🌹 And it really does hurt when you love someone

[erbier]

Content warning: Dark themes of violence, misogyny, trauma, brainwashing, a death cult. Ilde has trauma, her world is very violent, the king is insane. Here is an opt-out.

Character Name: Ilde
Age: 20
From When?: The end of the world

Inmate Justification: Ilde got a really bad hand in the kind of story she found herself in. She became vicious and cold and all her less flattering traits in order to survive. She deserves a shot at actually living, rather than making all her choices against the threat of imminent death. Being around people not from her world will, in general, help her. She's only ever had narrow options, and hearing about other people's lives and circumstances will help broaden her horizons of what is possible. Really internalizing that will take some time. She's unlikely to ever be a warm person, but her panic responses of violence and control could be calmed. She might even dare to be happy at some point.

But as she is now she's power-hungry, controlling, and manipulative. She is dangerous without intervention.

Arrival: She would never just agree to come, this detour defies the 'scripture' as it has been told to her.

Abilities/Powers: She doesn't have any.

Inmate Information:

CRIMES Ilde's existing crimes boil down to "under duress". She hasn't killed or harmed anyone else for pleasure. She has stolen, she has killed, and she is The Accessory to Dreus's crimes, upon joining him. Being his accessory was preferable to being killed by him. She has overseen and condoned his absolutely horrific acts. She has comforted and excused his madness, and guilt. She has been deeply twisted to find vicious, conniving, and toxic behavior to be both normal and safe. When her back is against the wall, or she perceives her back to be against the wall, she will find an avenue that gives her control. Let her continue down this path without intervention, and she will assuredly be a villain deluded as to her righteousness. ( I would know, I have a bad!Ilde. )

QUICK BACKGROUND She's an orphan who grew up in a refugee caravan; a hard life with few resources and constant threat from bandits, shadow monsters, and other scavenger creatures. Her caravan was eventually captured and taken back to the remaining "capitol" where they were presented with the choice to join Godking Dreus's court and worship, or die. Dreus is the dangerous madman who destroyed their world, and is bringing it closer to its apocalypse as he gains power. He is a time bomb of uncontrolled fire magic. Ilde falls under his thrall and becomes the gardener in his secret magical garden beneath the palace. He starts to include her in his mad ravings, convincing her that she is a holy Madonna. She is the only pure thing in the world, and when she dies in the apocalypse, her death will purify everyone's lost souls. This story is a lot better than "orphan girl just hasn't died yet, somehow" so she goes with it, despite any conflicted feelings regarding her fear and repulsion for Dreus.

PERSONALITY

PERSONALITY

COLD

At first glance, Ilde often seems pleasant. She has the posture and mannerisms of a young woman who is quiet and demure. Beyond this first glance, there is something cold about her. Her politeness and friendliness are empty gestures. After a life dominated by death, she does not know how to care about someone apart from herself without the domineering structures of power and control to guide her.

Everyone she has ever known has died: horribly, or sometimes pitifully. She will be polite in a social setting to avoid unnecessary confrontation, but she also has a general disinterest in connecting with others. She has long since accepted that this is the only way to go about things to avoid further sadness and trauma. She is numb to accepting further trauma, she has had too much in a lifetime.

She has lost all ability to mourn for the dead and we are all the walking dead, in her eyes.

INTROVERTED

Ilde has never lived a life where there were opportunities available. She merely lived one day to the next. There was nothing to be driven for, no goals to pursue. This has made her quite mellow, pensive, and solitary.

It has always been a struggle to not be consumed by the despair of her situation. To combat this, her day-to-day activities are ones which nourish her emotionally, keep her calm, and whittle away hours in the day. She loves poetry, reading, daydreaming, sleeping, and most importantly, gardening. She doesn't know how to connect with people, but she does know how to provide from her garden. She takes pride and pleasure in that.

Because the garden below Dreus's palace is [presumed to be] the only garden remaining in the world, she is very protective of her plants and her position as gardener. She has tied up a great deal of her self-image in being a benevolent provider of necessity. Not being able to tend to a garden would upset her and leave her directionless.

(In that vein, food and water are very important to her and she can be sharply preachy about those who are wasteful or ungrateful.)

JUDGEMENTAL

Not only are Ilde's logic and beliefs twisted, she is also fully devoted to what she believes. Her life has been ruled by a maniac's death cult, and he has instilled his irrational world view in her. Like him, she believes that "might makes right" and that there is something morally wrong and inferior with those who are weak.

Ilde does not see herself as weak. She would be dead by now if she were. This is a prophetic fatalism she tells herself to make herself feel better about the cruelties of her world. She rejects victimization firmly, resents being treated as weak, and blames victims for their own misfortunes. She disdains cowardice, ignorance, and those who speak without taking action. She admires the assertive, intelligent, and aggressive.

TOXIC

In the game, there are circumstances under which Ilde might bond with another person (why play otherwise?) It is obviously difficult and possibly even undesirable to get close to this woman. Her love can seem direct and unconditional, but she brings with her behaviors learned from her clearly toxic emotional relationship with Dreus.

She falls easily back into abusive patterns because she admires abusive traits. She doesn't know, or understand, that she has reacted to something abusive with only more abusive behavior.

She can be emotionally manipulative, a behavior she learned when under the constant threat of violence from a maniac. She has quite a lore built around herself as a benevolent victim, and will play that role even when her actions directly contradict it. She will use the fairy tale of her own goodness to whitewash nasty behavior and get people to trust and listen to her. She will go out of her way to frame her actions as necessities for the greater good of everyone; when really she's looking out for herself. She can be kind and comforting, especially when she thinks you might be of use to her later. She is subtly conniving.

UNSTABLE

Underneath all of Ilde's icy shields and judgement, she is ultimately very afraid. She lives inside of all her most traumatic moments, at all times. Her attachment to the here-and-now is quite tenuous.

She is disgusted by cowardice because the fear inside of herself is already so overwhelming. Thus, she is easily overwhelmed by any additional emotional strain. She can overcompensate with anger and resentment when feeling anxious or like she has lost her footing. She lashes out at anything she's let too close, razing back space to breathe. She doesn't care who she hurts. The closer you are, the harder you will be hit.

Her beliefs and desires are a dissonant howling mess, and if you deign to think you know her... well, she doesn't even know herself. She's tried to make a firmly angelic figure of herself, but maybe she's really just some orphan. One who escaped death by miserable luck and manipulation, not some beautiful Madonna after all. She believes both because one speaks to her insecurities and the other speaks to her mythology of importance.

She doesn't see the need to change this. Trying to untangle her trauma seems to her to only create terrifying fractures that make her feel vulnerable and only more afraid. She does not expect to grow up, or to need these changes, she expects to die as she is.

VICIOUS

Generally Ilde behaves as the demure and peaceful gardener, even if her manner can sometimes be blunt and standoffish. However, she has no patience for being physically threatened. There were many bandits in the wastes, as well as being hunted by the man-eating shadows. She doesn't think anyone can be trusted and she is not a pacifist. She is all but a feral animal when threatened, and reacts quickly and offensively. Killing does not disturb her. Killing the innocent does not disturb her. Torture does not disturb her. It can all be justified in her fearful world.

Further, she does not forgive and she does not forget. She may feign forgiveness, but if you truly betray or offend her, she will make certain that her debts are paid. She does not take kindly to insults. This haughtiness has several components: she is defiant about being treated as weak and she is superior in her importance to the Godking.

TLDR

Ilde presents herself as one thing (gentle, demure, self-determined) while actually more closely aligning with something else underneath (violent, toxic, deluded). While it's obvious that horrifying circumstances twisted her that way, the will with which she has doubled down on it all makes it more difficult to sympathize with or break her of it. Then again, doubling down is the only choice she feels she has that gives her any agency in the situation, or that will make her inevitable terrible death meaningful.

Her options were all ugly, her situation impossible.

Path to Redemption: Ilde's sense of self is tied to the mythology that Dreus made for her. She will have to find her own meaning as just another woman, and not the perfect Madonna cleansing the souls of the lost at the end of the world.

My milestones for her look like:

1. Discredit the figure of authority, the cult leader; - This will take care of itself with time. That she could even be taken from her world defies what Dreus has told her. The fact that Dreus can't get here and take her back also undermines his absolute power and omnipotence.

2. Present contradictions (ideology versus reality); - Again, this will come simply from talking to other people and seeing that life can be something very different... if Dreus just isn't around to destroy the world.

3. The breaking point: when reality begins to take precedence over ideology; - This is when she starts to see that other people can, possibly, be trusted. That death is not genuinely threatening her at every turn. That she doesn't have to make such ugly choices just to survive.

4. Self-expression; - Confidence in herself as a living person deserving of safety and respect, awareness of others as people. Awareness and acceptance that Dreus was also hurt, deluded, and wrong. This is when she starts to identify as a member of the surrounding community.

She's distrustful and traumatized, it will take a while to get anywhere with her.

She needs a really very emotionally intelligent warden who can deal with someone who is easily triggered into fight-flight-fawn. The wrong warden could really easily shape her as a follower, she's vulnerable and wants overt direction and guidance to replace Dreus. She needs a warden who is going to be invested in encouraging her to be her own person.

I think she can come around to the rehabilitation side of the Barge and one day warden herself, so that's the approach that is really going to move her over time. But right now she's feral, sorry.

World Information: ↓

HISTORY

History:

Ilde is from [my] parable called "The Burning World". I denote that it's in parable style because it means the world is rather small and encapsulated ala Kino's Journey, and is built around a particular motif. Anyway:

The story goes that the world was once flourishing and filled with beauty and magic, until the Godking destroyed it.

Godking Dreus was born with immeasurable magical powers. At first he was considered a blessing, as he truly was a wonder in his mastery of flame magic. He lived a happy, limitless childhood filled with the finest of things. He met the most respected politicians, pontiffs, and magicians in the land. He wanted for nothing, he was educated by the best and brightest.

Unfortunately his attachment to the flames drove him mad. Its overwhelming urgency to be expressed in destruction tainted him. All throughout his youth, he struggled to understand and contain his power, and eventually it broke him. He came to believe it was his right to end the world. That he should be worshipped for his mercifulness in for freeing all living things from the overwhelming sorrow and pain that is existence.

He opposed and slaughtered every other magic user who might have challenged him in the small kingdoms of the world. Proselytizing atop his his ziggurat, his magical prowess and his intense charisma were forces that began to bend those around him to his will. There was no one to stop him as he began to scorch the planet beyond repair.

By the time Ilde was born, he had wiped out the vast majority of mankind. Those humans who remained lived terrified, starving lives scrounging for existence during the day. They hid in the ruined cities at night. The night was ruled by living shadows, created as a residual effects of Dreus's magic. The shadows roamed the wastes and ate any remaining humans they could find; yet another writhing extension of the Godking's cruelty and madness.

Ilde was born into squalor, hunger, despair. Her mother and father took their turns being eaten by the shadows. She was subsequently taken in by other refugees. They could barely provide for themselves, let alone for her. Her childhood was hungry, cold, lonely, and frightened. Her adolescence was the same. Survival required nerves of steel, ruthlessness, quickness, stealthiness. She learned all of these things, with death always right at her heels.

One day, the Godking appeared before the caravan looking for new 'converts' for his court. He offered them food and shelter and his favor. The belligerent spit at him, and he incinerated them with the touch of his hand. He glowed like a sun, the only warmth in this ash-choked world he had destroyed. Exhausted, cold and not ready to die here, Ilde and the rest agreed to go with him.

They followed their mad king back to his palace, where they were fed and clothed. They would now live in his palace: within his reach, subject to his whims and his cruelty. It was not a merry court, and most days with the king were spent listening to his rambling manifestos on his dreadful dreams for the universe.

His preternatural charisma and hypnotic dogma began to worm their way into Ilde's heart and mind. She began to see him as a man with a destiny, a terrible destiny, but one he had risen up to embrace. She forgot him as a man and embraced him as an idea. Her fear of him fled. This was her world, and he was king of it. Acceptance soothed her tiredness. Dreus took note of her then, when she ceased to flinch at his vivid descriptions of gore and pain.

He decided to give the young girl a job within the palace. This was something he deemed an honor and a gesture of kindness; a rare whim. She became the apprentice gardener. The garden itself was an indoor secret: fed on magic and the precious little water sequestered deep beneath the palace on the cliffs.

The man who tended the gardens before her was a withered and ancient individual. He spoke infrequently of a long history with Dreus. She suspected the old man was his father, although Ilde never pried enough to entirely ascertain. He was a tired old man, ready to die. Dreus kept him alive to prolong his servitude. Ilde was fifteen when the old man's body finally succumbed to its decrepitude. She inherited his position with little ceremony. The old man was incinerated by his king. His ashes were spread out into the garden to feed the plants.

Tending to the garden alone now, Ilde lived a peaceful and purposeful life. Dreus visited her often, and only within the quiet confines of the garden did he show a more calm and pensive side of himself. A secret between the two of them; an emotional intimacy.

As Dreus began to enjoy her company, he also began to mistrust it. Assassination attempts had been made upon him in the past by the all-female contingent of [what he called] Witches. The toxicity of his magic had polluted the world's natural reserves, which expressed itself in the women who rose up to challenge him at the end of the world. The Witches were shapeshifters who often used the innocent faces of women and children to disguise their rotted souls. Dreus saw their spies in everyone and he wanted some way to assure himself that the young Ilde was who she appeared to be.

To continue to control her mind and her loyalty to him, he began to involve Ilde in the fairytale of his prophecies. She would be a madonna of sorrow, who was bearing all the remaining goodness in the world in her secret little patch of life beneath the Godking's palace. She was responsible for the last of his sanity and goodness as well, the only person who witnessed his brief moments of peacefulness and poetry. She was the Godking's only reprieve from his destiny to take this world back to nothingness from whence it came.

These promises did not erase Dreus's insanity. Ilde also witnessed his ugliest tendencies. The first Witch she ever saw him torture took the form of a young girl named Camille. He tortured her publicly in a dining hall, tying her to a chair before a vast array of fresh foods he instructed Ilde to bring up from the garden. It was the first time Ilde saw a Witch expose itself. Many of the others Dreus tortured were innocents.

This first incident imprinted itself on Ilde's memory. The others who followed--the Witches and some of his own shadow sons turned defiant--all blurred together into ugly scenes of gore and blood.

And that was to be her existence until the final wave of flames erupted and ended her life and her world.

Sample Network Entry:

[ Her video shows her sitting in the greenhouse. She has gotten her hands on a rather retro-looking CD player which seems to be playing the natural sounds of a thunderstorm overlaid with gentle piano music. It's very peaceful and ambient. She has a book with her, "borrowed" from the library and unlikely to be returned as long as she is here. She reads from it in a soft, clear voice, ]

Ah, with the Grape my fading Life provide,
And wash the Body whence the Life has died,
And lay me, shrouded in the living Leaf,
By some not unfrequented Garden-side.

[ She lets the moment be pleasant and quiet for a moment before she speaks, ]

I've never seen the rain for myself. It only ever snows ash, and all our water comes from deep underground.

[ Her eyes flick toward the camera, ]

I would like to hear about your beautiful, rainy places. Please.

Sample RP: https://tlvgreatesthitsdw.dreamwidth.org/116773.html?thread=36344357#cmt36344357

Special Notes: It will be a fun change of pace for me to design a Good Witch Ilde over time, so I am down to unknot her.