Theron

It's kind of funny how much I actually like Theron, despite the fact that he makes me sick sometimes.

Let's face it, the kid is screwed up. He survived by cannibalizing his mother's corpse- only to be raised by said corpse. Even if they'd stayed in one place long enough for him to make friends, most other children avoided him instinctively or threw rocks at him.

He actually seems to exhibit symptoms of autism or schizophrenia; until he meets Brenon, he honestly does not give a flying fuck about the rest of humanity. He's a very disturbing and disturbed child- his lack of emotion may be the result of the rather traumatic circumstances of his birth, but there's probably also a genetic predilection for various brain abnormalities.

'Course, I'm not at all qualified to judge if my characters are autistic or not, but it seems as though Theron could be, slightly. Asberger's syndrome, perhaps, only he doesn't exhibit any of the obsessive compulsive symptoms or any of the impaired motor functions. His fixation with magic could possibly fit into that category, but it's not quite the same...It would make a great deal of sense for him to have some sort of developmental disorder, though. And mild autism would explain a few things.

He's incredibly intelligent and amazingly talented with magic of all kinds- he can whistle, weave, and smith, but smithing is his primary strength. It takes him a while to develop into an Omnismith; having the talent is one thing, but no amount of talent is going to help without the proper training. He's a magical prodigy, though.

He becomes Bren's friend because Bren is persistent and can't take a hint; Theron actually doesn't feel particularly attached to Bren, despite the fact that the older boy saves his ass on a regular basis. He feels no empathy towards other living things, which is why Bren has to actually tell him that kidnapping Whimsey's pet rabbits and cutting them open is a very bad thing.

As he gets older, Theron learns to interact normally with other people. He still just uses them to further his own goals, but he can pretend to care about normal, human things. If he feels anything at all for Brenon, he hides it well...and never mind about what exactly happens to Brenon, because I still haven't forgiven him for that. Well, not nevermind, because I'll have to write it eventually, I suppose.

Theron wanders around for several years and picks up a few classical arcanum techniques, after finding he has a real affinity for pain magic. He's kind of like Silverlock D'Alestri, only not at all concerned with the consent of his power foci. (Silver gets his power from pain and sex, but he never uses someone as a foci without their permission unless he's being paid to do so. Gotta love mercenary morals.)

The Voyance Blacklists Theron for using arcane magic in the city, but doesn't realize it's his own son he just condemned to Death (really need new words for this). Theron leaves for a while and comes back an Omnismith who acts like a Vimancer- which is slang for necromancer, sort of. Vimancers work with both life and death, hence the turning a cabbage into a bird and creating life out of that which was dead. Proper Vimancers are just myths- no amount of aether manipulation can create or heal a soul. The Voyance is an inverse Vimancer, also called an Unraveler, because he can animate corpses and destroy or wound souls.

Being Blacklisted is what allows Theron to become an Unraveler like his father; his already screwed up genes get twisted even further when his soul is damaged by the Mark. (The Voyance is effectively a Blacklisted Omnismith- being Marked gradually seals away a person's magicrafting and slowly destroys their soul until they become one of the Dead. The Voyance's Mark is a little different, but the principle behind it is the same.) Because he was an Omnismith first, being Marked doesn't do anything to seal his powers, unlike the Voyance, who loses any of his original powers by being marked before succeeding to the power base. Omnismiths are funny because they're pretty much exempt from everything- they make up their own rules because they can transmute reality.

The general moral of Theron's existance is that it's a bad idea to mix magic and antimagic, and screwing with someone's genetic makeup is only going to end in grievous bodily harm and massive propery damage.

After all this trauma, Theron snaps completely- he was a cold, uncaring bastard before, but after coming into his own and having his soul ripped away (during the course of this, he realizes the Voyance is his father), he loses any control he might have had. He uses Brenon to get back at the Voyance and his mother and basically the entire country- and that's where things start to enter the incredibly squicktastic territory, because the things he does to Brenon and Mihonil are just fucking wrong. (It's worse with Brenon, though, because Mih never really trusted him. Brenon always did, and would have done anything for Theron had he simply asked.)

*shudder* Yeh. Theron is evil in the worst sort of way; he's willing to betray the trust of the people who love him (and Brenon really does love him) without feeling even the slightest bit of regret.

I wish I could make these things a bit more organized and coherent, but I won't be able to get real, concrete impressions of the characters until I actually start writing them. The good news is that Theron's rise to power is only half of the story; the second half is Stella's story. The world Theron and Bren live in is a pretty bright one, but their story is fucking depressing; Stella's world is a very, very cold one, but she gets a happy ending. So does Brenon, actually; I haven't yet decided what to do with Theron. He's fucking hard to kill, though...