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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shayuri" data-source="post: 3804055" data-attributes="member: 4936">Some background goodies for Thorn. Work in progress.[sblock=In Wych The Backgrounde Of The Respekted Wyzardess Thorne Is Moste Humbly Rekounted.]Thorn herself has little knowledge of the circumstances surrounding her birth. Given her nature, she assumes it to be unpleasant, and is content to leave it at that. Research shows that she was brought to the Lantern Street Orphanage as a baby by a holy knight of St Cuthbert who did not elaborate on the circumstances by which he came by the infant, save that she was not his. It is instructive to note that only a day before, the church of St Cuthbert had delivered the killing blow to a small cult led by a half-demon who had been smuggled into the city by some of his followers. The cult was destroyed, though the details of the battle...and the fate of the cambion that led it...are not widely known.Any further thought along those lines would, however, be purest speculation. Furthermore, since the identity of the knight is not recorded, and the whereabouts...indeed, even survival...of the creature unknown, the relevance of those events, if any, may never be revealed.Despite being healthy, rarely falling ill, Thorn always looked a bit sickly. She was unhealthily pale, and far too quiet for a baby. More than one sister was unnerved by those dark, intelligent eyes staring silently at her. Indeed, Thorn recounts understanding what people were saying before she could actually make her mouth form the proper sounds to reply. She both spoke and walked as much as six months before anyone expected it from her. Even so, she responded to praise the same way she responded to punishment...that inscrutable, hollow stare.Thorn's early life at the orphanage was lonely. Something about her pushed the other children away...be it her quiet, passionless demeanor or something more subtle. There was a sense of ominousness to her reported by many who worked there with her. A feeling more than one described as like a calm before a storm. Thorn was ten when the calm broke.It was about the age where children stop merely ignoring or avoiding people they don't like, and start acting out against them. It was also an age where Thorn seemed to be reaching out at last to the other children, in her own way. The two imperatives collided with disastrous results. Thorn's differentness, her otherness, were easy targets. Scorned and ridiculed by most of the other kids, she made friends with a few others at the fringes of the orphanage microcosm. Even so, she spent most of her time by herself, haunting the places she could find privacy like a little ghost.She tried once to run away, as much she recounts now out of boredom as out of fear of the other children. There were lessons at the orphanage, reading and writing, basic history...but Thorn moved too quickly. The old books and scrolls talked about the world...she could SEE it through her window every day. It had to be better than the orphanage. But the world outside was cold, and it was smelly, and it was full of people even scarier than the girls at the orphanage.Already in a bleak mood when a constable returned her, Thorn experienced another first that evening. Her first fight. When the usual suspects started giving her trouble, her silence broke, and she told them everything she really thought about them...not a few of her jagged words all the worse because they were rooted in unpleasant truth. The response was to be attacked by a shrieking, enraged girl that outweighed her by...enough to hurt.Her response, purely on instinct, was to douse the room in horribly inky darkness. The candles guttered low and burned faint, distorted green. The air seemed sluggish somehow, thickening slightly in the lungs and nose...not quite an odor, but still a suggestion of something awful. A sound like the flapping wings of some monstrous carrion eating bird, though felt in the heart more than anything else.The sisters came running at the screams.The children were crowded around the edges of the room, outside the globe of darkness. Thorn was still inside, wanting to get out, but afraid to try. A wizard from the Academy had to be summoned to dispel it...which was fortunate, because he also recognized that it was fairly ordinary magic...if used under extraordinary conditions. Clearly, Thorn's time at the orphanage was over. She left to go to the Academy at her young age, first as the wizard Yun's ward...then staying as a full student.Thorn's time at the Academy was eye-opening. For the first time she found minds like hers...full of insight and questions. In fact, at first she rather resented it...she had always used her own mental superiority as a shield against her solitude. In time, grudgingly, she came to value it though. She also found students of magic to be much more...forgiving...of unusual traits. Slowly but surely, Thorn came cautiously out of her shell, though she would always bear the scars of her past. Still disillusioned with the frailties and mundanity of the material plane, Thorn focused her studies on the worlds beyond...the fantastical realms of energy and matter...the dreamlike worlds of the ethereal and astral...and the domains of the spirit among the great Outer planes. And yet, in learning of the planes, she also learned of herself...and a fear blossomed. For if she had the taint of fiends in her very blood...what could save her from the grip of Hells? Or worse, the Abyss?It was in pursuit of an answer to that question that drove her back to the Orphanage, seeking answers about her origins. And it was then she learned of the kidnappings. Despite all the pain she'd suffered there, she knew by now that the sisters were good people, and the children there were just children. Surely her own personal quest could wait for this mystery to be solved? And perhaps there would be a measure of redemption to be involved in protecting children from a gruesome fate as well...[/sblock]</blockquote>

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