Titles: World Walker, Devourer of Spirits, Master of a Thousand Paths
Age: 56
World: A large and sparsely populated world, where humanity is divided into small and scattered settlements with wide expanses of nature in between. It is a land where humans fit themselves to the environment instead of the other way around, where their reverence for nature have prevented them from expanding their holdings or encroaching too far into the wilds. Their reverence and their fear.
Spirits roam the land, spirits *are* the land and human are, if not subjugated to them, at the very least at the mercy of their whims and desires. Sometimes they act as guides, sometime they benevolently act as humanities protectors, other punish humans for their failings; some are even willing to elevate human and teach them who to use their powers for themselves, so long as they can walk the path shown to them.
Most people live their entire lives in the settlement that they are born into, never knowing much of what exists beyond their walls. Those who choose to leave their homes and venture out are known as Wanderers; out there, beyond the quiet safety of their walls and borders, they will find endless wonders ahead of them, endless adventure and opportunities, but they are also unlikely to ever return.
Race: Human; a black-souled perceiver. Candice was a little stronger than most, a little more daring, but she started her journey as just a human until she met the spirits and began to walk their paths and gained a power beyond what anyone expected from her.
Legend: Candice was born in a cage. Or at least, thatâs how she viewed it. Like most of humanity she lived in a settlement that no one was ever allowed to leave; it had big tall walls to keep people inside, guards to make sure no one could escape and lots and lots of rules about what they should and shouldnât do to avoid angering the spirits. Beyond those walls there was a forest and beyond the forest there was a mountain and beyond that mountain there was everything else; no one knew exactly what was out there because no one had ever been that far and returned. The only ones who ever left the cage were the Exiled; the criminals whose punishment for their crimes was to be freed from the cage.
They always looked so terrified as they were pushed out of the one gate built into the cages walls.
Candice was jealous of them.
Her position inside the cage was an important one; or so she was told. Her father was its ruler, its king or something to that effect, and as his daughter that meant she was expected to one day rule it herself. Or more likely marry the person who would. That was the expectation placed on her, one of many; her entire life decided for her from before she was even born, the course of her life pre-determined. Just like everyone else inside the cage.
She wanted out.
At seventeen years of age, she managed to get herself exiled. And unlike the other fearful criminals who begged and pleaded for death instead of being forced outside the walls, she walked out the gate with her head held high.
She would have died in the first month had the spirit not found her. A life of looking beyond the walls had not prepared her for actually surviving beyond them and acquiring proper food and drink had not been easy for an iconoclastic girl who nonetheless had had everything she needed provided to her from the moment she was born. The spirit saved her life, took pity on her, or maybe just took an interest in her lack of fear, and nursed her back to health. It became her first teacher; that sly, cunning fox. Sometimes she thinks back to the smile it had on its face when it met her and wonders if it did what it did because it knew what would happen.
It showed her the first path she would walk, the first of many, the path
of walking. It taught her how to move like a spirit does, flitting from place to place with no regard for the distances in between. More than that it taught her that she could learn things, that a human could learn to do what a spirit could; their powers came from knowledge and understanding that humans lacked, not from any innate power that was theirs and theirs alone. It was ignorance that made humans weaker than them, nothing else.
âYou know so little of the world child.â The fox had told her. âYou lack
understanding. If you wanted to leave your city so badly all this time why didnât you just step over the walls? What was stopping you, other than the thought that you couldnât?â
It wasnât as simple as that, Candice would respond, a spirit could understand; humans couldnât do things like that. They couldnât fly or turn invisible or breath fire like spirits could. It was impossible.
â
Thereâs no such thing. Impossible? You limit yourself with such words. You weakness is self-inflicted, just like all the other humans. You place yourself in cages of your own making and tell yourself there is no escape. Little girl, your body might be free now but your mind and soul are still shackled.â Its eyes glinted.
âFree them.â
Two days later, Candice mastered the ability the fox had to teach and used it to step right over the mountain that had always blocked her view of the rest of the world, no longer an obstacle to her progress. She had thought that escaping the walls would be enough to free herself, but now she had clarity; the world was much larger than she had ever imagined, with more dimensions than she even knew existed. Candice had other spirits to find, other things to learn; no longer would those things be kept from her.
The fox smiled.
Candice travelled everywhere that she could, seeking out the hidden places that other humans avoided and met as many spirits as she could; some she had to run from, others tried run from her, a small few tried to kill her and an even smaller few were willing to talk to her and teach her their ways. Every time they told her it would take months or even years to walk the path to its end. Every time she proved them wrong, mastering their skills in days or weeks at most. Every time the spirits watched her leave their territories with fearful expressions.
At twenty she learned the path of healing and never experienced another day of sickness or weakness.
At twenty four she learned the path of stability and no longer needed to fear old age slowing her down, even if it would still one day claim her.
By the time she was twenty five all of the spirits she met already knew her name by the time she found them, even the ones who had hidden themselves so deep in nature that they hadnât seen a human in millennia. They spoke of her, told each other stories of the human who had walked every path put before her and learned everything that the spirits could teach her. Some said it with fear, others with anger, some with amusement or curiosity, but they all spoke of it; the girl who sought knowledge and power with an insatiable hunger. Watch out or she might devour you too.
At twenty seven they started to appear before her; the other wanderers. She hadnât seen another human in years at this point, sheâd avoided them as much as she could and there werenât many who ventured outside their cages to begin with; the ones who did were like her, those with adventurous or rebellious spirits, those who had been fortunate to meet the less capricious spirits and gain power from them. Some wanted to speak to her, others to ask her questions, a few wanted to challenge her, even kill her. She defeated them all; her power and mastery over the paths exceeded theirs.
At thirty she killed her first spirit. A powerful thing, a violent thing, possessing a hatred of all things man; it could not even conceive that a human like her might rip its soul from its chest until it was too late. And in its passing a path was closed forever.
The next couple of decades passed in much the same way as the one before; Candice travelled the world, she walked the paths that were opened for her and forever closed those that werenât. She defeated those that challenged her and those that tried to stop her. She found the hidden places and uncovered their secrets. She learned everything she could.
By the age of fifty, her appearance exactly the same as it had been the day she had learned to stop aging, Candice was powerful enough that no man of spirit in the world could challenge her. No place in the world was beyond her reach, nothing beyond her sight, nothing she cared to learn that she didnât already know. The world, conquered.
And yet, as she stood there, she could perceive
more. An endless sky and beyond that a veil and beyond that was everything else; no one knew exactly what was out there because no one had ever been that farâŠ
Will: Candice perceived that she had not yet seen everything that there was and this stoked the fire inside of her. She perceived that the world she lived in was yet another cage, another barrier between herself and the outside and that this was not acceptable.
Mastery: The paths that a spirit can open for a human are as many and varied as the spirits are themselves; they are more in tune with the world, more knowledgeable of how it works than any other and this knowledge, these closely guarded secrets, allow them to do things that the closed-minded humans cannot. They can walk the paths once shown them however, though it is rarely an easy thing and many fail to reach the end; usually it comes as an epiphany, a sudden understanding and a change of perspective that forever changes the way they interact with the world. The ability to cross great distances, stepping over mountains and across oceans, becomes possible when you shift your perspective and realise that distance is an illusion and that your destination is always a mere step away. The ability to see what was once hidden from you becomes possible, once you simply accept that your eyes have been closed your whole life.
Candice has walked almost all of these paths and has gained a mastery over all of them. The ability to
step, the ability to
see, the ability to draw power from the world around her, to interact with the soul, to heal her body or stop the physical effects of aging, to manipulate the very world around her, to control what others perceive. For all that the paths are varied however, most of them lead to the same place; mastery of the self. Candice is stronger, she is faster, she is tougher, her wounds are temporary and her physical appearance is locked by her self-image. She can control the natural elements to an extent, fire and water and earth and air, but has an easier time drawing from them to enhance herself instead; she always was the selfish type, more willing to take than give.
Ascent: The ability to
step was the first path that Candice ever walked, the one shown to her by a tricky little fox so long ago. The first step she took let her move right past the mountain that was blocking her path and her reach only grew from there. As she stood atop the world, staring at a sky that she now knew was not endless, as she saw with a clarity that had until that point eluded her and finally saw the veil that was keeping her from going even furtherâŠ
She stepped past that too.
Ephemera: No one and nothing. Candice has no possessions other that the clothes that she wears and her family has been left so far behind that she no longer remembers their names or faces.
