Isolde and @evarcana's Ev have joined @timmys-and-scribbles absolutely gorgeous Starlit Ball! This was so much fun to do, there is nothing I like more than drawing pretty dresses and the theme and style is delightful ❤
The runaway druidess with resentment in her soul and love in her heart.
Full name: Isolde Tlachtga Rosach
Name pronunciation: Ee-Soldt Clack-Ga Rose-Ak
Name meaning: Isolde means ‘she who is gazed upon’, and as the town’s future leader her role would be to be looked upon, and looked up to, but not more. Tlachtga is the name of a powerful druidess of legend, famed for her red hair and far-reaching travels.
Pronouns: She/Her
Birthday: June 26th
Age (when the Arcana game begins): 29
Notes: This makes her age 25 when she dies, and 26 when she is brought back by Asra. She is 20 when she arrives in Vesuvia and almost 24 when Arthen dies of the Plague.
I headcanon the characters ages based on this post
Orientation: Bisexual
Innate Magic: Natural Energy Manipulation, Animist Communication.
Learnt Magic: Light Bending, Lunar and Stellar Energy Manipulation.
Familiar: Clídna the forest cat
Love interest: Julian Devorak
Theme song: Runaway by AURORA
Playlist: Though she be but little... (This really could have been 100% Florence + The Machine)
Reversed: Insecure, dependent and co-dependent, fragile, martyrdom, over emotional.
Magic:
Natural Energy Manipulation
With this ability Isolde is able to harness significantly more power than she possesses, provided that there is a natural source of energy in the vicinity. This can manifest in many different ways, the most obvious being that she can draw on power from the natural world around her to empower specific spells she is using or potions she is making. It also allows her to rearrange natural energy (anima) to take different forms. For example, pulling the anima from a forest to rapidly grow one tree, or drawing in a fog from the moisture in the ground.
This can be heavily influenced by her mood: in extremely negative moods she can unconsciously suck the life from her surroundings, and the opposite is also true. This only really happens in states where she is beyond controlling her emotions to any degree, and she is extremely cautious not to have a negative impact.
Animist Communication
As with her energy manipulation, Isolde can use anima to commune with nature, to varying degrees depending on the strength of the life force in whatever she wants to communicate with, and heavily depending on her mood and frame of mind. This works as a sort of partial possession, transferring some of her life force into the being she is communicating with – always keeping a thread between them to find her way back. She can communicate with plants, in this case it is more like hearing an echo of what has been happening in the area with varying degrees of clarity, and with animals, where she gains a deep understanding of their emotional state – neither are like a conversation but she has learnt to intuit a lot of information. Using this skill puts her body into a trance like state and leaves her vulnerable.
Light Bending
Light Bending is a form of visual augmentation – by changing the way light refracts off objects she can partially change the way specific objects, or with a lot of effort, peoples surroundings, are perceived by them. This can be as simple as making colours appear more vivid to brighten her day, or to make a doorway blend into the wall so passers-by don’t try to enter. It is by no means flawless, and can usually be seen though by anyone looking for it, like a holographic image that shows a different picture depending on the angle you view it from.
Lunar and Stellar Energy Manipulation
Much like Natural Energy Manipulation, this allows Isolde to harness more power than she herself possesses. As this is a skill she taught herself, and is not innate, it is far from as powerful as Natural Energy Manipulation, and is heavily dependent on a clear view of heavenly bodies. She has a much greater affinity with the moon and certain stars (particularly those in the Cancer and Lynx constellations), so when they are more visible she has more power. This doesn’t grant her any additional abilities, so is really just a way to augment her other spells, or to infuse potions.
Other abilities: Isolde is a talented herbologist, and more casually, gardener. She speaks two languages, though one, being Celtic, doesn’t often see use. Isolde can ride well, and drive a cart or carriage. Finally, she is an excellent baker and cook.
PERSONALITY & PREFERENCES
Personality:
Isolde is a lover and a fighter. She is strong-willed, fiercely self-reliant, passionate, and holds herself to very high standards. She is also very scared. She craves having the chance to let go of her responsibilities, and to be vulnerable, but she is afraid of what will happen if she does. There are really two sides to the coin with her, and for most of her life she has struggled to find a balance, and to allow herself to be both parts of who she is.
Initially, Isolde is very responsible, she likes to be in charge and she carefully considers her actions to be sure she is doing the right thing at all times. She is very proud of how reliable she is, and how she doesn’t let things slip, but she is also deeply resentful of how, to her mind, everything rides on her. Not that she would admit it, because it is vital that she can believe herself to be good, and kind, and correct.
On another level, she wants to let go of everything, to be able to let her life become a bit messy without the guilt that her responsibility slipped, and she desperately wants someone to help her pick up what she misses. She can be much less uptight, becoming gentler and more relaxed, more affectionate as she lets the mask slip, and accepts the difficult parts of herself.
Isolde is terrified of abandonment, but takes a sort of sick satisfaction in people leaving her – it proves her right and gives her a reason to break down for a while. She is a very compassionate and loyal friend: her relationships are what she values the most, and secretly what she is most proud of. She is very emotional, and scared, and hates to be in the wrong, but she is also very warm, caring and loving.
Likes: Animals, especially wild animals, sunrise on a dewy morning, singing and dancing, baking, dozing next to a flowing river or under the shade of a tree.
Dislikes: Coldness and lack of emotion, lack of empathy, being in the wrong or worse being told she is wrong, feeling powerless.
Fears: Being trapped, physically or emotionally, and abandonment (ironically, she has been known to do the trapping to avoid being abandoned).
Most likely to: Bring an apple to her teacher for brownie points
Quirks: She always has cold fingers, so it’s not unusual to see her with her fingers tucked into her cuffs, or bundled in her skirt. In the wilderness, she can go into a trance like state, sometimes that’s what it is, and sometimes she is just so taken with the sound of the wild.
Mental health: Isolde has terrible nightmares about being trapped in a cage, back in her village. She would not openly speak about this. She holds herself to an impossibly high standard, and lashes out when she is not meeting it. As mentioned before, she has massive abandonment issues, and is also overcoming something of a victim complex.
Favourite food: Fresh baked bread with honey or wild strawberry jam
Favourite drink: Earl Grey Tea
Favourite flower: Snapdragon
APPEARANCE
Height: 5’6”/167 cm
Hair: A soft auburn in winter, muted ginger in the summer when the sun has lightened it. It has a natural wave, curling at the bottom where the weight of it is less inclined to pulling the curl out. It is long, just past her waist, and she usually wears half up in a bun, with many plaits to keep the volume more manageable day to day.
Eyes: Deep green, with just a hint of blue-grey near the centre. Large, with a deep crease, and downturned lashes.
Other: Isolde is quite heavily freckled and has moles all over, but especially over her nose and cheeks, shoulders, elbows, thighs and knees where she most catches the sun. She has several large scars, one on her left calf, another on her left thigh, and most prominently a large branching scar on the right side of her back. The main part of the scar is just below her shoulder blade, but it branches out like lightening across her back and reaches around her ribs on the right side – this is from where she very messily removed a tattoo.
Colour theme: Rich forest green, sage green, and lilac, with gold and white accents.
Fashion sense: Isolde’s fashion sense could be described as well-disguised practicality. She loves anything with a full sleeve and off the shoulder, and this gives her a good range of motion. Fitted bodices provide some minor support when she is standing in the shop for long periods, and loose skirts and wide legged trousers allow plenty of room for pockets. She likes to feel pretty, and feminine, so these things go hand in hand.
She likes to accessorise with jewellery, especially changing her many earrings frequently, and always wears gold.
She does long for the opportunity to dress more grandly, and perhaps to throw what she knows, and is comfortable with, out the door. Although everyday wear is quite simple, she is seduced by decadence.
FAMILY & BACKGROUND
Family:
Rowena - mother - alive | relationship: estranged
Unknown - father - alive | relationship: non-existant
Arthen - brother - deceased | relationship: very close
Background:
Isolde was born in a large, but well hidden, town called Dėrwintreb. Dėrwintreb sits in a cold, damp, and mountainous region south of the Sea of Persephia, and west of the Scourgelands. The people there, Atrebates, there are secretive, and know the land better than they know the backs of their own hands. It is not uncommon for towns to be a combination of stone and wooden dwellings, as well as homes carved out of trees and rocks, using what nature provides to make their structures.
Tradition is everything to the many tribes that make up the Atrebates, all slightly varied form one another, but all seated in mysticism and spiritualism, and very deeply routed in a respect for nature. They mistrust outsiders, or at least the change that they often bring, and this has driven an even deeper connection with the natural world.
In Dėrwintreb the leading Druidess was Isolde’s mother, Rowena. The Druidess is who the town looks to for guidance, as both a spiritual and governing ruler. The role and title is inherited, passed mother to daughter, with only very rare exceptions if aptitude is not shown. She spends almost all of her waking time in a trance, communing and sharing anima with the world and the wilds around her. She breaks the trance to use what she learns to guide and instruct the village. It is expected that she all but breaks familial ties, living for the good of her people and the forest, rather than for herself – and Rowena was proud to do this.
Which brings us to Isolde. She was born before her mother took up her duty as druidess, followed 5 years later by her brother Arthen. When Isolde was six and Arthen was one, Rowen became the Druidess. Isolde was used to having a distant mother, as she was always in training, but this was a new level. The saying “it takes a village to raise a child” was always the case in Dėrwintreb, so they were both raised by their neighbours, but Isolde felt responsible for, and protective of, Arthen, not wanting him to miss his mother as she had.
When Isolde turned 16, her coming of age ceremony was held – and as the moon reached its peak Rowena came out of the trance for the rare occasion. Isolde of course was overjoyed to be able to connect with her mother again, and did everything she could to be the golden child. She carefully lay still while she was tattooed with the tribe’s sigil, trying to prove to Rowena, and herself, that she was on the right path to become the Druidess no matter how much she dreaded it. A few days passed, like this, with celebrations and more attempts to “earn” Rowena’s love in a way Isolde had never felt it, but on the third day, when Rowena returned to her trance, Isolde couldn’t face it any more.
Horrified by being, to her mind, abandoned by Rowena again, and terrified of a future where she lived the same half-life, she took the 11 year old Arthen and ran. He didn’t face the same future as her, but he had the same absent mother. Wanting nothing more to do with the Atrebates, she used her innate magic for the last time in years to remove her tattoo, and then travelled east, through the Scourgelands.
After this, Isolde did everything she could to distance them from her culture, spending the next two years mostly living off the land and learning to draw her power from the heavens, instead of from the earth. She held deep fear, and resentment, of the connection she still felt to the wild, scared that it would draw her in and lead her home, so when a they chanced upon a traveling tradeswoman, Elmira, who spent all her time sailing from city to city, Isolde decided that was the way for her to separate herself entirely from the Atrebates.
Isolde, Arthen, and Elmira spent another 2 years traveling, Isolde peddling potions and astrological spells, Elmira working on building projects wherever they landed. Eventually, Elmira got word that her aunt had died, leaving her a shop, which is how, at 20, Isolde came to settle in Vesuvia. Elmira stayed around 9 months and in this time her and Isolde became romantically involved, but not wanting to settle she opted to move on and left the shop to Isolde and Arthen. This consolidated Isolde’s fears of being abandoned at every turn, although Elmira returned for regular visits and the two remained close, any chance of a relationship after that was scuppered.
She met Asra for the first time not long after Elmira left, out trying to prove to herself that she was okay, and that someone could still want her even though no one else had stuck around. Asra wasn’t what she was expecting, nor did they give her what she was looking for, but instead she gained a local friend, and that did more for her than any one night stand would have.
Isolde’s brother was among the first in Vesuvia to die of the plague, which is a large part of why Isolde chose to stay when Asra left. She felt entirely responsible, and if he was dead then she would make sure some good could come of it, even if that was just an extra set of hands working for a cure. Vesuvia was also the taste of a stable life Isolde had ever experienced, and being a city it kept her separate from most of the wilds that called to her innate magic, so the thought of leave terrified her.
Five facts:
o Isolde is quite uncoordinated – she loves to dance, but she is somewhat clumsy with it, and despite being a talented singer she has never been dexterous enough to pick up an instrument.
o She usually carries an assortment of dried flowers and herbs, and semi-precious stones that she has found while out and about and can use later for spells.
o She has terrible circulation, leaving her fingers and toes cold at all times – she is quite used to it so it doesn’t bother her, but as she gets more in touch with her innate magic this does improve.
o Her hair smells of apricots and vanilla – she loves to act surprised when someone notices it but of course it is very carefully curated.
o The plaits in her hair are normally simply for convenience because she has so much hair, but for certain occasions she plaits her hair into intricate patterns with different meanings.
A huge thank you to @leila-of-ravens for creating, and letting me use, this beautiful template, to @evarcana for always asking about Isolde and keeping me motivated, and both for inspiring me!
There are a few changes here from what I've said previously before I put any thought into her, so go ahead and treat this as Isolde's canon.
