Coriel Stormhold

Aasimar / Sorcerer

Submitted character story

Even worlds of swords and sorcery have superheroes. Adventurers, scholars, disciples gain their experience and grow their skills and powers over time and effort and guile. Some however, through intent or accident have great power thrust upon them through  great fortune.- or misfortune.  Such is the case of Coriel and her compatriots. 

Coriel was not born "Stormhold"; she reached for it. Before the Overdraw she mortal and plain, if gifted. Human by most accounts, half-elven by those who knew her mother, she was the most promising mind at the Slefwerra Lyceum in a generation, the kind of student the masters argued over and other students orbited without quite meaning to.

Almost from the start of her studies, a theory nagged at Coriel and grew with her knowledge. The elemental and planar tides at the edge of every arcane spell, every magical working, could be tapped directly, drawn down like water from a cistern. How to force and hold that channel open was a matter of arcane maths and raw nerve. The arithmetic, well, that was easy for her. Nathair had the nerve, and the fortune to fund their own little laboratory vault in a disused basement room of the Lyceum, and back then, something between them the survivors have never agreed on. They were partners in the work, certainly; more than that, perhaps. Coriel and Nathair could say, but have not. They led the binding together. She held the channel, longer and wider than she should have, and for a few heartbeats it was *working*. She chose to draw more in a moment she will never forget, nor forgive.

The working... overdrew, and the tide of power broke loose  and crashed down onto and into and through all of them at once.

She woke changed, skin faintly lit from within, eyes gone lightning-white, with an ever-present a aura of static she spent a year learning not to shed on everyone she touched. The Lyceum scholars called it a miracle in one breath and a massacre in the next, and both were fair. Coriel had reached for power to do great things, and it had grabbed her, and killed friends and hollowed out the man she may have loved. The event left her holding a company of the maimed and the transfigured, all of them looking to her because someone had to lead, and leading is the only atonement she knows that doesn't sound like an excuse.

She is very good at it, which is its own problem, in a way. Her drive is to step to the front, and her calm command makes it easy for the room to fall in behind her. The instincts come as easily as the lightning, and she distrusts all of them, because they are the same qualities that talked a dozen brilliant, brave, foolish people into a vault from which only eight emerged. She keeps Ozur close and pretends not to notice how he watches her. She keeps an eye on Simra too, and notices every day that Simra cannot look at her without remembering. Coriel has decided that enduring it is part of her own debt. She does not talk about Nathair. When his name comes up she goes still in a way that answers nothing. She holds the storm now the way she once held the channel: perfectly, endlessly, forcing her order on the chaos, vigilant and afraid of the moment she wants more, and certain at last, of exactly what wanting more costs.