Entry #3
Alienarose
Name: Rella Ja'neer
Age: 53 (in human years, she'd be about 17)
Race: Cyparti - humanlike, very beautiful in appearance, usually fair in complexion and posessing soft, silvery wings on their back.
Background:Rella grew up in the city of Angelus. With high walls separating the Cyparti from the wildlands, most of the residents went about their business without a second thought about what happened outside the city. War, famine, poverty, and even disease were foreign concepts to the Cyparti. The only thing they acknowledged from the wildlands were the Orim, cursed and hideous beings with rough, leathery skin and batlike wings - the complete opposite of the beauty the Cyparti possessed. No one knew how the Orim came to be and very few had ever looked upon them, but they were known to exist.
One day, Rella was introduced to the forbidden
Texts of Agarre. These covered a shady area of magic that seemed to nullify the teachings of the Pillars of Angelus. People who were secretly a part of the Agarrean Sect, argued that the teachings of the texts did not go against the Pillars, but rather opened up a whole other aspect of magic, called
The Grey. Many had gone become adept in this area before gaining so much power, they left Angelus for the mythical Higherlands. The allure of the forbidden tempted her into
The Grey and she soon became obsessed with it. She possessed a natural aptitude and began to rebel against the Pillars, believing they were put into place to keep the Cyparti from becoming too strong.
Rella kept her involvement well hidden from most of her teachers. One man who was familiar with the Agarrean Sect could sense a difference in her manner and something in her eyes that very few would ever detect. He confronted her about it, urging her to leave it alone. He told her there was much more to
The Grey than any of the Agarreans could even begin to understand and that she was toying with something that would invariably destroy her - something only the Orim knew about. Rella denied involvement and quickly broke away from the teacher. But his mentioning the Orim left a hollow feeling in her stomach. She didn't know what he meant.
It wasn't long after that she began to change physically. She noticed the dry patches of skin first and simply hid them, denying that it had anything to do with what she had been so obsessively dabbling in for so many months. Next were the veins that began to show up on her fair skin, mainly on her legs. She began to feel pain in her joints. She consulted the texts as well as the teachings of the Pillars to see if she could find any answers. As an afterthought, she researched the Orim. It didn't take her long to put two and two together.
The Orim truly were cursed. Once Cyparti just like Rella, they were cursed with the consequences of dabbling in
The Grey. Once the transformation began, there was no going back. Even discontinuing working with
The Grey, Rella would only continue to lose her beauty. In addition, her command of all aspects of magic would fail and indeed, she was already seeing that come about. The morning she woke to find many of the beautiful silvery feathers from her wings lying on her bed, revealing a scaly underwing, she knew she would have to join the others before her who had left, not to the Higherlands as they all had believed, but into the exile of the wildlands instead. She grabbed the feathers in anguish and clenched them in her hand until her fingernails pressing into her palm drew blood. She knew her innocence was lost forever and soon, her beauty and the ability to touch magic would be as well.
