yury aecor

GIVEN NAME: "Yury Aecor" (birth name unknown)

NICKNAMES: None. Any. He'll respond to anything that's clearly addressed to him.

AGE: Appears mid- to late-twenties (actual age ~1500)

PRONOUNS: He/him/any

BIRTH COUNTRY: Presumably, South

CURRENT COUNTRY South

OCCUPATION: A "mender" of things. "What things?" All things. Within reason, of course. For as long as most can remember, he's taken up shop on the corner of town. A dilapidated wooden sign, still full of warmth, reads: MENDER'S SHOP.

CREST LOCATION: Left eye, nearly indistinguishable from his iris. This eye of his is particularly sensitive, especially to bright lights.

SPECIAL INJURY: Those who make skin-to-skin contact with him are able to hear his thoughts, unfiltered.

MAGIC TOOL: Locket

MANA AREA: White sands, the furthest possible distance from the sea itself

AMULET: Seashell

SPECIALTY MAGIC: Alchemy

INCANTATION: Vale (Latin for "Farewell."). Taken from Line 62 of Orpheus and Eurydice (Metamorphoses, Book X), which reads "supremumque vale" or "she said her final farewell."

LITERARY INSPO: Eurydice, from Greek mythology. Born twice, but lost forever. Though in his story, he is more like Orpheus, it was of his own volition that he took the names of his parents and his beloved — and with it, their mantles. The dead are meant to follow quietly, after all. They are not meant to sing.

TRIVIA:

He usually sticks to neutral colors in his wardrobe because his sense of color isn't that great. When he is "branching out," please expect to be absolutely horrified by whatever he's wearing.

Sense of taste has dulled over his years. His food is always "extremely" something. He just wants to be able to taste it.

Seems super put-together as a person, but his workspace and bedroom, etc. are a mess. Clothes everywhere. Tools on the ground. Everything that can be used as a rack will be used as a rack. Careful. You might step on a puddle of ink.

He writes down a lot of things. He's not a forgetful person. He just doesn't want to forget.

Exceedingly quiet, though inoffensively so. He doesn't have much to say, but this doesn't mean he's mute. If prompted, he'll speak. And if he finds it necessary, he will too. (He doesn't often find it necessary.)

And even more exceedingly gentle. Though soft-spoken, he almost always has a small smile, at a minimum, on his face. A fan favorite of the town's elderly and children alike.

Few know of his past. This is intentional.

He leads a rather nondescript existence. In an ideal world, few would remember him as anything more than a nameless, faceless townsperson. It's not that he's afraid of attention: he just doesn't think people like him are meant for any spotlight.

There's a part of him that's deeply critical of himself. It's why he's extremely careful when it comes to the things he says aloud, and even the way he acts around others.

He's a social chameleon in a sense. Though nothing can change how little he has to say, Yury strives to match the expectations of others. He's comparable to water: he will flow to fit the mold that is offered to him. (The last thing he remembers from his father is this: "Be the ocean. Fill whatever basin the world carves out for you. And only that.")

He doesn't like being alone. He's simply resigned himself to it.

Calm and level-headed, there are very few things that seem to throw Yury off. That's not quite the truth. He's simply not very well-equipped to show any signs of extreme emotion on his face. Call it years of unintentional practice.

He is affectionate, but his affection is expressed largely through action. He has a lot of love to give, but can be awkward when it comes to receiving.

HOW HE COMES ACROSS TO OTHERS: A quiet but gentle person, who, in spite of their lack of words, seems relatively friendly. He does not make the same mistake twice. And he seems to do what's asked of him, no question.

WHAT ISN'T AS APPARENT: He carries a great amount of guilt. His existence isn't his, after all, and the only person who really knows this is him. The rest are dead. He's trying his best to fulfill a legacy and a life that don't belong to him, and it's why he takes such painstaking measures to be as quiet and gentle a person as possible. Because people like him aren't meant to leave marks. They're meant to be forgotten.

He's not born. He's found. On the outskirts of Southern country, in a time of relative unrest, he's found on the outskirts of an abandoned beach by his "parents." Nameless, but blameless. He's raised as their son. They're a normal family of wizards trying to find a place of peace in a world that is upending itself.

Raised under the guise of being human, because at some point, this feels safer than being a wizard, his first glimpse of a wizard's death is through his parents. His father urges him to run, to never look back. And when he does, careless as he is, it's just as his mother and father turn to stone.

He takes his father's name and discards his own. He abandons Southern country with only a locket to his person. For centuries, he may as well be stone himself.

When he returns to Southern country, he's not the boy he used to be. The boy he used to be was curious and exuberant in spite of the tumultuous world. When he returns to Southern country, an adult who's performed too many clumsy funeral rites, he is fatherless, motherless; and his hands are still dusty from spreading a flower's ashes in the wind in the name of a lost beloved.

(This is how he's come to mourn: by scattering the ashes of a bright-blue flower. He doesn't have time to find his mother and father, statues as they are, when they die. Doesn't have time to find the person he loved, either, when they're swallowed by the ocean's wave—and he has to wonder, if it was his fault, both times, for looking back.)

He starts a shop, an echo of the one his father used to run. By then, he has his father's name and his beloved's last. The townsfolk take kindly to him because he's gentle. Kind. And there are very few things he cannot mend.

He doesn't lead a human's life. Doesn't lead a wizard's life either. He lives as quietly as he can. Because all of his loss has come with lessons. And the lessons are the same: Survive. Like the water that fills only the space it is offered, survive. Make yourself small. Fit the mold that you are offered.