Rill Ondemar

Syldine (Undine-Sylph) / Kineticist

Submitted character story

Last to join the Charged Company, Rill Ondemar was also the first victim of the Overdraw. Youngest of the twelve who went into the vault, he was one of the five who did not come out. A halfling then, he was a river-town boy barely into his studies, running errands for scholars who had no reason yet to remember his name. He was present at the great binding because someone had to do the getting and bringing, and he was too curious to trade the job away. And Coriel of anyone, had treated him like more than a gopher. When the working overdrew, its first lash of uncontrolled energy struck his direction first, and... he was just gone. Of those that didn't come out of the voault, he was one of the three there with no body to mark his passibg. But the catastrophe didn't kill Rill; it *took* him. It tore him out of "here" to the maelstrom membrane between the planes, the churning between where the realm of air lashes against the realm of water, and it left hem there: disembodied, incomplete, neither drowned nor breathing, simply *existing* in a place with no floor or walls, or marking of time.

He was there over a year, as the world counted, as the suvivors of the Overdraw picked themselfs up, mourned the lost, pulled themselves togeter, more or less, and moved on to become the Company. Rill felt none of it. To this day it's a dream he doesn't remember and cannot quite forget. The Lyceum, in time, scrubbed the vault clean and put it back to ordinary use as a study laboratory. And there, with the Overdraw beginning to recede into Slefwerra legend, some students' simple homework conjuring happened to cross a last, near-exhausted remnant of the great working, and the echo, like a burr catching on a loose thread, pulled Rill *home*.

One from this plane can't spend so much existence in a place like the elemental maelstrom and come back unchanged. Though upon re-emergence, Rill resembled his old self, over the following days and weeks, his halfling stoutness thinned and lengthened. His skin took a faint tidewater blue; his hair began to move as though a current ran through it, even in still air. He was becoming undine-like, but not wholly. Water-blooded, amphibious, yes, but Rill's exile had been between the planes of air and water, and Rill was sylph also. Air and water alike, and pressure and flow of either kind is his native tongue. This is why his senses are so uncanny, why he reads a gathering, or even a presumably empty room, the way a fish reads a current or a bird reads a coming storm. And he didn't have to learn it all alone. An academic mentor, one of the few who had never quite stopped believing the vanished might return, sat with him through the changes, helped him name what he was becoming, and at last, told him where the others could be found.

Welcomed into the Company with surprise, and joy, and no small amount of renewed moourning for the lost, Rill is a rookie and knows it. While everyone else has had years to scar over, and he has had months, and he was spared the true horrors of the Overdraw and its aftermath. He compensates the way eager young people do: trying too hard, pushing his new gifts past what they can safely give, and grinning through any pain so that no one sidelines him. Of the seven in the company, he is most drawn to Ozur and Sifra. He finds himself trailing after the ifrit Ozur like a moth after a lamp. It's not quite attraction, but the pull of a small cold thing toward a great warm one, a boy still understanding how he was unmade and remade following a man who live in that self-knowledge. With Simra, where the whole company strains to reach her across her silence, Rill barely has to try, because her power is the vibration and his is the medium it moves through, and the two of them meet in the middle without words. After Veyla, he is the one she lets closest.