Rid of Me
Cassilde of House Vortayn
Age: 32
Species: Hapan
Gender: Female
Eyes: Dark Brown
Hair: Dark Brown
Height: 5'6"
Weight: 145lbs
Force Sensitive: Yes
Age: 32
Species: Hapan
Gender: Female
Eyes: Dark Brown
Hair: Dark Brown
Height: 5'6"
Weight: 145lbs
Force Sensitive: Yes
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Hapan-beautiful, as society demands. Cassilde is not just pretty, but striking. She has a strong brow, high cheekbones and a full mouth. Her skin is fair and luminous, maintained to be flawless because blemishes are death in this world. That's not to say she doesn't have cosmetic help; her deep brown eyes are framed by a signature dramatic eye, dark liner, and eyeshadow colour-coded to match the day's chosen outfit. The rest serves a quieter purpose; if you notice the foundation, you're doing it wrong. Her face comes in a pair. In the company of others, it is warm, open and expressive. Eyes that soften, the smile that comes easily, the one that makes a person feel chosen. Her private face is the truth, when the warmth switches off like a lamp and what is left is cool, still and almost severe. No one is meant to see it.
Her hair is a dark brown, worn to the occasion. Up in an intricate bun for the more formal and austere arrangement, and down sleek to the collarbone in a side-part for the more informal and personal. Never a hair out of place, as physical flawlessness is Hapan armour.
Cassilde's frame is carried in the curves, with an hourglass figure that's full at the bust and hip over a defined waist. There is nothing waifish about her. In a culture that values the sensual and sculptural over frailty, her body is close to the ideal, and she is perfectly aware of that.
INVENTORY
A fine cosmetics case - The eyeliner, the eye shadow, and all the rest, ready at a moment's notice for an emergency touch-up. The case has a false bottom which holds something entirely different. Poisons. Measured powders, tinctures and antidotes as required in case of emergency or drastic action.
Signature fragrance - Burnt sugar, smoke, dry cedar. Let a room remember you once you've left it.
A personal lamp - Hapan eyes should never leave home without one.
Royal symbols - A circlet of Callamar, and a Duch'a's seal ring. Beautiful, empty symbols of a conflicted authority.
Secure, coded comms - Just about as important as the portable lamp in Hapan society.
PERSONALITY AND BELIEFS
Cassilde holds herself with unhurried grace. Her beauty is a blade, bred into culture and woven into a collective societal neurosis. She's not self-indulgent about beauty, no, instead she uses it. She says less than everyone and remembers everything. Her warmth is the weapon; it's the first thing people notice and the last thing that they should trust. She is the type to compliment your dress while knowing the name of the lover you're hiding. She is, however, patient and not prone to carelessly spending the ammunition of information. The Hapan game is a slow game, where only one piece is moved at a time.
Her warmth is real, to a degree, more than just a weapon to be wielded at court to pull people into confession and sway perspectives. A small part of her honestly craves the closeness that it promises, and that in itself is a weapon because it makes the trap an honest one.
When Cassilde speaks, she makes the listener feel like they're the only person in the room. Rarely raising her voice. Threats come wrapped in kindness, and she never outright states what she wants, because wanting aloud is weakness. She has an uncanny read on people, which, while Cassilde believes this to be a part of her own natural genius, is actually due to the unrealised Force sensitivity within.
Behind closed doors, Cassilde is a conflicted woman comprised of grief and loathing. The circumstances that led her to the throne were traumatic, and while matricide and sororicide are not unheard of in Hapan society, the murder of her mother and sister was not her direct wish. However, she is also complicit in her own elevation, the beneficiary of her family's murder and she has kept what Mercy's violence has brought her. There is a dark, unspeakable satisfaction tangled in that grief, marred further by the loathing of Mercy that is often too complex to emotionally navigate.
To worsen matters, there is a silent undercurrent Cassilde has never looked at directly. The notion that she doesn't actually want to rule, and that the whole fight to hold Callamar and break Mercy's leash may be a performance staged by a woman who would rather lay the crown down than keep it.
STRENGTHS
[+] Disarming Warmth - She reads people with an unsettling accuracy and uses it for her own means, so even her enemies come away feeling chosen, safe and eager to confide in her.
[+] Long Game Patience - Cassilde never strikes where she can be seen to reach, and will gladly wait years to be proven right.
WEAKNESSES
[-] Night-Blind - Like most Hapans, she is near-helpless in the dark and is reliant on light to function. Cut the light, and you cut the composure.
[-] Louise Writes This Character - Beneath the open desire for the throne, Cassilde longs to be led. She, herself, is unaware of this and cannot see that she is drawn to those stronger and more ruthless than herself. The right hand could slip past every guard she has.
HISTORY
Cassilde was the second daughter of Elsivane of House Vortayn, Duch'a of Callamar. The spare, never in line, never meant for the seat. Her mother was a sympathetic reformer who pressed, quietly, on the matter of the sexes, wishing to ease the old matriarchal order towards something more equal. Unbeknownst to Elsivane, this made her something of a marked woman. When the traditionalists moved to purge their reformist Duch'as, Mercy was the hand sent to "take care of" them, and Elsivane was one of the names on that list.
Mercy killed her, and then, for good measure, she also killed Cassilde's older sister, Séverine, who was guilty at least by proximity and as the heir, accused of being groomed with the same radical brush. Both of their necks snapped like afterthoughts to a brute of a woman espousing the virtues of the true Hapan way. The warlord's hand was already around Cassilde's neck, lifting the woman off her feet and spelling an end to their House before there was a pause, and apparent mercy.
"Oh, I think you will be perfect for this. But I have my eye on you. If I see one wrong move... I'll be back."
Cassilde was spared and set in the wreckage as the new Duch'a of Callamar, chosen for a reason that the woman could only ever speculate on. The throne wasn't won or inherited; it was handed to her, over the bodies of her mother and sister, by the very woman who had made the bodies. It was a question left unanswered: what made her perfect for rule? Why was she judged acceptable when her mother and sister had failed?
She could only speculate as she inherited Callamar's circlet.
Callamar, a small, proud and luminous world with pale marble cities on mirror-still lakes beneath a sky that the Cluster's stars never let fall fully dark. Its first civic virtue is composure. Beauty, serenity and a flawlessness that is never permitted to look cracked, in its stonework as much as its people. That stonework is also its trade. Callamar quarries a prized pale stone that dresses palaces across the Consortium, cultivates pearls in its shallows, and refines the finest cosmetics and pigments in Hapan space, on which the Consortium's noblewomen depend.
It was a circlet with nothing behind it. Callamar's fleet did not answer to her, instead answering to Mercy. Her rule held on a leash, an ornament of authority with no force to take it back, and above her, in her mind, stood the woman who put her there and could take it all back.
However quietly, in the patience of the long game, Cassilde was not motionless. The Jedi. An old enemy her whole world had been raised to detest, and the one power in the galaxy she had judged that might be made to break Mercy's grip. It was madness. It was a worse heresy than her mother had been murdered for. Messages in the dark through encrypted communications, out past relays towards a strange, towards an enemy, and towards the most uncertain gambit. She sat amongst the lamplight, her warm face shed, and waited.
She had grown very good at waiting.