VIOLET DACEY, mage

[attr="class","qty"]"ever changing, the clock ticks on."

[attr="class","bxy"][attr="class","bb"]When she is born, she hears a song - a lullaby, bittersweet and melodic - hummed from the deep vocal chords of her mother. It imprints itself into her memory, searing hot, sweeping away the coarse faces of her parents with its silk-like tune. Sound comes first, sight second. By the time color and light surface to her world, she has already passed them over, in favor of the steady tune that wreathes around her like a protective cloak.

Time passes steadily. She grows, it grows with her, different each time she hums it, changed every time she taps out the beat with her fingers without realizing it herself. Purity, untainted with words, it holds endless meanings, questions that will most likely never be answered. Her father is gone long hours, comes home bearing a stench of alcohol and noise that suffocates the air around her. Perhaps that's why she spends long hours at the bar, where the noise cancels out into a buffer as she strums steady melodies on her harp. They are rugged, ragged travelers and beer enthusiasts and she finds a sense of calm around them that magnifies and grows as the clock moves in its unrelenting path.

(tick, tock)

The boulder gains speed, rolling down a steep hill that gets steeper until its practically vertical. She discovers magic at thirteen, healing at thirteen, the circle at thirteen. She is glad - relieved, perhaps - that she possesses the skills necessary to learn healing. At least this way, she has her own place in the circle. She drifts in and out of fits of feeling homesick and ambitions to help those out there that cannot help themselves. In her dreams, the deep rumble of her mother's voice echoes, nursing the day's new wounds when she thinks her daughter isn't looking. She does not remember when the spirit came to her, only the conflict she feels as to whether it is a blessing or a curse that ingrains itself deeper than the melody she never forgets.

They mark her as dangerous when it's is found out, the adolescence that harbors the ability to bring malevolent spirits from across the veil. A harrowing is denied - she has seen them, of course, the circle has quite a few tranquil, and it is known that after the rite, she can no longer dream. Her mother's voice, the song's meaning will shatter into a million pieces that scatter and vanish with the wind and she cannot dream.

(tick, tock, tick-)

The day of her rite is the day she dies.

(And yet, the clock ticks on and on and on.)

A little hedge mage once told her that surviving is everything in this world. He teaches her tricks, tactics, how to hide and kill from the shadows. She flees from place to place, healing and poisoning, bringing people together while breaking apart herself in her web of contradictions and lies. The steady beat of the lullaby goes on to the ticking of an invisible clock. When will hers end?

(tick, tick, tock, tick)

LIST OF TALENTS: healing aura, revival, spider shape, flying swarm

LIST OF SKILLS: improved survival, improved poison-making

SPECIALIZATION: spirit healer + shapeshifter