Profile
Conduit
- kind
- brave
- curious
- fearful
- reckless
- self-effacing
And the ocean, calling out
A song of freedom and longing.
A Soul
Empathetic and kind, Rusalka sees the good in people first and foremost, and she’s easily able to put herself in others’ shoes. When you fall, you get back up. You dust yourself off, you try again. It only seems to strengthen Rusa's quiet, stubborn optimism about the nature of the world.
She habitually tailors her own likes, dislikes, and personality traits to best mesh with those who stick by her. This makes her a good peacekeeper in situations when two parties are at each other’s throats, and a good friend to most types of people.
However, it has also gradually caused her to devalue her own desires. If she has an interest or a personality trait independent of the people she’s around (beyond “the helper friend”) it’s buried deep so as not to clash or cause conflict.
Rusa works hard to be the type of person who always knows what to do. Those with problems know that they can come to her for safety, for advice, or a good cry – even if it's 3AM, even if it's raining or the commute is an hour and a half.
That being said, she flat-out ignores red flags in dangerous or unhealthy people, even when they are directly harming her. Focusing on the silver lining keeps her peace of mind intact. Not to mention she's curious, fascinated, and feels secretly flattered when they notice her at all.
Her need to seek peace and her need to help others often clash with each other, creating a tangled knot of flaws. Rusa actively self-sabotages by overextending herself to help others, numbing herself to her own pain and suffering by living in a state of denial. When someone else is hurting, she becomes impulsive, ready to leap into danger without forethought. She ignores her own issues until they become too much to bear. Subconsciously, she thinks of herself as worthless unless she's useful.
- lavender & rose
- dimpled smiles
- the rain
- violence
- her own magic
- bitter coffee
A Dream
Rusa lives in the attic of an old church, tended by the mysterious veiled nun Hallow. It was an arrangement formed when Rusa showed up penniless in the city: she could claim the attic as her own, and in return, she would help Hallow tend the church.
I imagined your face to be like death— impartial and cold. But It was beautiful, as angels are in all of their foreign terror. “Do not be afraid,” they said, and so said you to me before I died.
I wonder how you'd look, holding my life against your palms,
or in your teeth.
A Memory
Born into the same pod of selkies as her sister Lelyah, Rusalka was the slightly-younger of the two. She came out different from Lelyah despite their striking physical similarity: small and timid, but endlessly kind, her parents and their aunts doted on the girl. However, Rusa was also born a Conduit, her body a natural magical battery that could cause great damage if she threw a tantrum (and did, especially as a toddler.)
Rusa and Lelyah were never close growing up. Rusa was family-oriented, always looking to help their aunts hunt or bring food to their elders, while Lelyah, born with more cunning and less empathy, visited the surface to play around with humans. Rusa was particularly close with their mother. She was one of the pod's matriarchs, practical over all else but blessed (or cursed) with a heightened empathy she passed down to Rusa.
Conduits are rare for a reason. A magical battery is many things: a tool for research, an experiment to dissect, a weapon, an artifact to increase a wizard or sorcerer's power. Additionally, their souls shine bright on radars that detect magical beings, breaking through cloaking spells and alerting hunters to their presence from miles away. A run-in with a hunter close to the surface caused Rusa's abilities to react to her fear, expelling stored sunlight far enough to alert the hunter's outpost and sending them after her pod almost faster than they could flee.
There were casualties – two elders, an uncle, a family friend. The pod's matriarchs met. Lelyah, with hurt and anger at her sister festering over decades, voted to kill Rusa for the safety of the pod. Their mother reacted strongly to that decision, and to the way it seemed to sway her fellow matriarchs. Her vote was final, and her vote was to exile both of her daughters. Rusa, for her conduit soul and the danger it posed to the greater safety of the pod; Lelyah, for her cruelty.
Rusa was sent to the surface. Her pod pooled their magical energy to cast a transmutation spell and turn her into a human, severing her connection to the seal pelt she once wore. The spell was not strong enough to rid her soul of its Conduit magic, unfortunately. They gave her false memories: a mother back in Ireland, a fight that left her a runaway. They gave her British money and left her in the coastal countryside to make a new life. Lelyah – now Layla – was cast out with no such safety precautions, only the warning that she would be considered a threat if she tried to come back.
A Desire
A Feeling
rusalka, rusalka
sing of the moon,
as it sometimes get shy
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