“— i saw the world i had walked since my birth and i understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.”
DOSSIER ⟢ PINTEREST ⟢ WANTED CONNECTIONS [ TBA, here’s the GOOGLE DOC! ]
TROPES: besties, let me fill this in later, i’m just trynna get this out TV PARALLELS: read the above line, lol
NAME: Lilith Rhian Gaumond ⟢ lilith— meaning “belonging to the night,” comes from the Akkadian word lilîtu, the feminine form of a word meaning “demon” or “spirit.” ⟢ gaumond— a surname of German origin, meaning “death in a battle.” AGE: 26 ( well, she’s been 26 for a good half a century; is really 78 ) OCCUPATION: Archivist for the Talbots CIRCLE: Night
THE STORY THUS FAR...
The Gaumonds were a prestigious family of Wizards before the fall of their estate, claiming to have descended from Perenelle Flamel herself— at the very least, they descended from one of her previous marriages, before she’d even met the creator of the Philosopher’s Stone. Perenelle had left her first and only son with his father, to be forgotten by history as she herself had been, though Durham Gaumond had endured.
Magic came easy for a man whose own parents had been so entrenched in these ways. While he could never hope to master the sorcery of his maternal half, his own father had taught the man all he could from his own ancestors. His was a lineage of healers, and his children and their children would continue this tradition for centuries before the birth of Lilith. She was a disruption to this working system.
But before she’d bastardized the magic that flowed through her veins she thrived in it.
Lilith had not been allowed to go to public school with the other children, her parents preferring home-schooling so that she could properly be taught. Hours were spent with classes in casting, ritual, history, and spells. The eldest daughter of the Gaumonds was a special sort…a prodigy that seemed to have more potential than her own father, the magic of Durham coursing through her veins with a fervor they hadn’t seen in years.
Her mind was constantly filled with her studies, and when it was left with its own thoughts, hers turned into a battleground, simple and complex all at once because she was unsure of how to marry the person she was supposed to become and the person she truly was on the inside: ravenous for a knowledge denied to her, needing all that Perenelle had kept from Durham.
Journals had been passed from parent to child for all these years, detailing the bitterness felt by their ancestor in being abandoned, the determination to surpass the Flamel name and the yearning for more forbidden fruit.
While her parents used the majority of these ramblings as a cautionary tale ( taking whatever teachings they could and attempting to redact the man’s more pernicious recordings ), Lilith could not be kept from the words on the weathered pages of those journals. She’d convinced herself there was a code, some secrets left to be discovered— perhaps she was right, but no one had ever listened.
As the years passed, her parents become busier with her younger sibling— if Lilith had been a prodigy, Levi was a savant. Better still, he took after Durham in the ways that mattered, and abandoned those that didn’t.
The siblings took very different paths then, with Levi becoming everything his parents wanted, and Lilith becoming this recluse, looking for something no one believed in. Flamel had his eternity among the living but his wife was said to have had some mastery over the dead. If she’d been descended from Perenelle, then why wouldn’t she strive to do the same?
Lilith had taken to visiting seats of power, finding tomes of years past and devouring their contents, making copies of the pages so that she could pour over them again and again and again. She was convinced Durham had left a codex of sorts, and with time she’d uncovered the secrets of Perenelle and the necromancers that came before her.
Still, the years would show that some things are forbidden for a reason— even with an affinity for the dead, she was a healer. Flowers grew wherever she’d tried to raise the dead ( animals, because she’d never come across anything else, and she’d kept far from cemeteries ).
Her first true test came with the most terrible caveat; Levi had taken to pixie dust and he’d taken to it so thoroughly that it’d taken his life in return.
As he laid in her bathtub, she’d moved as if on autopilot, filling the tub with water and herbs, slicing into the palm over her hand and pouring the ichor over her brother’s corpse. She’d chanted the words found in the old texts, in some archaic language she’d yet to decode in its entirety, but she didn’t have time to study, not for this test.
It seemed to work at first; the color returned to him and his lungs seemed to be filling with air once again— her own body and mind were filled with a feeling of vertigo. Her vision had blurred but she kept steady, chanting and chanting until the world around her went dark. When Lilith woke again, she was met with a worried younger brother, trying to shake her away and mumbling about how she was cold, still, not breathing.
She didn’t believe him, she was living in this moment and so was he? She’d discovered Perenelle secrets so why was Levi crying? Why had he flinched when she moved?
Lilith should’ve gone and read through the texts again, had she read the fine print she would have understood that necromancy was predicated on the transfer of one’s life force, and she’d given Levi all of hers. How she was still living? No one could say.
But she’d given her brother life again, right? Well Levi had gone relinquished it once more, wasting her life force as he had wasted his.
SMALLER TIDBITS!
— Lilith is the queen of making a small apartment look like an Italian villa for some reason. No really, with the simple but homey furniture and the color palette it’s very chic and very much the opposite of who the Undead Archivist has become as of late. It’s a room on the top floor of her building so she gets lots of privacy, and enough space for her to be comfortable. — Also this girl can eat ( hence buying out the meat market every week ). — Rises with the sun on average, even when she gets to bed at ungodly hours. — Her style is interesting, it’s this chic and grey/sepia mess of different things but her definite staples are gold and pearls, as well as sneakers and silk skirts ( and let’s not forget a cardigan with just about nothing under ). When she’s wearing pants, they’re the baggiest thing, and she loves turtlenecks and spends her time looking for blazers in the mens section.
Once again, more to come!
