“If someone is good at begging for their life these days, it’s probably because they’ve seen it enough times unconvincingly from the other end of the sword.”
P E R S O N A L I T Y
❖ Harsh
❖ Unforgiving
❖ Self-Assured
❖ Confidant
❖ Bitter
❖ Jaded
Claire was never the most sociable person, even before the Revolt. With her old life in the Army of Heroes cast aside, however, she has since hardened like tree bark under a snowbank. She cares little for the woes of others, even former Army members, though perhaps some old echoes of her time in the service can coax her into blithe, thoughtless acts of charity, every once in a while. Despite the rather godless sort of demeanor she puts on, Claire did feel strongly in the Army’s cause, a lifetime ago, and their fall is possibly the only source of conflict and uncertainty in her otherwise iron-clad heart.
While in the old days she cared about gardens, and pride, and doing something meaningful, Claire is a woman ground down, most of the old pillars of her identity reduced to pebbles, with survival as her only real concern, controlled flickers of wrath and sarcastic humor occasionally interrupting the monotony of her new existence.
A P P E A R A N C E
Claire has a shock of unkempt black hair that almost radiates around her head, like fire. Her eyes, similarly black, have no fire in them, however—these are colder things, full of rain and thunderstorms in their darkness. As an experienced, bona-fide magician, Claire possess mage-eyes, in this case two sets of black irises in each eye, rather than the customary and significantly less frightening set of one each. In the old days, Claire took a hard and self-satisfied pride in her eyes—leave the other hedgewizards and conjurors to their hoods and blindfolds; with the protection of her Army of Heroes uniform, Claire bared her eyes with pride. Now, however, life has made demands of her that she follows only with the greatest bitterness.
Claire is a tall, bony woman, standing at 5’9” with sharp shoulders and narrow, unfriendly lips. Her face is rather vase-like, with long, curving cheekbones, and a hard, pointed chin. Her eyebrows are thick and dagger-like, and more often than not furrowed down in some kind of unhappy expression.
Unlike the few other true magicians, Claire rarely covers up her head, not even with a hood, as though daring intrepid knights or brawler’s to approach her. Generally, this earns enough blatant distrust and hostility that no one notices the former Army of Heroes agent beneath the skin of a distrustful witch.
H I S T O R Y
Claire grew up as most children on the Tempesta grew up; working with livestock alongside siblings and neighbors, ambitionless, quiet, living something that could best be described as content, though perhaps what she felt wasn’t exactly the same as what content describes, not all the time. This was where she learned her first piece of magic, an old charm her father would occasionally call out to imbue rain with strange power for nourishing cows and vegetables. In time, she learned it as well, as did all her siblings, and in another life that would have been the beginning and end of her magical knowledge.
But something—maybe curiosity, maybe wanderlust, maybe discontent—would eventually push her into the arms of the Army of Heroes, and, with the blessing of her family, she went on to support her regiment as a nurse and aide, eventually honing that old family spell into something more powerful. She would pick up other little powers in the style of what she would later learn to call ‘Solvita,’ and, though her eyes one day warped monstrously under the weight of her new powers, she bared her mark with pride, deflecting suspicion with her prodigious brute power, all of it channeled into the service of the Tempesta, and the powers that be in the Army of Heroes.
She never lost that fiery commitment when the September Revolt first broke out, though by the time of the Unforgivens her passion had faded into a mechanical aggression on behalf of her faltering superiors. She fought, and fought, and fought, and eventually she realized that years of fighting had transformed her from the old Claire—the proud, chin-jutting-out, hands on her hips Claire—into the kind of person who could now recognize it was time to stop fighting, and run.
In the time since then, Claire has taken to wandering up and down the Tempesta, taking odd jobs, selling her spells to the handful of hamlets that might tolerate her, and eking out a bare, careful existence at the edges of the heel of the newly ascended People’s Legion. Due to familiarity with the region she has mostly stuck to the Causeway, where the agents of the Legion are few in number, though she has recently toyed with making the long journey to Brujeria, and finding some witch-settlement to join up with.
I N V E N T O R Y
❖ Dagger
❖ Army of Heroes Insignia
❖ Bow and arrow
O T H E R
Claire has a strong fondness for flowers and gardens.
Member
Mixtape Ghost N