Sole Member of a Decrepit LineageHead of the Einnashe Family
Anaxstolas “Ana” Einnashe
“What am I out here for, again…? Or, was it why?”Male
Age: 15
Alignment: Chaotic Good (?)
Rank: Frame
Wish for the Grail: A desire that is not his own, but it is rather that of his Elders, the most senior members of the Einnashe family, from whom he has inherited little. To restore the Einnashe, and undo the seemingly relentless curse that lingers over their name. However, the boy himself…
Command Seal: The first seal appears to be a crescent moon resting just beneath his middle knuckle. The second seal beneath that are the branches and trunk of a jagged tree, reaching up to try and wrap around the incomplete moon. The third seal, beneath them both, are the roots of the tree, curling around and shaped in a softer manner than the aggressive branches, looking as if they aimed to either impale the moon or strangle it in a thorn-like vice.
Biographical
Einnashe. A legendary name. A name robbed from those who once owned it.
When one thinks Einnashe, they think not of the once supreme magus family who could have been called the Highest Masters of Illusion & False Reality, who proudly yet secretly honed their craft as noble members of the early Association.
Nor do they think of the great shame of the Einnashe family, the Magus turned Dead Apostle Ancestor, who drunk on that very same pride sought out immortality.
Rather, they think of the forest in which Einnashe was slain. They think of the Predator Forest, the Disemboweling Sea of Trees, which was born from the blood of Einnashe seeping into the roots of a hematophagic tree. Empowered by the essence of the Seventh Dead Apostle Ancestor, the Predator Forest was granted the name of ‘Einnashe’, becoming the second of the Dead Apostles line. Through its unpredictable nature, appearing and siphoning miles-worth of land of life before vanishing once more, the Forest of Einnashe became the primary association for the family name from the Middle Ages onwards.
Yet, despite being a family at the very founding of the Association alongside the the Blue Bloods and the Director himself, the Einnashe are never heard from. Never seen. The truth of the matter is known -- the Einnashe family was cursed by their own great shame. His acts brought a degenerative blight upon his family line, reducing the quality of their craft bit by bit over the years, until desperation kicked in towards the end of the Middle Ages.
The Highest Masters of Illusion had become mere charlatans compared to their prior glory. And so, a sad choice was made. A desperate and embarrassing gamble.
A complete halt in their research of False Reality, in exchange for beginning a new in a path of the broad umbrella of Druidism. A brutal, hematophagic school which drew on the older and more unflattering ideas of the druid. Beyond being the guides and history keepers of communities, they were priests to deities of old, and as such, there were some who took on darker practices. The involvement of blood and body to empower their craft was among these acts.
Even while similarly foul practitioners were chased out of Europe in the Middle Ages, rotting away in Siberia and beyond without their magical foundation, the Einnashe hid themselves, as they were so expert at doing. The research continued, and for a time, there was progress.
The Forest of Einnashe, the association of that being with life and blood, seemed to have connected with the family’s new direction. Indeed, for a time it seemed as they would be able to thrive again, but it was not to be. They stagnated, their quality as a family remaining at a disappointing level. Yet, even still, they maintained face through old tricks of memory, maintaining an illusion of posture before the world of magecraft. The Elder system.
Let no more be said of the Elder system.
Fast forward to 1888, and the Einnashe are a footnote. Avoiding complete degeneracy of their legacy, they have yet to make any strides. Their family hangs on the very edge, even finding the act of producing heirs difficult. And to make things worse, the current heir is…
A broken tool for a complex task.
A boy who sees the progress of the world and stares on in awe.
A boy who regards the act of animal dissection, memory workings and blood druidism with a disinterested apathy.
A boy who would be content to be forgotten to time.
He moves with the flow of time as opposed to against it. The preservation of Mystery is secondary to sampling the newest wonder of this rapidly marching world. Automobiles, circuses, and other such strange things to come out of modernity occupy his thoughts. He is a Magus who fights against his nature, continuing the seek the Truth, yet constantly looking out the window to the land of progress.
It threatens to consume him and his family. In the greatest irony, the Einnashe could become as their great shame willed -- forgotten, and alone...
Unless they could work a miracle.
Directed by his Elders, Anaxstolas heads to a land of strangers to take part in a contest established by three families with the promise of a grand miracle as the prize. Truth be told, it is less the contest he is interested in, and more the fact he apparently gets to summon heroes. That’s pretty cool.
Unlike a certain magus of the future modern age, Ana is not one who is conflicted between being a Magus and being a human. He accepts the nature of being a magus, although it is with complete disinterest. The passion is only half-there, emerging at specific and odd moments over matters his Elders would consider trivial. He dissects and sacrifices, but he does not question if it is right to take the life of another. He just wishes he was doing something else. He employs remnants of the Einnashe’s original memory based magecraft, but does not consider the moral implications of it.
Really, he just wants to be out there instead of in that place of suffocating regression and nostalgia. He wants to be with the humans, even if he is a Magus. A broken being among humanity, how quaint. In a way, that desire is also nostalgic.
Magic Circuit Switch: The sensation of a pin pricking the skin.
Magic Circuit Quantity: C
Magic Circuit Quality: D
Affinity: Water, Earth
Magecraft
Ana’s basics were thoroughly covered, having been drilled into practicing the foundations of modern thaumaturgy from the moment he had the ability to understand -- which, thanks to the more eschatological aspects of the Einnashe magecraft -- was very early. His ability in them, aside from things such as Bounded Fields and Formalcraft, the former of which can be said to be his speciality, varies with a leaning towards the below average.
Dreuzaz Gamundiz Blōþą, a dreadful name for a craft.
‘Break apart the mind, and bloom (Rupture)’.
Although it is named from an ancient language, the craft itself is something of a mongrelization between the original focus of the Einnashe family and the new direction they took in the wake of the Predator Forest. It is a conglomerate of their old ways of mind and perception, and the new ways of body and blood.
Although the ‘library’ contained within the Einnashe crest is theoretically great and terrible, it has also suffered from degradation. A millenial class crest it is, but it is also the absolute lowest among them. Botched transplants are the lead cause for its degradation, and with it is the craft of the Einnashe. It is a constant reminder, hinting at greater feats to all those who wear it, yet the stored knowledge remains out of reach.
As such, the Einnashe have a fondness for their literal library in their family domain, containing the knowledge of thousands of years on all matters relating to the mind and their particular branch of druidism, as well as those outside of it.
Ultimately, the Einnashe magecraft is hematophagic in nature, turning them into something akin to a Dead Apostle due to their reliance on blood in order to fuel their craft, be it their own or that of others. The comparison to a Dead Apostle is something of a stretch, but if those of modernity were to witness the habits and power of the True Druids of Old--
But that is a distraction.
Despite drawing on the inherent quality of blood as a catalyst, the quality of Ana as a Magus limits his abilities greatly. Inducing illness, causing fevers and other virological and bacterial banes, are one of the few things he is capable of, although it is hardly an impressive capability. The catch is that such things must be transferred through his own blood and physical contact with it as a the catalyst.
Even their cousin-technique to the Gandr is not nearly as efficient or powerful.
However, like one might create a chimera in their workshop, Ana has found himself delving into the development of something called a ‘Chimera Hemo Pox’. A largely unimportant note, as for it to come even close to being as effective as chicken pox, he would require resources he simply does not have at such a time.
The use and employment of blood and sacrifice in divination is a given for a druid. In this way, it is the act of ‘reading the statistically likely futures of life’, and ‘perceiving life that is elsewhere’, although the qualities of this divination vary with the quality of the sacrifice, among other factors. To attain any useful and meaningful form of future sight for a Grail War, for even a moment, would require a sacrifice that may not even exist. Ultimately, this too is limited by Ana’s own quality, his body and soul lacking the appropriate strengths to ‘accept’ this magecraft’s clairvoyance to the full. Were he to have a more illustrious circuit composition, he would undeniably be capable of something closer to the Clairvoyance of a legendary magus.
Another ability of note is a Working that is the ‘encouragement of growth’, called
Red Cernunnos Circulator in its translated name. This accelerates the development of plantlife by an order of magnitudes, allowing flora and arboreal life to grow in what is the equivalent of a blink of an eye. Of course, the ‘equivalent’ in this case being the speed of a tree. A tree takes many years to reach maturity, but under the influence of Red Cernunnos Circulator, a sapling may become an adult over the course of several days, as opposed to the years that would otherwise be required. Perhaps regrettably, it does not allow such examples of life to grow beyond their adulthood into things resembling weapons. It is not the ‘rapid mutation’ of life, after all.
This in turn plays a part in the natural talent owed to druids of the Einnashe; the rapid establishment of efficient and well functioning Workshops. Indeed, while the overall quality of Ana’s magecraft is lacking, his Workshop will always be an undeniably beautiful thing. In that sense, the hints of his true nobility shine through, even if it is only through the slightest crack in a cursed wall.
His aptitude for the growth of plant life resulted in a leaning towards potions, acting in conjunction with his studies into disease. With the lifecycle of plants accelerated, his ability to acquire certain reagents is notably high.
Unrelatedly, did you know that Ana actually has the ability to communicate and reach an understanding with trees and plantlife? It’d be wrong to call it talking, so much as he does ‘gesture’ with them, and they in turn ‘gesture’ back, which translates meaning to Ana. However, the world of plants is a brutal yet slow pace, making said communication a matter of hours. Not all that useful, to the point of baffling the Elders. A meaningless form of ESP, maybe?
The mental and illusory side of the Einnashe magecraft is present within Ana, although not to the same extent as the druidistic element. It manifests in his seamless self-hypnosis, capable of skipping the incantation process almost entirely when it involves any personal work of his own. The Einnashe have an uncanny ability to regard their inner world. Although a shadow of their former selves, they can utilize what circuit count and quality they do have left efficiently, and Ana is no different. They are programmed from youth by their Elders to master the process, with the careful application of mentality altering magecraft channelled through an ancient mystic code of the family. Although this makes the thought process of an Einnashe magus clean and without much stutter, as well as enabling them to slip into deep self-hypnosis as easily as one would utilize their Magic Circuit Switch, it also has the adverse effect of making the Einnashe notably strange individuals holding a collective warped psyche beyond even that of the average magus. This is further compounded by the bloody nature of their druidism.
Naturally, Ana is capable of basic hypnosis and extensive memory alteration of regular humans and animals. Such a thing is effortless for the Einnashe.
But if that’s all too long, just know that despite being a vaguely celtic lad, he won’t be launching any Ball-Dagger Noble Phantasms at anyone any time soon. Hell, he’s not even one to make excessive use of runes. At worst, he’s going to be a terrifying tree surgeon.
Age of Crest: 2000+, one of the peerless millennium family level crest that retains quality and value in its age alone. Everything else is a distorted mess that barely retains any accessible knowledge past a recent generation or two.
Weapons: Ana was educated on the matter of short bladed weaponry, and his Mystic Code of choice -- or rather, his Mystic Codes of choice -- reflect this.
The
22 Daggers Klingewald are items that actually belonged to one of his ancestors, a set of individual Mystic Codes that are simultaneously recognized as a singular one. Continuing with the hematophagic theme of the family, the Daggers Klingewald are each activated with a singular drip of blood from Ana, only requiring to be a droplet from a pinprick. Due to the source of the wood-turned-stone which acts as the handles for each of the knives, they all carry the trait of “Vampirism” and “Seeking”. That is to say that they seek life-forces out like the roots of a tree reaching out into sources of water. This manifests in their ability to make sheer changes of direction mid-flight. Although the original intent was for them to be unpredictable, confusing thrown weapons which danced in the air like flies over carrion, Ana is only capable of changing each dagger’s direction once per use.
Should a dagger miss, then they must be retrieved by Ana. However, it is worth noting that if they should return to Ana, they also take a sample of the targets own blood down their fuller. Once upon a time, they were likely voracious blades which drained a target of their life-force entirely. In the hands of Ana, they are something akin to trick knives.
Benefit: One Week Prep. Ana doesn’t like rushing things, and likes to go at his own pace. The best way to do that is to start things off early.
