† The Mundane

Profile

Civilian Name: Eira Hecate Locke. Eira is Welsh for “snow”: a simple name that Cadmiel picked because she liked the sound of it, basically. Hecate is the Greek goddess of witchcraft and sorcery, but more importantly in significance, the leader of the Wyrd Sisters in Macbeth. Locke is after the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, who put forth the idea of the tabula rasa, or blank slate, where all men were born equal to do what they wished with their futures. Cadmiel found the philosophy of being born without predetermined destiny rather interesting, and thought it dreadfully ironic to take on the philosopher’s last name. Her pseudonym is “Moira” for when she takes a young woman’s form.

Demonic Identity: Astarte, Maiden of Destiny, previously Cadmiel, Angel of Destiny. The sphere is specific for a reason, rather than a more generic fate or future. Like any demon with common sense, she keeps her true demonic name a very well-kept secret. Other Lords and Maidens know her as Cadmiel.

Place in the Spheres: When she’s living the good stable life and doesn’t need to actually do anything, an old spinster with a lot of “retirement” money she’s accumulated over the years and an old church that she’s converted into her home. If she has to deal with something or meet with her fellow Dark Lords, she leaves behind the old woman glamour and becomes a young and shady fortuneteller, pseudonym Moira, living in a seedy little flat near Hell’s Parliament that she pays for with Eira’s money. Neither is really an “identity” so much as an alias and a glamour, and Moira is only rarely taken on: Cadmiel has no use for youth and good looks—what use have the blind for vanity?—and much prefers being Eira, most of the time.

Age: Fallen angel from the Holy War, so old. As looks go, it depends on whether she’s glamoured or not, but either eighteen or seventy. Eighteen if she goes with her fallen angel form with a few minor illusions to lend more humanity to her, otherwise known as Moira, seventy if she’s going full monty in her mundane identity, Eira Locke. Eira is seventy-two according to her birth certificate, and Moira is twenty-one if you ask her.

Birthdate/Astrology: She’s a Taurus sun, an Aquarius moon, and a Capricorn rising.

Likes:

Angelic and demonic mythos: Cadmiel is a geek. She really is. She has read every book on angel- or demonology there is. Even if she hadn’t read the Bible on her own time to see what the fuss was all about (she much prefers the Latin to the King James), she would have done it just to scope out all the bits about angels and demons. She has the Divina Commedia. Memorized. In Italian. If there is a doinky pseudoscience book out there on angels and/or demons, she owns it. Hell, she’s probably read Good Omens and all the Hellblazer comics, for that matter.

T.S. Eliot: Specifically, she likes The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, odd poem and bane of teenaged students everywhere. She’s also a fan of The Waste Land, and while she thinks The Hollow Men is grossly overrated, she likes the use of the Lord’s Prayer. Eliot is just another one of her poetry phases: previously she was all about Coleridge and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, until she overdosed on romanticism and now refuses to read anything from the nineteenth century. She goes through cycles.

Timekeeping devices: Cadmiel thought sundials were neat when they were first invented, and hourglasses, and water clocks, and especially clocks. She likes digital, too, although she’s fondest of analog, and Big Ben is her favorite London landmark. It’s because she likes keeping track of time, and now that in recent years—note what ‘recent years’ mean to a demon of her age—it’s a lot easier than it was in days of yore, it makes her life easier. Her favorites are the big church bells that ring out the time, for obvious reasons.

Routine: It’s not that she’s obsessive-compulsive or dedicated to order. Cadmiel is very old and used to long periods of boredom interspersed with short periods of having to think a lot and kill a lot to stay alive. She doesn’t want to have to think about daily rituals, or decide what to put on in the morning or when to go to the store. She saves her thinking for things she actually enjoys, like her <s>emo poetry</s> T.S. Eliot, as well as life-and-death situations. And making choices about everyday things just gets really old after thousands of years, too.

Gregor: Without going into too much detail—that’s the point of the supernatural NPCs section—she’s very fond of this particular assistant of hers. She’s attached to him, in the same way one would be attached to a favorite old hunting dog or a reliable computer: not personally, but for his use and his staunchness. “All that I can rely on in this world are death, time, and you, Gregor” is a wry comment she’s made a couple of times, but it’s true: he is about as reliable and dependable as reliable and dependable gets, and that’s not what she usually has to deal with, so she’s grateful for having such a useful and loyal minion.

Dislikes:

Hell’s Parliament: With the exception of Gregor, Cadmiel would be much happier if she never had to deal with another Hell-affiliated creature in her life. They have tried to kill her, steal her territory, upstage her, and kill Gregor at various times, and she is not happy about this. Quite a few of them are horrifically unsubtle, too, and have made her usually quite routine daily life a bit more of a pain in the ass than usual. They’re also competition, and the other Fallens truly unnerve her, particularly Duriel. (Raziel just gets on her nerves.) While she was a malakim, and now a very old and hardened Maiden, she does not want to risk battling another Fallen of any sort, particularly anyone of a higher choir than her. Her strategy throughout life has been to avoid contact with other demons, and Hell’s Parliament is a concentration of quite a few in one place, which makes her nervous. Still, it has its uses, and better to be allied than ganged up upon.

Angels: This is not a villain ‘curse those durned kids, ruinin’ all my plans!’ kind of thing. Not at all. For reasons outlined in the next dislike, angels all remind her of her very least favorite period of history: the Holy War. She would very much like to forget everything that happened and that she did at that time, and when these bloody angels keep reincarnating and going after her, it’s goddamn impossible. She is more than happy to kick angelic ass, or lead them to their doom some other way.

Public transportation: Loud. Crowded. And also recently full of zombies. When Cadmiel has to travel to other parts of London, she has to take the Tube, and she doesn’t like it one bit. For one, she likes her personal space, and doesn’t like being trapped in one isolated place for so long, especially with recent events and the activities of other demons. Still, it’s a necessary evil, and she will partake in it. Reluctantly.

Loud music: Cadmiel likes music: Baroque piano while sitting in her study at home with her minion watching the door, that is. Anything else severely impairs her ability to hear her surroundings, especially loud punk rock or the like, and it’s just distracting. If it goes on for extended periods of time near her, she’ll find a way to get rid of it, whatever that takes.

Is Neutral On:

Raphael: There’s no love lost here, at least not on Cadmiel’s part. She has no odd urge to protect her brother from harm, or strange feelings of remorse around him, or scary semi-incestuous obsessions, or anything like that. It is something, though, that she doesn’t detest him just for being an angel. In fact, her emotions regarding him are limited to a distant sort of fatigue and a wish that this particular ghost would just evaporate sometime. She doesn’t want to harm him directly, though she has no problem with him getting harmed. In fact, she wants to find out someday that Duriel made him die the unreincarnating death, and then wash her hands clean of it and forget that she ever had a brother.

The end: Honestly, in the end she doesn’t give a damn if the Creeping Dark is resurrected. She doesn’t know if it’s going to happen, and even if she did, she would just mechanically go on with her life. While she hates those goddamn angels, and she would like nothing more than to see them all die the final death so she’ll never have to think of them again, she doesn’t particularly like the idea of a world ruled by Hell, either.

Hobbies:

Soul collecting: And for her, it is a collector’s hobby above all else. It’s quite disturbed, actually, in a butterfly-collector sort of way. The basement of the ex-church she lives in is completely devoted to shelves and shelves full of tiny hourglasses. They’re more trophies than anything, as she’s taken all but the empty outer shell from them, but she likes these trophies.

Going to church: Oddly enough, Cadmiel uses her regular attendance of Mass much like someone would use a quiet room to meditate. She collects her thoughts, works things out aloud, and listens with interest to anything concerning angels and demons, because she’s a millennia-old infernal geek like that. Her own crucifix and rosary beads are old and shabby-looking, but nevertheless she’s quite attached to them, and her whole ritual of church in general. It’s a nice routine.

Reading: Ah, the stereotypical hobby of the ages. In truth, there’s not a whole lot to do when you’re immortal. She’s very well-read, and I mean very: however, she’s burned out on fiction lately, and history bores her (except for when it differs amusingly from what actually happened, which she was often present for), but she’s never lost her fondness for poetry. Yes, a demon who reads poetry. She keeps up with all the good literary journals, and while she complains a lot about the modern styles, she’ll have Gregor read them aloud to her in his monotone until she has them memorized, and then she’ll repeat them out loud to sound out the words and the language.

Aspirations/Dreams: Cadmiel, antisocial creature that she is, will not admit to it, but she wants absolution from everything that happened in the Holy War. She wants to believe that everything that happened is history, not that she was justified in doing it—because she’s switched from being utterly convinced of her justification to trying not to think about it to something in between—but that it no longer matters, and that it’s off her shoulders and her hands are washed clean of it. She has a lingering issue with the Holy War, and every time she’s come close to forgetting, she’s run into some incarnation that has popped the issue freshly back into her head. Therefore her real dream is to kill these angels and see them die and never, ever have to see one of their reincarnations again.

NPCs: Cadmiel is antisocial even for a demon. Move along, officer, nothing to see here.

History

Cadmiel’s story begins the same way as her brother’s: in the story of her parents, charming trigger-happy malakim and lovely young weaver, madly in love in a little village in Cornwall. We know how the story goes from Raphael’s background – Azazel died, leaving Rhian a young widow with two kids who quickly remarried. About nine years passed, and after a series of demon attacks, teenage Cadmiel spirited herself and little Raphael off to the Watchtower for safety and some answers about both of their powers.

But that is largely Raphael’s side of the story. As I said, Cadmiel’s begins with her parents as well, but it also begins when she was about eight years old and started realizing that she knew things about people, or thought things about people, at least. When her mother’s friends mussed her hair, she knew that they were going to discover they were pregnant, or fall victim to a demon attack when they went to the next town to buy eggs, or die wailing in bed from a burst appendix next month. It wasn’t that she saw visions, because she was blind, or had dreams, because her dreams and nightmares meant nothing more than anyone else’s, and like everyone else, she forgot most of them. But things just entered into her head about people when she was exposed to them for a short while, especially if they talked directly to her or touched her, and she was experienced enough at eight years old to realize that this was not normal, and not the way knowledge was supposed to work at all. It made her vaguely worried, and brought to mind scary stories about demons and tragic prophecies, but she tried to pay it little mind until the thatcher from down the road did die from that appendix, or the milkmaid was found butchered by the attacks of demonic minions.

Then she gave the whole issue some serious reexamination, in between trying to stop her brother from giving frogs and slugs new homes on the family pillows. She was a sober little thing, just as she was a sober larger thing later on, and she did indeed give it a great deal of serious thought like the introspective little girl that she was, and determined that while she knew things, they were certainly not things that anyone else should know. This was an astonishing piece of little-girl logic that was at the same time completely irrational and rather insightful, and based off of two basic things. One, that because of her own particular region’s beliefs and her family’s values, the idea of what was going to happen was going to happen was pounded into her head, and she firmly believed it: cemented all the more by the fact that what she knew in her head about people did end up happening. That was the moral and philosophical reason behind it, and it was compounded by more practical reasoning and fear: she didn’t want to disrupt the responsible little life that she envisioned for herself, or be held accountable for why she didn’t say anything about the people that were going to die or suffer horrible misfortune, or worst of all, disrupt the great plan which she was lucky enough to see a part of and risk the wrath of whatever might have made it.

By the time she fully awakened and went to the Keep, this attitude was firmly written into her mind, adjusted slightly, and with some practicality injected, as well as a little mercy in her own way: she still believed in her predetermination, and it would be only cruel to let people know about the things that were going to befall them when they couldn’t really do a thing about them. Besides, she didn’t want the responsibility of upkeep, she didn’t want people coming to her every waking hour to worriedly ask how they could avoid their misfortunes, and she most of all didn’t want any kind of blame for what she hadn’t done so far. This was in no way a closed issue with her, though, so even as she went through the process of apprenticeship and watched her brother go off to war, she said nothing. She knew that he would be ambushed on one of his missions, and she knew that he wouldn’t die or be permanently crippled: while this made her more conflicted than ever, she justified her silence to herself by figuring that he got out of it all right, as he was not to end up with any permanent physical problems, such as being dead.

While her brother was away at war, Cadmiel took up her job as one of the more powerful and prominent and powerful Keep mystics by keeping up a juggling act. She claimed that she could not see anything about a person’s death, which was a lie, and that she couldn’t see anything about free will or events outside of their impacts on specific people, which was true. Nevertheless, her visions were useful, as far as she decided to reveal them: not as useful as they could have been, or as lifesaving, but she did her job, and she was respected. When Raphael came back from war, she bit her lip and firmly decided that she would never tell him what she saw about his mission, because she couldn’t bear the thought of how he would react.

Her conflict over her powers really never stopped, and although she came close a couple of times to admitting her deceit, she never did, now simply because of her thoughts on predetermination and her guilt over not having done it previously. In early HW 148, she began seeing amounts of death and destruction among numerous people that clued her into something large happening in the near future. It was the strongest temptation she ever had in her life to tell someone, but after nights of thinking and thinking and more thinking, she turned the other cheek and said nothing. Because it, after all, wouldn’t impact her, would it?

Would it now? Well, it did. During Keepfall, which she didn’t expect to happen precisely the way it did (she was expecting more along the lines of a large military maneuver gone wrong, or perhaps a plague), she panicked for the first time in a while when she couldn’t find her brother, and while others were fleeing, ran through chaos and pandemonium to look for Raphael, and found herself face-to-face with an opportunistic, powerful demon, who in turn found himself facing a scared, blind angel without much in the way of combat prowess at all, and offered a simple deal with his blade at her neck: sign over her soul or die.

The one strong motivation that had pushed Cadmiel out of her little village with her brother and kept her alive all these years reared its head, and she signed her soul.

The rest, as they say, is history. But it is history that we are going to bother outlining anyway. After this she, fully conscious of what she had just done, fled the Watchtower as fast as she could possibly go, sneaking and killing her way across England to avoid the wrath of the Habbalah that she was certain would hunt her down. As fate would have it, one member of the Habbalah lost his soul at the same time she did, another went after him shortly afterwards and was slaughtered, and the last died of grief a week later. Cadmiel was safe from that particular threat, at least, and traveled and traveled until she found a little cave in Scotland where she retreated to the back and tried to sort out what to do next.

She did a lot of sorting, and even as she was utterly terrified of the consequences of her actions and what would become of her, she also felt like she had just been relieved of quite a burden. She no longer had conflict over her duties as a Keep mystic, or guilt over what angels she could have saved from their fates, or even a troublesome younger brother to watch over—she was for the first time in her life free of responsibility.

It was a state that grew on her considerably within a short period of time. Cadmiel decided that hiding would only end up in something finding and slaughtering her, and carefully ventured out into the wide world when she had to, acquiring souls, keeping her head down and avoiding everything else remotely demonic, and most of all learning. As years went by, she grew old, outliving many other demons, and still continued to learn: while she was a creature of habit, she was certainly never a creature of stasis. She changed and she kept practicality and survival priorities on top of anything else, and that is what kept her alive more than anything else.

Now she’s come to a time when things are a little different than what she’s gotten accustomed to. She’s unused to so many angels and demons in once place, and it unnerves her, and furthermore she has an idea that tugs at the back of her mind about what’s going to happen. What’s worst of that is that she doesn’t know exactly what that idea is.

Personality:

One important thing to remember about Cadmiel is that she is not who she was in the Holy War. Strangely enough, from one perspective, she can be thought of as more human now than she was back then, in that she is no longer drifting around in a cloud of disturbed apathy and has learned to deal with her power. However, it is also important to remember that she’s a demon, specifically Fallen, and therefore definitely evil, and in some respects even more detached and estranged from reality than she was when she was technically on the good side of things.

There is no difference between Eira, Moira, and Cadmiel, personality-wise. Eira will do superficial little old-lady things and complain about the younger generation, and Moira will perhaps put on airs of mysticism if she needs to act her part, but fundamentally they’re just Cadmiel conveniently leaving out the bits about collecting people’s souls. She doesn’t act any differently between her identities.

So, onto Cadmiel. First, she has seen it all. She is old. She is not as old as Duriel or Raziel, of course (by a few years), but that doesn’t mean that she’s not ancient. From this age comes a certain amount of knowledge, and experience, and cynicism. She’s not survived in the world by being tough or strutting around or beating other Lords and Maidens, but rather by staying low, staying aware, and most of all learning. Those, aside from her power, are her main strengths: she’s perceptive and she learns. As old as she is, she’s never been one for tradition: as an angel and now a demon whose powers revolve around the future, she sees clinging to the past as something futile and foolish.

She’s also changed a lot from being young and silent. The obvious change is that she’s no longer wearing a white hat. She may not be sadistic, but she sure as hell isn’t good, or decent, or even normal. The other major shift is that she’s no longer inactive and indecisive, and her apathy no longer manifests itself in the same way. Cadmiel will go out and actively work towards her own benefit, and use her powers and her resources as well she can to win a few more squares on the chessboard.

Cadmiel is a survivalist. It is one of the core values that has been ingrained into her being since the day she popped into this world, kicking and screaming, and it will be until she goes out of it. She’s kind of like her brother like that, willing to take any and all measures to uphold one core thing, although this actual thing differs greatly between the two of them. She has always been willing to go to great lengths to keep herself and those important to her alive—and since she Fell, all bets are off on everyone else, but she fights like a cornered animal, literally and figuratively, if that’s what she has to do to stay alive. It’s why she’s still alive to this day. She might not be lucky, ambitious, or extremely powerful, but she is determined to one cause above all else, kind of like a less neurotic and more competent Rincewind. There is no suicidal urge buried deep down in her psyche, and there never has been. This girl will live, or she will go down fighting for her life.

When she can afford it, she is sort of honorable, though, if only because she can afford it and she likes the looks of it when she looks at her self-image. It’s dignified. She likes dignity. She doesn’t exactly play fair, but if you’re nonthreatening, she won’t brutally kill you from the outset, and if you leave her alone, she will most likely leave you alone, too. (Thankfully, there has been a large enough number of people that haven’t left her alone so that she’s had plenty of souls to take.) Rules of honor are forsaken when it comes to most angels, of course, with the possible exception of a very, very few, but that is yet to be worked out, and most of that very, very few is her brother and her rather look-the-other-way view on him, anyhow. Basically, sometimes she’ll set up rules of the game if she thinks she can win the game, and when she does she’ll stick to that. Key words being if she thinks she can win the game, and an important addition being up until she stops thinking she can win the game.

In outward temperament, she’s not all that different Fallen from what she was as an angel. She’s a bit on the antisocial side, to make an understatement: that is, she’d rather avoid all social contact that isn’t Gregor or grocery store checkout lines, and if she could get Gregor to buy her groceries, she’d do that, too. This is not to say she’s withdrawn, because when she does have to deal with other people, she’s no quieter than average, although no more talkative. She’s exceedingly grim all the time. Hell’s Parliament knows her as the resident dry pessimist and unsmiling demon who, if forced to attend session, will offer her opinion as much as she sees fit. It’s not because she is unhappy—although she is—it’s because she doesn’t often see things as worth her amusement, and even less often her cheer.

She’s very neutral. She makes a point of neutrality on everything that does not concern her own safety or property or an angel, particularly an angel she knew in the Holy War. Other demons’ territorial wars mean nothing to her, unless one of the demons winning means they’ll next try to go after her, and then it is by all means her affair. If a demon intends to insult or demean her, she’ll turn the other cheek: she knows that she has a reputation to uphold among other demons of being dignified, icy-cold, and untouchable, and she knows that petty reactions to foolish lesser demons don’t help this. And they are all more or less lesser demons: older, more powerful ones, such as other Fallens, don’t bother her. Many of them know her, and while they don’t know exactly how her power works, they know that she was a prominent mystic and that she has killed or arranged for the deaths of everyone who’s attempted to murder her or encroach on her territory. Other demons do have common sense: why hunt a tiger when there are plenty of deer around for the picking?

Onto the issue of angels. Now we start seeing something beyond jaded neutrality intersected by strong survival instinct. Cadmiel’s feelings are mixed on angels and anything to do with them, especially the Holy War, but they are all mixed flavors of fear, hatred, and annoyance. She blames them largely for her situation and her fate in the Holy War, and yet she also doesn’t like thinking about her own part in everyone else’s. In fact, right after she Fell she would have been content with never, ever seeing an angel again, and assumed that this would happen. Not so. With every reincarnation she’s bumped into has come a reminder that she had a different life, and she had people she knew and people who knew her and people she could talk to who weren’t reanimated statues, and she no longer does and she won’t ever again and that it was not her fault but had a lot to do with her decision and maybe could’ve gone differently and do you get the sense that Cadmiel’s attitude on this subject is not the most coherent thing ever? She hates that. She can’t very well convince herself that everything she did was reasonable and right, but she can’t very well cheerfully accept that she was wrong and irresponsible and downright traitorous, either. This makes for major cognitive dissonance for her, because she hates being a hypocrite, and yet she can’t really have it any other way. Also, she hates feeling guilty, because that would invalidate her whole justification behind her way of living and the fact that she’s still alive. This manifests itself in abhorrence of the issue of the angels, the memory of the angels, and most of the angels themselves. As mentioned in ‘aspirations’, she would love nothing more than to be rid of them forever and ever and wash her hands clean of the whole affair. She will gladly kill them to be rid of them, and more gladly see them meet their final deaths somehow. The fact that she is a demon and collects souls and they generally try to stop that and kill her doesn’t sit well with her, either. What once was guilt and conflicted feelings, and perhaps still is in a way, has manifested itself as abject hatred and fear, and that ain’t gonna change.

In contrast, unlike in Holy War, her powers are no longer an issue of strong feelings and conflict to her. She uses them when she can, and shrugs it off when she can’t, and tends to see destiny as a vague map of what’s going to happen no matter what you do, but something you can draw the landmarks and boundaries on if you’re aware of it. She has a very practical view in that much. If an angel is destined for Greatness, then she gets worried, but she will try to see to it that their Greatness comes posthumously. Destiny is a thing that’s there, kind of like just another system you have to work around. Cadmiel can deal with that just fine, and has been doing so for a while now.

Onto Eira and Moira. Like I mentioned earlier, aren’t really identities so much as they are personas, kind of, and even that’s a stretch. They’re more like forms with associated behaviors to smooth the way for Cadmiel. Eira Locke is a useful form that keeps her in a steady place without having to work or have people ask too many questions, which is compounded by her standoffish, crotchety-old-lady demeanor to the general public and her big scary dog. She has papers that say when she was born and that she owns that old ex-church thank you very much and that yes, she’s paid her taxes. Moira, on the other hand, is for when Cadmiel needs to go out and deal with some crazy occultist, or someone looking for the demon Cadmiel that needs to be brushed off, or if she needs a pretty disguise for Hell’s Parliament. It doesn’t look odd for her to be active and sprightly, and she is the mundane identity associated with Cadmiel as a demon—Eira Locke is safety and an alter ego that most demons don’t know a thing about. Moira is dealing with the occult world in general, a demon’s illusion to those who know her, an eccentric fortuneteller with no apparent connections or background to those who don’t. When she’s just using the appearance to deal with other demons, she’s only Cadmiel—when she’s masquerading as mortal, she’s a bit more mysteriously aloof, vague, and properly mystical-acting, like any decent faux-mystic, only less charming.

To Cadmiel, as to most people of her rather impressive age, most things are insignificant. Among these things are human lives, human destinies, other demons so long as they don’t bother her, and the way things will work out in the end. Some things are importantly good, such as her own safety, her own safety, and did we mention her own safety. Some things are the scourge of the earth, like demons that try to mess with her, angels in general, the Holy War, her own lack of safety, and anything else that might threaten her or her, if not exactly comfortable, stable and workable worldview that justifies everything she’s done, or at least makes justification insignificant.

So, what is Cadmiel? She is not sadistic, persay, or irrational in her actions, or all that power-hungry. What she happens to be is icy-cold, calculating, apathetic, completely survivalistic and holding the grudge of the ages. And this makes her more frightening an opponent than any giggling psychopath.

Pros: Resilient, perceptive, calculating, rational, determined, insightful, honorable in her own way, knowledgeable in quite a few different areas, experienced.
Neutral: Survivalist, skilled liar, cynical.
Cons: Avoidant, amoral, bitter, defensive, ruthless, reclusive, holds grudges, incapable of being honest with herself, angel issues.

Appearance

Face/Skin:
Moira: Youthful, heart-shaped, and refined are the best ways to describe Moira’s face. She’s basically a slightly spritzed-up version of Holy War Cadmiel, so she has features that are elegant and unidentifiably foreign. Her skin tone is a very light olive, and her features are ever reminiscent of a perfect noblewoman or ballet dancer, with elegant, smooth cheekbones, cupid’s bow lips, ever-so-subtly slanted eyes, and a slightly upturned nose. They are also somewhat off-British, but not in any definite ethnic way. Her dark grey eyes seem to be a little ill-fitting for her face, as they’re rather intense while the rest of her features project aloofness and neutrality. Usually her expression is some variation on vaguely interested neutrality, often with a quirked eyebrow or a slight twist of one side of the mouth that indicates a lopsided almost-smile.
Eira: Moira, plus fifty years, with some basic bone-structure changes to avoid being recognizable. Shrewish-looking with hard grey eyes and a perpetual scowl, and a hell of a lot of wrinkles. None of the plumpness or sagginess that comes from usual age: rather looks drawn and strained, actually.

Hair:
Moira: Thick, ink-black, and straight, falling to her mid-back with a veil/shawl to look properly mystic.
Eira: Straight, steel grey, and pulled back into a tight bun all the time: Can’t fault her for practicality.

Build:
Moira: Slender to the point of being very boyish, with little in the way of a womanly shape. On the upper end of 5’4”, so there’s no way you could call her tall, and she’s in fact a shade taller than her real and Holy War form.
Eira: See Moira again, only bonier but somehow hardier-looking, despite seeming like she ought to be damn near decrepit. She makes a show out of joint pains and frailty, but in reality she is quite fit, quite strong, and nowhere near decrepitude.

Carriage:
Moira: Shuffles around for dramatic effect, and generally takes her grand time going from place to place. Unless she needs to get somewhere in a hurry, which is a lot of the time, and then she just walks briskly with no dramatic facades.
Eira: Businesslike, straighter posture than you’ll ever see in your life, wastes no time on the trip. Can run if she has to, and a very good sneak as well, but you’d never guess either by knowing her day-to-day.

Voice:
Moira: A light alto, very mellow, almost airy in tone when she’s telling someone their fortune, but never quite cheerful enough to be happy or quite bleak enough to be melancholy. Her tone is a lot like her expression: lightly neutral.
Eira: Same pitch, quite different tone. While she also has a light voice, she’s almost hoarse, and speaks flatly and evenly. In either form, however, Cadmiel has a gift for making people listen when she’s speaking quietly.

True Form:

Do you see elegant young Moira? Yes? Drop a few pounds and make her gaunt and deathly pale, with veins all along her arms, and a little shorter, just a little under an inch over 5’3”. Tangle her hair up, make it a pitch-black oil spill color. Make her hands and arms near-skeletal, make her teeth blackish and pointed, make her fingernails into sharp claws. Most prominently, make her eyes nothing but white from edge to edge, shot through with bright blood-red veins, without pupils or irises. That is the picture you would have to paint of Cadmiel, and it is in no way a pretty one.

Abilities

Literature: Very esoteric ability for a demon, yes. Nevertheless, Cadmiel’s spent so much of her time reading and reading and doing more reading that she is very, very well-read. This combined with an excellent memory means that she can identify characters, themes, and quotes from nearly anything that’s fairly well known in the English language and that was written before 1900 (she’s still catching up on the 20^th century). What the hell use is this? I don’t know, except that would-be smart alecks trying to quote Shakespeare on her will have her respond by saying the next line.

Languages: You know the dealie. She’s fluent at everything Latinate, including Latin itself (although she never quite got the hang of modern French, so French speakers will look at her oddly), as well as German and Hindi. She’s picked up a smattering of various other languages as well, and can speak passable Mandarin and Cantonese.

Senses +101: I’m sure you were expecting this. Still, it is the thing that makes her formidable at physical combat. As you may have noticed, Cadmiel has lacked sight all her life, and she’s developed her other senses to make up for it, particularly hearing. This is a hell of a lot more than your average trained-with-a-blindfold fictional ninja, too. She’s lived a very dangerous life for thousands of years without sight, and the senses she’s had to develop because of this have only been enhanced through determination, necessity, and magical boost. It makes her an absolutely deadly sneak, because she understands everything about sneaking from how every footfall and how every rustle of hair makes a difference, and it also makes her damn near impossible to surprise. Also, don’t fight her in the dark.

18 Agility: A lot of enemies fighting Cadmiel make the mistake of thinking that “blind” equals “disabled”. This is largely influenced by the above senses ability, but she’s fast and flexible and has a lot more endurance than what one would think from her size and shape. Being small helps this, too. None of this is supernatural. It comes merely from training and training and escaping and surviving a lot and learning the advantages of speed when one doesn’t have strength. Enemies fighting her may have an initial “holy fuck, she’s fast” reaction because, well, holy fuck, she is fast, and that’s not what you’d expect. Although they usually don’t have time to have that reaction before they suddenly find that their eyes are no longer in their sockets.

Fortune-telling: As with Teiaiel, Cadmiel’s found it useful to pick up some skills at faking the ability to tell futures. She’s not going to be reading any tea leaves anytime soon, but otherwise her persona is utterly perfect: she can use her glamour to up her mysticism a bit if she needs to, and the blindness only adds to the impression (especially with the miniscule tactile markings she uses to identify her different tarot cards). When she has to take up being Moira, she’s extremely good at playing her role.

† The Infernal

Color

Dark grey - #A9A9A9, specifically. It hasn’t changed with her Fall, actually, but it was not a cheery happy funtime color to begin with.

Symbol

A circle quartered by a cross: otherwise known as the sun cross, the wheel cross, Woden’s cross, one of the Signs in The Dark is Rising, and a circle with two lines through it, yo. It’s a simple symbol that represents quite a few things, one of them being Fortuna. Her lil’ bro has one on his Key to the Kingdom, as a matter of fact. Must be genetic or sumfink. Shown here: http://symbols.com/encyclopedia/29/291.html

Voile

Cadmiel’s infernal voile brings to mind several things: the classical personification of Fortune, a Catholic cleric of some sort, an old-woman fortuneteller, and of course a demon. The base of the outfit is a long, shimmery, translucent gown that brings to mind Renaissance paintings of maidens and the like, except it’s a dirty dark grey and a little ragged around the edges, and rife with black stains. It’s somewhat flowing, sleeveless with a circular neckline at a modest level, and it reaches to about her ankles. She goes barefoot. Over this she wears a black cloak with a hood, also ragged and dirty-looking, reaching a little past her gown and with a high collar reminiscent of a priest’s. It fastens at her neck with a brooch the shape of an hourglass, and is belted with a chain. The hood is large and drapes well over her forehead and partially over her eyes, but if one gets close enough to look at her face, she wears a white, bloodstained blindfold that is tied around her head. If she feels like being creepy, she’ll often push the hood down and take off her blindfold, because she is aware that her eyes are less-than-comforting.

Now, onto wings. She’s a Fallen – obviously she has wings of some sort, but what kind, exactly? Well, they’re more like the ghosts of wings. They are vague and shadowy and incorporeal, unfolding from her back when she is in full demonic form, but more like smoky clouds or shadows of what once were black wings than actual wings. She can’t fly with them, or do anything else with them, for that matter, although she can move them and fold them. They never demanifest if she is in full infernal form. They basically look like blurred blackish-grey versions of ascended malakim wings, without the power and the beauty: just faded, dead shadows of what once was. There was a time when they were all black and raven-like and shimmery, but it is not this time.

Weapon

Bear in mind that Cadmiel’s skill at physical fighting is not her primary means of defense (that’s Gregor and the fine art of running the hell away) or her primary means of killing (that’s Gregor again, or her soul stealing method). However, that doesn’t mean she’s bad at it. In fact, coupled with her agility and her nearly-uncanny senses, she can be quite deadly.

She doesn’t have a weapon, persay, but as described in her true demonic form, she has claws. They’re not that long (she ain’t Wolverine), perhaps extending three-quarters of an inch past her fingertips, but they are sharp and they are quick to use and while she can’t exactly stab you in the heart with them, she can sure as hell get rid of the sight you think you have as an advantage over her or just slash your jugular. They’re also tougher than human fingernails and she doesn’t have to sharpen them regularly. They’re also black. That’s all there really is to them.

Henshin

Whatever mundane form she’s using sort of wavers, like a TV image going out, and disappears, leaving her demonic form in voile. It’s kind of creepy, actually.

Gifts

Second, er, Sight?: This is what makes Cadmiel herself, pretty much, and the bane of her existence as well as really her most powerful ability. She was one of the Mystic Angels, and to this day she’s one of the mystic demons, and as powerful as ever. Her sphere is distinct from foresight in that it’s specific to people, and events as they impact people. It basically involves “looking” at people’s life-threads, or specifically the events connected to them in the future. In order for this to take effect, she doesn’t have to have skin-on-skin contact or eye contact or anything, although touching them does speed the process up a bit: she just has to spend enough time in a close vicinity and after a short while, if she chooses to do so, the bits of life-thread start filtering into her mind. There is an important condition to this. The first is that it is intrinsically tied to people, and the events that happen to people. She can’t see anything that is either strongly based in the free will of the person in question or simply unconnected to anyone in particular: her power depends on finding out what will happen to one particular person.

Black magic: Over the years Cadmiel has devoted some time to the study of the occult, beyond just honing her powers. By this I mean she knows how to draw up a ward around her house to keep demonic powers out unless she invites them in, can pick the right animal and sacrifice it the right way to summon something, understands the power of various charm and curse substances, and has learned a thing or two about the strengths and weaknesses of various supernatural creatures and powers. Note how much of this is theoretical. She would be a terrifying sorcerer if it weren’t for the fact that her own remnants of angelic magic kind of screw with her results. Seeing as how none of this even holds a candle in power to angelic and infernal power, it depends on precision, and it tends to go a bit haywire around her. The only thing she can do with great skill and reliability is make wards to protect herself and her property, and even that takes ceremony and materials, like anything else in this field. Everything else works with varying success, but she still knows a lot about it and if it were up to just her she could kick John Constantine’s ass in five seconds flat, man.

Black Dogs: Because every good demon needs minions-of-the-day. Cadmiel has picked up a specialized summoning power along with all the other occult things she’s studied over the years, and this involves calling shadowy dogs to do her bidding. These aren’t Gregor, note: they’re not as dangerous as him, as fast as him, as durable as him, as corporeal as him, and most importantly as smart as him. They’re black creatures that don’t seem to quite have made it to “dog”, and seem more like collections of shadow squeezed roughly into dog shapes, about the size of a small wolf, with glowing yellow eyes that seem more like floating lights in the heads of these shadow creatures. They aren’t very bright at all, and all they can really do is attack indiscriminately in a general direction. They’re not even as smart as dogs, really. One blast of magic makes them vanish, or anything that would rend them to pieces otherwise, for that matter, such as getting a sharp chop on the neck with an axe. To summon them, Cadmiel has to be near substantial shadows, which isn’t something she can specifically judge on the whole. She simply makes a beckoning gesture and the dogs coalesce, makes a dismissive motion to get them to attack, and a sharp cutting motion to cause them to vanish again.

Attack(s)

Hasten: In order to do this, Cadmiel steps up to her intended victim, presses a hand to their arm, face, or whatnot, and says quietly “We haven’t got all day.” That’s all the flash-bang, which is pretty much nothing.

The effects of this vary greatly, but here’s the general gist of it: the longer she manages to keep hold of her victim, the farther forward in time they hurtle. No, they don’t meet themselves or get transported anywhere. Physically, however, they feel aged. If they have any injuries or odd pains or feelings that occur in the near future, they feel as if they’ve suddenly manifested them, which can be a rather big shock just from the feeling of suddenly having a twisted shoulder from a later battle, or a broken leg. She can stop wherever she wants: she can even fast-forward to death, in which case the person enters a coma. She’d have to keep hold of them for over a minute for that to work, though. However, none of these things actually happen: while Hapless Victimiel might suddenly feel like she’s in the throes of childbirth because that’s how far Cadmiel decided to take her, she’s not, and her teammates will give her weird looks when she collapses on the ground screaming for an epidural. And while these effects are constant and often quite devastating while they happen, they only happen as long as Cadmiel stays in demon form: the concentration it takes to throw up a glamour breaks her concentration on this.

How bad this turns out to be really depends on the victim. Happy McFortuniel might not be affected that badly, but assuredly he’ll sustain a painful injury at some point in the future, and Cadmiel’s pretty good at looking for that point. Doomed McAngstiel is going to have a harder time. Any girl who’s going to birth a kid at some point or another is Fuck Out Of Luckiel. Also, anyone who is forcefully unconscious at some point in the future, drugged or such, can get affected that way and suddenly drop to the ground unconscious and incapable of being roused for the duration of the attack. This doesn’t work for sleep, note, because the people tend to wake up pretty quickly.

On top of all that, this really messes with people’s heads.

Prophet’s Curse: Again, no flash-bang here. Cadmiel basically has to somehow get close enough to her victim for long enough to whisper “And Thine is the Kingdom” into their ear: this choice is purely arbitrary on her part, although she likes the Lord’s Prayer.

This is an evil one. This allows her victim to be Cadmiel-For-A-Day. Well, not precisely. They will see a series of visions of the destinies of whoever they look at, jumbled, vivid, and often horrifying and nonsensical. They have the same limitations as Cadmiel’s powers: limited only to events, not choices. However, they have no control over it and no way of sorting or deciphering the images at all, not to mention the immense shock that such visions suddenly gives to someone unused to being a psychic. They can’t see anything of the real world while they see visions, either. Also, they can’t tell anyone about them, and they can’t really do anything about them when they’re impossible to sort out and rather nonsensical. Once the effect goes away, the victim forgets about them entirely, except for the nagging feeling that they saw something of great import.

The Curse goes away when Cadmiel wants it to go away. The catch? She gets rid of it ASAP. She hates the idea of anyone else having her power, especially so vividly, even if they can’t talk about it. While she will use this to freak out and incapacitate an enemy in battle, as soon as it’s no longer necessary she’ll very quickly lift the Curse. This, again, messes with people’s heads.

Soul Stealing: Do you notice a pattern of flash-bang-less powers here? Very simple. Rather creepy. She grabs her victim and kisses them on the lips, not all sensual or romantic or anything, but chaste and very Lady Luck. They promptly cough up an hourglass covered in blood, and that’s that for their soul. This doesn’t tend to mess with people’s heads, as they no longer have heads to mess with.

Demense

Cadmiel doesn’t actually have much: just one old church on the outskirts of London and all of its grounds and the shops and such around it (so she doesn’t have to be bothered by any other demons when going to buy groceries), and one little apartment near Hell’s Parliament. However, all demons that trespass can expect to be greeted by her and the Grim Reaper.

NPCs

Gregor: Cadmiel’s only real companion, Gregor is a huge black dog about the size of a small pony, with a shaggy coat, pointed ears, yellow eyes, and a very wolfish bearing to him. He tends to scare the hell out of people, although he is calm, composed, and obedient, and otherwise seems more suited to the task of watchdog than that of guide dog and companion, which is his ostensible role to Eira Locke. Although she’s curiously mum about his genealogy, current neighborhood speculation is that he’s part wolf and part mastiff. The curt answer from his owner is usually that he’s a useless mutt and that’s the end of it.

Of course, Gregor is not a wolf, a mastiff, a mutt, or useless. What he is is a very old creature who was once a statue set to watch over a medieval noble bloodline. When that line died out, he found himself without a purpose, and set off wandering when a minor demon animated him and attempted to bind him to his service, botching the job horribly. (Ironically enough, he would have been perfectly willing to serve that demon if he had just asked.) It was, as a matter of fact, pure chance that led him to run into the blind Maiden of Destiny. She asked him to serve her, he was more than willing because he’s rather pointless without a master, and they’ve been a team ever since.

He is not evil, because that implies a certain kind of self-interest, which just isn’t in his makeup. He is a servant first and foremost, and second, and third: he will do any manner of atrocities if his master asks him to, because she is his Master and Masters must be Obeyed. He functions as her eyes, to a certain degree – not so she can watch her step, because she’s fine at that, but to check for things out of place and possible dangers. At home he also reads things aloud to her: he’s got a charm on him that allows him to speak, but basically by manifesting speech directly from his mind to the air, so it’s more of a gravelly, disembodied monotone that happens to be located in front of his mouth. He’s as intelligent as a human, perhaps more intelligent than most, but he is not an independent thinker: that’s just not the way he works. While he’s capable of thinking for himself, he would not for a second put his own conclusions over the orders of his Master. It’s just not how it’s Done. If Cadmiel told him the earth was a humongous orange, he would believe her, and operate under the assumption that the earth was a humongous orange despite all evidence to the contrary. Oftentimes she will give him “do as you see fit” commands, because she knows he’s smart, but the permanent orders he is under are to protect her and be on his guard all the time. And he does that well.

Physically, Gregor is not something to be trifled with – he’s huge, fast, and has sharp teeth. He also functions as Cadmiel’s brawn: in tight situations that she hasn’t managed to maneuver herself into the upper hand in, he’s always around to bite off fingers and rip out throats. He is really damn difficult to kill, also, because he is basically a living statue. It’s not impossible, but he heals fast and well.

Past Lives

Cadmiel has been very much a hermit throughout the years: however, one thing is definitely attributed to her. She published the anonymous letter, while staying in Paris under the guise of an old nun named Marie, which led to the guillotining of one young student Antoine at the end of the French Revolution. Other incidents are unconfirmed, but she is no stranger to fratricide.

† Writing Sample

† Resume

Name

Pope Katie XVII.

Contact information

Man, you know this stuff.

Experience

NEVER.

† Your Thoughts

As you may have noticed, a lot of this is based off the Moirae in classical Greek mythology, and to a lesser degree the Norns of Norse. So we’ve got the maiden, yes, the crone, sure—wait, where the hell is the mother? The standing theory is that Cadmiel was pretty much the mother aspect during HW times, looking after her brother. That aspect was pretty much killed off with her Fall. That would probably make her imbalanced fate, then—well, er, she’s definitely unbalanced.

The Black Dogs and Gregor are based somewhat off the folkloric death omen of the Black Dog, also known s the Grim. Inevitability, yo.

Also, to give the most random bit of random ever to dance down Random Street, I think Cadmiel may well be the only ancient demonic virgin out there. She hasn’t been making with the horizontal tango since she Fell, that’s for certain.