To the dark, I said pour and forgot to say when. And the words that you wrote come back blacker than smoke. I’m so sorry, I’ve done it again

Beauty in darkness, violence in power, burning antlers in the night. Kardala forges into the world trailing the remnants of a childhood of isolation, cloaked in the confidence of her burgeoning power. “Yet power has its price,” whispers the black stag with burning antlers. Perhaps that is a price she is willing to pay, perhaps she was always meant to embrace the darkness, perhaps she will fight it a bit longer.

Personality

She wears independence like a cloak, it keeps her safe, and it keeps others out. She sees it as her strength, and it is. But she wields it like a knife to pry up anyone who might cling to her. She expects no help from the world and is reluctant to offer any. She distrusts others, even if their intentions are good.  

Unapologetic in the use of her magic. Years of suppressing her magic have crumbled under her acceptance that it is a part of her. It scares her but she has begun to embrace the fact that because of it she is powerful. 

Yet at times, her confidence is tempered by feelings of inadequacy as she feels at each turn in life, she has never quite gotten it right. No matter what choices she makes she has been ostracized, reviled, hunted, and in the end, she left a small hamlet littered with the bodies of its former residents. Deep down she is worried she might be nothing more than what the villagers had called her from the beginning; “witch,” “beastmaster,” “monstrous.”   

Whether true or not, Kardala heavily believes her family carries a curse passed down through the generations. A generational curse. How else would one explain the manifestation of her power, the scorn of her mother, and the disappearance of her brother from reality? She feels it like a festering darkness in her heart, like a weight on her shoulder, like simpered words heard in the back of her mind.

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History

Kardala had a brother a twin. The frailer of the two of them, one second, he had been there the next he had not. He had not disappeared like people in the village often did, losing their way in the wilding woods. No, he had disappeared like a coin you drop at your feet. You watch it fall but it never lands and simply can not be found no matter how hard you search. So too her brother had fallen and simply could not be found. But worse still, not one seemed to remember him. Kardala had had a brother, a twin.

His voice was deep as fissures and flowed like molten honey. At least that is how she imagined the voice of her father, though he was long gone by the time she was born. Her mother spoke nothing of him, but not the same way she spoke nothing of her brother. She did not speak of Kardala’s father, but she resented him. She resented Kardala too and the child found herself playing alone. She had shown the other village kids her magic once and they had never come back to play. She played alone, turning to her magic and summoning up shadowy little forms to occupy her time. The beasts came when she summoned them, but sometimes when she did not. The black stag with burning antlers came shortly after her brother left. She did not summon him nor could she dismiss him until he pleased. He spoke to her and his voice was deep as fissures and flowed like molten honey.

Beastkeeper they called her. Kardala’s mother, for the wild men she entertained as they passed through the village. Wild men who came at her beck and call. As Kardala grew older she began to spurn her mother’s house and struck deep paths in the woods. Sometimes the wild men would find her too and expect to have their way. But Kardala feared no man or monster for she walked with the shadows. Rumors spread in the village of shadowy beasts that slithered and skulked, black as ink with burning eyes and the corpses, twisted and torn, with no eyes. The villagers shunned the thicket. Beastmaster they called her.

Kardala left the woods for the village. But the village reviled her. Years of stories and hearsay had made her out to be a monster. Her intense magic had altered her appearance significantly, any attempt to look nothing like her mother. Before long a witchunter came for her, with ill intentions. He was far stronger than she had expected and to save her life she loosed terrible shadow beasts that wrested from her control. The witchunter was gone and so was the village. Kardala left the village for the world.

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