Hiss Off
Poison
Hemomages are often times a more tricky topic than necromancers. Dead bodies are one thing. Doing magic with someone's blood? While they are living? Or dead? That's another. You can animate them. Control them. Use the blood in all sorts of ways. It can be cleansing, beneficial. Purge toxins and invigorate.
That's how some of her friends grew into their power. And yet... Ather found it tiring. You'll learn in time. Don't ask those questions. There are things we just don't do. She yearned for more knowledge. For more things. It was a tiring existence, being a helper to people who came for simple answers and selfish needs. Helping was nice and all, but why should she and her kind live in seclusion and relative squalor when they had so much to offer?
Why were they hiding and living with so little... when the people who were coming to them were driving Lambourghinis or wearing fancy clothes? They could be living better than the people who wanted the use of their talents.
Ather, rest your heart. Your hunger is too strong and you don't need what you desire... and you desire more than you should.
It began to itch from the inside. And so she started to look for the answers when they wouldn't give them to her.
Ather was born to a sort of community of mages. All of them hemomages, she never knew which of them were her birth parents. It wasn't important to them. Maybe none of them were. Maybe she was dropped off there because of how she looked. Sometimes some of them had normal looking infants and they were sent away from the community, so it was possible she was from outside. It didn't really matter.
What did matter was that they had smaller minds than she did. In all of the 73 that lived there, none of them but her cared to learn anything that was in the books in that back room. They were anathema. Forbidden. For whatever reason, they wanted to keep their hemomancy on the pure path, to keep it kind and helpful in whatever realm they deemed that to be. It was all very arbitrary.
The community wasn't living in squalor or anything. They had irrigation, solar power, everything off grid, a twenty acre lot for alpaca and cows and chickens... so many cats. A ton of herbs and flowers and vegetable gardens. They bought their meat from a nearby farm. Everyone was expected to contribute. They had expectations that as you grew, you'd learn your lessons - school, one or more kind of way to help around the community and of course the magic.
So long as it was the magic they wanted you to learn. Ather wanted to learn more than that. She knew there was more. She asked about it. What happens if you pull blood from someone when you're angry? What happens if you use the blood with this rune? ... with this spell? ... what if you did this instead? ...What happens if the person is dead and we use someone else's blood to help them?
It led to a lot of arguments and disciplinary actions. Before long, Ather began to act out. In subtle ways. She stopped participating in the help meets. She went to bed early as a protest, rather than attending coven meetings and rituals. She spent a lot of time in the gardens.
And then, in the night, when everyone was sleeping she went into the back room of the library.
They say the best way to keep a secret is to keep it to yourself. They should not have left the books in the library. Ather had spent an inordinate amount of time reading all that she could in the library when she was a little snake girl looking for knowledge. And when she turned eighteen, she was old enough to learn that there was another room she hadn't been privy to before. A room that held the answers to her questions.
What did happen to those bodies? What would happen if you were angry? ... what if? Each night she soaked up the knowledge in those books, little by little.
She learned the darker side of hemomancy. And she knew she couldn't stay where she was. The community held nothing for her. She learned more. Her body was able to do much more. The secrets of her lineage were unlocked in that room. Her venom, her shapeshifting. It was glorious, beautiful knowledge.
The world was waiting.
And with that knowledge, she also knew she couldn't leave these books here for anyone else. She began to switch the books with story books in her room, masking them with spells that would last a year. One by one, she traded them out, packing the treasured books into a trunk in her room.
And in the mean time, she practiced her other skills. Testing her retractable fangs, gathering her own venom and studying it. Playing nice with everyone around her.
And then, one month shy of her nineteenth birthday, she disappeared with a trunk of childhood books.
The only other oddity was the disappearance of Mary Nacil, a young girl from a nearby town that same night. A redhead with no connection to the community, at all. She was a waitress, had been on her way home from her shift. She was reported missing when she didn't show up for her next shift two days later.
After five months of no news, a phone call would place her on the east coast. She would later be found in Tampa and spend several days in the hospital, severely anemic. Mary would claim having no recollection of having gotten to Florida, and only remember the sounds of scraping, club music and lots of darkness. There would be no leads after that.
Ather began her life in true soon after that, manipulating those around her. She spent time as a trophy wife, a lawyer, a model, and then grew bored of it all, almost got caught and took all her money and ran... to a shady little place call Etoile.
There she is following some talk of the Gorgons, riches and trouble. She waltzed in as the mistress of a high stakes roller and then left her in the care of a few doctors hopeful of a good payout and has taken up residence in a nice little place in Cap au Diable.
- .☼. Ather is a hemomage primarily. It is what she was initially trained for. Using the blood of someone else (Because why would she ever waste her own? She knows exactly how precious it is, thank you very much.) she can manipulate them in all kinds of ways. Controlling their level of energy, their health, their very well being. It's fun.
- .☼. Ather is also a beautiful viper. And as such, she has venom. While they are not visible when she is talking normally, she has within her mouth retractable fangs that hold a very potent neurotoxin which she can use to either incapacitate or fully inject and use fatally. Ather does, however collect and make different variations of her own toxin by mixing it with other plants and chemicals to cause different effects. Growing up with knowledge of plants has paid off.
- .☼. Ather is, additionally, a shapeshifter. Thanks to some beautiful geneological gift in her family tree, she is able to use the hemomancy along with her genetic shifting to take on the image of someone that she has incapacitated. Losing the image is as easy as shedding skin.
- .☼. While it may seem distasteful to some, she can be beneficial to have around. There are good sides to hemomancy, despite her preferences. She knows how to revive someone and how to quickly stop nausea and there really is nobody better than a snake to fix a snake bite.
- .☼. Ather has a soft spot for the finer things and strives to get them, after living a life being told they weren't necessary.
- .☼. As long as an identity is useful, she will try to keep the source around. And she keeps the skins she sheds somewhere safe. When the sources are no longer useful, well... it's a coin toss.
- .☼. Her entire body is covered in scales. She had no fingernails or toenails in her natural form.
.☼. Whomever -