Cascala

Cascala is a character in The Vivacious Deadlock.

Description:
Cascala is of fairly average build for her race and gender, standing about 5'4" and neither noticeably slender or appreciably plump. She is considered quite beautiful in her own culture, with flawless olive skin, deep-brown almond-shaped eyes, and long, dark hair. In actuality, she would be merely pretty were it not for the fact that her station in life gives her the opportunity to augment her appearance with expensive clothing, cosmetics, and a general regal bearing.

She is dressed in opulent robes of cream and blues and bedecked in what amounts to a few pounds of jewelry[not pictured]. The fabric of her robes and tabard are heavily embroidered and beaded with swirling, flowing patterns reminiscent of waterfalls and waves; the faceted beads and metallic threads catch the light as she moves, giving the impression of water flowing down her garments. Cascala's vanity is one of the few excesses or luxuries she allows herself, and it shows in gold and sapphire.

Cascala's personality is perhaps to be expected, given her upbringing; she is haughty, serious, self-confident to a fault, and little interested in other people. She is also quite humorless and a perfectionist at any task she sets to. Those few people she has deigned (or been forced) to cooperate with find her difficult to work with, abrasive, and often dismissive of others' abilities. She expects the same competence from others that she forces from herself, and is extremely harsh when faced with mistakes or failures.

Weapons and Abililities:
As far as weapons go, the only one Cascala has on her person is her staff; its main role isn't even as a weapon, but as a way of powering, amplifying, or delivering spells, but if push comes to shove, it's still about four feet of tempered magesteel. She also has some experience with longbows, as is expected of anyone of even vague nobility, but is not particularly skilled nor even in possession of a bow.

The staff itself, as mentioned, is about four feet long and made of magesteel; magesteel is an unusual alloy discovered by Bellizhian artificers that essentially serves as a conduit and battery for magical energy. Unlike most inanimate objects, through which mana flows unimpeded, magesteel acts in much the way a magically-gifted living thing does; that is to say, it collects magical energy that passes through it, to be unleashed later as spells. In addition to the material's properties, a mage's staff is carved with runes in such a way that it augments their spellcasting abilities and can even store some preprepared spells; as such, a mage without their staff is still fully capable of spellcasting, but at a rather decreased power level. Finally (and most importantly to some mages), a staff can be used to deliver spells that would otherwise require the mage to touch their victim.

More important than her equipment are Cascala's abilities; trained nearly from birth to become the Grand Magus of Flow, she has a near-unsurpassed mastery of magic, especially that which relates to water. While the Bellezhian magic tradition is divided into six general disciplines, those six disciplines are further subdivided into countless specialties; Cascala showed talent for and developed her ability with weather magic, and it is spells that affect the weather that she prefers to turn to given the opportunity.

Even aside from those areas she is most skilled with, she is a capable and versatile mage; however, she tended to eschew studies like alchemy and other so-called ars physicas, dismissing them as "Marialite parlor tricks". For that matter, she has little knowledge and few skills outside the magical spheres, having been forced to focus on magecraft to the exclusion of all else. Without magic, she would only be as competent as an average well-educated person in her technologically-primitive home-plane.

Biography:
The nation of Bellizhi, by all rights, should have been a largely-unimportant minor player in the world stage; its position was strategically poor and unimportant, it lacked significant quantities of most resources, and its citizens spent far more generations in insular tribal warfare than its neighbors, leaving it culturally and technologically outstripped on all fronts. Bellizhi's unimportance and possible conquering would have been cemented were it not for one man: Bakir, the first Grand Magus.

Bakir was a powerful mage in his own right, but it's not that that he's remembered for; rather, it was his tactical expertise and skill with diplomacy that allowed him to eventually unite the forever-warring tribes of Bellizhi, organizing them under one flag and one nation. After a decade of constant warfare and political infighting, Bellizhi had finally left the dark ages, the way its neighbors had done so long ago.

What allowed the infant country to rapidly rise to global prominence in spite of its slow beginnings was Bakir's focus on the standardization of magic. He, unlike his contemporaries, recognized magic as the ultimate tool, rather than the ineffable art, quasidivine entity, or frightening mystery many considered it. While the average mage in another country was still toiling in an inefficient master/apprentice setup, Bakir was developing the first College of Magery, modeled after Marial's academic systems. He standardized the way magic was studied and taught, introduced novel concepts of magical theory, and made some study compulsory to all citizens.

The end result was a nation with power unrivaled by any other; where one army might be able to entice a handful of hermitic hedge-wizards to supplement its forces, every Bellizhian soldier could hurl fireballs and lightning bolts, and their generals could boil away oceans and topple mountains. One by one, civilizations fell, and Bellizhi became the Bellizhian Empire.

Their success ingrained the system into Bellizhian culture. Generations passed; leadership of the empire was still officially in the emperor's hands, but everyone knew the true power lay in the Collegiate Council. The Grand Magi of Flow, Heat, Flux, Terra, Sight, and Life not only ran the College of Magery, but had their fingers in every major political event in the Empire's history. It wasn't necessarily a good system, but it worked, and the Empire prospered.

Then, 32 years ago from the Bellizhian perspective, the Grand Magus of Sight was struck with a vision: the Grand Magus of Flow would be plucked from their world by the hand of a vengeful god, pitted against seven others so stolen for the god's amusement. At that point, the vision split in two; in one version, the Grand Magus was victorious, and the Empire's reign continued; in the other, the Magus fell, and his death so far separated from their world shattered the flow of mana. Magic receded from the world, and the Empire went with it; an age of darkness and war followed.

Three days after the Grand Magus of Sight received her vision, the Grand Magus of Flow died.

The Council scrambled to pore through the future and determine who the Magus of Flow would be at the time of the god's game. After a week of rituals and bickering, it was revealed that a woman who was currently an infant would be that mage. The Emperor ordered that she be taken in by the council and made into the perfect spellcaster in preparation for the battle that would decide his empire's future.

And taken in she was; from that moment, Cascala experienced scarcely one moment that wasn't dedicated to turning her into the grandest Grand Magus the Empire had ever seen. Even before she could walk or speak, her every waking moment was filled with old men and women in robes reading her spell-theory, showing her cards with runes embossed on them, and being subjected to experimental mana infusions. As she grew, this lifestyle was refined and intensified, honing her magical ability but leaving her little more than a thinking tool.

The day of reckoning approached; on the morning she was destined to be stolen from Bellizhi, she awoke, bedecked herself in her most stunning robes and jewels, fetched the staff that had been crafted over a period of ten years specifically for this purpose, and entered the Grand Magi's ceremonial ritual chamber. She sat cross-legged in the center of an elaborate pentagram, meditating under the gazes of the other five Grand Magi. At about noon, the Magi momentarily felt a slight presence at the back of their minds; after that, they were struck blind for several seconds. Most called out, but there was no response from Cascala.

When their vision returned, the pentagram was empty, and they knew their fates were about to be decided.

Theme Song:
On Occasion Aflame by Rational Thought Process