The Ruin
A webcomic
Character Profiles
Rannai Matheus is an archaeologist from Carminacora , the current capital of the Akelli Imperium. She grew up poor--her father, a soldier of the Imperium, died when she was four, and her mother turned to bringing in others' laundry and sewing to try to make ends meet.
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Rannai managed to get a scholarship to one of the best schools in Carminacora, the Spadelli Academy of Arts and Sciences, where she was frequently harassed and hazed as member of the underclasses. Her abusive step-father died mysteriously when she was eighteen--stabbed to death in an alley. Authorities didn’t care enough to try to crack the case.
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Now twenty-eight, Rannai has been an archaeologist for four years, but her experience has mainly been in authenticating pre-Ruin finds brought in by others at the Estrinelli Museum of Ancient History. With her job being threatened by budget cuts, Rannai has managed to leverage a small grant to look for relics on her own, leading her to Caprisa, Tyren, and the crashed city of Ai'dellia.
Tyren Quarelli is a native of Caprisa in the Akelli Imperium, with its jungles and steamy heat. He’s markedly less formal than people from other parts of the Imperium, with a quirky sense of humor.
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He’s also indebted to some bad people, shall we say, and is looking for a big score so as to repay that debt.
How’d he get indebted? When he was in his early twenties, his mother, his last living family member, fell ill with a wasting illness, and a series of quack doctors and would-be priests took most of her money. When she died, he inherited her debts. This has left him feeling dubious about the 10,000 gods of the Imperium, to say the least.
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He meets Rannai when she arrives from Carminacora via zeppelin, with ambitions to recover artifacts from Ai'dellia , which is just a hundred miles away. Well. A hundred miles away through steaming, trackless jungles. . . .
Koraine Kararehe is a somewhat traditional shaman of the Tixaeronan people. He’s also somewhat less traditional. For starters, he’s young. Rather than being a revered tribal elder, Koraine is only 28 or so, but has felt the calling of not just his own Spirit, but ALL of them, since he was a small child.
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He comes from the northerly city of Ke'oke'o, where there are still statues to the Old Gods, and where science was at its height at the time of the Ruin. He stands in deep opposition to more traditional shaman who want to destroy the statues of the Old Gods and abolish any of the writing of science that’s been preserved over the past two thousand years. “The Spirits are not fragile,” he likes to say. “The beliefs of others, the beliefs of the long-dead, do not threaten them.”
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His Spirit is Puru, the Great Bull. As such, he has definite mutations--towering height and strength, bull horns, and hoofs in place of feet.
Kashima Pania hails from RÄ“hua, and is a Warden.
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She originally was born in Ilio, to a mercenary captain and one of his lieutenants. Raised by two fighters, Kashima learned the art of blade and rifle at an early age, but it was from her grandmother, Amiria, that she learned to love the old ways and ancient spirits. She became a Warden at 22--young for the position, and is now 26.
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Wardens are called from city to city, investigating crimes and adjudicating disputes. They also guard the ancient ruins of the elven and dwarven cities, guide folks in the wilderness, and more.
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Her Spirit is Nalani, the heavens or night sky. As such, her mutations are minimal--her eyes are moon white, and glow.
Lorien Tawera is a native of Kai'ma a northern Tixaeron city known for its white sand beaches and the toppled towers of knowledge wrecked in the Great War. He now lives in Kiwa of the black-sand beaches. Kiwa is also the city most easily accessed by sea or zeppelin from Caprisa.
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Lorien comes from a line of more scholarly types, sometimes at odds with the shaman and Hierarchs of Tixaeron. His family and their allies have been trying to recover the knowledge lost by their ancestors in the broken towers of Kai’ma for generations, and they have a more scientific way of looking at the magic of their spirits. They aren’t as totally surrendered to their Spirits as many others are, which leads to tension.
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Lorien has training in medicine as well as magic. He spent four years learning Imperial medicine in Carminacora, and capped that off with two years in Luapele for an introduction to surgical techniques. He’s thirty-two years old.
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His Spirit is Ahiahi, the gloom of evening shadow. His father is a teacher of ancient mystical arts--like a shaman, but more book-bound. It’s he who trained Lorien to think about his bond with his Spirit more critically, and not just to take it as a matter of faith.
Nergui is a native of Khangai in the Shandril Empire. He was born in this town twenty-five years ago, to the owner of a coffee and cacao plantation and one of his father's six wives.
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Nergui was a younger son of a lesser wife, and had been told that he would be lucky to become a scribe or an accountant in his father’s storehouses. Until, one day, when he was twelve, the dragon-riders arrived at the plantation, come to take their tithes. Nergui stole into the courtyard, where the great dragons lounged in the sun. His various siblings had dared him to get close enough to touch one of the beasts, claiming he wasn’t brave enough. He got close enough. In fact, he climbed up the leather fighting straps and sat on one of the great beasts, which tolerantly turned its head to regard him.
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The dragon-riders had returned in time to see this. His mother and father, horrified, begged the riders' pardon for this impasse, this gaffe. The dragon-riders, after a brief mental conference with their dragons, said that the boy had spirit, and that they’d be taking him to their stonesreach to train.
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Of the children his age brought to the stonesreach, fully half are now servitors--servants who tend the dragons and attend their riders. Most consider this a great honor.
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Of course, they also can never leave.
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Young, hot-headed, prideful, and honor-bound, he was bound to Snowstorm as her rider when he was eighteen, and she was eight-hundred and some.
Snowstorm is a silver dragon over eight-hundred years old. She's seen (and mourned) many a rider, and is tolerant of human foibles, but impatient with rashness and stupidity. She doesn't often take a humanoid form--she's vulnerable in that shape, and if she does, she tends to maintain the armored scales of her draconic form.
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The jewels on her body are magically enchanted to displace some of her great mass when she shrinks to a humanoid form. She's wary of losing them for that reason, not just because they're sparkly. (But oh! How they sparkle.)
Audra Lindseth is a Librarian at the great Library of Njalfast in the Skadric Union. She’s also an accomplished arcane caster, with a specialization in fire and ice magic--earth and air are not her best friends, alas.
She loves books, and grew up literally in the stacks of the Library, as her mother was an apprentice mage who had a fling with a traveling warrior and wound up pregnant after the fling ended. There is no particular stigma attached to a birth out of wedlock in Skadric culture, but her mother died in childbirth, and her mother had no living relatives to take the infant. As such, the great Elementalist School and the Library of Njalfast took in Audra, and she was raised literally from birth to be a mage and scholar.
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She would do just about anything to make her teachers proud, and has very little knowledge of the world outside of her books. She’s shy and awkward, but incredibly powerful.
Bjorn Sejr was born and raised in Hrefnholme in the Skadric Union, the city known for its White Nights. He’s a skald, a keeper of ancient lore and songs and oral tradition, and prides himself on only using runes to tell the future.
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He comes from a big family, and is the eldest child of eight living siblings. His father had two wives (polygamy is frequently practiced in Skadri’s northernmost regions), and he was the first child born to the first wife.
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Bjorn learned how to fight from both his mother and father, but learned his first songs at his grandfather’s knee--old Sarsen was a skald himself, and Bjorn took after Sarsen, with a mind for rhyme and a keen memory for details. His father was disappointed that Bjorn didn’t want to join him on the ships as a warrior. . . but is proud that his son is a skald now, carrying on a family tradition of another sort.
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Bjorn looks down a little on book learning. He regards writing as cheating--a story dies, in his estimation, when it’s written down and pinned between pages. A skald is part of a living tradition, and he’s intensely proud of that fact.
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This leads him to frequent arguments with Audra!
Hanali Antara sometimes goes by ‘Hana’ and sometimes by ‘Nali.’ It . . . depends. She's of the Isha'ta, the sea-faring folk who live on the thousands of islands and archipelagoes of the world.
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When she last was in Caprisa seven years ago, when she was 21, she was a singer of tales, a collector of knowledge, who traveled the world in search of new ideas. She called herself Hana at the time. She knows she visited the lost elven city of Ai'dellia with a group of investigators and archaeologists, but has no memory of the event. She just remembers waking up in the jungle outside of it, alone, covered in blood, and having to hike her way out on her own. The ghosts and undead of the jungles ignored her completely, as they had not before.
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She’d somehow forgotten all her old stories. Had forgotten how to sing. To laugh. To dance. She’d been right-handed; now, she was left-handed. She decided that this was never going to happen to her again, and that she’d learn new skills. She apprenticed herself to a Sea-witch, and learned the skills of the craft. She can settle storms, or raise winds. She can soothe waves, or stir them to fury. She can stop the sea spirits (the ghosts that travel the ocean waves in rotting ships) in their tracks.
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She calls herself Hana now, and recently changed ships from the Windtossed to the Dauntless. After the Dauntless' captain, Hadi Gunawan, fell ill and died, the owners of the vessel appointed her captain in his place.
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The crew doesn’t like this. The quartermaster is her ally, but the navigator and the bos’n both feel that she’s haunted. That a ghost took residence in her body long ago, and that it’s evident that she’s bad luck.
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Or maybe, they have other reasons to dislike her beyond mere superstition?