Nathair Ashen, the Unmaker

Human / Wizard

Submitted character story

Nathair Ashenova led the dangerous, ambitious arcane working at Coriel's side, and of the two of them he had expected success without consequence from the start. Nathair was old money with an older name; the golden son of a house that had endowed half the Lyceum's towers. Most things he reached for were easily grasped, and anything else, well, an Ashenova was refused vanishingly rarely. He brought that certainty to the grand binding as an untouchable; a man who had never learned the world could say no. His fortune restored and furnished the vault, and his nerve pushed when caution, and sense, said stop. Whatever was between him and Coriel was real enough that they trusted each other past the point where either should have trusted anyone. She held the channel. He told her to hold it longer. She did. She may have been the one to reach too far, but his eyes, his infinite, arrogant confidence, had reached with her.

The Overdraw neither killed nor transfigured Nathair into something greater, as it did the others. Or perhaps it did both part-way. It hollowed him. Where Coriel woke with the storm inside her and Ozur with fire, Nathair woke, seemingly aged a decade or more, with *understanding.* Everything the conflagration had caused - the deaths, the ruin, the shattering of brilliant lives - was simply entropy, not catastrophe. The Overdraw had merely been the world doing what it always does, what it is constantly doing, running down, coming apart - just a little faster for a moment. Everyone still grieving was lying to themselves about where it all inevitably goes, or denying that it would, or should. Nathair didn't grieve, or feel remorse, or much of anything else. To many of his former compatriots, it's not clear if he's still human, or alive. The horror that chills Coriel, angers Ozur, enrages Simra: Nathair looked at the worst thing he had ever caused and found it clarifying.

He can accelerate the running-down now, or briefly reverse it: rust iron to red dust, rot flesh from bone, or conversely un-break a shattered thing for a time before letting it fall again. He does it all graciously, still in every visible way the charming, old-money lord. He's warm, unhurried, generous with his ruin. He knows precisely where Coriel is soft, and he uses the knowledge without cruelty, which is worse, as though corroding the woman he may have loved were merely another natural, inevitable process he's helping along.

The Company is, in the final analysis, the wreckage of Nathair's certainty and arrogance organized into opposition to it. Coriel leads them partly to atone for having followed him; Ozur stands in the path because Nathair proved what the path carries destruction; and Simra... Simra will forgive the others in time, because they grieve, and grief is proof they know what was lost. Nathair doesn't grieve. He thinks the loss, all loss, was and is the world's only real truth. There is no reaching a man like that, and he knows it, and has made peace with being unreachable the same way he's made peace with everything. Decaying even his name, Nathair Ashen knows that entropy is simply truth, and the only truth, and he's the one with the nerve to say so.