Mara

Mara Arkades is the Party's companion and resident expert on The Dream World. The illegitimate daughter of Alyn Arkades and a powerful daemon, Mara grew up with all of the wealth and privilege of nobility with few of the responsibilities that came with it. Her temperament is judgmental and sarcastic. However, those who she deems worthy of her friendship will find a powerful ally in her company.
The Party often relies on Mara when confronting problems relating to The Dream World. However with skills in unarmed combat and first aid, along with tattoos that allow her to mold her spirit to enhance her speed, toughness, or strength, she is adpet at filling any role the Party might be short on.
Mara identifies more with her daemon side than human one. To her, the affairs of the waking world are secondary to those of The Dream World. She views her visits among humans as those of a galivanting demi-god, looking upon mortal affairs with wry amusement and interfering or taking lovers among them when doing so strikes her fancy. She looks upon her father with derision, only ever calling him by his first name. After her mother unexpectedly cast her from daemon society, Mara must come to terms with the fact that she may be more human than she'd like.

Early Life

Mara is the product of an unlikely union between The Reikeh Goddess known as the Blind Queen and Professor Alyn Arkades, the Homyn Queen's younger brother. As an expert in The Dream World and Alchemy, Alyn's studies sought to create a unified theory that connected the laws of The Dream World with those of the physical world. In his studies, he came in contact and eventually fell in love with the Goddess, an ageless being who had sired and guided civilizations in the spheres since time immemorial.
Early childhood for Mara sought her hopping between her parents' world as dictated by the needs of her father's studies. In the waking world, she lived in the Homyn royal palace along with her cousins Princess Halle and Prince Lucas and other children of the Pride, Oliver and Thane Kestrel. During these times, her mother travelled under human guise as a traveller from the Rim and her father's consort.
In The Dream World, Mara lived not just as royalty, but as divinity. She visited places and mingled with peoples incomprehensible to mortal minds, and enjoyed an esteemed position among them thanks to her mother's influence.
Mara also mingled with an extended of sorts from her mother's other affairs with mortals. Her half brother, Sena, tried to instill in her the importance of her role as a bridge between the waking and dream world. He even managed to convince her to help with his seasonal gig as the "Spirit of Hollytide", having her don the mantle of "Little Miss Holly Tide" and help him distribute holiday gifts to mortal Homyn children.

A Great Divide

Mara's two worlds split apart when her father published his research, sharing secrets of The Dream World with the Homyn Kingdom. He believed he could influence the Homyn by sharing this knowledge and guide them to greater understanding and tolerance for The Dream World. The Goddess, distrusting of advanced societies like the Homyn, saw his actions as a great betrayal and ended their relationship.
Mara hardly struggled with the choice of which parent to follow. She saw untold wonders in The Dream World at the side of a Goddess, while the Waking World only ever saw her as a bastard.
She spent her teenage years wandering The Dream World in search for her place within it. While she rarely speaks of her adventures there, she looks on this time in her life fondly, engaging in many strange adventures such as serving as a psychopomp for the dead.

The Moku Annexation

Mara's time in The Dream World came to a sudden end when her mother abruptly cut herself off from all contact. Upon returning to the Waking World, she discovered the source of her mother's frustration. the Homyn Kingdom had annexed the moon Nimbus, the home of a race who worshipped her mother called the Moku. Plagued by a bacteria called Helioschosis that turned their skin to stone when in contact with the sun, the Moku revered Mara's mother as a Sun Goddess, believing their condition was punishment for the hubris for harnessing fire that did not come from the sun.
Alyn had entered the Moku's good graces first by developing aritificial clouds that could cover their holy cities and then by working on a cure for Helioschosis in general. While his actions could be interpreted as an attempt at reconciliation in his own way, Mara ascribed malicious intent behind his actions. She came to Nimbus to reunite with him. While Alyn was overjoyed to have his estranged daughter back, Mara caused nothing but problems for his official duties, often causing scandals among the puritanical Moku society.
Mara entered a relationship with her father's bodyguard, an inquisitive Moku named Tempi. Her new lover was a devout follower of the Goddess, who nonetheless wanted the freedom to leave his home and see all the spheres had to offer. While Mara seemed to have genuine affection for Tempi, there was no denying their relationship furthered her goals of frustrating her father's colonization efforts.
Matters grew more complicated when the Party came to Nimbus in search of progenitor ruins, with Mara's cousin Halle in tow. After Alyn and Tempi were captured by pirates seeking his cure, Mara accompanied the Party to an ancient Moku sight where Helioschosis originated that contained information necessary to find the cure. There, the Party learned of Mara's true nature. Coming clean, she tried to persuade them to abandon the cure since her father was only using it to pull the Moku people away from their mother. Nevertheless, the Party decided that the decision of whether the cure should be administered should belong to the Moku on an individual basis. So, they took the information to Alyn Arkades so he could synthesize a cure.
Regardless of whether that decision was correct, Mara's suspicions about the Homyn Kingdom's intentions proved accurate. The group returned to the Moku capitol to find that the Lunar Brigade had staged a coup under the queen's orders, in order to destroy the Moku Goddess. Military forces were executing Moku monks while their leader, Brigadier General Howe, led an expedition to the top of her Altar--a Progenitor ruin called the Grave that structurally supported the Dream World-- in order to deal the deity a killing blow.
While Alyn confronted Howe to try to stop matters, Mara assisted the Party in freeing the imprisoned Moku. They ascended the Grave, where they defeated Howe's unit and managed to convince him to stand down before he did lasting damage to The Dream World. With calamity seemingly averted, Mara's mother returned.

Banished to the Waking World

While Mara was overjoyed to reunite with her mother, the Goddess came bearing ill tidings. With the cure invented, she saw the Moku as having travelled too far down the road to civilization for her to shepherd. As such, she decided to retreate permanently into The Dream World, letting mortals walk freely into dooms of their own creation. Mara hardly disagreed, ready to leave the waking world behind and rejoin her mother in The Dream World. However, in rejecting the waking world, the Goddess rejected Mara as well. She told her daughter that she belonged among the mortals rather than the Gods. Once again, she retreated to The Dream World, leaving Mara behind.
Listless and adrift, Mara broke up with Tempi. She decided she needed to take some time to figure out who she was in light of recent events, and invited herself to join the Party's crew to do so. The Party returned to find Mara throwing Royce's belongings out of his an Halle's room so that she coudl move in.

Adventures with the Corsairs

Despite her sour attitude and joining uninvited amidst a personal existential crisis, Mara got along well with her new comrades. She became a reluctant spiritual mentor to Itthis, guiding him to The Dream World to search for familiars and helping him (with mixed success) with his recurring nightmares. She sometimes finds herself butting heads with the Homyn members of the crew, particularly Royce, whose pride and ambition reminded her a little too much of her father.
During a Holly Tide celebration on Nimbus, Mara expressed disdain at importing a Homyn Holiday to the Moku people. Nevertheless, she agreed to don the mantle of Little Miss Holly Tide one last time to grant the Holly Tide wishes of Tempi and the Party after they saved the holiday from a White Lion Armada plot.
During the Party's adventures on Jotun, Mara got a harsh reminder of how fragile a mortal body can be. In a confrontation with a fire giant and its druid followers, she took an arrow to the arm that caused a permanent loss of strength. She also accompanied Wukong and Itthis to the Lost City of Saxon, where she urged them to help a group of rebels fight against a coven of fire giants who ruled over them. During the Battle of the North Sea, Mara and Wukong stopped a Dream World ritual to the Geit Saint of Death Lundi, securing casks of meade in the process to give the Clansmoot's forces a much-needed boost in morale.
On Sera, Mara found herself thrust into command of the Nomad while Wukong and Anh tried to recruit Appoline from the White Lion Armada. She prosecuted a days-long battle of attrition that almost brought the crew to a breaking point to afford the Party time to escape and return to the Nomad with their new lookout. Mara also helped the Party during their investigation of the daemon-infested town of Westfall, by helping them fight Daemons and using her powers to uncover memories from the town's past.