Aethlred Navar
Aethlred Navar
The creed that an author must “write what they know” applies well to reclusive novelist Aethlred Navar. His stories of vengeful ghosts, ancestral curses, attic-bound abominations, twisted cellar dwellers, and bleak promises that pursue his doomed characters through one life into the next increasingly captivate many of Absalom’s young aristocrats, for these tales allow those of high-society a chance to live lives of danger vicariously through the lens of lyrical—if dour and fatalistic—prose. Aethlred avoids speaking of himself and is notoriously difficult to draw into conversation, and prefers increasingly to spend his time scribbling away while locked into one of the thirteen divergently-decorated writing parlors he keeps in his Ivy District home—a decaying manor itself rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of a family said to have perished all in the same night from a series of apparently unrelated but increasingly violent and improbable accidents. He only emerges from his home these days sporadically, often soon after completing a story to deliver the manuscript by hand to his publisher before spending the next few evenings alone in the corner of a room at the Bloom Cabaret, the one social outlet he’s known to frequent. Other members of the Cabaret know to leave the gloomy, morose author to his thoughts, yet rumors that he’s entered into a secret affair with someone in the club have begun to spread.
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