unlight | Caldera: Application

caldera

Player Mica
Name: Oxana of the village north of the Woad Mountain
Contact: Here
Over 18?: yes
Current Characters: Solas, Skandranon, Olivine
Link to permissions/opt out: Here

Character
Name: Oxana
Canon: Original
Canon point: 94th Winter
CRAU?: No.
Age: 94
History:

Born poor in a remote village in the north of a Fantasy-Allegory East Slavic Country
Magical potential manifests nearly at birth as a "midwife" or "wisewoman" (depending on who you wanna ask) which is a specific subclass of magic-user, and which allows Oxana to sense and manipulate the life forces of others, and to reach across the membrane between Life and Death.
Gain notoriety on her own, and nearby villages even as a young girl for her use of her abilities. Everyone is very proud and she is already technically working professionally before she is eight or nine. This is fine. This is a normal amount of pressure to put on a young girl. This will not have any knock-on psychological effects.
Apprenticed to local (non-magical) midwife, but fails to keep the job because she is a mouthy ten year old who can literally see her boss' fuckups.
Apprenticed to local doctor because sure why not? Fails this job because she's a mouthy eleven year old and sexism would have killed hr career even if the sassmouth didn't.
Apprenticed to the local catholic priest in an air of desperation, but asks too many questions and is asked to leave before two days pass by.
Apprenticed to the local undertaker because Jesus wept, child, you gotta have a job that isn't the sheep at lambing season? Fails this job because she keeps raising the dead by accident.
Her adoring/despairing community scrapes together money enough to have her go apprentice to the big deal wizard in the big city for an education and maybe to find a vocation or something. From this guy she learns to read and write and that probably most men, and especially all wizards, are fundamentally stupid at heart.
She returns home at sixteen, slightly more worldly to find that the local witch has turned up to train her. This is not exactly the same as being trained by someone with her same powerset, but it's also a lot better than any of the other yahoos.
Appenticed to local witch for a ten year period, graduates and is told to never marry.
Gets married to her sweetheart.
Sweetheart sickens and dies, leaving her a young, beautiful widow with a lovely farmhouse, a broad pasture, and a decent number of goats.
Many men come courting over the years, as Oxana plies her trade. She marries them, when it seems fit to do so, and sometimes it isn't even a bad idea.
Eventually she does figure out what's killing them.
(It's her. Sometimes even on purpose.)
Time passes, and she grows old.
Eyes cloud, bones ache.
Memories of the dead begin to feel more real, with every passing year; it's hell to grow old.
But what do we say to the Devil?
that's right
Not. Today.

Personality: A wiley, wary old cast-iron cauldron of a person, Oxana represents and embodies a specific fairytale archetype: that of the unassuming figure with a hidden and terrible power. Like the witch who cursed the Beast's castle for his hubris or the fairy who sentenced Sleeping Beauty to die, she is aware of her place in the fabric of the world, and is deeply pragmatic about her purpose there. She has an attitude always of well, let's get on with it, shall we?, of rolling her sleeves up, and going to work. She does not expect to be paid, but she does expect a debt to exist, and will call upon it with ruthless aplomb.

She has known beauty and she has known strength, and of the two prefers the latter. She can bake, cook, butcher, weave, clean, doctor, deliver a healthy baby, banish a wicked demon, and hold final rites. She plays panpipes and raises goats for wool and milk, and has never owned a cat. Oxana is a person who is kind without being nice, canny without being wise, and carries a wickedly sharp grudge whenever she is able to find one. In her long, long practice she has learned and forgotten more about anatomy, herblore, natural remedies, and the way of the world than most people will ever guess exists in the first place. She's crotchety and sassy and bold, with all the recklessness of someone with little left to lose, and an intimate memory of what terrible things one can survive. Like all Wisewomen, she was born with a powerful desire to cleave to life, and to drag all the world along with her, and like all other Wisewomen, she has repeatedly been faced with the cold reality that life is a fuck and will kill with impunity.

And she's never gotten over that, nor forgiven it for being so.

Powers and abilities: Oxana's magic has to do with the sensing and manipulation of Life and the membrane between Life and Death. She has, from birth, been able to see and sense any living thing, regardless of other visibility conditions. Once her powers were more fully trained, she became capable of touching and manipulating these life-forces more directly, both by pulling them away from Death, or by thrusting them back into it, depending on her purpose. On occasion, she has even reached deep into the waters of Death itself to grasp a particularly stubborn life and hoist it back onto the shore. And where she could not simply feel around and grasp such a being, she could plunge her head, metaphorically, into Death and have a brief look around— which is what has caused her progressive blindness.

Chosen faction: Terra
Suitability: She is from a fantasy setting, she will do just fine here.

Sample

Questions, comments, and concerns:None