Amaranth Darke
Faction: The Veil · View the Gallery · Listen in the Songbook
The Veil: 5 - Shaper (Power Level 5)
Amaranth Darke was half-demon — son of a mortal woman and one of the great-house lords of the deep places, whose name he will not speak aloud in any room. In his father's halls his true form stood fifty feet at the shoulder. On the surface he wore eight feet, two horns, and a slow grin. He was, by every measure his father used, the proper heir. When he came of age he was summoned to the throne to inherit, and the inheritance ritual required, as it always had, that the heir consume the parent of the lesser blood — his mother — as the seal of his line. He refused. He refused publicly, in front of every court of the great house, and when his father moved to perform the consumption himself, Amaranth set his fifty-foot body across the only gate out of the hall and held it shut for three days while his mother fled to the surface. He took his father's own blade between the ribs on the third dawn. The blade was a thing made for ending half-bloods. He came up bleeding hellfire, found his mother safe in a stone circle on a rain-soaked hill in this country, sat down beside her, and bled out into the moss as the sun rose. The wound did not close. The mortal half of him survived the bleeding-out by the thinnest margin and woke as a wraith. The demon half did not. His fifty-foot form hangs behind him now as a vast faint shadow he cannot re-enter; the two of them keep a long polite agreement. At the Lodge he stands at the threshold between the public rooms and the inner ones. He is the Lodge's gate. There has not, since he took the post, been an incident. There may not be. The shadow behind him is sufficient.