Introduction:
Howdy! Welcome to my side blog for my Caelum (and Caelum: Thornsweet) characters!
This is the home for all things Eirys, Frances, Aster, and Tempest—my persona, her doomed-by-the-narrative lover, my former persona, and my former persona’s baby mama Divine Patron/Curse Endower.
I hear that persona’s aren’t supposed to have lore, but rules are made to be broken. And unfortunately I simply Cannot Help Myself
Click here for a post collecting all current one-shots I have for this story in (more-or-less) chronological order
Continue below for: Synopsis, About Me, About My Characters, Fun Facts, and Tags:
Synopsis:
this is kinda long im sorry im trying to speedrun through a story and a half and i got a little fancy with it lmao. there are also hyperlinks throughout for points i've fleshed out in short stories etc for those who are curious
This is a story of fate, in more-or-less two parts. Of lovers kept apart, trapped together; trapped together, kept apart. Said story begins with the imprisoned Goddess of Storms, Tempest, who is a newcomer to morality as a concept. Said story also begins with a cursed elf, Aster, born with a star in her heart that endowed the gift of unbounded travel, and stole minute by minute of her life in return.
When Aster was young, the star in her heart was loose and uncontrollable, draining her life force as she Flickered between worlds. One of these Flickers lands her half-alive at the feet of Tempest, a mischievous goddess imprisoned in in what was supposed to be an impenetrable pocket dimension, banished from her pantheon for a trick taken too far. Seeking opportunity over humanity, Tempest takes the loose star in Aster's heart and contains it in a gemstone protruding from the elf's chest, exerting control over the magic. But not Aster's control: Tempest's. Tempest uses Aster and her starstone as a window to the outside world, with the latter none the wiser, flicking through realities like channels on a TV.
This comes to an end when Aster begins to dream of her other lives, breaking through the fog. She demands a reckoning with her "patron," who, after centuries of this, has started to feel quite guilty about the whole ordeal.
An uneasy agreement is made: no more Flickering without Aster’s say-so. No more being kept in the dark. No more lies. And in return, Aster would allow Tempest her company, would hear her input, would entertain her conversation.
Tempest, who we’ve established has finally started to develop a conscious after a few thousand years, holds up her end of the bargain admirably. As time passes on, Aster and Tempest’s relationship develops from puppet and puppeteer, to reluctant partners, to friends. To… well.
Just when Tempest gets used to working with Aster to choose where to go and what to do, their control over Aster's star starts to fail, causing her to Flicker without warning once more—and once more, putting her life in danger.
In a last-ditch effort to save Aster's life—and conveniently give up the power-imbalance Tempest has guiltily held over Aster for centuries—Tempest uses her godly magic to give sentience to the power within Aster's starstone, giving up her dwindling control over the magic in exchange for being able to reason with the magic itself. The result of that is Eirys: not quite woman and not quite beast, who for all of her alien features looks embarrassingly like if Tempest and Aster had been mixed in a bowl to make her. She has Aster's golden eyes and Tempest's cloud-like hair. Her hair is even permanently in Iridescence—her namesake?—because she was made in an act of Tempest's love for Aster.
Now that Aster’s autonomy was out of Tempest’s hands—even if not quite returned to her own—she felt safe to allow herself to nurture whatever it was she felt growing between herself and the goddess. She takes a retirement from adventuring to Tempest’s prison, more affectionately referred to as the Bubble, where the two of them attempt to get to know eachother without so many walls in the way.
Eirys, for her part, takes up the adventuring mantle in Aster’s stead, embarking on a quest to collect experiences. She’s always a touch away, though, connected no matter the distance to Aster’s starstone. As long as Eirys is near, the starstone is powered, and Aster can access her abilities. Its lucky for Eirys that Aster feels little need to travel these days, even if she still returns to the Bubble now and again to visit her makers. At long last things settle into place, and the unlikely family finds peace where chaos once reigned.
However, this is where that dratted more-or-less second part comes in.
When a cracked starstone alienates Eirys from her makers, unable to locate the Bubble without the connection, she finds herself stranded on a backwater plane known as Thornsweet. She finds her magic drained, leaving her stuck in an unfamiliar place and with a loose leash on her inner beast, with no way to contact Aster and Tempest, and no idea if they are okay.
Eirys not-so-peacefully bides her time, her magic slowly strengthening. When a year later she finally gathers enough magic to Flicker she enacts her plan—she’s going to slowly, tediously, tortuously hop from plane to plane in a direction, praying that it takes her closer to her family. She leaves Thornsweet behind—though not before making quite the reputation for herself to the neighboring towns as a wild, feral creature.
Half a century of yearly Flickers pass before Eirys realizes the fool she was. Thornsweet was unique in its loose Laws of the Land—though she had little magic at her disposal as she waited for it to recharge that first time, it was apparent to her regardless that there were none of the usual restrictions on her innate abilities that she had come to expect from her travels. And her Role was unique too, in its unimportance. She had traded a quiet life as an out-of-the-way menace of the woods for years of dodging starring Roles and high stakes plots. She needed somewhere quiet to think. To plan. To research instead of run.
So Eirys slowly, tediously, tortuously Flickers all the way back, dodging the same Roles and plots, finally returning to Thornsweet one hundred years later. It’s to her luck that she left the impression she did before leaving. As far as the superstitious townsfolk are concerned, she’d been terrorizing the woods all this time. They leave her alone to her work.
Mostly.
Frances Clearwater had been born in (on?) Thornsweet during the second half of Eirys’ doomed pilgrimage, and had grown up in the time it took for her to return. She’d lived her fair share of lives for her years—as a young girl she suppressed her interest in music to help her parents run their bakery, then begrudgingly passed on her knowledge to her baby brother, Fergus, when her parents decided they wanted him to inherit the business instead. At fifteen Frances ran off to become a knight out of a desire to choose a life for herself and to get the hell away from her parents and the choices they robbed of her.
She served the kingdom for ten years before a piece of paper once again robbed her of her autonomy: her little brother had run off to live his own life, just as she had, and her parents were too old to keep things afloat themselves. It was time for her to come home and take over the business, and wasn’t it a good thing they put in all that effort to teach her everything before Fergus was old enough after all?
Now Frances was 26, trapped once more in her hometown, her time divided between keeping the sleepy bakery afloat and caring for her aging parents. She was surprised to hear rumors on her return that the creepy old cottage she and Fergus had been scolded for playing near as children wasn’t abandoned after all, and that the White Lady had returned to claim it. Curiosity may kill the cat when Frances decides she needs to see this for herself, but she had no way of knowing the satisfaction—and worse things—this fateful meeting would bring.
About My Characters:
So ideally I’d use my own art here—however, I have been in and out of a drawing slump for aproximately a thousand years, and I can’t maintain enough momentum on the outs to make a full set of illustrations for all four of the characters so that its a cohesive set. So we usin’ Picrew today, courtesy of the lovely Maddel_art. I was able to get some pretty good approximations, but I do have art of most of these characters that is going to be more accurate
Aster (she/her) is strong, noble, and loyal. She has a dry sense of humor and a big sense of honor. She does forgive Tempest for what she did—eventually—and the two become some shade of friends, and Tempest no longer forces Aster anywhere or anywhen without her permission. Aster is in deep denial about the way her heart flutters when Tempest's apparition sidles up beside her, and the way her ears flush in pleasure when Tempest points out something about Aster that she never even noticed about herself.
Read more about Aster here!
Tempest (they/she) is playful, naive, and tends to be apathetic. They have lived without consequence for so long that the idea of her actions affecting others is only recently dawning on her. She still seeks her own pleasure and goals above most others—other than Aster. Now that she has Aster's tentative friendship, she will do whatever it takes to keep it.
Read more about Tempest here!
Having been a captive star for centuries, Eirys (she/her) is now enjoying her relative freedom. She is quick to follow her wants, but is friendly enough. She exhibits a healthy balance of Aster's nobility and courage, with Tempest's playfulness and cunning. Although now capable of having her own adventures, she has to return to Tempest and Aster now and again to rest in the starstone (failing to do so would result in ...difficulties, which is unideal, but she's also pretty fond of the two of them so she doesn’t mind too much).
Read more about Eirys here!
Frances (she/her) is your typical eldest daughter—she is all too good at giving more of herself than she had to give. It makes her a good big sister (and sometimes third parent) to her brother, a stellar knight, a good baker. All the while her passion for music remains in the background, untapped. She’s known for her quiet and sturdy nature, a firm believer in actions speaking louder than words. She’s also known for not leaving well alone things that are probably not good for her.
Read more about Frances here!
About Me:
its a really cute picrew so i decided i get one too lol
My name is Rebekah, but occasionally online I also go by Disaster (my go-to gamertag, and the name of this sideblog hehe), Merry (for my main blog), or Eirys (for my main sona)! I’m a young adult, queer, and use she/her pronouns.
You can find my main blog @merryweathermakes. There I post about my other creative projects, reblog posts about my interests, and continue to fumble my way through pretending I know how tumblr works (better late than never).
This is a safe space for those who need it, and an unsafe space for those people need safe spaces from! If you have to ask, I would take it as a sign.
Fun Facts:
Eirys and Aster fill “roles” in the worlds they visit, allowing their presences to be accepted there without question. This means that when one visits a world another has occupied before, their ‘stats’ for that world carry over to the next person playing that role, unless they choose to 'restart'--but that's a whole other can of worms
Aster only has magical powers when in contact with Eirys, or when Eirys is inside of her starstone. Otherwise she has no special powers, other than being able to telepathically communicate with a distant Eirys by touching the starstone embedded in her chest and thinking at her. Like a magical taxi service!
To get a little meta now, Aster was initially meant to be much more star-and-cloud themed when I first made her as my persona, as they’re both elements I really love in designs. When I realized a year later I had failed at that and she was very much all stars no clouds, I made Tempest—not as another sona, but just a compliment to Aster. Another year later I was motivated to make a new persona that combined the both of them, and Eirys was the perfect outcome of that.
Tags:
#iry speaks is for posts where i'm not yapping about anything particularly lore-heavy--think blog maintenance, sillies, what-have-you. no lore, no illustrations, no writing. sometimes me reacting to it though lol
#Eirys is for any posts heavily featuring Eirys, my primary persona
#Frances is for any posts heavily featuring Frances, Eirys' doomed-by-the-narrative lover (she puts the doomed in doomed yuri fr)
#Thornsweet is going to be a catchall for everything after the cracking of the starstone, and preceding the dooming of the yuri. It is the name of the town that Frances lives in, as well as the name of the plane she lives on (Eirys is only so creative, alright?)
#Aster is for any posts heavily featuring Aster, my former persona
#Tempest is for any posts heavily featuring Tempest, my former persona's baby mama divine patron
#Temper is their ship name, ooooh. This is for any posts that feature both Aster and Tempest
#Sketch is for any posts that contain unrendered illustrations of any character
#Illustration is for any posts that include rendered illustrations of any character
#Text is for any post that contains text, regardless of depth
#Snippet is for any lore-adjacent bits of writing that haven't been fleshed out--just slapped on a page for safe-keeping
#Story is for fleshed-out snippets, usually short stories that focus on characterization and whatnot
#Fanart is for any Caelum artwork I did not create. I don't have a lot of this yet, and a lot of what I do have is from ArtFight users who don't use Tumblr, and I don't feel comfortable reposting art that isn't my own and am too shy to reach out for consent lmao. SO, please please tag me if you draw my characters so I can reblog it! And in the meantime if you'd like to see some of those artfight attacks I'm rereferring to, you can find my account here!
