An Ocrim from a very small splinter settlement of the groups inhabiting the northern mountain ranges, Eha Ethoka’s village consisted of only thirty-some odd Ocrim and, at one point, three Canish. Growing up with a Canish child ever trailing in her footsteps— Adoration Bell— easily established a lifelong bond between them, as Eha’s home life was often lacking in warmth and levity. Aware of their status as a dying race and unwilling to change it, the Ocrim as a people tended to be grim and austere, while the little Canish household tacitly allowed to exist on the periphery of the village was frequently warm and full of tempting laughter and welcome. Beyond Eha herself, the mingling of the two races had an overall positive effect on both groups: the Ocrim village received an injection of new thoughts and crafts it would otherwise never have seen, and the Ferrum family received sanctuary and survived otherwise certain death from the elements and eventually became enough of a quietly beloved fixture that they learned the Ocrim tongue. The arrangement— although expressly forbidden by usual Ocrim decree— was a secret and satisfying one.

Good things are rarely meant to last, however: upon return from a hunting trip, Eha was horrified at the cloying, still, sound-swallowing aftermath of an avalanche burying the entirety of her village. Everyone was dead— everyone but Adoration Bell, whom she found close to death as she dug them up out of the lethal snow. All kin she turned to in their hour of need had the same stipulation: they would assist her, but not the outsider.

Devastated and feeling betrayed, Eha cast off her name and appearance, choosing to mingle unobtrusively with the society of Leifr as a Nil. This was not without its own set of hardships: while she as an Ocrim was theoretically best suited for any magically-intensive jobs, her cover as a magic-less Nil prevented her from partaking in them and worsening starvation by means of being cut off from the concentrated Nidus magic of her homeland— an Ocrim’s main food source— soon rendered her unable to. After a few years between low paying odd jobs, she began work as an assassin for hire going by the moniker ‘Snuff’. Her early days were sloppy, and eventually the kin of one of her kills managed to trace her back to her home. Rather than seeking revenge on Cassius herself, it was instead Adoration who took the brunt of the message intended to be sent: their hands bound behind them and hair wrenched back, a pitiless hand shoved their chest into a fire, the resulting burn and recovery nearly killing them. Seeing this as a personal failing, Cassius— who already had a contentious relationship with magic and her kin (nearly one in the same to the Ocrim)— swears off its use entirely, and kills not only the one who injured Adoration, but their entire immediate family as well. This both cements her on the path to a lucrative but difficult niche— high quantity exterminations— and sends a message of her own: that dragging Dora into anything is as good as signing your own death sentence.

Because she refuses to utilize the Ferrum’s preferred Motus magic and cannot utilize Nidus on such low reserves, all of Cassius’ kills are ‘hands on’. This is a driving factor behind why she’s considered the best in the industry in a world where any reasonably adept mage can kill with a spell from a tidy, impersonal distance: she is close to untraceable, always making her kills with her Ocrim features on full display and using nothing more than the anonymous bite of steel. Magical crimes will always yield a trail and a suspect and are often a loud affair, but a knife between the ribs is heard only as a final, quiet crepitation. Cassius spends several months on targets to this end, a persistent stalking that seeks to learn every habit, routine, and connection a person has before deciding how best to go about snuffing the lot of them out in conjunction. Rarely is she hired for solo affairs— her specialty is one singular night of multiple hits and high risk to her own safety, so long as the last one standing at the end is her.

For years this was a holding pattern, and not a good one. It did pay the bills and then some, but such a line of work with few to no moral exclusions for who could be a target had obvious detrimental effects. As her bodycount and infamy grew, siphoning Nidus buildup intermittently off of Dora and her other employees and eating the freshest meat available— animal or person— kept her functional but hovering constantly at a starved threshold near to mental exhaustion.

Already a quiet and reserved individual, the relentless existence of running on fumes and ending lives made Cass even more apathetic and disconnected. She places little importance on anything that does not immediately and personally affect her or her found family, and has even less room for patience regarding threats to the same. Though she’d never knowingly accept the title, she does on occasion have a bleeding heart that struggles to make itself known between stretches of ruthlessness. Cassius has been known to ‘pick up strays’, in the cases of her housemate/live-in handyman Laurent and his little son Beau— and later, Cairos— each going a long way towards hauling her out of the darkness of her own mind. But the support of her family is palliative, at best, to the starvation that always dogs her heels.

As far as Adoration Bell is concerned, they are from an Ocrim tribe in the remote northern mountains of Clemence despite being Canish. Few would believe this claim as the Ocrim are a people in total isolation and obscurity, little more than myth, but Dora is an exercise in the impossible— both in origin and in personality. As an infant in a fractured little family of three, Dora’s parents sought refuge in Ocrim territory and carved out a scarce and desperate existence for themselves. Attempts were initially made to get the family to leave, but when it became clear that kicking them out on the cusp of winter would likely spell their doom, they were given grudging permission to linger. Against their own rules— but true to their nature— the local Ocrim found the Ferrum family to be fascinating in much the same way a placid zoo animal is fascinating. Contact increased regularly until the invaders became strangers, then neighbors, and eventually family. Growing up in this unlikely fusion of cultures, Adoration became fast friends with one of the few other young Ocrim children there, Eha Ethoka. The relationship akin to that of siblings was solidified further when a natural disaster unexpectedly wiped out the entire village in an avalanche. Having escaped death only by means of taking shelter between the wedge of boulders, Adoration was clinging to life and dug out of the snow at the last second by Eha returning from a hunt and narrowly missing the disaster, herself.

With their home destroyed and the lives of all they loved cut short, they had no choice but to seek help. Eha knew that the clock was ticking to get her half-frozen Canish sibling stable and find them food. The next closest Ocrim settlement further up the mountain seemed the most likely place for such aid, and indeed they were devastated to hear of the Ethoka village’s fate— but arriving with a non-Ocrim in tow, the pair was told in no uncertain terms that they would accept only Eha. She would have to leave her “pet” behind.

Finding this unacceptable, Eha took Adoration and left the mountains entirely. Stripping herself of her first name and posing as a Nil going by Cassius, a few very difficult years of scraping by as young adolescents in various wintry cities of Clemence passed. Adoration was unable to contribute much given that they were barely more than twelve, and funds were lean. In the early days of Cassius working as an assassin, a misdirected attempt at revenge against her instead left Adoration brutally scarred across the chest. The event served to both sour Dora’s disposition towards people at large, and incentivize Cassius to keep them safe at home as much as possible.

With money flowing steadily after those first few years of poverty, Cass’ uncaring attitude and the nature of her work coupled with an over protectiveness of her only remaining family resulted in Dora being incredibly sheltered and clumsy with social graces. Lacking utterly in tact and politeness— and never being much of a ‘people person’ to begin with— they have a habit of frequently putting their foot in their mouth with outright rude or off-color remarks. The majority of socialization they receive is by way of theatrical productions (and such over exaggerated performances don’t often map well to day-to-day life), and interactions with their handyman/groundskeeper/jack of all trades Laurent and his child Beau.

These few things keep them from being utterly terrible, but Adoration Bell is consistently a grating presence at best to be around in their teens. They aren’t pushed to grow or change significantly until Cairos Iliou-Mercator is ‘hired’ and thus inserted into their life, like it or not— and indeed they do not, at first. But there is intrigue and appeal to an age-mate that acts significantly more mature by comparison to themselves and has a much stronger moral compass than what little Cassius and snatches of society and books have failed to instill. Riling him up is good fun, and always will be, but it is the addition of Cairos to their circle that tempers Dora into someone that doesn’t get into screaming matches over tomatoes at the market and Dora, in turn, eventually gives the Alloy love and acceptance he hadn’t thought were accessible.

Because Cassius makes a hefty sum for each kill, Adoration has no need to be employed for the time being. Their days are passed learning various skills simply for the challenge of it, with a focus on apothecary medicine and their garden first and foremost. They have the absolute worst bedside manner imaginable, but the talent doesn’t go entirely to waste: patching up Cassius after her contracts is par for the course, and creating a variety of substances both helpful and harmful entertains them. They bitch endlessly about “getting dragged into becoming Cairos’ private physical therapy doctor”, but it is only through their intervention that his days are rarely spent in debilitating pain anymore. Adoration Bell is irascible, easily bored, and taken to flights of fancy— which makes it all the more a contrast when they decide a person has earned their loyalty.

An odd case for an Alloy, rather than being abandoned or killed at birth as is the norm, Cairos was instead kept in secret by his father Catreus Mercator. As councilman of the Postal industry, his father could ill afford to be pinned with such a crime but neither could he bring himself to ‘deal’ with his only son in such a final way. As an imperfect solution, Cairos was kept indoors and hidden throughout his childhood. An elderly Canish nanny— Thalia Iliou— hired on and sworn to secrecy when he was six served the dual purpose of educating him and instilling social skills while his father remained detached and distant, and she quickly came to love him as her own. Frequently ‘breaking him out’ of the house by covering up his wings and affixing a fake tail, Cairos was exposed to a society that accepted the false front he showed them as Thalia cautioned him to understand that while nothing was wrong with him, he was better off never letting anyone know the truth. From this nanny Cairos learned a handful of languages and to sew, and with little else to do in the otherwise empty manor (and in the face of a father that had difficulty so much as looking at him), he passed the years and perfected the craft far beyond even her own level. She would take the things he made to the market and sell them under her own name, bringing Cairos back the profits which he squirreled away for lack of anything to spend them on. Thalia passed away when he was fifteen. With a house now devoid of any warmth at all, Cairos took a pair of shears to the feathers of his wings, bound them down painfully tight, and grabbed the suitcase and money he’d had packed for a long time. He left Corvata at sixteen, and never looked back.

The ensuing years were rife with close calls, setbacks, and hard learning experiences as Cairos bounced from town to town ever outrunning a clock that always seemed to tick down to someone inevitably finding out he wasn’t a pure Canish man. As time went on, his wings atrophied from constant containment and disuse but his disguises improved; a bit of makeup to blend out the Volucrin facial crest, refusing to hum or sing, restraining instinctive head tilts, pretending to be unable to read faraway signs, rebuffing casual embraces, always positioning his back to walls, closed-mouth smiles… on and on, compounding more and more habits over the years serving to both keep Cairos alive and feed his paranoia further.

In his early twenties, one job working as the personal tailor to a Kerim high priest ended in near disaster. Found out as an Alloy and given the ultimatum to be gone before the next morning, as Cairos frantically gathered his already-packed case and headed back downstairs a bloody sight gave him pause: his (former) boss being murdered in cold blood there in the living room by a creature he’d thought was a Nil but was evidently anything but. After a harrowing failure to escape out a window, the woman— Cassius Ethoka, an Ocrim assassin— offered him employment under her as a way to ostensibly avoid having to “tie up” the loose end Cairos now presented.

With little actual choice in the matter— and his status as an Alloy strangely not seeming to matter to this person at all— Cairos followed her home. There he met Laurent, a middleaged Felish jack-of-all-trades with a little son, Beau, and Adoration Bell, a young fox Canish that ricocheted from hostile to neutral more quickly than he could keep up with. With his real identity still under wraps from all but Cassius and assuming himself well and truly “stuck” in this role at least for the foreseeable future, Cairos prioritized attempts to improve relations with all members of the household lest he be cohabiting with misery. Beau and his father Laurent were amiable enough, and even Cassius (once he moved past the fear and memory of viscera coating her mouth) warmed to him readily. A tougher nut to crack, Adoration Bell remained stubborn and recalcitrant and uncannily apt at dragging him into juvenile quarrels. Only patience and the passage of time— and rising above the majority of their efforts to rain on his mood— began to have an effect in the form of providing a (seemingly) well-adjusted role model for Dora to emulate and, eventually, a real friend and soon crush that they wanted to impress rather than drive away.

Still, a lifetime of concealing what he was and a very rocky start of less-than-encouraging social commentary from Adoration didn’t exactly have Cairos jumping to come clean about being an Alloy. Things were simply easier if everyone was none the wiser… and he maintained the charade admirably long, for the better part of an entire year. The downfall came, unsurprisingly, at the literal hands of something he’d told himself not to get comfortable about: Beau. The grabbing mitts of Laurent’s little son pulled the fake tail right out of his pants one unassuming morning in the kitchen before all and sundry, and all Hell broke loose. Months of artfully crafted lies and brush-offs about chronic pain and odd mannerisms crashed down in an instant. While Cairos was expecting the usual— to depart and begin anew, a return to a cycle he’d always assumed was merely paused but not broken— he instead was pleaded with to stay. With all his cards finally on the table and a found family that became his home, Cairos found himself belonging in a way he’d never dared to hope for. Expectations continued to be defied as he and Adoration Bell entered into a relationship around the third year, and Dora’s efforts to repair the damage he’d done to his wings since sixteen found him living a life he’d written off as fully beyond him.

Because his work for Cassius as a tailor was more an initial excuse not to kill him than anything truly needed, Cairos became increasingly involved in managing Cass’ business over time. Already familiar with the underworld (if at arms length) and with a good sense for danger, he steadily became the main point of contact and liaison through which prospective clients would pitch their target— and their price. It is through this avenue which he first meets Odessa Trajan.

As the firstborn daughter to the royal line, Odessa Trajan should have undeniable and absolute claim to her country’s throne. In reality, a sickly baby was born whom her father adored but her mother loathed: a preternaturally terrible roll of the dice resulting in a Kerim child directly from two pureblood lines, but with the appearance of no such pedigree. Her father’s love shields her as well as it can manage to for the formative years of her life against a hostile mother and mercurial siblings being swayed back and forth by either parent between loving her or hating her. The push-pull of the squabbling over Odessa ends abruptly when she turns fourteen and her father dies. Having lost her protection and the only advocate in her corner with any sort of sway, the vitriol and distaste her father had been keeping at bay rushes over Odessa from all angles for the next several years.

Under the hopeful assumption that the throne will be hers someday if only she can hold on, Odessa weathers increasingly worse attitudes and boldly cruel rhetoric from both within her family and without. Whatever good will or bond between her siblings existed beforehand is eroded in the following years; even in spite of the clearly evaporating ties to her family, Odessa craves their love and acceptance. Although much of the blame for her siblings’ treatment of her is pinned on the Queen’s influence and efforts, when she falls ill and begins to fade from their daily lives Odessa is forced to reckon with the reality that the possibility of recovering a relationship with any of them is vanishingly small as these are indeed their true opinions of her even in the absence of their mother. The only sibling it can be argued that Odessa maintains a “good” relationship with is the youngest one, Cecil. As furthest removed from the line of succession by age— and by virtue of being a child and thus not quite as set in her ways as her siblings have come to be— Odessa is of the deluded opinion that seizing the throne and lancing the Queen’s poisons may yet be in the nick of time to recover her last sister from the same path the others have walked.

With the Queen’s prognosis taking a turn for the worse, Odessa’s vague paper-mâchéed ideas of the acquisition of the throne being the nebulous fix to all her woes goes up in flames as councilwoman Alabaster Morning-Glory delivers crushing news kept from her since shortly after her father’s death: by decree of her mother, the throne is no longer to be passed down by birthright of age, and instead put to the council as a vote. Seeing this as the clear manipulation it was meant to be— a way for the Queen to orchestrate her sister Adrianna’s ascension whilst she still lived, or secure it if she didn’t— Odessa despairs, knowing full well that she is no match. Falling short in nearly every possible theater from purity to personality to prowess and cunning, Odessa stews upon her lot in life and shortly comes to a crystallizing solution as the only way to come out on top:

She must find someone willing to kill her sister, the only threat to her claim on the throne.

Odessa Trajan, first in line and rightful ruler of Leifr by birth order, vows that she will have the throne— the one thing in this land with the power to cast aside the specter of the Queen and claw back her family’s love through authority and respect… even if it can only be the love of the singular one not yet fully lost to her.

Orphaned at a young age and caring for his baby brother Quentin on the streets for a time, Theodore Manolas develops a determined and pessimistically prickly mindset from early childhood that persists throughout a life which ultimately takes a fortuitous turn for the better that few of such origins could hope to dream of.

Drifting from town to town and scraping by with whatever can be stolen bribed or fought for, ensuring their survival was the only goal for many years. Being on the small side, Theo weaponized and honed the only thing he could bend to his will when so much else was out of his control: magic. Eventually the brothers landed in a speck-on-the-map town off the Southeastern coast of Derumo and in an unexpected break from the rat race, the doctor of Brineburrow took them in. Afforded a sanctuary and a new family and community to want to do right by, Theodore paid back this kindness by apprenticing under her. He cleaved to the healing arts with great interest and skill, already having a knack for magic usage. A clear prodigy, Theo rocketed past her skill level in short order with the manipulation of Nidus, a magic strain notoriously difficult and dangerous to wield. Despite surpassing her, he is forever grateful to the life she saved him and his brother from and it is undeniably her influence and tutelage that both plants the seed for a deeper lifelong passion for the study of Nidus, and gives him the inspiration and basis off of which to build his own school of thought: that of peaceably dipping into Leifr’s raw flow of Nidus magic not in an attempt to fight against it, but to move within it. By approaching Nidus with less aggression and brute force than his peers, Theodore begins to feel the faint echoes of it in the world around him— there’s a throughline here, he knows it, he can feel it, and he will spend the rest of his life chasing that connection.

Swearing to support the town which had embraced and uplifted him and his brother from poverty, Theo received a scholarship to the premiere magical academy in the country: Daine. The funding was ostensibly for further pursuit of the medical arts, but much to his chagrin, the study of only that one niche remained unsatisfying to restrict himself to. Dabbling in myriad other practices, experiments, and research endeavors from the moment he set foot on campus, Theodore quickly made a name for himself among the staff and students as a mage of unprecedented skill and uncannily successful— if unconventional— ideas.

He deviates from the path of doctor readily enough, pivoting into the role of a researcher. This seems to be his calling… until the current royal court mage dies unexpectedly, and Theodore is put forth on suggestion as a replacement. Hardly a nomination that one says no to, this uproots his trajectory and foists him into a role that deals in brute force offensive magics and protection of the royal family above all else. Unwilling to pass up the paycheck— or the honor— such a thing entails, Theodore settles into what will define more than the next decade of his life.

Conducting his own limited projects from afar and keeping up with correspondence and news from Daine academy as best he can manage, Theodore doesn’t regret the path that has allowed him to heavily support and pay back his family and improve Brineburrow— but he forever wonders what heights of magic he may have missed out on in exchange.