Kholashi, Duke of Windows and Marquis of Sacrifices

From Familia Niveum

Duke of Windows and Marquis of Sacrifice

Kholashi

He is the flicker on the windowsill that you barely noticed until after it was gone. And even then, you wondered if there was anything there at all. After all, all you saw was an extra bit of cloud in the sky, or a discarded newspaper fluttering through the air from an apartment higher up in the building. But sometimes, after you turn away from the window, something flickers in the pane of glass, or even in the open air occupying the space between Indoors and Outdoors. Thin eyelids open - even if you tried you couldn't see anything through them, just extremely faint crescents in the open air or on the glass.

Contents 1 Personal Code 2 Design 3 Miraculous Abilities 4 Gifts 4.1 Immutable 4.2 Shapeshifting 4.3 Perfect Timing 4.4 Unexpected Quarter 4.5 Shadow on the Sill 5 Restrictions 5.1 Revelatory Trait 5.2 Visible 6 Bonds 7 Sample Miracles 8 Estate Correspondences 9 Personality 10 History 11 Anchors 12 Notable friends and Enemies 12.1 John Kay, Lord of Spies 12.2 Zsuzsa Nagy, Lady of Courage 13 Goals and Motivations

Personal Code

Kholashi follows the code of the Wild:

1. Freedom is the highest principle.
2. Sanity and mundanity are prisons.
3. Give in kind with a gift received.

Design

Miraculous Abilities

• Aspect 0
  • 5 Permanent Miracle Points
• Domain 4 Windows, 3 Sacrifices
  • 5 Permanent Miracle Points
• Realm 2
  • 5 Permanent Miracle Points
• Spirit 0
  • 5 Permanent Miracle Points

Gifts

Gifts are unique special abilities possessed by the Noble.

Immutable

Kholashi was not of man and woman born. Even by faerie standards his parents were a bit strange, since most faeries at least look quasi-human. Kholashi's line of shadow faeries has a lot of very odd physical attributes. They still think in terms of beauty the way other faeries do, it's just that the words they use for "beauty" and "appearance" never quite line up with what everyone else thinks of when they look at Kholashi. As if that wasn't enough, shadow faeries don't have to eat, breathe, or do most of the other things that living creatures do - you don't have to breathe to be a shadow, for instance. He also doesn't age like everyone else does - faeries being more or less immortal. He hasn't progressed to that stage of life yet, but it's on his to-do list. (1 point)

Shapeshifting

Shadows get everywhere and in everything. In the light of the human heart, there are shadows in the ventricles and on the chest's interior wall. Before enNoblement Kholashi could approximate a human form, but now that he has access to vast amounts of information (like the windows in all the zoos and libraries and museums in the world) he's stretching his mental and physical capacity for shapechanging. He can already make himself taller, shorter, or more or less human. He can also change into a few different animal shapes, they're just always jet black. Sometimes he forgets that he's not in Faerie when he changes shape - it's very rare, but once in a while it does happen. It took a bit of doing to explain the police incident report of a six-foot black spider crawling up the side of an apartment building in downtown Los Angeles at three AM, for instance. (1 point)

Perfect Timing

Somewhere in the land of Faerie there is a vault under an old hill. They say it used to be the vault of the first shadow faerie, or the vault of some faerie king who died in a war with his brother over an ancient treasure. Whatever it used to be, what it is now is impossible to locate except by those whose clocks are stored there. There are dozens of clocks there, but none of them have moving hands. The hands are all there, but they are stuck at different times - the moment in perfect time at which the owner was born. Finding out which clock is which takes a long time and an encyclopedic knowledge of very personal information. It is only when a faerie whose clock is in the vault dies that the hands move. When that happens, they spin like tornadoes until the clock comes apart in an orgy of exploding gears and springs. It is said that because of these clocks, the faeries who own them do not perceive time the same way as everyone else - they can measure it, step into it or come out of it the way humans get onto trains. Kholashi's is one of the strongest - his is overgrown with moss that looks delicate but is tough as steel, ensuring that he has tremendous dominance over his own personal time-flow. (2 points)

Unexpected Quarter

All Lords of Sacrifice have had this Gift since the first Sacrifice was created millenia ago. But some have not made as good use of it as others. There was one notoriously besotted Sacrifices back in the 16th century who had a bad habit of turning up five minutes late and missing things. He wasn't Sacrifices for very long. For a long time Lady Nashira was troubled by how to find someone suitable for the job. A lot of potential Nobles didn't have a knack for time or prophecy or a tolerance for being around sacrifices, many of which were human sacrifice in one meaning or another. A lot of different Sacrifices held the title and couldn't get Unexpected Quarter quite right. Then the Imperatrix discovered the secret of the faerie vault by some contact or other among Imperatrices and went looking for the one with the strongest control of his clock. That's one of the biggest reasons why Kholashi is a Noble at all. When used it doesn't just drop Kholashi out of the sky - he always turns up somewhere inobtruse and out of the way, since he's there to witness and not take part. It exists so that someone will be there to witness great sacrifices and ensure that people, faeries, demons or whatever don't die in vain and unremembered. There aren't many Nobles that have this Gift, and most of those are members of related Estates - Death, Glory, Redemption and Finality, to name most. Not all of them turn up at each sacrifice, but it's relatively rare for there to be only one of them there. It took a while for the Estate of Glory, whose use of Unexpected Quarter normally involves him turning up in the guise of a Marine, police officer or whatever else in a very public manner, to get used to the fact that the Estate of Sacrifice turns up at these things like a slithering black snake in the shadows. He's never quite gotten over that. (Major Creation of Pathways (7 pts), Simple (-1), Onessel only (-3), One Trick (-3), Rare (1) = 1 point)

Shadow on the Sill

Shadow faeries are always a bit disturbing because so many of them can finish each other's sentences and do so. Nobody really knows why, but some faerie historians believe it's because there's very little variety among shadows compared to most other things. It's true that some are smaller and some are darker than others, but on the whole they're extremely similar. This extends in some part to their affinity with shadows on Prosaic Earth and elsewhere. Many of the older and more powerful shadow faeries can relocate themselves through shadows or darkness or night because of what they are - this doesn't make people any less scared of them. Kholashi was just starting to develop this power when he was enNobled, and now it's become frozen, framed by his primary Estate. He can move through any window anywhere, so long as three rules are met in addition to the usual geographic boundaries: He knows where it is, he didn't create it, and it has shadows around it. It normally has to be a physical window as well, but if he really stretches it he can jump through someone's eye and see the condition of their soul. He doesn't like doing that, though, because it normally causes Dementia Animus. It has one other side effect: Any window he passes through physically takes on a slightly psychedelic sheen, like someone spilled very fine machine oil on it. This burns off within an hour at night and within five minutes in daylight - he doesn't know why this happens. This is also one of the reasons that passing through someone's eye causes them to go very insane - unless they're asleep, they wonder what burns. Even if he just looks through a window using this Gift, he leaves thin oily eyelidprints on the side he looks through - those only last about fifteen seconds at night and three seconds in the day, though. If there is no glass or plastic in the window, the windowsill or frame get oily or otherwise a bit smeared. (Major Creation of Pathways (7 pts), Simple (-1), Onesself Only (-3), One Trick (-3), Rare (1) = 1 point)

Restrictions

Restrictions are much like limits, but less universally problematic; they grant extra miracle points only when they become a major problem.

Revelatory Trait

A restriction of Aspect (+1 AMP when appropriate)

He's never been able to hide one element of his shadow faerie heritage: His eyes are completely jet black all the time, whether he looks like a human, a dog, or a spider. More than one brand-new Noble has mistaken him for an Excrucian until informed otherwise - his eyes don't have the falling-star beauty of Excrucian eyes, though. They are more like shark's eyes.

Visible

A restriction of Spirit (+1 SMP when appropriate)

The more he uses his powers, the more he resembles his shadow faerie self. He gets taller and skinnier, his hair starts to smell faintly or strongly of pine needles, his skin and hair darken. In extreme cases, his eyes will even turn dark red. It is the only way for his eyes to be something other than black.

Bonds

• Sanctity of Windows: 5
• Sanctity of Sacrifice: 5
• Protection of Faerie: 3
  • He feels very strongly about protecting where he's from - at least as much as most Nobles care about protecting Earth against Excrucian throatslitters. If for no other reason, Faerie contains his clock - he doesn't know what would happen if Faerie were destroyed while he was out of it, but he's sure that at the very least he'd lose control of his personal time-stream.
• Long-Running Feud with the Power of Cameras: 2
  • Cameras is a nutty ex-FBI field agent who got too close to something that broke his mind. To protect the Noble who caused his Dementia Animus, an Imperator made him into the All-Seeing Lord. He likes to think of himself that way, but he doesn't think everyone else does. He watches just about everything in part because he's so suspicious. He fights with Windows from time to time because Cameras has a weird definition of them - he's all into how information is transmitted where and through what medium. He's convinced that cameras are the way to go because cameras can go where windows can't, and are easier to move around. You can't put a window in a bank vault and expect it to be perfectly secure, for instance.
• Long-Running Feud with the Power of Nihilism: 2
  • Nihilism is a very old concept, but until relatively recently it didn't have a tremendous amount of sway. It still doesn't, really, but some Nobles attribute more power to it than it actually has. It's the little voice inside people that says "What if that just doesn't matter?" It's not the angel or the devil on their shoulder, it's the little grey stormcloud over their heads. The current Power of Nihilism is a shapechanging spirit that, in human form, tends to favor looking like an emo kid. It doesn't pay much attention to its outward form because hey - outward appearances don't matter. Some Nobles wonder why Nihilism exists at all, but sometimes it's essential - if some people can't look at a situation and say, "None of this matters," then they're going to have a very difficult time in life. He tends to fight with Sacrifices because of his belief that sacrifice is inherently meaningless - you don't live on in any meaningful way after you die, and you just snuff it. It runs counter to everything that Sacrifices really believes in - they haven't gotten to a shooting war, but every once in a while they clash.
• Long-Running Feud with the Power of Fine Print: 2
  • Fine Print is another small but pesky concept that's only been around for some 500-some-odd years, since without Guttenberg there'd be no Fine Print. The current Power of Fine Print is a former Christian missionary from Peru and in other circumstances he and Kholashi would have nothing to do with each other. But he's at least a little obsessed with glorifying his Heavenly masters, and one of the ways he does that is by stealing the thunder of a sacrifice by assigning it to a higher power - an angel or God. In Sacrifices' view, it isn't a sacrifice unless people (or wolves or sentient vending machine robots or whatever) decide among themselves to do it. Saying "God made me do this" and have it be somehow true is a violation of how sacrifices ought to go. Fine Print has a thing for assigning a little line to the end of each great sacrifice story or account he finds that says something like, "Without the Lord's Will, I could not have made this sacrifice". That isn't on so far as Sacrifices is concerned, and he's been looking for a way to get Fine Print to forget about that pesky hangup of his. It might end in knives.
• Advances in Glass and Plastic: 1
  • Anything to boost his ease of transit and ability to see through windows all over the place. And if they can do something about the pesky oil, so much the better.

Sample Miracles

Windows:

Divination: Looking through a window into a place with a window to see what's going on - somehow it will be relevant, if not the event itself.

Preservation: Reinforcing a window so that its frame is hard as steel and its glass resilient as diamonds.

Creation: A brand-new window in a wall in a building in Tunisia that looks out from a window in a guardhouse in the Great Wall of China.

Destruction: Closing up a window so that it was never there, destroying the conceptual boundary between Indoors and Outdoors so that the window just doesn't work.

Sacrifices:

Divination: Kill a man and burn his body to read signs in the smoke, perform a haruspicy on a goat or an ox. Old-fashioned bloody prophecy.

Preservation: The image and immediate effects of a sacrifice - the calm in the instant after the explosion before the reaction starts, the images in the smoke or ox guts, or the emotional and mental resonance of a sacrifice in a given area.

Creation: Ehr...can't. You can't force someone else to sacrifice themselves - then it's threats and coercion, not sacrifice.

Destruction: Getting rid of the sacrificial impulse - making someone want to live through the day instead of fighting that last glorious and horrendously stupid charge.

Estate Correspondences

Glass, plastic, glaziers, knives, altars, fire, smoke, dead things, courage, battlefields, military uniforms, voyeurism, blood, tears, frames, and eyes.

Personality

History

He was born a very long time ago somewhere in Faerie. The exact location is irrelevant, and so is the year, really. Since faeries don't normally die of old age, time doesn't matter as much to them as to other peoples. The somewhat communal nature of shadow faerie existence meant that he didn't really distinguish himself from his peers for several hundred years. Like other faeries "finding themselves", he took several decades to do so. He started to turn up in windows and on battlefields during the Opium Wars in China, finding something inexplicably interesting about them. By 1937 he'd moved across Asia and towards Europe, witnessing a lot of incidents through windows - people spying on other people, people betraying others, and all kinds of things. He didn't take part very often because he liked watching them - they were so unlike him that it was both oddly frightening and strangely interesting. At some point between then and now, but he doesn't know exactly when, someone of an Imperial nature spotted him.

Anchors

Eduard Achebe: This man is a correspondent for a major newspaper in Lagos, Nigeria. He's their one war correspondent - and recently he's been assigned to covering the trouble in the Middle East after spending several years on beats all over western Africa, particularly the blood diamond conflicts in countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone. He's a relentless fact-hound, and always wants more, regardless of how much he's got. It's how he got to be the one war correspondent for the paper, and the most famous correspondent in Nigeria. But by necessity he's had to tread pretty hard on a few toes and memories to get and keep the job - he still does, because he knows that even though he inspires children to be honest reporters, he also inspires greedy men to come after his job. He doesn't get paid much because journalists in most situations don't, but he likes the work. He doesn't want to see it go to someone who'd use it as a springboard to much better conditions working for CNN, the BBC or whoever. Sacrifices has a twisted sense of hatred for him - the man is so close to being a perfect example of sacrifice for the truth, whatever it is, but he also will stomp on fingers that get too close to his platform. Even if he does it out of necessity and not because he's got a good opportunity to crush a rival, Sacrifices thinks that for him personally, it would be a greater sacrifice to let his reputation go, and maybe find a less "glamorous" job somewhere else. Not that journalism is really glamorous, but for adrenaline junkies like Achebe the constant stimulation, innovation and violence of being a lone war correspondent are essential.

Notable friends and Enemies

John Kay, Lord of Spies

These two are thick as thieves and have been thieves together more than once. Kay doesn't like Cameras much either, for pretty much the same reason as Windows. Cameras' opinion of Spies is that they're outdated - a piece of fiber-optic cable and the brand-new audio pickup type he's trying to push will render spies outdated. John Kay used to work for the best - British Intelligence, and he dislikes Cameras' American technofetishism. He has lists of every spy and secret agent working for everyone around the world, and is one of the few beings in existence who can make sense of the tangled global intelligence web. They've collaborated a few times on foiling Cameras, normally by applying good old-fashioned eyes and muscle instead of lenses and recorders.

Zsuzsa Nagy, Lady of Courage

Zsuzsa is a ghost - she was one of the Hungarian revolutionaries who took up arms against the Soviets in 1956 and fought in the streets in Budapest until she was shot during the Red Army's brutal retaking of the city. She disabled two tanks by herself with homemade explosives before she was machine-gunned. She's one of the other Nobles who hold an Unexpected Quarter, and the two of them tend to turn up in a lot of the same places, since Courage and Sacrifice are most often very closely linked. She's connected with the Lord of Remembrance and similar Nobles - their Chancel is very isolated and quiet as the grave, the only place in all Creation where many courageous acts are remembered.

Enemies mentioned above, under Bonds.

Goals and Motivations