The Drowned, the Living, and Those in Between: A List of Notable Persons in the Undoing of the Life of Adelaide Triton
Hellooooo everyone !! Much like how I made an NPC list for Phillip, I decided to make one for Adella too, since I reference these folks quite often, annnd they might also feature across threads / plots! These are the main folks I wanted to get down quickly, to lay down and tease a few essential details about them you should know, as well as more on Adella's birth, mother, and so on before I expand on them in richer, dedicated metas. I'll also add more minor characters I have in my head here at a later time (her child imaginary friends that the Sea King brought to life for one day for her birthday, her music teacher, the person she first learned potion craft from, etc.).
Below the Sea.
ZHANSAYA ("ZHANYA") AYGERIM, The Moon Beauty, Su Iyesi of the Caspian Sea, Mother.
Tall, thin as a needle, with pale yellow hair and eyes that seem made from amethysts; they refract a thousand different ways in the light. Her beauty is a severe, mathematical kind, every line carved so precisely, every gesture even more so. Even in her youth, she had deep eye troughs that lent her an exhausted, yet noble quality. Cruelty is her first language, yet she speaks it with great elegance.
She never looked upon Adella with love, but with predatory curiosity. Like how certain creatures study their malformed young. She made several attempts to murder Adella in her infancy, believing her to have been born wrong.* Maternal infanticide is not uncommon practice among seafolk, but it is particularly rare among the perisi, who are an endangered species and can only conceive children under particular, magical circumstances. She stopped all attempts under the command of the Sea King.
Deeper profile (TBW).
A CARTOGRAPHER OF UNKNOWN NAME, Father, biological, long dead.
Thought to have hailed from the steppes near Samarkand or Kashgar. He had a long, oval face, narrow eyes the color of wet obsidian, a studious brow, and black hair kept lengthy and tied back. There was a calm symmetry to his face. His possessions, upon his person during his drowning, hinted that he had a wife and multiple children.
Perisi can only be conceived under certain circumstances: A human man must be lured to their waters, drowned, and transformed to be able to survive in the deep. This begins the ritual. Over a period of time, the child is conceived under the light of a full moon — however, the conception itself doesn't come from his seed, but the ritual itself. If the Moon is pleased with this human sacrifice, She places a child in the perisi's womb as Her blessing. The man, no longer of use, is shortly killed after this. It is also worth noting that factors such as the weather, the season, etc. will have a determining factor on what kind of child will be born (a man who dies on a stormy night will give rise a to turbulent child, etc.).
Zhansaya lured this cartographer to the seas, and through this ritual Adella was conceived. The manner of his death and drowning was particularly cruel, though not much else is known.
THE SEA KING, Father, adopted.
A primordial of the deep, known by a hundred names across time — Triton, Daryā Pādshāh, Yalun Khan — each a mask for the same immortal face. He has ruled the shifting courts beneath the sea since before memory itself. To mortals he is a myth; to his children, a warden whose love, if you can even call it that, anyway, feels like gravity: vast, inescapable, and without real warmth.
Deeper profile (origin story, magical abilities, folk stories) here.
THE SEA KING'S DAUGHTERS, Sisters, adopted.
Adella's sisters, though none are her biological kin, are the other six daughters of the Sea King. They're each born to a different sea and mother. Argaleth is the favored one (she has a million nickname-titles, way more than the other sisters), since she is the only true-born daughter of the Sea King; Aygül is the wise one (they sometimes, also, called her the forgetful one); Adella (Marzanna) is the fair one; Saanyu is simply called the sorceress; Roya is the poetic one; Želkja is the fearless one; Melpomne is the listening one.
Deeper profiles here.
MORGANA, THE SEA-WTICH.
Once bound to the Sea King's court as an oracle, before her transformation into a sea-witch. She was condemnned, like all her kind, to lonely, barely habitable waters outside of the kingdoms. She is some hybrid between a woman and a Portuguese Man-of-War: long, trailing filaments drifting like ribbons of glass behind her as she swims, her translucent flesh shifting between colors of lilac and bruise-blue. Beneath this skin, you can easily see her veins glow faintly, like bioluminescent threads, and her movements are both graceful and grotesque. She has 7 eyes.
Her speciality in magic is developing tempting trinkets, like a locket that would afford a perisi the ability to walk ashore. Though feared for her cunning and her curses, Morgana is not the cruelest thing beneath the waves. Adella is far crueler.
MARÉ, The devil in her head.
A voice without origin, first heard by Adella in her head when her curse began. Whether actual devil, parasite, the voice of the curse itself, or something more ancient, like the will of sea as it tries to reassert balance, is unknown. This voice is shrill, like metal scraping, and can often carry two tones that clash against each other. She / It guides her on a quest, telling Adella that completing it will undo her curse.
She often speaks in riddles and nursery rhymes, her words twisting through Adella's mind like fish hooks. She brings pain down upon her, splitting headaches, trembling fits, dangerous episodes of sleepwalking, but, to Adella, these all feel less like cruelty and more like a current pushing her towards somewhere unknown. Somewhere, hopefully, better. Punishments, perhaps, meant to steer her from greater darkness. It's the only guidance she has since neither the seas nor her family will help her, anyway. These whispers are all, essentially, she has left.
Maré cannot be exorcised without Adella dying in the process.
More reading here and here.
Above the Sea.
IMILIA CARUSO, Friend.
The elderly keeper of the Stramuro Inn on the Italian coastline. She's no taller than 4'8" on a generous day. Her back curves like a squiggly question mark from a lifetime of hard work and much-too-many untreated ailments. Her skin is deeply tanned from years beneath the sun, and her white hair seems to glow under any light. The inn smells of lemon peel, wet wood, and the ghost of her dead husband. She has a fondness for the occult.
She found Adella bleeding, half-mute, upon the shoreline, took her in without question, and taught her human kindness, the miracle of baking, and local village slang. She loves her fiercely, as though she were her own.
CARMELA & PIETRO
Imilia's two grandchildren live with her at the inn while their parents work in a city farther way to send money back home. Both have black hair, black eyes, and ruddy, freckled skin. Carmela helps with the laundry and keeps a small diary she never lets anyone read; she once had a hopeless crush on Adella, convinced she must've been a princess in disguise. Peitro is quiet and birdlike, always whittling driftwood into shapes of fantastical animals. Both are exceptionally devoted to their grandmother, terrible cooks, and don't like it when Adella lies.
MICHELE, LAST NAME UNKNOWN, Former lover, deceased (?)
He was a sailor, a man with burn scars on his skin and wind always tangled his brown hair. Somewhere in his mid 30s, with the swaggering grace belonging to any storytelling adventurer upon the tides. He was darkly handsome, strong, with olive-toned skin and wolfish looks. His eyes were black, and his smile was like a knife. He spoke softly, touched roughly, and never stayed in one place too long.
He met Adella near the docks one evening, while she, and he thought this was quite odd, was talking to the crabs in the sand. Over the summer, they grew close. Close enough for Carmela to watch on with a sad heart, and close enough for Imilia to notice that it was souring very quickly. Adella was endlessly doting at first, waiting for him at the door and smoothing her hair whenever his shadows passed. But as the weeks wore on, her laughter came a little less easily, she flinched at sudden sounds, spoke in her sleep, and stopped going down to the shore alone.
Then, one night, he was never seen again. Adella would only ever say he hurt her very badly, and that he left. But she said this far too quickly, her hands trembling, and Imilia had noticed the little necklace she would never remove, not even during her baths, was cracked. She never pressed the inquiry further.
