kalmiya "worm off the string" longwillow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
longwillows) wrote2023-03-28 12:56 am
longwillows) wrote2023-03-28 12:56 am
✨ information
CONTENT WARNING: Please note that the following post contains strong themes of cult practices & upbringing, religious trauma, and child neglect in regards to Kalmiya and her backstory. Accounts are not detailed or graphic, but the subject matter may still be upsetting to some. Details regarding how these and other potentially upsetting topics pertain to Kalmiya's story can be found on her permissions post here. Please read with caution. Thank you!
kalmiya longwillow
"I was worshiped from the moment I was born, but I was never loved."
A delight wrapped in an enigma wrapped in sparkles over a core both curious and vengeful. Kalmiya is a warlock of the Fey, having made a bargain with a powerful Archfey to always entertain them in exchange for the power to live a life as the person she's always wanted to be: herself. Raised to be the leader of a cult in an isolated, theocratic desert town, Kalmiya was misunderstood and molded into an idol based on a misconception of her angelic heritage, deified for abilities and a divine connection that she didn't actually possess.
Repressed, isolated, and crushed by the pressure of divine perfection, Kalmiya eventually fled the town as a young adult with only vague knowledge of the world outside, provided to her in visions through her one real connection with her Celestial lineage, an angel with whom she has a limited psychic link. She lived a brief life as a nameless vagabond before finding herself lost in the Feywild, where she met the fairy noble who granted her power and took on the name that would become her own: Kalmiya Longwillow.
Now, anonymized by both the magical and practical gifts of her patron, Kalmiya is a school-sponsored adventurer and entertainer, using her chaotic powers and raw charisma to tackle typical adventurer problems and delight people in the process. She's living her best whimsical life and will never have to think about her horrible cultish hometown ever again.
Probably.
A delight wrapped in an enigma wrapped in sparkles over a core both curious and vengeful. Kalmiya is a warlock of the Fey, having made a bargain with a powerful Archfey to always entertain them in exchange for the power to live a life as the person she's always wanted to be: herself. Raised to be the leader of a cult in an isolated, theocratic desert town, Kalmiya was misunderstood and molded into an idol based on a misconception of her angelic heritage, deified for abilities and a divine connection that she didn't actually possess.
Repressed, isolated, and crushed by the pressure of divine perfection, Kalmiya eventually fled the town as a young adult with only vague knowledge of the world outside, provided to her in visions through her one real connection with her Celestial lineage, an angel with whom she has a limited psychic link. She lived a brief life as a nameless vagabond before finding herself lost in the Feywild, where she met the fairy noble who granted her power and took on the name that would become her own: Kalmiya Longwillow.
Now, anonymized by both the magical and practical gifts of her patron, Kalmiya is a school-sponsored adventurer and entertainer, using her chaotic powers and raw charisma to tackle typical adventurer problems and delight people in the process. She's living her best whimsical life and will never have to think about her horrible cultish hometown ever again.
Probably.
personality
+
good-humored . intuitive . understanding . adaptable . personable
=
mischievous . free-spirited . flirty . impulsive . candid
🔥
spiteful . facetious . self-centered . anxious . petty
appearance
Kalmiya stands at 5'6" tall, or about 168cm. She carries most of her weight in her bottom half; this combined with regular exercise and irregular nutrition has left her arms and shoulders almost wiry while her thighs are wide enough to kill a man. While her legs are quite strong, they aren't toned—she's soft and squishy wherever she holds weight. Very pear-shaped! Very huggable!
She also has a heart-shaped face with rounded cheeks and jaw but pointed chin. Her nose is long, thin, and fairly straight, with a soft rounded tip. Her silver eyes are sharply upturned, almost fox-like in shape, with dense, long blonde eyelashes. Her lips are bronze in color; her bottom lip is fuller than her top, and in their resting position give her an almost... :3-like expression. Ideal for mischief.
She also has a heart-shaped face with rounded cheeks and jaw but pointed chin. Her nose is long, thin, and fairly straight, with a soft rounded tip. Her silver eyes are sharply upturned, almost fox-like in shape, with dense, long blonde eyelashes. Her lips are bronze in color; her bottom lip is fuller than her top, and in their resting position give her an almost... :3-like expression. Ideal for mischief.
abilities
background
Kalmiya was born in a small town called Sanctuary, located in the arid desert of the continent Eris. Sanctuary is a walled town with nearly no contact with the outside world; only authorized merchants and clergy are permitted to come and go from Sanctuary, and they do not bring info from the outside, only goods needed for the survival of the town. Many of the town's ~1200 citizens (mostly human in species) don't know anything about the outside world, and some don't even know there is anything of note outside of Sanctuary.
This is because the town is mostly self-sufficient through a socialized resource pool and limited bartering, and it centers around worship of the local god Terin, god of guidance and shelter. Sanctuary is a theocracy; the high clergy of the Temple of Terin are also the town government, and every citizen of Sanctuary belongs to the Temple of Terin. Terin protects the town and its people. Terin gives them everything they need. There is no need to wonder what is beyond the walls of Sanctuary, because there is nothing out there for Terin's children.
So basically it's a cult, and Sanctuary is an entire town of normal nonmagical folks who have been brainwashed for generations. The culture of Sanctuary is incredibly modest, conformist, and community-oriented. No individual is more important than the continued survival of the town as a whole.
ExceptKalmiya Longwillow Teresinha, the Guiding Light. The Holy Daughter of Terin. The Savior of Sanctuary. Their Lady, who was a gift directly from their god to lead their community to peace and salvation.
"Teresinha" was born an aasimar to human parents in a world where aasimar are so rare that most people will never knowingly meet one in their lifetime, even outside of Sanctuary. With shimmering gold skin and the impression of feathered wings seemingly engraved along her back, the child's Celestial heritage was obvious from the moment she was born. With little knowledge of the peculiarities of genetics in their world, the child's birth was regarded as a miracle, a blessing from Terin Himself. They believed she was destined to be their leader. And so the child's parents surrendered her immediately to the care of the Temple to be raised accordingly, and she was given a holy name derived from the name of their god: Teresinha.
She was raised as both a spiritual and political leader in a very strict and loveless environment. Revered but misunderstood as a divine entity in a vessel of mortal flesh, Teresinha suffered greatly under the expectations of leadership placed upon her, expected to give herself entirely to the duty of taking care of the town and its citizens, no matter what they needed of her. Whether that be emotional counsel in the form of ritualistic confession, practical solutions to community conflicts, or divine intervention for issues such as drought and famine, Teresinha was the solution to all of it.
In reality, her connection to the divine was far more limited than the town realized, and it was not to Terin Himself. Her connection was to an angel by the name of Mihr, who sent visions to Teresinha in her dreams since childhood. Communicating and interpreting these visions is the main thing that allowed Teresinha to keep up the charade that she was a messenger of Terin, though often the visions didn't pertain to Sanctuary at all. They showed strange people and places beyond the desert, lush forests and humanoids with dragon scales and monsters that swam beneath vast bodies of water. Her communications with Mihr are what led her to the knowledge that there was a world outside of Sanctuary—a huge one, at that, beautiful and mysterious and sometimes dangerous.
But escaping from Sanctuary was no easy task, especially for the town's most important figure. Teresinha did nothing but dream of escape for years while fulfilling her duties to the town, afraid of what might happen to her if they discovered her to be a false prophet. Transgressive behavior from normal citizens was enough to prompt reeducation and sometimes even disappearance; what would they do to someone who committed the blasphemous crime of falsifying messages from their god? She spent much of her childhood hiding in the branches of the impossible willow tree that grew in the center of the town's magical oasis—the water source that ensured Sanctuary's survival for centuries—just daydreaming of better places.
Her preparations to escape did not begin until her late teens, when she was able to understand the full ramifications of what exactly had been forced upon her. While Sanctuary was mostly known to the outside world for its delicious jams and preserves, its actual most significant export was the salt from the mines that created a labyrinthine network beneath the town. Much of the town's workforce was devoted to the operation of the mines, but despite that devotion of labor, there were many tunnels that had been decommissioned for various reasons. These included tunnels that stretched beyond the ground-level security walls that contained the town.
These would become the key to Teresinha's escape. It took her years to squirrel away the supplies she would need (as she was not allowed most material possessions nor the freedom to shop for them) and to become familiar enough with the route that she would need to take. In tiny increments she studied the maps of the Temple archives that were kept out of the public eye, tucked away jars of preserves and small amounts of coin given to the Temple as offerings, and studied the clockwork goings of the clergy and townspeople when they weren't attending to her.
She made her escape not long after turning 20 years old, with the overwrought celebration of the day of her birth fresh in her mind. Desperate not to let the rest of her life be like that, she finally fled, wrapping herself up in torn and stained pieces of Temple vestments to protect herself from the harsh desert weather and conceal her gold skin and floating hair. It was no easy task to make it to the closest neighboring town on foot, but she had prepared just enough to get her to a place where she could properly supply herself for long-term travel.
Unfortunately, she didn't have many marketable skills nor the coin to compensate for it. With its limited, self-sufficient economy, actual money was hard to come by in Sanctuary, and she hadn't been able to leave with much. So she spent a lot of time doing odd jobs and the occasional petty theft of food or supplies that she didn't think anyone would miss, never giving out the name that the town of Sanctuary had forced upon her. Never telling anyone much of anything at all, really, beyond that she was just trying to make her way to a better place. Being regarded as inherently unequal to everyone she had ever spoken to didn't leave her with many social graces, and she wasn't terribly eager to make friends with the potential consequences of her escape still looming over her.
She found her way from town to town in Central Eris, little but a nameless vagabond for about a month, before her wandering led her to a place where the boundary between planes was weak. One moment she was in the desert, and the next she was in the Feywild, colorful and chaotic and utterly new to her in every imaginable way. Survival in the Feywild was both easier and harder than in the material plane; everything seemed designed to trick and trap the unsuspecting, but she'd lived her whole life telling half-truths and refusing to trust that anything was as it seemed on the surface.
For a week she was lost in the Feywild, managing better than most strangers to the plane but hardly an expert in Feywild survival. Still, she found all the danger and trickery strangely thrilling after a lifetime of strict routine and being handled like spun glass. It was after a week that she caught the attention of a powerful and noble Archfey, who was intrigued by this intruder to her realm. This is how she met Lady Islainene, the Great Fey who would become her patron. And this is where she took on her own name, going by it for the first time when introducing herself to Islainene: Kalmiya, from the name that her parents had intended to name their human daughter; and Longwillow, after the willow tree that had been her happiest hiding place from her hometown.
This is because the town is mostly self-sufficient through a socialized resource pool and limited bartering, and it centers around worship of the local god Terin, god of guidance and shelter. Sanctuary is a theocracy; the high clergy of the Temple of Terin are also the town government, and every citizen of Sanctuary belongs to the Temple of Terin. Terin protects the town and its people. Terin gives them everything they need. There is no need to wonder what is beyond the walls of Sanctuary, because there is nothing out there for Terin's children.
So basically it's a cult, and Sanctuary is an entire town of normal nonmagical folks who have been brainwashed for generations. The culture of Sanctuary is incredibly modest, conformist, and community-oriented. No individual is more important than the continued survival of the town as a whole.
Except
"Teresinha" was born an aasimar to human parents in a world where aasimar are so rare that most people will never knowingly meet one in their lifetime, even outside of Sanctuary. With shimmering gold skin and the impression of feathered wings seemingly engraved along her back, the child's Celestial heritage was obvious from the moment she was born. With little knowledge of the peculiarities of genetics in their world, the child's birth was regarded as a miracle, a blessing from Terin Himself. They believed she was destined to be their leader. And so the child's parents surrendered her immediately to the care of the Temple to be raised accordingly, and she was given a holy name derived from the name of their god: Teresinha.
She was raised as both a spiritual and political leader in a very strict and loveless environment. Revered but misunderstood as a divine entity in a vessel of mortal flesh, Teresinha suffered greatly under the expectations of leadership placed upon her, expected to give herself entirely to the duty of taking care of the town and its citizens, no matter what they needed of her. Whether that be emotional counsel in the form of ritualistic confession, practical solutions to community conflicts, or divine intervention for issues such as drought and famine, Teresinha was the solution to all of it.
In reality, her connection to the divine was far more limited than the town realized, and it was not to Terin Himself. Her connection was to an angel by the name of Mihr, who sent visions to Teresinha in her dreams since childhood. Communicating and interpreting these visions is the main thing that allowed Teresinha to keep up the charade that she was a messenger of Terin, though often the visions didn't pertain to Sanctuary at all. They showed strange people and places beyond the desert, lush forests and humanoids with dragon scales and monsters that swam beneath vast bodies of water. Her communications with Mihr are what led her to the knowledge that there was a world outside of Sanctuary—a huge one, at that, beautiful and mysterious and sometimes dangerous.
But escaping from Sanctuary was no easy task, especially for the town's most important figure. Teresinha did nothing but dream of escape for years while fulfilling her duties to the town, afraid of what might happen to her if they discovered her to be a false prophet. Transgressive behavior from normal citizens was enough to prompt reeducation and sometimes even disappearance; what would they do to someone who committed the blasphemous crime of falsifying messages from their god? She spent much of her childhood hiding in the branches of the impossible willow tree that grew in the center of the town's magical oasis—the water source that ensured Sanctuary's survival for centuries—just daydreaming of better places.
Her preparations to escape did not begin until her late teens, when she was able to understand the full ramifications of what exactly had been forced upon her. While Sanctuary was mostly known to the outside world for its delicious jams and preserves, its actual most significant export was the salt from the mines that created a labyrinthine network beneath the town. Much of the town's workforce was devoted to the operation of the mines, but despite that devotion of labor, there were many tunnels that had been decommissioned for various reasons. These included tunnels that stretched beyond the ground-level security walls that contained the town.
These would become the key to Teresinha's escape. It took her years to squirrel away the supplies she would need (as she was not allowed most material possessions nor the freedom to shop for them) and to become familiar enough with the route that she would need to take. In tiny increments she studied the maps of the Temple archives that were kept out of the public eye, tucked away jars of preserves and small amounts of coin given to the Temple as offerings, and studied the clockwork goings of the clergy and townspeople when they weren't attending to her.
She made her escape not long after turning 20 years old, with the overwrought celebration of the day of her birth fresh in her mind. Desperate not to let the rest of her life be like that, she finally fled, wrapping herself up in torn and stained pieces of Temple vestments to protect herself from the harsh desert weather and conceal her gold skin and floating hair. It was no easy task to make it to the closest neighboring town on foot, but she had prepared just enough to get her to a place where she could properly supply herself for long-term travel.
Unfortunately, she didn't have many marketable skills nor the coin to compensate for it. With its limited, self-sufficient economy, actual money was hard to come by in Sanctuary, and she hadn't been able to leave with much. So she spent a lot of time doing odd jobs and the occasional petty theft of food or supplies that she didn't think anyone would miss, never giving out the name that the town of Sanctuary had forced upon her. Never telling anyone much of anything at all, really, beyond that she was just trying to make her way to a better place. Being regarded as inherently unequal to everyone she had ever spoken to didn't leave her with many social graces, and she wasn't terribly eager to make friends with the potential consequences of her escape still looming over her.
She found her way from town to town in Central Eris, little but a nameless vagabond for about a month, before her wandering led her to a place where the boundary between planes was weak. One moment she was in the desert, and the next she was in the Feywild, colorful and chaotic and utterly new to her in every imaginable way. Survival in the Feywild was both easier and harder than in the material plane; everything seemed designed to trick and trap the unsuspecting, but she'd lived her whole life telling half-truths and refusing to trust that anything was as it seemed on the surface.
For a week she was lost in the Feywild, managing better than most strangers to the plane but hardly an expert in Feywild survival. Still, she found all the danger and trickery strangely thrilling after a lifetime of strict routine and being handled like spun glass. It was after a week that she caught the attention of a powerful and noble Archfey, who was intrigued by this intruder to her realm. This is how she met Lady Islainene, the Great Fey who would become her patron. And this is where she took on her own name, going by it for the first time when introducing herself to Islainene: Kalmiya, from the name that her parents had intended to name their human daughter; and Longwillow, after the willow tree that had been her happiest hiding place from her hometown.
CREDITS
art 2
code
CAMPAIGN SYNOPSIS
ABBREVIATED HISTORY
After twenty years of being the Savior of Sanctuary, she eventually fled the town with only vague knowledge of the world outside, provided to her in visions through her one real connection with her Celestial lineage, an angel with whom she has a limited psychic link. She lived a brief life as a nameless vagabond, doing odd jobs and occasional petty survival-related crimes like stealing food or supplies, and making absolutely no friends in the process. This brief phase of wandering ended up with her stumbling into the Feywild (the plane of existence where the Fey originate,) where she got very lost and then met the fairy noble who granted her power and took on the name that would become her own: Kalmiya Longwillow. The deal they made was that Kalmiya would always entertain her patron in exchange for the power to secure her own freedom and live her own life as she chooses to.
Gifted with unprecedented magical ability and adventuring gear that hid her entire face and body, Kalmiya was empowered by this opportunity to take on a new identity and live a new life, though there was quite an adjustment phase of mistrust and not knowing her own strength. More than once, she grievously injured or killed people that she didn't mean to, and plenty of people that she did. Most of them foes, but some of them people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time in a moment of panic. There were a lot of growing pains in her transition from aimless weirdo to wandering do-gooder, but eventually she found her stride as a bit of a mercenary, taking on low-level jobs and solving simple problems like predators menacing livestock, bandits robbing small merchant carts, and elderly shopkeepers needing something like 25 freshly-picked apples that they couldn't pick on their own.
She moved on quickly from all these people and places that she helped, unsettled by the idea of putting down roots and trying to build genuine connections with people she couldn't bring herself to trust even when they were kind to her. Still, so much exposure to the wonderful and different world outside of Sanctuary did wonders for her ability to interact with other people as equals and accept that she was capable of receiving kindness, even if it would take her a while to feel like she deserved it. After a year and some change of wandering mercenary work, Kalmiya craved more from her potential, and so she enrolled as a student in the University of Abrax, an adventuring school located on the same continent as the town of Sanctuary. She managed to complete one semester as a student there and grew her magical capabitilites significantly before the proximity to her awful hometown finally got to her. She fled the continent partway into her second semester, transferring to the Brightstone Institute on the Isle of Cyre, a good ocean's trip away from everything she was trying to leave behind.
Her immediate welcome to Brightstone was a bit fraught with the interpersonal conflict between members of the cohort that had been preestablished before her arrival. One of the party members with demonic heritage was being possessed by his fiendish father and acting out about it, and it was pretty much just a mess until they completed their first mission to kill his dad and Kalmiya had the opportunity to integrate more effectively with her new cohort, alongside a couple of other new classmates. Amongst the cohort, she also met someone else of Celestial heritage for the first time in her life, and the importance of this connection is what finally convinced her that maybe she'd found people worth staying with, despite all of her doubts and fears.
The trials of many missions, domestic life, and school-sponsored events have given compelling reasons both for and against establishing herself at the Brightstone Institute. On the one hand, she's surrounded by a variety of wonderful and interesting people who she has truly come to love. On the other hand, those people all also have terrible powers in their pasts, and Kalmiya's proximity to them has made her a target for a lot more than just wayward seekers from Sanctuary, and that sort of cramps her freedom-focused vibes. This is a struggle that came to a head over the course of their biggest mission yet, a venture to the frozen land of the Reave, a prison colony which had mysteriously cut off all contact with the outside world.
It turned out that an eldritch horror had taken up residence beneath the island and pretty much decimated its population with minor horrors like shapeshifters and mind flayers, best known as creatures that eat your mind until you die. Most of the party temporarily lost a lot of incredibly important memories in the conflicts with these psychic aberrations, and having forgotten her reasons for staying at Brightstone in the first place, Kalmiya nearly fled the island and abandoned her cohort before being convinced not to by the romantic partner she had forgotten. This was a pivotal moment in cementing her commitment to the cohort, as the entire mission left her incredibly disillusioned with Brightstone's disregard for the safety of its students and distrusting of all the faculty involved; the only people she does trust are the members of her party, and she'll die before she lets them be taken from her.
On the way back from the Reave mission, the party also took a little detour to see a wizard about removing a curse from Kalmiya, which she'd inadvertently taken on after freeing some conscripted assassins from magical tracking by their fascist government. Getting those literal demons out of her head was a lucky break, but supposed summer vacation following the trip to the Reave only brought more misfortune: the death of a former teacher in a conflict against a powerful swordsman seeking the hearts of felled gods; the resurrection and reappearance of a cohort member's murdered brother, back for revenge on behalf of the spy organization they'd both been part of; the discovery that one of Kalmiya's past accidental kills was a relative of someone in her cohort; the appearance of clergymen from Sanctuary searching for their Savior, now apparently outcasts from the town who had begun worshiping a new and more eldritch god after Kalmiya abandoned them; and the discovery that one of the party member's mentors had been kidnapped and was going to be executed in a political bid to prompt a war. A lot of things happened very quickly and pretty much all of them were terrible.
Being put into a position where she could no longer hide her origins from the party was a low point for Kalmiya. Sharing her truth with them not because she chose to in a moment of trust, but because circumstances necessitated it when she needed their help dealing with the apostates from Sanctuary, left her shaken to her core in a way that she's still recovering from. Their support was invaluable in getting her functional enough to complete the mission to save their friend's mentor, and she put on a big show of being the usual Kalmiya in the hopes that she could fake it 'til she made it. With mixed success, but at least the cohort finally got a break from awful missions over the next few months.
Instead life was filled more with interpersonal drama and a lot of relationship developments amongst Kalmiya's cohort, which was a little difficult to watch for her, as she'd had a bit of a dispute months prior with her romantic partner in the process of trying to figure out some less-monogamous aspects of her sexuality. It was frustrating to watch the rest of her party pursue those things so easily while she struggled both with her boyfriend and her religious upbringing, but eventually the couple was able to resolve the misunderstanding and Kalmiya was able to nab a girlfriend in addition to her boyfriend, which was a big step of both self-acceptance and general good fortune.
The slower months also included prom,
HalloweenHallow's End, and Remembrance Day, a celebration of the lives of fallen friends and family. Many of these were Kalmiya's first time properly celebrating occasions with loved ones. Kalmiya's boyfriend and his best friend also had their own exclusive mission, an excursion toanother campaign in the same universea resort island also being targeted by evil gods and magical fascists, which went pretty successfully and resulted in her boyfriend meeting his long-lost sister.Then, as the winter holidays approach and Kalmiya decides how to spend them with her cohort, she dreams of Sleep...