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World Info
LOCATIONS
Norden
-the country Elendhaven is in. Things are described as being 'Norden' this or that. Vaguely German/Norwegian/Russia.
-it snows 10 and a half months in the year and the sun only shows for a brief 6 weeks during the summer.
-"the North paints the sunrise in colours undreamt in Mittengelt and Sudengelt"
Mittengelt
-to the south. Kinda France/England.
-most powerful of the city states
-masters of the trade routes
-hold full sway over certain products such as pink and green eyes
Sudengelt
-to the far south. Kinda Spain/Italy.
Southern Colonies/Isles
-farther south than that. Kinda India smushed with the Caribbean.
-"the water is so clear that you can see the seabed on a bright day. It's so warm that you can bathe babies in it and only worry about the salt."
Basics
-"there is no brotherly love between Elendhaven and the South, or the Old Kingdoms."
JUST ELENDHAVEN THINGS
Elendhaven
-the setting of the story
-'truly is the end of the world. After all, it dwells at the edge of the map.'
-"magic and war did poison this land"
-"for the true sons and daughters of Elendhaven, our mother is the sea and our sister is the winter. We stand alone at the edge of the world."
-'the whole city stank of industry'; air thick with oil, salt, and smoke; streets slippery even on dry days from a slick film of filth
-ugly architecture: squat warehouses 'peppered with snails and sea grass', mansions in black stone and green windows stained by the sea; tallest buildings the coal refineries and constant carts with whale offal for oil refining
Black Crescent
-the semi-circular bay that houses Elendhaven. So named because it's a big honking crater that looks as such. Created 500 years ago by the North Pole being cut open by searing magic that puckered the land with craters.
-black waters poisoned with an arcane toxin that causes the skin to bubble and the mind to go soggy and loose 'like bread in broth'; also creates aberations "something frothing and wet with its insides leaking out its eyes"
-a volcanic crater "fored by geological forces, not mad sorcerers"
Black Moon of Norden
-the more mythical name for the Black Crescent, prophesied to be the gate through which the Gods will come through to begin the Final Conflict
-a 'fetid crescent that hugged the dark waters of the polar sea'
-"Demons and monsters still sleep inside the Black Moon"
The Plague
-"the illness swept first through our gutters, then through the factory districts. [...] even our most privileged, sheltered citizens."
-brought by sparrows from Mittengelt; it was believed to be native to Norden and this delayed a solution
-started in the textile mills and factories
-Florian's father was the first prominent citizen
-at which point the people decided it was a sorcerous plague and locked him and his family up in their home to try and 'contain' it
-the city was 'saved' by the "Great Kingdoms of Mittengelt" with their gold and doctors... but only after the gates were barred with corpses and they 'feared that we would no longer be fit to deliver whale oil for your lamps or oysters for your feasts [...] only when our silver mines closed because the miners were too sick to work [...] when you thought you might own us in return."
Industry
-coal refinereies, oil refineries
-fishing
-"this city's economy depends on whale-oil exports"
Former Industries
-silver mines
-textile factory work, due to much more lax labor laws
-lumber
CULTURAL
Food
-"sticky oysters, purple-shelled crabs, black-water soup. Seal eyeballs in rendered whale fat, the only parts of them fit for eating. These parts were flash-fried, and sauteed with caramelized onions and red spice (paprika). The wine was so tart and dry that it left an aftertaste of hangover vomit"
-coffee is available
-jam and biscuits are available
-champagne
Fashion
-vaguely 1700s (justaucorps, tricorn hats, waistcoats, gentleman's vest, brooches, cravats, ascots etc)
Sorcerers
-practice of Old Magic is punishable by death
-"Old Magic is tranference [...] not addition, not alteration."
-Mittenwelt purged the ancient bloodlines of magical aptitude over a hundred years ago
-'the age of sorcerers' (around 500 years ago)
Leickenblooms
-founding family of Elendhaven
-one of several but the only one still around
-all died other than Florian in the plague 15 years ago
-Florian's father was the family head; he had brothers who had wives and children themselves [a listing]
- Aloysia (great great grandmother), Odette (great grandmother), Magdela (grandmother)
-Florian had a twin sister, Flora, who was practically identical to him but she was 'the sun' to his 'moon'
-Flora's body was recovered such that her signet ring was found in Ainsley's belongings; Ainsley's father had acquired all manner of Leickenbloom items at auction 20 years past
RELIGION/SPIRITUALITY
Hallandrette
- A combination of Hel with a dash of Umberlee and a pinch of Auril
-her statue usually involves a woman with skeletal hands who looks like she is drowning
-"Hallandrette is the watcher of that gate [from whence the Gods will come] -- the Allfather's favorite daughter. Our city's guardian."
Hallandrette's Roe
-iridescent stones found in the Black Crescent. Throwing them is part of the ritual to create a hallenkind.
-contain traces of an extremely rare metal
Hallankind
-a companion given to the most wretched souls; to create a hallenkind, one must toss into the sea that which you love the most, toss one of Hallandrette's roe against a stone, and keep the stone in their pocket, and Hallandrette will bless you with a companion
-"made from the same dark matter that coats the bottom of the Nord Sea. A hallankind will love that wretched child as a brother or sister. They will drag whoever wronged their brother-sister-friend into the sea and wring them through the spines of their mother's baleen until they are foam and sea particle, forgotten in the cradle of her belly."
-"a toy that cannot be broken"
-Johann is a hallankind.
-also the name for a male child used for sex work
Allfather
-leader of the gods
The Apocalypse
-started during the age of sorcerers 500 years ago
-"a deadly spell split the silver mountain in two [...] turned a thousand men and women to ash, and that ash snowed down along the shore for ten days. When the ocean rushed in to fill the crater left by the spell, the water was black." -according to 'barbarian' myths
-mirrors an eclipse: first the black moon, second is 'a plague that will bring a long dark', third is 'a war that will burn a circle around the oldest kingdoms of man. When our monuments are reduced to rubble, the Gods will ascend from the Black Moon and begin their final battle."
-may be part of a cycle of "first is creation: then we prosper, then we preserve. Then decline. Finally, decay. The last cycle is a corrupted world, so far form the light. When this cycle collapses, the world folds in on itself. And then we begin again."
Florian's Life (File)
Magic had fallen from favor in the world some five hundred years ago and a hundred years before his birth had become outright illegal: any child to be found to have magical talent was to be killed and should be killed by their own family as a matter of stamping out magical blood. Adults found with magical talent would be found and killed or lobotomized. Florian survived mostly because his grandmother who was particularly fervent about such things had gone senile and because his parents were largely uninterested in their children. This was also a kind of imperialism as his country was under financial, social, and martial domination by the countries to the South who were especially vehement on this point.
Growing up a mage with a non magical family had several disadvantages: the first was seeing abominations and magical creatures that were the result of the magical devastation that had taken place five hundred years ago in his region. The second was that he was aware of the currents of magic and fate that were all around him in the world that said that the world was stuck in it's place in the cycle of rebirth: he grew up with the world screaming at him that it wanted to die, everywhere he looked, everything he did. He also grew up with the city patron of the goddess Hallandrette, goddess of the sea and of death whose job it was to usher in the beginning of the end of the world, and given that his family was the last of the noble houses still going that had founded the city (Elendhaven), this tie was significant.
He grew up in a large manor which had seen better days, and his father owned a textile factory in the city. His father was patronizing and took pride in actually talking to his workers, which is why he was one of the first people to fall ill with a plague that swept into the city. Because it was his father, the last old family in the city, it was declared a 'wizard' plague and Florian and his entire family were forcibly quarantined in their home with 0 evidence of anything.
His mother, in retaliation, locked the servants in the basement and when his father died, had her children help her throw his body down there; they had to hear the screams and dying cries. When their mother became sick, Flora thought to chop the infection off as it seemed centralized to her leg, which did not work. Florian was forced to euthanize his own mother by incinerating her from the inside out, a method he chose out of panic but also to preserve her beauty as it was the only thing she'd ever valued. This was also the event where it became clear that his sister was also ill. She died in his arms, and he, knowing of an old folk tale, carted her body to the shore and tossed it to the sea.
The reason he did this was that there was a tale that said that if a wretched soul offered up all that they loved to Halandrette, she would offer to them in reply a creature known as a hallankind: an immortal playmate and companion they could never lose. Florian, assuming the hallankind would take the form of his sister, was confused when he was given a boy with dark hair and the two parted ways for over 15 years before they met again.
But as for the plague, it raged through the city, decimating the population especially because it had never COME from the 'wizard baron' and his family, all of which died except for Florian, who was left in a house of the dead for two months by himself. Florian's dreams of being a doctor QUITE dead after that, he emerged as the only survivor and the city hated him for it, both because he HAD survived under those circumstances and because he was a mark of shame against them since they had been wrong about their source and it had caused even more suffering. Instead, the plague had come from the South, and there is some hints that it was purposeful as the Southern Nations used the weakness of the North to capitalize and cannibalize the industries and the wealth of the now-decrepit city.
This left Florian with a house full of dead people and nothing to help him, which was when he turned to sorcery. He used it to convince a distant relative to pay for his education which he turned to accountancy, science, and medicine. Once he returned to the city a man, graduated, he began working in an accounting house with two goals:
Destroy any ambition by a Southern investor to help build up or continue the major industries of Elendhaven AND destroy any attempt to revitalize the city from the inside out. He wished vengeance on the Southerners for their biological attack/opportunism (waiting until Elendhaven was weak before sending aid and doctors) and he wished vengeance on the people of Elendhaven for blaming his family. And for seven years, that's absolutely what he did, filling his own coffers with the remnants of those failures even as every major diplomat and businessman in the city swore by his work because no one could trace anything back to him, his advice, or his actions.
He was also, in this time, working on a plague. This plague, based on the one that had killed his family, was to restart the death of the world and bring about the End Times as he believed he had been chosen to do. Why, after all, would he be spared when his family all died? Why would he, the mage, live through that horror if not to understand what it is to watch the world rot around him, unable to properly die? He tested this on maids and servants as necessary though nothing was, to his mind, deadly enough and unstoppable enough for his needs.
This changed when he encountered a ruffian named Johann who held him at knifepoint and instead of requesting his wallet, insisted that that he make him his bodyguard. It turned out that Johann was the boy from 15 years ago, the hallankind that had been sent for him, and his unnatural vitality was exactly what he needed to magically transform his virus into an unkillable plague. Thus did he use magic (what he had been able to figure out for himself) and science together to craft a disease that would bring about the end of the world and he used a great banquet that he'd organized to spread it to every Southern businessman and major financial power in Elendhaven.
But alas, one of those he'd worked with had suspected him and had called in a mage hunter, a lovely girl whom Johann got a crush on. She came after him, especially after Johann killed someone whom she was closed to (not on Florian's orders, but he didn't particularly care other than inconvenience) and when Johann played with his food, for lack of a better word, knocked him out and went for Florian. Johann walked in to Florian at gunpoint and Johann's mishandling of the situation ended with Florian's guts blown out.
In Florian's dying moments, he imbued Johann with the last of his magic and strength and charged him to finish his work, to see the world ended and the cycle begun anew. That was when he showed up, against his will.