⇀ Description

• Height || 6'2
• Build || Lean
• Eyes || Blue
• Skin tone || Pale
• Hair color || Medium brown
• Hair style || Short, slicked back
• Demeanor || Imposing
• Style || Professional, monochromatic

Age and HRT have taken away some of the baby-fat from his young adulthood, making Caelan look a less soft than he did before.

Still, his features are naturally more 'cute' than many men, though he tries to divert attention from that by maintaining an extremely professional haircut and style of dress. Caelan uses subtle makeup to fill in his eyebrows, making them a bit thicker, and wears clothing tailored to accentuating the masculine aspect of his frame. He eschews most forms of decoration, mainly wearing suits, vests, and extremely expensive leather shoes, and his preferred color palette is composed of blacks, greys, and whites. Secretly, this is because he's almost entirely color-blind and wants to avoid making an absolute fool of himself by trying to properly match hues he can't even see. If he had someone to help him pick out outfits that weren't ludicrous, he'd try a little harder to be more fashionable.

The only 'accessory' Caelan carries with any certainty is his leather briefcase, which instead of being filled with important professional documents, is chock full of monster hunting supplies. Never know when an apparition needs to be eradicated, right? This constant preparedness also extends to his posture and expression. Caelan's shoulders are always tense, his eyes constantly wandering around and taking stock of his surroundings. While it's difficult to read much from his constantly dour expression, there is a discernable discomfort to manner of bearing. He never really looks like he's having a good time, or even that he's moderately relaxed. Caelan MacMathan is a man who seems like he's always ready for someone to throw down and try to kill him.

Caelan's fingers are long and slender, and his limbs are on the thinner side of muscular. He's a leggy guy, though his feet are small, making it harder than it should be to find shoes for him that fit. His medium brown hair is slicked back, and kept meticulously neat along with his well-manicured fingernails, spotless shoes, and well-pressed clothes. His upper lip is prominent, his nose is short and round, and despite how unapproachable he seems, there's something... sad in his blue eyes. Something weathered and worn, like he's been through a bit too much.

⇀ Important Notes

• Caelan is very tall and doesn't often smile.
• He only wears extremely modest, neutral colors.

⇀ Moodboard

⇀ History

Warnings || Look, you're about to get into some eldritch abomination body-part eating horror territory, only press on if you're okay with young adults getting traumatized after gnoshing on the harvested bones of incomprehensibly powerful alien lifeforms and shit (and also turning into monsters and murdering each other.)

ok, quick (LOL how is this quick) shitty bio to give an overview on how Caelan's life falls completely apart.

Caelan MacMathan was born as a concept at the age of twenty-three.

No one was surprised when Molly achieved extremely high marks on her MCAT, making her eligible for getting into a pretty dope medical school. Wanting to be a doctor Just Like Dad since, despite everything she's learned about Isaiah (which basically amounts to "he's a cultist" and "DAD ALL OF YOUR DEAD FRIENDS ARE HAUNTING ME?? WHY") she still thinks he's the ideal person, she goes off to school, which means she leaves William behind because for some reason he doesn't want to pick up everything and move towns with Molly??? (Like that isn't actually sarcasm, Molly sort of expected he would and is... kind of... actually really lost now that she's apart from him.) His reasoning is "hey dude no ghosts have tried to kill you in awhile, I think we might have solved your problems, also freaky shit seems drawn to me so... like... maybe we shouldn't push it?" which Molly begrudgingly accepts as she goes off on her next phase of education.

So Molly's chilling at medical school, not making friends but doing Really Damn Well when a professor named Robert Knox is like 'hey, you are hella hella smart, wanna do some independent studies with me' and Molly, whose alarm bells are basically permanently on mute, goes 'sure!' to. Surprise surprise, Knox was a.) secretly one of Isaiah's pals back in his Super Cult days and b.) wants to convince Molly that power is awesome, and she should want more of it. The impetuous for this was Molly's grandfather, Ezekiel, ringing Dr. Knox up and saying 'I will give you TONS of money if you can help me rope my granddaughter into the family business.' Knox has literally zero reasons to say no here, but it does beg the question: why does Molly's weirdo grandpa care?

Answer to this question comes in the form of a small history lesson.

So a long time ago, a group of miners delve too deeply in their operations and end up striking a bizarre chamber covered with a equally bizarre mineral. They break into it, and find a skeletal, half-dead eldritch deity sealed for millennia beneath the earth, slumbering in a prison made from its own spine. This old, dark creature of power - whose name can be very, very roughly translated into the cosmic word of Lyf - offers them SWEET SWEET POWERS in exchange for their undying belief, worship, and the promise that they'll put their collective noggins towards resurrecting it and raising it from its prison. They miners say "SURE SOUNDS DOPE", are given Lyf's blessing, and they consumed bits of its body to basically get superpowers. They come out of the mine, get mad amounts of wealth using their eldritch blessings, and begin establishing the cult.

A couple of things become clear. One: not anyone can just... eat bits of Lyf and be okay. If you do not the blessing of the Old Ones, consuming something like that just drives you completely mad, warping your body and completely twisting you into a really gross monster. Two, the blessing of the Old Ones can basically only be conferred through birthright, so basically... through a bloodline. But it's not a certain thing! It's possible for a child to be born to one of Lyf's Blessed that doesn't have the ability to snack on god bits. Because of this, the cult began encouraging having lots of kids, and then indoctrinating the proper heirs into cult-y business to expand the chosen faithful.

So how does this tie into Molly?

Well! For some complicated reasons (partially stemming from Isaiah's own desire to NOT HAVE HIS KIDS BE MARKED BY AN OLD ABOMINATION JESUS CHRIST) Molly was his only one of his children that had the potential to be his heir. Isaiah avoided all this by dying, but now that grandpa is in the picture, he wants to scoop Molly up and bring her into the fold. He's actually kind of successful, because a lack of William + praise + affirmation and love from grandpa start convincing Molly that 'oh... maybe this... isn't so bad?' During this process, Molly eats one of Lyf's knucklebones, and gets spooky powers.

Naomi (Molly's mother) finds out about this Through the Grapevine and is FUUUUUUURIOUS. Among the things she does is tell William 'hi GET OVER YOURSELF AND GO SAVE YOUR FRIEND'. A ton of stuff happens, Molly realizes 'oh um i don't like what's happened to me', also Camellia (Molly's sister) crashes the party, eats some more god bits because she's extremely jealous of Molly's heir status, and starts turning into a monster. William grabs Molly and runs, and to try to protect her identity/hide from this bullshit, Molly starts disguising herself as a boy and goes by the name Caelan MacMathan.

...and begins to realize that, oh. Um. Wow. I like being a boy?

(And so Caelan realizes he's trans.)

Due to the weird emotional repercussions of all of this nonsense though, also due to not having a ton of people to talk with about his identity, Caelan gets these incredibly weird views of himself. He begins separating out who 'Molly' was from who 'Caelan' is in an attempt to cope with the whole "you have your dad's weird blood curse and also your family is weird and bad, like, way worse than you thought it was." Being Molly is so abhorrent - in part because Caelan's always kinda... hated the supernatural??? like it sucks - and Caelan refers to Molly as both a separate person and also not really an aspect of his identity to compartmentalize how tied to the supernatural he really is. This makes Caelan's journey of self-identity infinitely more confusing and bizarre.

Caelan and William begin to travel. Absence has made the heart grow fonder on Caelan's side, and he's starting to really understand 'hm yeah I think I'm in love with William', which is freaking William the fuck out because he's been in love with Caelan for years and the idea of them maybe becoming a thing is super scary. It's too... serious, y'know? Like with flings he doesn't really care, but Caelan is... Caelan. He can't even deal with the idea of things going wrong and him breaking Caelan's heart. Before any of that can really get sorted though, some Dicey Shit happens, and the dynamic duo are suddenly saved by William's sister, Lorelei.

Lorelei ends up offering to train these two idiots on how to deal with the problems they've gotten themselves in. For the first time, Caelan and William get an actual legit education on the supernatural, and all the while, Lorelei and William are playing catch up. Caelan and Lorelei also find they got on really, really well actually, so well that Lorelei starts nursing a crush. William doesn't react particularly well to that. He reacts even worse to Camellia, finding them and trying to nuke them with her unstable god powers because to protect William, Caelan uses his dad's gun a ton of times, which basically nukes his color vision entirely. While everyone ends up okay in the end, William freaks out that Caelan has had permanent damage done to himself because of William's sake, and that - combined with a feeling of 'please my sister is so much better for you fall in love with her instead' - causes William to disappear, leaving Caelan behind for what he intends to be 'for good.'

This happens just as Caelan is turning twenty-five.

He's heartbroken. Like. Legit heartbroken. But life goes on. Having some know-how now, he begins hunting monsters, trying to atone for some of his family's legacy... and he's also hunting down the wretched beast that Camellia has become. To him, it's what he needs to do. While he may want to distance himself from the Burke name, what it's become is his responsibility. It's his job now to kill his sister.

It's for her own good.