So I can unfurl the pretty flames
that have my arms
Which I will raise up to the sky
with a twisted smile
And I will sing "Glory Be"
and inside, whisper "help me please"
and shout out "Love, love, love"
For eternity
Oh what have I become
Helios had never been a cruel God. He’d been divine, and he was very, very old, and that came with a certain level of detachment. And usually, that was fine. People prayed to the distant sun god, and they left offerings, and Helios didn’t need more than that.
And then there was Desert Bluffs, and more notable, there was StrexCorp, who had taken his name, and the faith in a sun god, and twisted it to fir their own ends, twisting him with them. he couldn’t burn the city to the ground, or well; he could, he had the power, but he didn’t want to. He had mad this place, and the city had spiralled out of his control, when he hadn’t been looking, but it was still something he didn’t want to see razed to the ground.
the people didn’t believe in Helios, or Ra, or any of the other hundreds of iterations he had been, they believed in the Smiling God, and so he took a mortal form, and played priest in front of a town of people that prayed to him with hollow and broken voices, and a faith that wavered on the line between real and false.
He sings the hymns about the Strex the Smiling God, and he extols what will become of them if they work, and work, and never stop working until they are consumed, and he hates every minute of it.
This wasn’t faith, wasn’t worship, it was something else. Something far, far worse. The people of Desert Bluffs pray to a real god, under false pretenses and all the hymns are just euphemisms for StrexCorp. But this was his fault, his mess to fix, his city to burn if it came to that. (He wonders some days, if he’ll one day become the god they pray to. He worries that the only reason he isn’t is because he took a mortal form to stop it).
if they had a kid - Matvei/Holly, Helios/Holly, Mikhail/Tomas, Matvei/Tomas
Send in two characters || @halcyonterror
There’s enough kids, and each of their bios is long enough that i’m just gonna put them all under a read more.
Matvei/Holly
Name: Evangeline Sofia Anastasia Halley
Gender: female
General Appearance: Evangeline looks so, so much like her mother. The same colouring, the same shape of the eyes. The height that certainly isn’t tall, but isn’t short either. But Evangeline is sharp in a way that Holly isn’t. Nails, and wrist movements, and clothing with perfectly tailored corners and creases.
Personality: Evangeline is sharp, and cruel, and exactly what Strex wants. She’s a lawyer who can spin the facts until the defendant is lost in a web if truth, and she takes after her father. She’s kind, if odd until your purpose to her is fulfilled, and then she’s calm and cruel, and more than happy to send you off to the re-educators.
Special Talents: Evangeline isn’t actually anything other than human, so she has no interesting supernatural powers, and working for Strex means there’s very little downtime, but she has an uncanny ability to replicate origami by de-contructing the steps inside her head.
Who they like better: Matvei
Who they take after more: Matvei
Personal Head canon: Evangeline takes better to the fall of Strex than her father. She still struggles, but she is nothing if not capable, and more than ready to come out on top. For the first while, it’s mostly just pretending, and trying to deal with withdrawal from the Strex medication, and the variety of conditioning that had been her whole life.
Face Claim: Kacey Rohl
Helios/Holly
Name: Alaric Jeremiah Leix
Gender: male
General Appearance: Alaric takes after Helios in terms of appearance, though some of the divine edge is missing. He still looks like he’s a thousand miles away most days, but his eyes while odd, are more because of the seemingly empty way he can state than any actual feeling that they’re seeing into your soul. His hair is blonde, though no where near as white as Helios’, and the same sharp features are his father’s also. Some of his finer features though, are his mother’s; the curve of his lips, the shape of his hands, the pure fact of mortality.
Personality: Alaric is distant from the world like so many prophets are. Partially, it’s to try and avoid attachments when you see how wrong it all goes, and partially, it’s because people don’t like the strange child who sees too much, and knows too much, and seems to have a stare lost somewhere in space. Alaric is quiet, and hauntingly aware of the world around him. He helps Holly run the bakery, the repetitive motions of kneading bread and the precise measurements is both familiar and comforting.
Special Talents: Alaric is, for all he is still very much mortal, he is still half God. he can’t live forever, though he doesn’t tend to get sick as often, and perhaps the thing that causes him more issue is the gift of prophecy. Alaric can see a person’s future of he touches them, and occasionally, he’ll stare into space, seeing things that are yet to be. He wears gloves to cut down on the personal things he sees.
Who they like better: Holly
Who they take after more: both, but mostly Helios
Personal Head canon: If Helios runs hot, Alaric runs cold, but in the sort of way that rises goosebumps on your skin, and makes people think of lightning and running your hands over fleece blankets in the dry summer heat and watching the shocks fly. He seems unstable in the world, like he’ll just vanish into the mist one day. On days like those, he tucks himself away in a corner of the bakery kitchen, and kneads and makes until he feels grounded and human again.
Face Claim: Gerhard Freidl
Matvei/Tomas
Name: Melchor Vladilen Halley
Gender: male
General Appearance: Melchor takes more after Tomas in terms of appearance. He’s far less angular than Matvei is, but his features are narrower than Tomas’. His colouring is largely Tomas’, though his hair is dyed an ashen grey colour most of the time, and his eyes, while not quite Matvei’s, are closer to his than Tomas’. He’s an awkward collection of gangly limbs, though since joining track and getting into the pole vault and high jump, he seems far more secure in his own body.
Personality: Melchor is a bit of a flirt, and while smart, he doesn’t much want to enter science as a career. He writes poems, and music, and when he’s not working through chords on his guitar, he can usually be found running endless laps in the school field. Melchor is an idealist, and a romantic at heart, and tries to live his life like he’s the star in one of those summer teen movies.
Special Talents: People look at Melchor and they see a star track athlete, and a musician that writes love songs, so it always surprises people when he says something related to a complex math or science like it’s nothing. He might not want to do it as a career, but he pays attention, and he’s really quite good at chemistry.
Who they like better: Tomas
Who they take after more: Tomas
Personal Head canon: Melchor doesn’t have many memories of Matvei, and the few he does are from when he was still young enough for Matvei to fall asleep on the couch in the lab, to the sound of Matvei singing lullabies. Some of them were ones from when he was young, and others were ones put out by Strex, praising the Smiling God. Mostly, he knows that Matvei was a scientist, and that Melchor shares his last name, but Tomas doesn’t like to talk about him much.
Face Claim: David Carrera
Mikhail/Tomas
Name: Valeri Raphael Corvin Bell
Gender: male
General Appearance: Valeri takes after both his parents in his appearance. His colouring is like Tomas, though his hands, and the more angular features belong to Mikhail. He’s tall; taller than Mikhail, and he’s been wearing glasses since he was a child, even if not all the time.
Personality: Valeri is driven to excel, and does so, though it comes with nights spent hunched over his desk, tired eyes trying to read textbooks from the light offered by his table lamp, with hands and wrists that have cramped from coping over names, and dates, and scientific discoveries first onto paper, on then onto his screen. He’s charming, and suave, though not nearly as much of a flirt at Tomas was.
Special Talents: Valeri is incredibly talented at research and essay-writing. He can type down information in a methodical and mildly interesting way, but when it comes to having original ideas he struggles, though he’s good at taking an idea and making it his own. He really loves Alternate History Week, and it ties in nicely with his love for science, and history.
Who they like better: Mikhail
Who they take after more: Tomas
Personal Head canon: When Valeri is older, he ends up petitioning the City Council to let him become a librarian, and to try and modernize the library system. It’s... not a winning fight, but it’s also a task he’s determined to succeed at. He’s been working with Tamika Flynn to see a change in the way Night Vale views books.
Empty room, I'm empty too
Everything reminds me of you
So many things I shouldn't have missed
The more that I push and the more you resist
It's easy to see its for the best
When you want more while you leave me with less
I know you're fine but what do I do?
Kevin dreams in colour- he’s always had dreams that seemed too vivid upon waking, being in the Desert Otherworld only makes it worse. He learns how to imagine a life in real-time. One where he’s not alone, and there are people around that care about him- him, and not what he provides to the growing Desert Bluffs Too.
He has a house he’s barely entered since Carlos left, and a radio station that’s mostly just empty walls and a few pieces of messily assembled broadcast equipment. he makes up most days to find he’s fallen asleep with his head pillowed on his arms at the desk.
In his dreams, it’s like the imaginings but better, he can’t be taken out of them. Sometimes it’s Carlos or Cecil, or both of them (those are always the best, and the ones he hates waking from the most). And there’s the ones with Helios. Those ones always seem to be the most exhausting ones, even though they rarely seem like more than sitting on a sand dune and talking. (the air always smells of petrichor, and the sand is fine and slippery int he way it always was after a storm).
But it’s the desert around Desert Bluffs, and Desert Bluffs when he looks over the sand. It flickers between what it looked like when he was young, and what it looked like at the end with every second or third glance. it’s not Desert Bluffs Too, or the mountain with the lighthouse. The sun is always just below the horizon (rising or setting, Kevin can’t tell), and all the light and heat in the dreams always comes from Helios beside him.
“You could come home.” Helios says, and Kevin knows, knows without a doubt, that he can’t. he failed them. It was his city, and he let Strex come and break them, and he... he helped them.
At some point, the dreams lapse into something that’s mostly silent, and he falls onto Helios’ lap. (Still warm, like he contained all the warmth of the sun inside him. Kevin doesn’t understand why his brain chose the priest to be his image of... regret maybe, some emotion he doesn’t quite know how to describe in words). He falls asleep when the rain starts rolling back in, and then he wakes up in his empty office in an empty radio station in an empty desert. Waking up feels wrong, like he’s in the wrong skin, in the wrong city, and it’s wrong, because this is supposed to be home now.
All peoples are driven
to the point of eating their gods
after a time: it’s the old greed
for a plateful of outer space, that craving for darkness,
the lust to feel what it does to you
when your teeth meet in divinity, in the flesh,
when you swallow it down
and you can see with its own cold eyes,
NAME :: Helios (primarily), The Smiling God
NICKNAME :: n/a
FANDOM :: Welcome to Night Vale, mythology
GENDER :: male... currently.
ORIENTATION :: pansexual, polyamorous
BIRTHDAY :: pre-humanity
ZODIAC :: n/a
SHIPS :: chemistry
• BIOGRAPHY •
Ra, Helios, the Smiling God, he has gone by many names in many languages. Technically, all of them are right, they are all a part of who he is, and what he had been at one point. In a way, none of them are right. His true name has not been spoken aloud since the universe was still barely more than a collection of atoms and dust.
He uses Helios more often than not as a name- it’s perhaps the most comfortable identity, the one he has claimed as his. The Greeks called him a Titan, but he was something older, and more powerful by far; but the name, and the flesh, it’s one he finds himself coming back to time and time again.
The believers change, and he changes with them. In some incarnations, he is kind of benevolent, in others, half sun, half war. Now, he is the bleached white madness of the desert. The names they call him, the flesh he inhabits, it all varies, but the prayers and the offerings never do, all that does is the form they take. It is, perhaps the only thing he can count on, the consistency of worship remains, however the world fluctuates.
In recent decades, he’s returned to the small desert city he build. He’s been invoked en mass and more than anything else, he’s curious to see what’s become of the city.
• PHYSICAL •
FACE CLAIM :: Valery Kovtun
HEIGHT :: about 6′0″
BUILD :: toned, slim
VISUAL AGE :: 25
ACTUAL AGE :: older than the stars themselves
HAIR :: platinum blond
EYES :: blue, gold when he’s using his powers
SPECIES :: divine
HAND :: ambidextrous
GLASSES :: no
IDENTIFYING :: Helios runs hot, really hot, as if the sun is trapped under his skin. Most people would guess that it’s heat stroke, but it’s just permanent.
• MENTAL •
FAITH :: Himself?
MARITAL STATUS :: single
OCCUPATION :: sun deity (drove chariot across the sky), StrexCorp figurehead
EDUCATION :: nothing formal, but he’s learned a lot from experience
QUIRKS :: When Helios is inhabiting a mortal body, he tends to refer to himself as a priest of Helios, or whatever name it is that he’s using.
