About
Name: Xanthus, Saint Eques Levante [ roughly, “Fair Knight Rising” ].- •---“Ma'at”, or “Hieros”, are sometimes his given honorifics.
Race: [ Fairy: Changeling ] Fractal Species, Proto Alien, Retainer Specimen, Botanica People
Class: Rectifier; Cosmological Mender; Knight
Title: Formerly, Guardian of Yggdrasil; Sentry of the Great Tree; Keeper of the Albus Kabbalah; Protector of Life; Shepherd Sword of Thorns; Galahad; the Samaritan Dog; the Saint of Valhalla; Pope of the World; Canis Majoris; Hræsvelgr; Sleep Walker.
Appearance:
A once noble great preserver and high steward over the White God Tree, Yggdrasil, his hair is a swaying wave of silk and majesty bouncing and billowing about. As a guardian Fae, a botanical species begat from this numinous tree’s womb of power, these threads possess a strange and unearthly bioluminescence, changing color with the many seasons of the alien warrior’s protean spirit and emotion.
Distinct from the strands of this hoariness, his skin prides a pitch-black melanosis like soot; this onyx, which every now and then presents the scaly rinds of something ophidian and snake-like, distinguishes him as an other to humanity. This tenebrosity abides with the occasional coruscation of fire and heritage, the eminent markings of cabalistic glyphs and cyphers upon him; these etched abdications of the ebon, although seemingly branded, are actually the work of a born spiritual heredity and highness. Most notably, between the center of the eyes, a red swastika resides — the Tetra Gammadion, a supreme symbol of the warrior's benevolence and adjacency to the Divine. Above this, a marrow-like crest guards the forehead, a protrusion much like a crown.
His entire body is encased in an entomoid membrane akin to that of a cicada’s wings, functionally enrobing him like a cocoon. These alae work amorphously to enwrap him like a sleek exocarp in their strange living agency. In some incarnations, he appears inconspicuously human and effeminate: fair, fetching skin, draping platinum blonde hair, and an androgynous body.
Molded by the soft borders of innocence and youth, his expression is ever touched by notes of gentility and mercy, almost penitent. Winter brows seem furled in a state of fixed futile concern and pusillanimity, as though tepid. Beneath them, the translucent pearls of the nobleman's glimpse, in their glowing viridity, seem to look past, not at — boring right through their intention, and seemingly transfixed by a subject beyond. His leer, lulled by perfect pacifism and complete composure.
Personality:
A saint sword of heroic valor and protection, the Fae is a pillar of compassion, strength and the codices of honor, even as he levies the grim scythe of euthanasia, the black war sword Tyr Exordium. Herald of the Seelie Court, the magistrate of supernal good, his purpose is directly promised to guarding the system of divine order, the “Albus Kabbalah” — Yggdrasil.
Even in battle, he unleashes a radiant compassion and understanding still; he considers his dutiful work an amnesty from the burden of life. Death and mercy, one and the same. For that, there is a subtle alarum associated with the errant sword's arrival anywhere; its implications can mean the swift evanescence of living things across the lands. Therefore, the guardian Fae is a bearer of many titles to distinguish his chilling eminence. For his selfless servitude, he is sometimes called the “Best Samaritan”; for his warrior valor, the “Saint of Valhalla”; and, for his connection to Yggdrasil, as well as the strange fatal, black wind that notoriously accompanies him, he is likened to the hawk that is said to sit atop it in the Prose Edda, “Hræsvelgr” ( quite appropriately translating to 'corpse-swallower' ).
His labor, quite simple. The nobleman is a tamer of sorts; he is a vanquisher of any feasible sedition against the natural structure of the worlds, an antithesis to any upsets in the balance, a corrector in the ordonnance of life, a mender of aberrations and generally a bane against world-ending scenarios. A great rectifier, his demeanor is correspondingly a thing of cutting grace, elegance and higher goodness. The cross-bearer's business is a matter of spiritual cleanliness. Yet, with some irony, his presence is considered an antipode to good fortune. He will commit hecatomb, administering the anodyne of mass extinction in order to protect Yggdrasil and the balance — it is not beyond him; he has done it before, driving the black mass, Tyr Exordium, into the land in order to plunge castles, colonies, dominions and kingdoms into the dusk of oblivion itself. To cleanse the lifestream, he has extinguished entire populations. His presence is well considered an ill-omen for that reason. By the anecdotal accounts of many, he is even considered antagonistic.
He is not intimately well-known, either; his very existence has been reduced, by some people, to a phenomenological response to cosmic messes, less a person. The emissary's mediation is thought to be an effortless moving in the celestial, invisible, accomplished with the phases of portentous ceremony: the telltale appearance of his ensign, the hexagram, which appears in skies overhead as a draping prophecy of destruction, dawning imperiously on the world; then, the funereal emancipation of death itself, an accurst, black cloud of lustration released from the seal. Senescence.
However, as it stands, his true primacy as a sworn sword of protection has long been put to sleep. At some time throughout the length of his indomitable tenure as a cosmological enforcer policing the natural order, a furtive nemesis was born against him. It fermented within, growing with each and every calamity the warrior had ever felled — an enemy subtle enough to elude even a prudence of his own. Boredom. After years of amending the matters of things most sacred, the chore of protecting the Great Tree had grown banal. From the Fae's unconscious desire to live freely among others as an individual, and to secede from his role as a penultimate shield ahead of Yggdrasil's well-being with time, he has, over the course of his existence, assumed many various and noteworthy lives as different individuals — egoic fragments and unique shapings of his “Óðr” ( or, mind ). These are much like fonts in the expression of his being.
The fracturing of Óðr into shard parts has produced many lifetimes, unique fractals of his power and identity cast into the realms in order to come upon his truest purpose again. As such, he has forgotten who he truly is. And, under these conditions, the nobleman is pronounced as a certain kind've Fae: a Changeling, if you will; possessing numerous bodies in his many incarnations. Thereby, he is hardly ever immediately acknowledged as a being of terrific status by other creatures of capability and deduction. But, like a dog's instinctual whiff of any offness, crisis will bring the Fae's other demeanor and keenness floating to the surface. And upon rousing, that presence will be felt.
At any other time, the silent sentinel is an oblivious bystander, ambivalent, and usually nominates for remoteness from those matters considered most mundane. His presence is a river of calmness, and in appearance, lacking the grievous qualities of his knighthood. In dealing with others, the Fae is notoriously unsociable and his manner often inscrutable. He is many-times shown to be unacquainted with the conventions of human civility and decorum.
Despite his office as a conservator in the Seelie Court, having forgotten his nature, as a Changeling the Fae's attentions are often stolen by a fatuous wonder in pastime. His curiosity is a faithless thing, easily eloping with the teeming distractions of nature and imagination; he can almost always be seen immersed in the hymns of singsong, looking off into the vast yonder distances of his surroundings while mired in the mirth of juvenile admiration and play, entranced by things unseen. In this, he is much like a child.
At the suspension of any widespread peril though, his recollection is pollinated by obligation, maturing with the dignity of his immense position. It is then that the slumbering soul wearily stirs awake and our emissary emerges as the final warrior and aegis that he was meant to be. Argus-eyed, he peruses the threads of different worlds with glimpse of glistering percipience, and equally, single-mindedness, for what must inevitably be sheared. Evermore, the wayward winds of worldly indifference makes the Fae a rather antagonistic threat against the forces of unruly, easily carrying his stormless detachment into his office as a ruthless Samaritan sword of the natural order upon waking.
While fundamentally gentle, in battle, a floating arrogance does indeed aerate him. Through smog-like faces, who are bound to the black egregore of its maleficence, Tyr Exordium, barks boldly, with hoarse and deathly rasps — demeaning. This derision is what some suspect the warrior might, in some repressed way, refrain from saying, taunting enemies and foes alike. Although, this is questionable, as they tend to quarrel over matters of approach; with Tyr urging indiscriminate destruction, and the guardian, restraint.
Weapons and Items:
Tyr Exordium: The Excrement Sword; a forbidden Noble Weapon and antiquity afforded to Xanthus by Rauk, and the token spiritual utility of the guardian’s arsenal. A foul black bale of ill-will and odiousness, this ugly weapon belies the cleanliness of its saintly wielder in everything that it stands for. It heaves a calamitous expiration in the Ethereal Plane, wearing at the spiritual integrity of a thing. In the physical, this deleterious power is expressed as a palpable pall of pollution, pitch-black and ceaseless in its billowing unfurl. Its shroud forms the weary faces of woe and wail, and it promises to consume the warrior should he use its power and lose. Xanthus, rather irreverently, refers to the rancorous sword as “Ammit”. All things considered, it is a strange and unlikely pairing, Xanthus and this bane.
In appearance, its sculpture hardly acquiesces to the semblance of convention. Beyond its tuxedo of petrification, it is a colossal encumbrance, and a graceless forge, scarcely practical. Its mass is a dense wave of adumbration, as if its fragment was wrought from the limbo of annihilation. The obelisk is an artless stone shard of obsidian, only barely resembling its graven image: a benighted glaive.
Equinox Ring: A ring whose powers inspire balance, symmetry and homeostasis. It emanates a special, rhythmic pulse; a distinct palpitation in the reticulum of spacetime, alike to the skipping of a stone across the surface of a pond or lake. The aeriform undergoes a sort've visible fluctuation — like the wrinkling in the fabric of space around the stone. Said to've belonged to Nostradamus himself, it's emblem, the Libran scales, tilt with the ubiquity of preternatural forces, particularly unstable ones. Xanthus uses it as a directional guidestone for his work, tracing the trail of such disturbances back to the lineage of their source.
Powers and Abilities:
Cauda Pavonis: N/A
Tetra Gammadion: The equilateral cross of his blessedness, each arm hooked with the nuance of its sacred symbology; its complexion, maroon, like old blood. It glows red in synchronicity to its liveliness. The Fae can use its unction like a sympathetic broadcast, moving the transports of powerful emotion, as well as to communicate without any need for sermon. It is a kind've psychic emotional telepathy speak, an adamic language, beaming profound concepts as parcels of information in the form of eidetic imagery and sensory media.
Six Degrees of Separation:
Complete as a magic circle, it is luminiferous construct — bright and blue. An empyreal stamp emboldened by the work of spiritual artifice, its ideography is purposed for errands of general intermediation in the ethereal. Its power pertains to the ontology of correspondence itself. It is a binding of mutual association, and its system of utility rests on the foundation of imitation magic, or the Law of Contagion. This signet, the Six Degrees of Separation, wherever it encompasses, landmarks a binary condition of spiritual sympathy with whatever the Fae wills. This aperture apparatus is a gangway for spiritual compatibility and initiation. Think, an electric outlet. It is a standalone antechamber for schematic permission, inviting receptivity to whatever its host intends in the ethereal. As a virtual port, it can communicably adjoin two or more spiritual things through its agency.
Additionally, when the arch is modally “closed” through the caster's doing, it acts much like a circuit breaker instead, suppressing targeted spiritual connections and sealing off power instead of permitting it through a kind've resonant permeation. This was how the Fae had slain the Fallen Angel Naazir ( Raziel ). Although to effectuate this energetic bottlenecking, it is a precursor that the brand first be conjured. Closing, is an act distinct from the ikon’s complete dispersal as a magical tool.
Churning Smog Stab of Czernobog:
Tyr Exordium, the malignant sword, breathes such a mean and damnable shroud in the Ethereal, Xanthus uses SDS to access the immediacy of his foe’s spiritual body, plunging the sword into the symbol as an act of adjunct ritual initiation, sprouting the cankerous halitosis within the bosom of their very being. Unleashed directly upon its threshold, the terrible shroud would eat ravenously at the spiritual constitution of a soul with advanced atmospheric attrition. In the mundane, this immense impregnation and dark encroachment appears to the unaided human ogle as the shroud’s inexplicable envelopment of a person, object or being, rescinding life through abolition. Obliteration.
Living Sutras: N/A
Total Tropism: N/A
Relationships:
Driveida: The Dragonborn, descendant of Nidhoggr, is opposed to the guardian in what they intrinsically represent. There is a strange affinity between them, and there exists a tension of mutual distrust when either encounters the other. Yet, in obedience to his principle, the guardian has no reason to abolish the beast.
Joachim Castigare: Alike to siblings, as Yemen, the guardian treats the little one with a snide, but caring seniority. To stifle his involvement with the mafia in the hopes that he would lead a better life, Yemen even went as far as to use SDS in order to hide the compact-drill gun in the boy's possession.