Phoebe Íonachta

Princess Phoebe Íonachta

Born into the august lineage of Queen Bridged and King Faolin Íonachta, Phoebe's genesis was shrouded in the opulence of royal privilege, yet, destiny, with its capricious machinations, would soon cast her into the abyss of adversity during the tumultuous epoch known as the Blockade of the Seanachaisian Isles. Conspirators, ensconced within the shadowy echelons of power, manipulated the puppet strings of Sovereign Daimus III of the Bechtlarite Empire, orchestrating a malevolent symphony of aggression aimed at the peaceful shores of the Seanachaisnian Islands. Faced with the insistent demands of compliance, both King and Queen steadfastly rebuffed the imperial overtures, thereby inviting the iron grip of blockade upon their realm. At the tender age of eight, Phoebe found herself ensnared in the clutches of malfeasance, plucked from the sanctuary of her homeland to be secreted away in the obscure mining town of Grey Turn, nestled within the borders of the Becht Empire. Unbeknownst to her captors and the architects of her misfortune, Phoebe was a prodigy with an innate mastery of magic, her unheard of talents steeped in the arcane arts of necromantic sorcery, thus, when fear ignited the dormant embers of her power, her captors faced the tempestuous wrath of a fledgling adept, their ranks decimated by her unbridled fury. Left abandoned and trapped within the darkened recesses of a forsaken mine, amidst the forgotten corpses of miners lost in a recent cave in, Phoebe's childhood ebbed away. Bereft of kin and companionship, she forged an unlikely camaraderie with the corporeal remnants of those lost to the subterranean depths. Her spectral whispers of power intermingled with her laughter, as they whiled away the hours in a dance of innocence amidst the shadows, playing children's games amidst the rubble and ruin with the animated remains of the dead as her only company, and surviving on scraps of food her playmates brought her and the natural mineral deposits in the mine. She was discovered by a team of investigators sent by the Stapleton Investigative Service, who were investigating another matter. The young girl was sent to the headquarters of the agency in the care of Mycroft Stapleton, who did not immediately realize who she was, but had suspicions that a young Seanachaisian girl found in the Bechtlarite Empire with the socio-political climate being what it was, deserved more attention. In that time he discovered her identity, and had made plans to smuggle her through the blockade and home before it could create a serious political incident, but it was too late. As plans coalesced for her clandestine exodus from the confines of captivity, a nefarious twist of fate conspired to entwine the destiny of mother and daughter in a Gordian knot of peril. Queen Bridged, en route to parley with the Sovereign in the hallowed halls of Armuun, fell prey to the sinister stratagems of her adversaries, ensnared in the treachery that sought to sow the seeds of conflict between the two nations, and spark the flames of war. Through the valiant efforts of the same team that rescued Phoebe, the Queen, with Phoebe and Stapleton himself in tow, made a daring escape aboard the airship, the Fettered Cloud. While the ritual that summoned the Blight began down below, they fled across the skies with the Empire's forces, a mercenary group, and the great dragon, Voltaire on their heels. They fought alongside a small contingent of Seanachaisian troops, and managed to hold off the attack for some time, felling the great dragon with a terrible burst of chaotic magic that sent him plummeting from the sky and into the already forming Void below. Unfortunately, by that time, the Fettered Cloud had sustained tremendous damage and was going down. In an act of desperation, a portal was opened to a random location, somewhere far beyond the realms of Cairne, and the investigators escaped with the exception of Mory Wickeltongue, Mycroft Stapleton, Queen Bridged, and Phoebe herself, who crashed into the Blighted lands below as the cataclysm began. Phoebe, some unknown time later, and quite unexpectedly, awoke amidst the wreckage of the Fettered Cloud, her small frame a tangled mess of broken limbs and torn skin, but strangely, she felt no pain or trepidation about the situation. Over time, her body began to knit itself back together, her frame realigning and reassembling. During this time, her mind wandered and changed, and by the time she was finally able to stand again, she was not the person she was before. She began to wander this new world she found herself in, a stranger in a wasteland unfamiliar to her, and finding life itself now, altogether alien. Slowly, she began to test her abilities and talents, finding them to be enhanced somehow, enabling her to wield vast amounts of power with very little effort. She was able to command the dead both in physical form and the specters that remained following the Blight, and was able to move unscathed through the Void energy that now swirled around her, though any other living thing it touched seemed to perish and be twisted by the miasma. Driven by curiosity, and eventually by hunger, Phoebe began to explore the new lands of Cairne, changed by the Blight.