Application -- Deerington

[singularwidower]

IN CHARACTER

Character Name: Daemon Sadi
Canon: The Black Jewels Series by Anne Bishop
Canon Point: Within Daemon’s timeline roughly 15 years after the death of his wife, before he’s officially High Lord. Bookwise: after the first chapter of the short story “The High Lord’s Daughter” in the Twilight’s Dawn anthology.

In-Game Tattoo Placement: On his right upper chest, just below his clavicle: a thick knot of intertwined antlers mimicking the facets of a gemstone.
Current Health/Status: Hale and Healthy. He fell asleep in his own bed.
Apparent Age: 32
Actual Age: ~1800
Species: Hayllian/Dhemlan (Human)

History: (cw: child abuse, rape and rape themes, murder, & sexual slavery) Wiki Link
Hometown/World: Daemon currently resides in SaDiablo Hall outside of Halaway in Dhemlan, Kaeleer. Kaeleer is the Shadow Realm of the Realms of the Blood. The world consists of three realms (Light/Shadow/Dark), of which Kaeleer is the central. The people there are separated into Blood (of which Daemon is one) and landen (normal, unpowered humans). The Blood have been gifted great psychic power in return for acting as guardian and caretakers of the physical world. Blood society is firmly matriarchal and very hierarchical, based around a combination of Jewels, caste, and social rank. Within Daemon’s lifetime, there has been a societal revolution, purging from the realms those for whom consent was considered irrelevant. Though this purge happened nearly a hundred years prior to when Daemon arrives in Deerington, the formerly destructive and abusively-entitled society he grew up steeped within left its scars on all of the Blood and landen still living.

Personality:

Loved and Lost: (cw: death and grieving)

Daemon spent hundreds of years in anticipation of becoming the lover of Witch, the Realm’s messiah-figure. When she finally rose to power, they married and lived happily for seventy years. However, she was from a short-lived race, with a lifespan like an average human’s, while Daemon was long-lived. He remains devoted to her. In the fifteen years since her death (as of Deerington-ation), he has gone through the motions of relationships, seeking only temporary companionship and sex. Basically, he’s not over her and at this point in his canon, there’s no sense that that will ever change. Jaenelle’s life was a flash in the pan from a long-lived perspective, but that flash was what he was made for.

Biggest Fish in the Pond: (cw: sexual references)

Daemon is the most powerful and highest ranking person in his canon, besides his now-dead wife. He’s a Warlord Prince (the highest warlord caste) as well as a Black Widow (of which he’s the only warlord born as such), he’s the only wearer of the Red to Black (making him exponentially more powerful than the next-lightest person in the realms), he’s the heir apparent of the previous Most Powerful Personage (his father) who is gearing up to pass the reins, he’s pretty much already started becoming the High Lord of Hell (ruling the demons and such of the entire Dark Realm), and has already taken over most of the day-to-day stewardship of the Dhemlan territory in both the realms of Shadow and Light. Sleep is for the weak.

Basically, he’s very shiny, and has been since birth. His experience has been that pretty much everyone wants a piece of him--usually sexually, but money, influence, prestige, and favor all come in close second. This has made him chronically suspicious of strangers’ intentions and actively terrible at forging all but the most superficial of connections with anyone but family. Additionally, the fact that his concerns are so radically different than most of the population leaves him a little out of touch. With the added complication that he’s an introvert, he has to force himself to interact face-to-face, and he’s awful at it; he will default to a polished mask of politeness and not invest himself at all. Lastly, he’s used to getting away with a certain amount of casual hauteur, assured that the inherent danger of who he is psychically apparent to all other Blood. He’s always been the big fish, and no longer being one/not having people afraid of him/not being able to throw his weight around always knocks him for a loop (read: his wife could kick his ass in spades).

Bad Touch and No Safewords: (cw: abuse, rape, sexual slavery.)

Much of Daemon’s life after his maturity and prior to his marriage is trauma-shaped. Fitted with a Ring of Obedience (evil magic cockring) while he was still relatively young and hadn’t yet grown into his power , he was then subject to whoever held the controlling ring. Disobedience meant pain via the Ring. His purpose, according to the evil queen who controlled him , was to bring his bloodline’s power to her favored witches, and she repeatedly attempted to force him to bed any number of women over the course of centuries. These experiences as a sex slave left him with an entire phonebook’s worth of triggers, most of which understandably revolve around physical abuse, relationships, sex, and consent.

Adaptation to a life without a great deal of agency resulted in Daemon’s responses toward anxiety or threat to be unilateral controlling behavior, intimidation, and violence. This carries past his enslavement in sometimes maladaptive ways. Specifically, he has a breaking point that results in murder, and he is an accomplished killer, by turns messy and discrete as the situation requires. Prior to that point, however, he adopts the persona of ‘the Sadist.’ This persona acts as a major defense mechanism that leaks over into other aspects of his life, and is--in essence--a form of brutal retaliation packaged within the framework of ostensibly playing by the rules. A ‘they want pleasure, I’ll give them pleasure, but they’re not going to fucking like it,’ so to speak. This retributory persona is Daemon granting himself blanket permission to exact the price of his enslavement from the flesh of his captors in the most mind-fucky ways possible. This mechanism becomes a go-to tool in his toolbox, and more than once he has damaged his relationships by acting upon a perceived attack with the Sadist without realizing that his vulnerabilities leave him open to gravely misreading situations.

Life Turned Up To Eleven: (cw: abuse, in-world equivalent of psychosis)

Daemon has no chill. This explained as due to his caste as a Warlord Prince. He’s protective and loyal, and when he’s in, he’s all in. He will give his body, soul, Jewels and everything he owns and is for those to whom he has committed himself: his family. This applies primarily to his wife, but if any of them are in trouble, his goals, reputation, and the world be damned. The two defining examples of this are when he gave up a solid attempt at ending the Big Bad’s reign of terror far before the main series started at the threat that he would be sent his brother in pieces, and when he lied to friends and family to embody the Sadist in order to buy Jaenelle time to do her societal revolution thing. When down to the final decision, he will accept the consequences of his commitments with eyes wide and shoulders squared.

And so the concept of a half-measure is completely foreign. Unfortunately, this applies to negative aspects of his personality as well, namely his temper. He will swing between his baseline and the ‘killing edge’ at the wrong word, wrong action, or wrong look. Part of this is not just caste, however, but another aspect of his layers and layers of defense mechanisms; it’s not paranoia if everyone's out to get you, and he has well over a thousand years of abuse to contend confirm his wanted status. Plus, though he’s had practice at self-control since escaping his abusers, his ability to leash his temper or not see a threat in every stranger is still wobbly.

Then too, Daemon went through a lengthy psychotic episode where he broke with reality--though in-world this follows a somewhat different paradigm. Plagued by hallucinations exacerbated by his psychic ability, his recovery required external intervention by someone he trusted implicitly as well as a lengthy recovery period both before and after the hallucinations ended. The imagery associated with this type of of break (called becoming lost in the Twisted Kingdom), is that of a shattered crystal chalice pieced back together one shard at a time. Around the rim are jagged edges, and while this specific imagery applied to his wife in the books, it applies equally well to Daemon himself. His chalice remained fragile for years. Even ‘now,’ he has landmines and triggers that, when tripped even accidentally, require careful and compassionate handling lest his normal emotional amplification allow his defense mechanisms to do more harm than good.

Injustice Cannot Stand: (cw: slavery)

The time Daemon spent as a child being taught about morality by his father and mother made a lasting impression upon him. Combined with his experiences as he grew into an adult, he eventually considered himself to be fighting a war against the witch who denied him his family and enslaved him, Dorothea. To this end, he has a drive to right wrongs, large and small, and he’s willing to back up that drive with all of the prodigious power he has at his disposal. Long-lived as he is, he’s ended up becoming a mysterious mentor figure to literal generation of short-lived people in need as Hayll’s influence marched its way across the Realm of Light.

This also ties in with his ability to commit with every ounce of his being as well as his conviction that he’s made to be a protector. He’s got a soft spot for the vulnerable, and if he’s able and has the resources to spare, he’s illustrated repeatedly that he will do what he can to the point of pushing his limits to make sure that the vulnerable are taken care of.

Before and After:

Being married and among the safety of family (both found and blood) helped sand down some of Daemon’s roughest edges, but he had more years of no-Janelle than he had with her. A lot of the worst of his negative or anti-social behaviors have been tempered by time and care, and yet still remain as part of his psychological makeup. Even so, he is in a much better place than he was, with a robust support structure of family and friends and a powerbase that has been long-established and remains relatively unthreatened.

Generally, Daemon’s in an okay place, despite his lingering grief, though he’s currently more going through the motions than he is thriving.

Personal Moral Codes:

• Loyalty and commitment are his top priority (see above).
  
• Personal agency and consent are a big deal--not just because he adheres to Protocol (the Blood’s formal rules to keep consent front and center), but because he knows what it’s like when the power differential between people makes things go bad. His experiences from when he was not able to exercise his agency informs his actions when he’s the one who could abuse his power without breaking a sweat.
  
• Retaliation must be swift and brutal, and final solutions are always on the table. Sometimes he starts fights, but even when he doesn’t, he will always end them. Even odds if this results in bodies.
  

Insecurities/Personal Demons:

• Massive trauma and a significant number of triggers.
  
• Loneliness--part of him having loved and lost, yes. However, this loneliness is also part fatalism. He’ll be alone forever, because the one person who really understood him is dead, so everything else just might as well happen.
  
• Vulnerable when encountering new relationships that inch anywhere past acquaintance. He runs a constant litany of whether or not people see the ‘real him’ and understand he’s not the polished and polite person they think he is or whether or not they’re gold-digging.

Abilities/Powers/Weaknesses:

Abilities:

• Good at hand-to-hand and some weaponry, but doesn’t much care for it. Fairly good at business and finances, and delegating the operations of large organizations. Experienced in bed (*coughslegendarycoughs*). Very good at partnering with more straightforward and brash individuals and being the knife in the back while the quarry is distracted.
  

Powers:

• Theme: Psychic
  
• Concept: In Daemon’s canon, Craft is the in-world equivalent of science+magic, allowing recording devices and horseless carriages and large-scale limb reconstruction and fabricating life from dreams. This following limited list of powers are what I’d consider those that would be Daemon’s.
  
• All Craft is driven by psychic power provided by the character’s Jewels, making it temporarily finite, as the Jewels will refill over time once drained. Basic Craft is that which can use the body’s inherent power. Jewel Craft drains the jewels in greater or lesser proportions.
  
  
• Basic Craft (All Blood, inherent)
  
  Basic Craft encompasses the inherent magicality of the Blood. It’s all tiny stuff.
  
  • Vanishing and Calling — sending objects elsewhere and bringing them back into existence where you want them to be. Like telekinesis without the intervening travel through realspace.
    
  • Minor Telekinesis
    
  • Witchfire — the power itself is feeding the flame, and it burns out when no longer being fed.
    
  • Small-scope spells (warming, cooling, sealing of nicks and cuts)
  
  
• Telepathy (All Blood, inherent)
  • Can ‘link’ with others, creating a two-way thread that encompasses thoughts, words, and emotions.
  
  
• Psychic Scenting and Empathy (All Blood, inherent)
  
  • Can ‘breathe in’ psychic scents, getting a snapshot of age, caste, and gender, for the most part. Each individual has a particular psychic scent, and the darker they are the stronger their mental presence impresses itself upon their surroundings.
    
  • Can send out ‘probes’ to brush and penetrate other’s inner barriers of the mind, giving the prober a sense of emotions and surface thoughts of whoever they’re probing.
  
  
• Jewel Craft
  
  • Major Telekinesis
    
  • Passing objects through other objects—i.e. sending things out of phase, up to and including the living.
    
  • Locking doors and windows—Sealing portals with power so that only someone darker (or someone determined) can break the lock.
    
  • Shielding (Aural, Kinetic)—basically ‘bubbling’ someone—or lining walls or people with power—to prevent sound or force from penetrating.
    
  • Memory Storage (in crystals/gems/jewels) of images, voices, emotions, etc.
    
  • Airwalking—modified levitation based on creating the impression of surfaces to stand on.
    
  • Phantom hands and sensation inducement—Daemon uses these for sex, tbh.
    
  • Major Spellcraft (Seduction spells, temperature manipulation, strength manipulation, and emotion manipulation.)—Daemon’s good at people manipulation, but less good at other manipulations.
  
  
• Black Widow Craft (Daemon and other Black Widows)
  
  • Poison Expertise
    
    • All Black Widows have a ‘snake tooth’ beneath the ring finger of one hand. This is biological on Daemon’s part. Each lunar cycle (roughly) he must milk his poison sac and re-brew a poisonous concoction that will allow his body to synthesize fresh poison. If this does not happen, he risks blood poisoning, infection, and death.
      
    • Broad-spectrum poison resistance.
      
    • Brewing and administering.
    
    
  • Web-weaving—Using spidersilk on a frame, a Black Widow can weave spells and prophecy into free-standing constructs on closed power loops to various effect. Webs can be woven as traps for the mind, or if damaged can inflict pain or madness upon the culprit.
    
    • Illusion Webs—a web can be woven that will produce an illusion that can be worn or perform scripted actions.
      
    • Tangled Webs—webs of prophecy, incorporating past and future into a snapshot that can suggest courses of action or likely outcomes
      
    • Shadows—constructs that act as remote bodies for drivers in other locations, or mimic human bodies. Often can touch but not be touched. An upgrade of an illusion.
      
    • Autonomous spellcraft—webs sunk into locations or objects can be given contingency conditions. When those conditions are met, the spells woven into the web will active using the power provided during the weaving. Blood is often a trigger mechanism.
    
    
  • Walking the Twisted Kingdom
    
    • A Black Widow flirts with the edges of reality and can step from physical reality into what is called the ‘Twisted Kingdom.’ This is a place of visions, dreams, and reality-warping at right-angles to the physical. By utilizing the visions within the Twisted Kingdoms, Black Widows can discern truth and receive minor prophecy.
  
  

Weaknesses:

• Daemon’s impulses can be turned against him. His drive to protect those he’s decided require protection is a massive weak spot. This especially applies to his brother, but his entire family falls under this umbrella. However, when his wife was alive, he would consider it his duty to burn the world (including family) in her defense.
  
• His temper is beyond touchy, and he has a great deal of trouble controlling it without help or an anchor.
  
• This is an old trait of his, but he is prone to deliberately creating chaos when he’s feeling trapped and bored, especially at the expensive of his captors, as it gives him a sense of control over a situation.
  

Ability/Power/Magic Warping:

(A/N: I’d like to nerf Daemon pretty well into the ground, please, for ease of play and to lean hard on his current psychological makeup as very powerful and his prior experience with existing in a dreamstate.)

• Basic Craft and Daemon’s Snake Tooth are inherent biological abilities and subject to minor warping. For Basic Craft, this means intermittent failure of his abilities. For his Snake Tooth, this means struggling to keep up with his need for poison and a strange desire for more than he’s ever needed before.
  
• Psychic Scenting and Empathy primarily blocked: As psychic scents are a Blood trait, unless a character is telepathic or otherwise psychic, Daemon can’t get a read on them. He experiences a dreamlike inability to correctly scent caste, gender, emotions, or anything else. Even other psychic characters feel strange and fuzzy, and Daemon feels like he’s slowly going scent-blind.
  
• Telepathy interference and limitations: Daemon can still link with the psychic/telepathic characters, forming the usual two-way thread, but its prone to interference like he’s never experienced before. He cannot link with landens, and if he tries by habit, all that gets through is a headache for both of them, static, and maybe a couple of words.
  
• Jewel Craft is nightmarishly limited: all Jewel Craft is based around Daemon’s Jewels, but after he does a spell or two (that may not correctly fire) he discovers that his Jewels refill exponentially more slowly, thus becoming a near-finite resource and terrifying him with what would happen if he unleashed his power and drained them. Any spells or craft that use his Jewel and their reservoir of power, such as those above Basic Craft, may or may not take hold, and if they do, he feels as if he is using his power by reaching through warped glass and mist to the point he grows physically cold if he tries for too long.
  
• Daemon’s Black Widow craft goes...wonky: anything capable of independent movement, such as illusions and shadows, flicker hauntingly and take on seemingly minds of their own, progressively outstripping his control until he destroys the web that created them. If he tries autonomous spells, the triggers do not set properly and the blood requirement is much higher—but this is his only reliable method of casting anything. Weaving Tangled Webs for prophecy just gives him nightmares that linger.
  
• Daemon honestly can’t tell whether or not he’s dreaming, walking the Twisted Kingdom, or something else. Even if the Twisted Kingdom would still help him, there’s no way for him to discern if he’s using his caste abilities or it’s an aspect of Deerington.
  

Inventory:

• Inventory Item 1: Daemon’s Jewels Red and Black (Black Pendant and Ring, Red Pendant and Cufflinks.)
  
• Inventory Item 2: Trunk with a single set of clothing (black slacks, white silk shirt, black socks, dress shoes, undergarments)
  
• Inventory Item 3: Eyeliner
  
• Inventory Item 4: Travel web-weaving kit (three small skeins of spidersilk, one small weaving frame.)
  
• Inventory Item 5: Travel poison kit (two common poisons, his reserve of his own poison, a small glass beaker and a glass stirring rod.)
  
• Inventory Item 6: Cradle set (board game with cards, tokens, and lots of variations)
  

(A/N: All objects he would normally have stored Vanished are completely gone.)

Writing Samples:

Sample #1:

Empty eyes stared at him from the husk that had once been a friend, sticky warmth trailed across his throat like fingers, and thick silks from a spider the size of his carriage trapped his limbs and kept him from drawing a full breath. Daemon gasped awake to find his bedding in tatters, his sheets knotted and slashed and the room stinking of night-sweat and terror.

Daemon breathed a curse and leaned back against his headboard. His heart still raced, his nightmares clinging to his thoughts. Rubbing a hand down his face, he panted. So much for sleep. Worse still was the lingering fear in the air. It drove him from his bed and into his robe. He’d sooner brave his housekeeper and sneak into the kitchen than try and return to sleep just yet.

He let himself out of his room without probing the hallway first. When he turned from closing his door, he startled at the sound of footsteps.

Sample #2:

A deep chill preceded Daemon as he swept toward the battlefield. That his chosen field was the receiving room of the Queen of Amdarh made little difference. Painting the walls of her palace with blood would make only the barest dent in his temper. With a contemptuous wave of his hand and a pulse of power, Daemon flung the heavy double-doors open and glided into the room.

“Lady,” Daemon said, his temper leashed but barely. He could not keep the chill out of his voice as he fixed the Queen with his gaze. “I received your letter.” He slid his hands into his pocket, shifting from a frontal assault to his preferred oblique approach. Smoothly, politely, he asked, “Did you expect agreement?”

OUT OF CHARACTER

Player Name: Axael
Player Age: 33
Player Contact: @axael on plurk or DM to axael or singularwidower on DW.

Other Characters In Game: None
In-Game Tag If Accepted: Daemon Sadi: Axael
Permissions for Character: Linked Here
Are you comfortable with prominent elements of fourth-walling?: Indeed!

What themes of horror/psychological thrillers do you enjoy the most?: The uncertain nature of reality and how permeable the psyche is. Not knowing what’s real and what is not real and having to navigate that anyway to reach a goal.
Is there anything in particular you absolutely need specific content warnings for?: Nope, I'm good!
Additional Information: I’m excited!