. She gazed into that darkness, straining every sense to touch it and understand it so she could hold it fast as she stepped back into the light of the world.

Her gentle brown eyes had been meant for hunting and healing, for telling tales and teasing her sisters. But, as she peered into the Darkness, they adapted to it. Time ceased without the sun to mark its passing. When she returned to her world, three days had passed. Her clan was waiting for her, spears levelled and bows drawn. Their Priestess gazed coldly into her eyes. Her deep purple eyes.

And, in that moment, Draiocht Dubh knew that her clan had not been protecting the temple from intruders. They had been ensuring that the Darkness remained sealed away inside.

The Priestess’s mouth worked as she struggled to pronounce the death sentence. Draiocht Dubh felt the Darkness swirl and swell within her, saw the fear flicker on the Priestess’s face. The word, “banished” formed in Draiocht’s mind and moved on the Priestess’s lips. The Priestess gestured for the warriors surrounding her to take Draiocht to the edges of their forest.

Where The Magus, cousin to the Garlean Emperor, waited with his soldiers. Had he sensed Draiocht’s encounter with the Darkness? Was it Fate? Or sheer damned bad luck? Whatever, he was waiting for them with his Garlean soldiers armed with carefully brewed sleeping poisons. Draiocht saw the other Viera drop around her. She managed to grab one sister’s spear and kill a soldier before she herself was swallowed by black slumber.

The Magus took her to Garlemald where he ran his fingers over her face and body as he gloated over his newest toy. He had licked his lips over the Dark racing through her, and chuckled at its presence. She was Viera. A beast. His to make into an obedient weapon. Terror would do the trick, he thought. Terror and humiliation. For, whatever powers she might possess, she had a mortal body still, and a beast’s body at that. She could be broken.

But Draiocht Dubh did not break. She waited with the patience of a predator. She paid attention to how he augmented his strengths with hers because each attempt betrayed his weaknesses. Even when he did exercise his own powers, he held the connection between them open so he could call on her at will. Why protect yourself against a mere beast, after all? She never learned the theory behind his magic, but she learned the feel of it as her own soul mirrored his. And, learning the feel, she learned to wield those powers. The fool even congratulated his success when she made others writhe and scream in pain and cower in fear.

Finally, The Magus brought Draiocht Dubh to his research facility on Azys Lla where her kinswomen were being held in cylinders made for experimental beasts. She was to kill them. Slowly, excruciatingly, so their screams would resound for days as she held them on the very edge of death. But, as she knew he would, to best enjoy her torment of them, he dropped his guard to become one with it. A crack in his wall that she was quick to pour her rage, her fury, her strength through where they could join with his. And even her memories of that dark chamber in the Temple poured itself greedily into The Magus whose eyes bulged while his body swelled until he exploded like a carcass left too long in the sun. “Enjoy that?” she quietly asked his splattered remains.

Alarms sounded. Intruders from outside the Empire. The women would be safe, but not the world. She sped to the area which held the computer in which The Magus had stored his thoughts and spells so he could gloat over them like so many jewels and dream of immortality. She had watched him punch in his access code time after time, feigning helpless terror while memorising the process. “Obliterate,” she commanded the computer even as the rescuing strangers surrounded her. The Magus and all his work were gone.

Except what she had learned, of course.

She then turned for the first time to a small group of adventurers who had followed her from the experimental chamber. She would turn to such adventurers again and again in the future to join forces against the Empire and others who preyed on the weak. She turned to one especially. Guillaune, who would guide her to the Thaumaturge Guild where she learned to control the Dark energies at work in her and to Momodi at the Adventurer’s Guild for work.

When people asked her name, she said Draiocht Dubh, which meant “Black Magic” in her native tongue. She was amused that she gained the nickname “Dove” because that was the way her surname was pronounced. She’d been used to people looking on her with suspicion back in her clan and in terror in Garlemald, but was startled to find that she was looked on as an ally in a shared fight.

The Dark still calls to her, but, in her mind, it is simply the unknown. Dove hunts knowledge of it voraciously. Libraries, beast tribes, and mages—all are sources of knowledge, experience. But what is Dark is hidden from common knowledge. Often it is a part of life that doesn’t translate well into static words or translates all too well into the language of sin and evil because it threatens those in power. An encounter with Troupe Falsiam gave her a wordless means of sharing some of the wonders of this realm with others.