Erderis Dewseeker
storyinmypocket
- Created
- 4 years, 4 months ago
- Creator
- storyinmypocket
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Profile
if you knew what i knew, you would be angry too
Eris genuinely tries not to be cynical and vicious, but the world makes it difficult sometimes. After eir experiences with the nobility, the list of nobles e doesn't hate is pitifully short, and e's spent ten thousand years learning to live with the knowledge that even if they make you an example of what the lower classes are capable of, even if let you into their halls of learning and shower you with praise, if you're lowborn trash, that's all you'll ever be to them: at worst, vermin; at best, a token, a symbolic gesture meant to preserve the social order. This has left em suspicious of anyone with more power than e has, and fiercely protective of the shal'dorei children that had to grow up in the worst parts of Suramar City.
At eir best, e's a source of kindness, creativity, and wonder, a consummate show-off who can turn a sparkly bit of foil into a diamond ring with just a bit of magic. At eir worst, e's full of a seething anger that shows itself in unexplained fires (e specializes in the arcane by preference, but fire's just so very cathartic) and the kind of public displays of drama that are more commonly seen in the trashiest of fiction. Eris is known for going from genuine sweetness and affability to poisonous smiles and high drama in a matter of seconds, over things that even eir closest friends (few as they are) don't entirely understand. There's always a reason, but very few of the privileged can understand just what they did that was so terribly upsetting.
E wants to believe things can be better -- for emself, for eir family, and for eir apprentice -- but it's been a long time since e had any hope, and most of that time has been spent as a sex worker, wearing one illusion or another, but never eir real face. It's hard to resist the urge to put some noble pricks in their places now that the barrier between Suramar and the world is down. Living in a bubble, you have to keep your mouth shut and play along, but with an entire world to lose emself in, Eris is starting to appreciate the possibility of some carefully-applied justice.
Appearance
Although eir gender may be ambiguous, eir physical form is anything but, tall and broad-shouldered, with long silky black hair and purplish gray skin. All the same, e can usually be seen wearing midriff-baring outfits, daringly-cut dresses, and carefully-applied cosmetics. Trousers and flowing shirts do occasionally make an appearance, and the best rule to figure out what Eris will wear on any given day is to imagine the opposite of what you'd expect em to. While e tends to favor dark colors and jewel tones, e's been known to mix cloud-gray silks and rainbow iridescence to stunning effect.
Living in poverty as e does, very little of eir finery's ever worn without some magical augmentation. Expert in illusion that e is, it's not much effort to mend what the nobles throw out and give it new life, with a bit of magic to cover the mended places, restore fullness to velvet that's been worn away, cover a burn mark or even a bloodstain that's set and can't be laundered out. Any outfit takes not just one illusion, but no less than six and possibly dozens, just small, economical bits of magic that e can chain together in ways that attract much less notice than a head-to-toe spell. In eir hands, a pretty bit of glass becomes a priceless ruby, and cheap pot-metal jewelry turns into delicately-wrought silver.
Background
Dewseeker. The name itself had definite implications in kaldorei society, even before the Sundering. It was a name for a family whose talents were so trivial, so commonplace, that the most effective use for them was to be out just before dawn, gathering dew and other such spell components for people who mattered. This is what Eris came from: the wrong family, the wrong class, wrong enough that eir family was the last to be evacuated to Suramar City when the demons came. Eir mother didn't survive, and eir father was never the same again, though he remained as good a parent as he knew how to be. That alone might have been enough to make Eris bitter, but what followed made it worse, because Eris was a prodigy.
While other children were learning trades, Eris studied. Eir tutors were astonished by eir talent, and e learned both the arcane skills necessary to impress the upper classes, but also how to speak, how to dress, how to carry emself. E scrubbed eir voice of any trace of a rural accent (though it still makes an appearance from time to time, and tried eir hardest to be "respectable", which was just enough to get em accepted as a scholarship student to where the wealthy and influential continued their magical education as young adults.
E made eir share of enemies, and learned quickly to show them no mercy and leave them too terrified to bother em again. E made a friend, Estienne Vaillant, who was one of the few nobles e'd found to be genuinely kind, if infuriatingly ignorant about the harsh realities of the world. E then fell in love with that friend, who was unfortunately only interested in purely male partners, not those who were neither one thing nor the other. When faced with the choice between letting eir gender presentation match eir genital configuration or giving up on Estienne and moving on, e chose the second, and made a spectacularly bad relationship decision in eir attempt to get over him -- one that might be described as mutually destructive, resulting in fires, property damage, and physical injuries. It might also have been described more simply as class warfare via the medium of edgeplay, in the BDSM sense. Fun while it lasted, but probably for the best that it didn't last long.
E graduated with highest honors, was granted the rank of Arcanist, and presented emself to countless nobles, eir arcane tattoos inked by the most skilled (and most expensive) artist in the city, wearing clothes that, for once, were just as costly as they appeared. E pointed out the breadth of eir research, the applicability of eir work with illusion. E applied for research positions, work as a household mage, anything and everything... and was denied, every time, until one prospective employer "kindly" told em that perhaps e'd be happier putting that skill with illusion to work doing something more suitable to eir background... like entertaining children at parties, perhaps?
And there it was. That was how far e'd be able to rise in society -- a pat on the head, and then only the most humiliating of actual work. Eir rise gave the lowborn hope, but the only positions 'acceptable' for lowborn filth were ones that would never have any real power, or make real contributions to their understanding of magic. E was a symbol, and e was meant to rise and then toil away happily in a menial position until the end of time. So e did what seemed like the only natural thing to do: e told the woman in question what she could do with her suggestions for employment, and how thoroughly she could fuck herself, and disappeared back into the Commons, because being a nameless whore was quite frankly less degrading than the life the nobles had planned for em.
E did this for thousands of years, wearing countless other faces. E refused to give eir former classmates the satisfaction of knowing e'd ended up just as they'd predicted, and there were too many young shal'dorei, barely more than children, who might have been victimized by nobles craving variety. E knew how to talk to nobles, how to play on their desires, and could just as easily illusion emself to be younger, more vulnerable-looking. The money e got out of them for those assignations went largely to the children in question, the ones who might have been desperate enough to say yes to a noble's offer. Meanwhile, eir father started suffering from mana withdrawal, then started withering, and Eris worked more, and harder, forgoing sleep and food, replenishing emself with just enough mana to keep the illusions up.
When the demons came, when people started running, e helped as e could, throwing illusions on anyone who needed to get out of the city. It didn't feel like enough, but eir father was getting worse, between the withering and the panic attacks every time he saw a demon, and e had responsibilities. All the same, death seemed inevitable... Then the city was liberated, by more courageous people than e was, one of whom was Estienne, that old school friend and unrequited love from so long ago. Estienne helped eir father get real treatment for the trauma he'd been carrying for ten thousand years, and for the first time in a very long time, Eris remembered what hope felt like. E took an apprentice, a bright girl named Thomasine who was doing magic with very little formal education and a frankly dangerous knack for making things work without regard to magical principles. E met a young sin'dorei girl named Summer, who had a terrible mother, and volunteered for the role emself. And e met a very curious and very charming blue dragon named Tandrigosa who... there may be something there. E's not sure.
Things are better than e thought they'd be. Now it's time to leave and find... fame? Fortune? Maybe just enough for a house somewhere that's big enough eir father can have his own room. That would be nice.