Yal'queran

Grand Witch Inera (a.k.a. Yal'queran)

Grand Witch Yal'queran was once a commoner from Godswater named Inera, a minor facet of the past forgotten even by herself. She grew up in Godswater as a despised minority race, a spellbinder, and at the age of nine her parents were killed and thrown into the waters as a gift to the Storm (as Godswater was experiencing violent hurricanes). The only reason she was spared unlike the majority of her fellow spellbinders was her age; apparently, humanoid sacrifice was acceptable to the Gods, yet child sacrifice was abomination.
Still, the Godswater authorities were unsympathetic to Inera's plight, and she became homeless, using her chaos-speech to conjure up daemonic flesh to eat in her most desperate moments, which led to bizarre dreams and unusual twisting of her less prominent features; her tail, for example, would subtly crook and split at the end, while her skin would develop the odd purple-red blotch. She became known as a pitiful beggar girl about the city, wretched to all save a high elven girl called Narawyn.
This young woman understood Inera was unusual, but given Godswater was a city of human mages who arbitrarily discriminated against magic they deemed 'unholy', regarding most other races as inferior, Narawyn sympathised. Though her parents told her not to seek trouble, the high elf and Inera would grow close, and as they became teenagers, even experimented with being lovers.
This unfortunately led to Narawyn's increasingly fearful parents to report Inera as a corrupting influence on their daughter, which led to Narawyn and Inera alike being imprisoned for deviancy. While Narawyn died screaming, her dying proclamations of pain resonating loudly enough to force King Garlan's hand and outlaw the death penalty for sexuality, Inera would go down in history as a destructive monster.
As she was tied to her stake, she beheld the ashes that were once her lover, the only light in her dark, dark world, and knew there was no point pretending to be something she wasn't. If the world hated her, she had no reason not to hate the world, and so she unleashed her powers to their fullest extent, warping the very fabric of reality with myriad chaotic portals, using tentacles to free herself and thrash wildly at every Godswater ascetic she could. She marched towards the Saltwater Temple, utterly consumed with hatred, and massacred the majority of the Godswaters and Applewoods of the day, leaving only the children, forcing the future Godswaters to interbreed with whiter, Valeborn humans.
She would run away from Godswater after this, only to be stopped mid-escape by a cloaked figure in fuchsia. They promised her that to them, she was no monster, but a warrior with great promise. Though she strongly doubted this, she knew that she wouldn't survive alone in the jungle-like Forests of Summer. As such, she travelled with him to the city of Nightshade, and from there, Inera ceased to be, and in her place, Fuchsia Acolyte Yal'queran of the Order of the Shade was born.
Her ascent to expert was relatively unremarkable by Order standards; she proved herself in both raw destructive potential and an instinctive understanding of her own chaos-speech. Her mentor, Grand Warlock Yal'langshen, despite being an ascendant, was openly supportive of the chaos-speaker, and despite suffering under racial prejudice her entire life, the vengeful remnants of Inera that remained enjoyed the thought that in the Order, there was still a racial hierarchy; one where she got to reign over and bully all the vile humans who ruined her life.
Her unremarkable order life would continue until she was almost seventy, where in doing research upon ascendants, she came to a horrifying conclusion that despite the strict racial hierarchy of the Order, the Grand Warlock himself was no spellbinder, but in fact a necromancer. However, she knew that the other fuchsia experts would consider her a heretic and an upstart, and so spoke in the only language the Order understood; she challenged the Grand Warlock to a duel to the death, hoping to prove his weakness. If she, a mere unascended chaos-speaker, could dominate an ascendant, surely his failure would be self-evident.
True enough, while Yal'langshen was troubled by his protegee's sudden turn against him, he agreed to the duel, and due to Yal'queran's liberal use of chaos-speech, she used her tentacles to corrupt his very ascension stone from within, twisting the ascendant and slowly, painfully converting him into black, daemonic sludge. Once the necromancer screamed no more, Yal'queran declared herself the victor, and therefore the Grand Witch of the Order of the Shade.
Though numerous uprisings would occur within the Order following what many considered to be a brutal, unnecessary end to what stood to be a stable, eternal leader of the Order, Yal'queran would regularly squash these internal schisms until eventually, the Order had an external revolution to squash; a revolutionary bid by a necromancer-seer hybrid known as Abraxas. Despite historical precedent regarding necromantic-seerish warfare and the Order, following her Green Division lieutenants' visions, she backed the Royal Electorate, leading to the Order experiencing unprecedented support in mainstream Arkheran culture.
She would run initiatives to open a lodge in every major city and port town, along with multiple charitable undertakings both due to her own sympathies to the homeless and the need to paint the Order in a good light. Though she would grow old and dependent on her daemons, which she would become increasingly aggressive in her control and enslavement of, her leadership was generally respected as the years went by. She would grow to forget why she sympathised with the homeless, she would forget the exact rationale behind discouraging romantic connection within the Order, and she would even forget the name Narawyn, but nonetheless, her power became cemented over decades.
Eventually, however, her enslavement of daemons would come back to haunt her, with the daemonic representative Rakh'dor ge Nu'ei paying her a diplomatic visit that consisted largely of threats. While Yal'queran could not physically persist without her daemons, she was able to at least quell Nu'ei's outrage by promising her that, upon her death, the daemons she currently had enslaved would go free, able to feast upon the flesh of any Order member they pleased. To further ingratiate herself, she promised not to enslave any daemons beyond the ones in her possession, and Nu'ei, knowing the daemons with Yal'queran would relish such a rampage, accepted the offer.
With the Order's long-term security assured (at least while she persisted), Yal'queran would continue to expand the Order's operations and influence, make the once obscure cult a bustling, businesslike affair, filled with arcane zoos and advertising knowledge and skill development opportunities found nowhere else in the Kingdom.
One day, over four centuries into her reign, Green Archmage Mid'hamath warned Yal'queran that a baby had recently been born who stood to face the Order and destroy it. When she asked her soothsayer where this baby was, they responded, for once, with surprising clarity; she was Lanna Shearwater, a geomantic infant born to Aiden Shearwater and Sophia Adderwood. Yal'queran, arrogant in her presumption that this vision was not only thwartable, but completely subversible, kidnapped the baby and took her in as her own, raising the girl as a nameless future weapon of the Order.
Though she would give the girl a pet name, Humancake, it was only when the girl officially joined the Order as Ran'galchen that she would truly have a name. Yal'queran was as kind as her heart allowed her to be to a human, but she ensured that above all, Ran'galchen was a true believer in the Order, a blunt geomantic instrument who would never, in a thousand years, betray her as Mid'hamath predicted.
Now her adoptive child is the Indigo Archmage, the embodiment of standards for humans in her organisation, and Mid'hamath is dead. The Order is stable, the Daemons of Arkhera are sated, and her greatest potential threat is instead her most unwavering ally. Now, all that remains for Yal'queran is to achieve the godhood that her predecessor hoped to achieve, the final nail in the foolish wisp's nonexistent coffin; if she becomes eternal, after all, the daemons will never get their due, but if they were to complain, they would be facing a god of their own kin.

Physical Description

General Physical Condition

Yal'queran's body is crooked, decrepit and wizened, nestled amid countless daemonic tentacles that provide her frail form some much-needed robustness. Her true eyes have long since whitened with blindness, while her mouth is almost permanently agape. Whenever she does speak without daemonic assistance, her voice is a creaking, unnerving whisper.
While her skin and eyes have paled to a deathly white, her hair, unusually, is still very much blonde, perhaps through dye, or perhaps through luck. She almost never moves on her own, with her tentacles performing the vast majority of her actions. She covers her body in the standard fuchsia-and-purple cloak of her Order division, along with a multicoloured octagram pendant indicating her role as the Grand Witch of the Order.

Social

Contacts & Relations

Purple Archmage Mar'goritz (inferior archmage and regular lickboot)
Indigo Archmage Ran'galchen (inferior archmage and adoptive daughter)
Blue Archmage Aor'kirin (inferior archmage, an irritating glitch in her system)
Green Archmage Mid'seran (inferior archmage and soothsayer)
Yellow Archmage Kir'selai (inferior archmage and secret weapon)
Orange Archmage Chen'razghul (inferior archmage and resident thug)
Red Archmage Ark'golom (inferior archmage and reliable engineer)

Family Ties

Religious Views

Yal'queran is the sort of woman that believes that all gods are amoral beings and that humanoids such as herself are perfectly capable of apotheosis, considering the ascendants of Galdus to be a fair attempt at such an ideal. She, being a chaos-speaker, would be incapable of accessing the orderly magic of ascension for herself, however, in her perpetual exploitation of daemons and continued in-depth research into chaos magic, she hopes to find a chaotic equivalent of ascension, in doing so becoming a vile, betentacled goddess herself.

Alignment

Neutral Evil

Current Location

Nightshade

Species

Spellbinder

Conditions

• Blindness
• Insomnia

Ethnicity

Arkheran

Honorary & Occupational Titles

Grand Witch of the Order of the Shade

Year of Birth

4 AGA 547 Years old

Circumstances of Birth

Common

Birthplace

Godswater

Children

• Ran'galchen

Current Residence

Nightshade

Gender

Female

Eyes

White (covered in cataracts, formerly purple)

Hair

Blonde

Skin Tone/Pigmentation

Pallid white

Height

10'4'' (assisted by tentacles, true body is 6'5'')

Aligned Organization

Order of the Shade

Other Affiliations

• House of Godswater

Known Languages

Common Tongue
Old Galdusian
Jaranese
Madaki
Isleborn Ilazari
Plagueborn Ilazari