Stella Matin, Book One, Character Spotlight
Name: Brenon Zonila
Status: simple crafter
age: 14 at the beginning of book one; 22 at the end.
Magi sphere: Sight and Weaving; his sensitivity to visual patterns in the fabric of the universe is exceptional, given his rather mediocre weaving talent. He works primarily with earth and water, but he's able to weave aether in small amounts, as well. He doesn't get a chance to reclassify as a Magicrafter before he dies, but if he had, he probably would have become a low ranking mediweaver.
Crafting sphere: Weaving/clothmaking; in another world, he would make an excellent tailor or designer (in the headspace, he and Jance occasionally discuss fashion trends). He's very creative, and is constantly coming up with new designs and patterns, both for normal weaving and for magicrafting.
Appearance: Tall for his age as a teenager, he ends up somewhere around 5'11"; people in Radrezhaea don't run exceptionally tall. He has strawberry blond hair, green eyes, and freckles. Lots of freckles. His skin is pale and sunburns easily, and he smiles all the time.
Family: Zonil (mother), Rozhaeonil (father), Mihonil (sister), and Theron (adopted brother)
Bren's parents are something of legends in their town; his mother is the chief healer and a council member, and his father was selected by the Voyance to join the Guild Council in the capital. Bren has never actually met his father, as Rozhaeonil was selected before he was born. Before being chosen, Rozhaeonil became very rich by breeding parkeeti; they're commonly used to carry messages across short distances, and they make cute pets.
His sister is a model child; she follows in their mother's footsteps and is well on her way to becoming a mediweaver of great talent. Bren can't stand being in anyone's shadow, much less his sister's or his father's, so he acts out in any way he can. He's a prankster and a brat, but he's ultimately a good kid- even if all of his teachers have tried to kill him at one point or another. (They've all given up; every time they try to stab him, he just goes out a window- and Bren bounces quite well.)
Theron helps to curb a lot of his bratty tendencies, partly because Theron takes bullshit from
no one, and because Theron hates people. This hatred manifests itself in him avoiding them; Bren has no chances to play pranks when he spends most of his time wandering in the forest with Theron, catching butterflies for Whimsy.
Theron is the first close friend he ever has; Bren is friendly, cheerful and well liked by his peers, but he isn't
close to anyone outside of his family. Theron is someone new (in a small village on the northern border, new people are rare and often shunned) and someone who desperately needs help- and Bren, for all that he doesn't have the power to back it up, is a healer at heart. (Their relationship is brotherly, to a point- weird, but brotherly. This becomes easier on Bren when Zonil actually adopts Theron after Shanreth leaves. At the time, Theron is too screwed up in the head to appreciate what Bren's family has done for him.)
Due to certain traumatic events in his early childhood involving a locked cupboard and a brick, he's very claustrophobic and
hates silence. He talks all the time to keep himself from going insane- much like Stella does, two hundred years later. (They're distant cousins, actually- the clairvoyance comes from Bren's father, who has other kids in the capital after he leaves the town that still has no name. Huzzah, zombie incest!)
The summer before Theron leaves for the next country over, Bren locks himself in the cellar with a bunch of tapestry looms, and screams his throat bloody while weaving most of his clairvoyant ability into a tapestry for Theron. When he finally emerges from the basement, his vocal cords are permanently damaged. He sounds like he has a permanent case of laryngitis; it doesn't affect him much in the long run (he couldn't sing to begin with, so there's no loss there) but it does make Walker that much more frightening later on, and it leads Mih to make a lot of tasteless jokes when she finds out about it.
If you stripped Bren of everything that made him who he is, and gave him a slightly sick sense of humor, you'd have Walker. (Take away the freckles, too- Walker's body degrades much faster than a normal Corpse's, so he looks vaguely like a very well preserved bog mummy by the beginning of Book Two.) Walker is cruel; he does whatever the Voyance tells him to do, but he puts his own spin on things. When he's told to ensure Mordant's cooperation with the Voyance's goals, he wired a bomb to the man's spinal column. Nobody actually knows what he's got on Solneki, but some people have speculated that it has something to do with a small room in a very dark basement, a lot of rats, and Solneki's family. (This is utterly untrue; most of the rumors about Walker are just that- rumors. But he does nothing to discourage them, and there's a grain of truth to all of them.)
The idea of upsetting the status quo doesn't even occur to him; he simply does what he's told and keeps himself somewhat entertained. Sometimes this involves illegal drugs; sometimes this involves killing a lot of people for no reason whatsoever. (I think, early on, this is incredibly traumatic to Theron. If Walker hadn't been quite as sadistic and willing to kill as he was, the whole empire would have collapsed much sooner.)
The only real similarity Walker and Bren share is their loyalty to Theron, but for Walker, it's less loyalty and more force of habit than anything else. Being the Voyance's hitman is all he's ever known, until he meets Stella. She helps him regain something of his humanity before he starts remembering things, which makes the transition from Walker to Bren
slightly less destructive to their personalities.
At the end, when everything is recovered, (it's a weak ending, really, but I can't give them anything else) Walker regains Bren's body and memories and most of his personality. Unfortunately, even if he was never supposed to exist, Walker has been around for nearly ten times as long as Bren- and it's kind of difficult to just erase two hundred years of your (un)life with a wave of the hand.
Bren would rather be himself than Walker, but he has all of Walker's memories and mannerisms to deal with- given how utterly different they are, it's a struggle for him to remain anything even remotely resembling sane. He comes very close to breaking in the first few days after coming back to himself; in the end, he bends a little, and compartmentalizes his consciousness and gives himself a case of MPD. (No, I really
can't write a story that doesn't involve voices in
someone's head.) Walker, thankfully, doesn't mind being relegated to the background most of the time; he prefers being Bren, too. They don't actually interact very often, since they're both aware that they are the same person, but Bren occasionally talks about Walker as though he were someone else. It makes Mordant an Solneki
very uncomfortable- and Bren isn't cruel, he's just easily amused and still something of a brat. Eventually, Bren and Walker will integrate themselves into a new, cohesive whole; for now, they're taking it slow. (Theron doesn't have this problem, because he just doesn't give a shit about
anything but Bren the things he did while he was Voyance. Mihonil's problems are completely different and have more to do with the fact that she's carrying around the memories of several thousand dead people than any personality conflicts she might be having.)
It should be noted, though, that Walker and Stella have a functioning romantic relationship while Bren and Stella do not. They're working on it, but they haven't gotten that far yet. They're like awkward teenagers, actually; it's excessively cute and kind of painful to watch. They have issues, though- Stella doesn't really approve of Bren's continued attachment to Theron, but Bren wouldn't know what to do with himself without some form of abuse in his life. And, of course, being quasi-alive does nothing for Stella's mental state; it strengthens her powers of foresight, which totally screws with her timesense and perception of reality, making her more inclined to skip in circles than form coherent sentences.
Post-apocalyptic Bren is a little more jaded than Original-Flavor Bren, and he has a ruthless streak that wasn't there before. He's quieter, too; he and Stella fill each other's silences, and he's already been through hell, so his old fears don't mean much anymore. He's still completely loyal to the people he loves, but he's less wiling to put up with Theron's bullshit. Eventually, he'll probably break away from the others and do his own thing with Stella, but until then, he'll be sticking around with Theron and the rest of the remnants of the Radrezhaean Empire.
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*whew* There you go, Bren in a nutshell. Sort of. Whenever I profile a character, everything that isn't actually
written is just speculation, so it's difficult to be sure than anything I've got here is at all accurate. I do like the contrast between Bren and Walker, though. Bren still talks to himself, even after he comes back from the dead- it's just that now, he does it less often, and he ends up
arguing more.
