[center][hider=Ramona Lume]
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[color=#007BA7][sup]__________________________________________[/sup][/color] 
[sub][COLOR=#007BA7]24     [color=#007BA7][b]|[/b][/color]     Blightborn     [color=#007BA7][b]|[/b][/color]     Maid for the Royal Residence
[color=#007BA7][sup]__________________________________________[/sup][/color] 
Kingdom: Lunaris 
[color=#007BA7][sup]__________________________________________[/sup][/color]
Magic Specialty: Water, Air(Minor), Necromancy(Limited theoretical knowledge)
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	[COLOR=SILVER]✧ [B]Height –[/B][COLOR=#007BA7] 5’4”[/COLOR]
	✧ [b]Build –[/b][COLOR=#007BA7] Hourglass[/COLOR]
	✧ [b]Eye Color –[/b][COLOR=#007BA7] Cerulean[/COLOR]
	✧ [b]Hair Color –[/b][COLOR=#007BA7] Cerulean (Dyed black with soot)[/COLOR]
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[/cell][cell][color=#007BA7][b][sub]B I O G R A P H Y[/sub][/b][/COLOR] 
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[color=#007BA7]‘[i]If you’re reading this, I ask that you pass this on to my mother-in-law, Virginia Lume, born Sala, failing that, my grandmother, Zoe Vicario, born Sala. I only wish that I might confess my truth and leave some fragment of my story, some testament to the searing beauty I have seen and lost, to those who remain. If I am survived by neither, then go ahead, burn this, throw it away, but I pray that you might do so only after you have read it. This will be the last of my voice—the only whispers that I ask survive beyond my grave, if only for a little while.

May fate offer you a kindness that it has taken from me. May her hand be gentle to you. May you look gently on me as I write. Thank you. Thank you ten thousand times for reading my last grasps at life, and for giving me the mercy of your compassion. If only for a moment, I ask you to give me this.

If you do not know me, I will introduce myself for the last time. My name was Ramona Lume, born Vicario. I was born and raised in a village two days’ travel to the southeast of the capital. For so many years, it was only me and my father. My mother died when she brought me into this world. It is that burden that I first knew, from the moment I took my first breath. My father was a dedicated follower of Seluna—to her, he devoted his life, even before he officially took up the cloth when I was young. 

Let me tell you about this life: To be a member of the clergy is to bring the entire family into that world. I remember lighting the candles at our little temple as a little girl. I remember the soft robes, the quiet encouragements, and the long prayers. In another world, perhaps I would have joined my father in the cloth. Perhaps it would have been for the best. But I will never know this different world. I live in this one. I did study as if I were bound for the cloth. How could I not? I learned as my father did. It was the temple that taught us, and it was at the temple that I spent most of my time, for there was nowhere else to go but to follow my father there.

I admit, though, that this was not my entire life. I just never have understood how to go around without any particular purpose or direction, as a child can. I had my share of fun when I was little, definitely. Could I have had more friends? Could I have laughed more, played more in the mud, wrestled in the snow more, and so on? I probably could have. But I like to imagine that, even if I am probably not a person who has a happy spirit, my early years had as much joy as they did anything else. And I think that’s enough. It would feel wrong to ask for more.

But now, I want to write about something that I feel more strongly about than anything else. Love. I have always known the love of family. But even though I mourn that lost love, the love that leaves the biggest gaping hole in my heart is that which I shared with my dear Nico. 

We had first met when we were both around 12. If only I had known! But we were young—too young to understand such things! It was only when we were sixteen that we became friends. How I loved his company. We would speak for hours and hours about everything under the sun and moon. I learned later that he hoped to impress me, so he would sneak around the temple and read in order to make more conversation! He knew before I did what love meant. How silly I was, to not see that my best friend’s gaze was motivated by love as much as it was by the warmth of friendship! 

I still remember when he confessed his feelings. It was around the Spring Equinox when he said it to me. He had tried so hard to invite me fishing—it must have taken months! But it was there, by the seaside, as he was reeling in a crab no less, that he asked if I wanted to go with him. Of course I did! And of course, foolish as I was, I failed to understand what he had hoped for. I wish I could write about the funny story of our time dancing around the fire, locking eyes at sunset, and my foolishness being revealed as he leaned in for a kiss, while I blushed and giggled until realizing it was serious. I wish I could write about that perfect first embrace, but what I can write about instead, I think, is in a way just as beautiful.

You see, it was around when the blight first settled our lands that we began our journey together. And it was at that same time that my time with my father ended. We did not know, in those days, how the blight would come to poison us all. I was saved only because I had chosen to sleep rather than help at the altar that day. The blight settled in on our temple. My father and the dear old ladies who oversaw the upkeep of the temple were some of the first victims of the blight in the kingdom, as I understand it. And one of those old ladies was Nico’s grand-aunt.

Nico and I had always shared in our grief before. Like most people in the world, we never were strangers to the hardships of life. Even more, I had grown up without a mother, and he without a father. We bonded in those shared bitter tastes on our lips, wondering about what could have been, fantasizing about kinder worlds. What was meant to be a day of dancing, for us, was a day of mourning. Our first “I love yous” and promises of devotion were sputtered out through hot tears of grief. I remember telling him while I leaned on his shoulder, as his quiet tears melted into my scalp. As his mother and my grandmother pulled us away to do funerals for our loved ones, I remember feeling that the comfort was no longer the same. How the comfort of family had been poisoned by the depths of need for a single person!

Behind those tears, my eyes and his were set on each other despite everything else. How many times did we sneak out into the woods, intent on laying with one another, before kisses became quiet embraces and warm naps. For this, my only regret is that I came to use him as a crutch. I grieved and wept as he stoically comforted me, and he so often saw no room to share his own grief. If I had been wiser, I would have understood myself better and been my best from the beginning. But here I reveal a truth of my life. I do not, in my heart of hearts, feel I have any worship left to give Seluna. I am a wellspring of blind exaltation, which bubbles up only in the face of the object of my worship: Nico. 

I was always going to cling to him, wherever he was. But his roots went deeper than mine, and I always wonder if it is my fault, in the end, that he never got to say goodbye to his mother. I needed to leave our hometown. He always told me he did too. Sages, we said we’d become, and we’d move his mother into a better house up in the capital, where we’d be passionate academics. I see how the academies denied me. I always have known why. I know the magic of water well, but who in Lunaris cannot do water magic? Nico, my dear Nico, though he would contest me, is the true gem that went unpolished. He could weave and weave illusions. He showed me so often what his mind had conjured, intent on every detail. 

If only I had known that his art was fleeting and would escape me so soon, I would have cherished every second of it. But I was too busy gazing into his eyes, drinking the passion as he spoke of the challenges of light and perspective, of colour and darkness. And yet, this light was snuffed, and so we were in the capital together, newly married and without prospects. Maybe we should have returned home. But what was there to return to? The blight slowly crept across the land. Any day, home could have been gone forever.

So we fashioned new dreams. Dreams of hospitality, of community, of building family that we had always known so little of. Cooking is a way I’ve always tried to connect to my ancestors with. The flavours whisper memories into your ear if you only listen. We wanted to share our love, to find warmth in those we could. Lunaris has always been the more sickly of the two kingdoms. A warm soup to nurse aching hearts and heat frozen bones is a greater blessing than most, if you ask me. From great academics to simple cooks, we pulled our dreams closer to our station and chased them just as eagerly as we always had.

Sharing a dream, sharing a purpose, all of that is something that, when mixed with love, is the most powerful elixir of them all. Oh how I loved to drink it! I worked as a maid, first for a local magistrate, then for an advisor to the King, and then in the palace itself. When my fingers ached, cramped, and bled from scrubbing boiling water into grime, I could only close my eyes and drink that potion of dreams like I had never sipped on anything before. I could see it all so vividly. We would lay exhausted in our little bed, in our cramped little room, and we would whisper about our future while embraced so tightly that the winds of winter could never have broken us apart. 

In a different life, maybe I’d have the clarity to look back and see how the ugly purple bruises on my knees, my aching back, and my throbbing fingers were all signs of the hardest days of my life yet. But for me, I would go back to it without a doubt in my mind. I sit awake at night, remembering those days, for even if I just felt Nico’s lips on mine once in the morning and once before we went to sleep, covered in dried sweat and the stink of a day too hard to wash away, it was always a good day all the same. What I would sacrifice if only to know his lips pressed to mine again, I could never write in my right mind.

Love is madness. I hate being sane.

So let me tell you about my terrible return to sanity, now. One part of our dream was always to convince Nico’s mother to move in with us. She had stayed in her little cottage, a ways out of town, since we’d left for the capital. But even on that little hill, the blight was encroaching. When the sun finally left for good, we were able to convince her to come. We had scrimped and saved and could get a whole second room! She would take the bedroom, and we would take the floor of the main room. And from our little shack, we’d work harder than ever as she looked for some work to keep herself busy. Maybe one day, if Nico felt he was ready, we could have had children. A large family, smiling together through the hard times and good times all the same, sharing love and kindness with one another, passing on stories and sharing food—I wanted all of this so badly.

But Nico was right. We needed to find our security first. So we stayed careful, avoided surprises, and saw the apothecary to be certain about it. And yet, what I wouldn’t give to selfishly have a piece of him to hug called a child. I will never know what kind of mother I’d be, though. I couldn’t bear to know any child but one shared with my beloved.

We set out to help Virginia move. Little did I know that I would fall asleep in Nico’s arms for the very last time, that first night we spent camped by the side of the road. The blight had moved in on us in the night. I awoke. He didn’t.

I couldn’t bring myself to move for a day. I just stayed in his arms. I needed so badly for it to all just be the cruelest dream I’d ever dreamt. But I’ve never woken up. My heart was breathless. And if I could only have endured a thousand years of lashings in order to have another day with him, I would accept immediately. I cannot begin to describe how horrible a cold, dead hug is. My soul floats behind me when I walk, ripped out by the thorns of the death of love. Whenever I close my eyes, I still see him. I never want to see anything else.’

[ink splotches render a section illegible, if anything was indeed written there at all]

‘Love is like a poison. It’s the sweetest poison you’ll ever taste. You’ll want nothing else but more of it. I would drink it and bleed from my guts until the end of time if I was only allowed to. When you close your eyes, you enjoy the sweetest of dreams. And one day, you will open your eyes, and the love is gone, replaced with an empty bedside. I want to go back to being blind and deaf. I want to drown. I want to burn in it. I wish that Nico’s corpse reached back for me and strangled me so that I could have joined him. I wish he would have killed me and ripped my entrails from my body in the woods, as a skeleton animated by loving hatred. If I could only snap my wrist off and animate my hand into writing every gruesome exaltation for what I would rather to this soul-snapping shattered illusion of reality without my beloved, I would rip my own hand off and command her to do it. I would grow a new one and do it all again. I would gouge out my eyes if I knew they would not grow back, so that the remaining blackness could be filled only with visions of he who I have lost.

I will go to my grave gripping this cruelly sweet, thorn-coated rose of adoration. I will blaspheme in his name to the foul gods who allowed him to be taken from my arms. I make love to the dead with the passion of the living, for my heart screams that he must only live or bring me into death with him

If it were not that I had to do him the final act of seeing his funeral done, I would have set myself on fire that very vile morning. I wish I did. But I can’t. I can’t leave my love’s deeds undone. I can’t leave our dreams undone. I can’t march into death and face him if his mother is not cared for until I am ripped from this world like he was. I want so badly just to see him again. I want his touch again. It hurts just to remember the faintest shadow of his kiss, of his fingers grazing my cheek, of his eyes feeling my body. And I want it to hurt more. I want to feel it even more. Every burning moment of painful love reminds me why I am here. Our deed must be done, so we can love as beasts in the land of the dead with clear consciences. 

So I did something I had never before wanted to do. I volunteered to go to Dawnhaven and be the maid and a cook for the Princess, insisting only that half of my wage-and-a-half be left to dear Virginia, who granted me the only kindness any world has ever given me: my love. I will rip my fingers off to clean the grates in the floor. I will bleed, sob, and wheeze as long as I can, so that the burning love can consume all that I have to give it. I will build our home when all is done. I will make it all perfect, just as we dreamt. I will die there and give it to someone who understands, some other pairing who drinks the poison of love so greedily as I do and always will. This is my vow. This is my oath. I will be the maid of all, cleaning the cruelness of the world and sweeping together the shattered dreams of a bitter perfection that I will not taste until the grave. I will fill my food with the salt of tears and the poison of love and devotion, until my death leaves hunger to return. I will never again give anything less than the total devotion that I NEED in order to stab my love through to the other side of the veil and pierce my beloved’s heart once more, so his blood and mine can marry again.

Let all who oppose the innately divine calling of love be pierced and flain into the beautiful marital bed upon which the immaculate monsters of adoration lay. They know not how it is a mercy next to the all-consuming awe of the poison.

One day I will die, and you will read what I write in horror. It is horror, for my love is horrible in how it hurts like lightning to be so full to bursting and unable to ever again find a rod to strike.

I love you Nico. I love you so much that I hate all life that there ever has been and will be. Let my last breaths be broken, bloody whisperings of my love.[/i]’[/color]
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[color=#007BA7][b][sub]B L I G H T - B O R N[/sub][/b][/COLOR] 
[sub] 
Ramona, more so than most, has fought viciously against the tide of her transformation. Locked in a continuous struggle with her own body, it is hard to say what a fully-transformed Ramona would ultimately look like. For her wrestling with the forces of change, Ramona remains largely human in appearance. The cerulean glow of her eyes is smothered by a thick mourning veil, while she keeps her hair blacker even than it was before her transformation with the routine application of soot to stain it black. Ramona has always been tight-lipped, even for a maid, but her transformation has pushed her even further in this respect. Her voice sounds gravelly, raspy, almost as if she is hovering on the brink of the cold, its cadence further exacerbated by how she opens her mouth as little as possible when speaking, in order to hide how her teeth—all of them—have transformed and multiplied from human teeth to densely packed conical teeth. 

Even in her free time, Ramona is generally entirely clothed from the neck down, in addition to her veil. By ensuring as little of her skin as possible is shown, Ramona disguises another unavoidable feature of herself: her pallid skin. Ramona appears ever-slick with sweat, even in the coldest of temperatures. Like the skin of an amphibian, her skin is perfectly smooth, incredibly soft, and must remain moist. For this reason, Ramona refuses even to sleep without several layers of clothing, and wears a hair cover to bed, lest she leave a mark on the fabric pillow. Ramona shakes herself awake numerous times during the night, tossing and turning to ensure her pillow is flipped and its sides never become too damp so as to suggest anything other than what a cold-sweat from stress—her last ditch excuse—might produce.

And in these wee hours of the night, Ramona faithfully slips out to relieve herself, though her time is spent on other things than mere biology as well. Several times each week, she runs her With a bit of steaming-hot water and her very own pocket knife, Ramona brings her blade right in front of each ear, severing and cauterizing tiny mole-sized stubs, as if it were simply a normal routine. Then, reaching behind herself, she finds another nub, right at the base of her tailbone, and severs it, cauterizing that wound too. Finally, she takes her knife to her hands, to cut back the webbing that has begun to form between her fingers. After wrapping her hands in freshly-washed bandages, she returns to bed, as if nothing had happened, destroying the evidence by eating the removed parts of herself as she walks back. Without fail, Ramona undertakes this gruesome endeavour to ensure her struggle against being discovered for what she has become is not made all the more difficult. 

[COLOR=#007BA7][b]Type:[/b][/color] “Classical”
[COLOR=#007BA7][b]Abilities:[/b][/color] Ramona has seen a similar increase in strength to other blightborn, and a lesser, although still notable, increase in speed. To her unending frustration, Ramona has a truly formidable regeneration factor, not unlike those of some salamanders. Although she regularly cuts away her transforming flesh, it faithfully regenerates as if it were growing for the first time. When Ramona was first cutting away her webbing, she sliced off one of her pinkies. Within a month, it was regrown and indistinguishable from the lost digit. Similarly, her amphibian-like skin, even without gills, allows her to passively breathe without inhaling or exhaling, both on land and in water. When she sleeps, Ramona can sometimes fail entirely to breathe for extended periods of time, with no ill-effects. As a creature so devoted to water, and one bearing some resemblance to the salamander, Ramona may be seen on occasion to steam from her nostrils, like a dragon’s nostrils might smoke, for she can spit boiling water and steam as a dragon does fire and smoke. Finally, she has found an ability to sense movement with uncanny ability. Although her ability to do so varies by the material she’s standing on, Ramona can often feel people’s steps even through her shoes, able to sense the intensity of the step and around where it’s coming from, especially if she knows the people well. 
[COLOR=#007BA7][b]Weaknesses:[/b][/color] Owing to her skin and regeneration abilities, Ramona runs warm and has a lesser cold-tolerance to most blightborn. She is extremely vulnerable to dehydration, requiring a great deal to drink over the course of a day. In fact, it is her thirst which wakes her up for her relief most nights, rather than her bladder. Beyond this, Ramona’s transformation has made her appear allergy-prone, being rather intolerant of pollutants in the air and water, which makes wearing cloth over her mouth while sweeping all the more necessary lest she worry people for appearing sicker than she already can often come off as. For her continued use of soot to keep her hair black, Ramona often finds herself itchy and uncomfortable even before beginning her day’s work.

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