Basil Hawthorne Name: Basil Hawthorne Race: Hylian Age: 23 Gender: Male Place of Origin: A small village north of Nabooru PWC: 1/5/3 Racial Perks: Magic Proficiency Basil's life has been dedicated to witchcraft, giving an affinity with magics.Business: Botanist [lvl. 2] A skill with plants, focused on the concoctions one may make of them.Gift of Prophecy While he cannot control it, Basil is often stricken with strange dreams of future happenings. Studious divination may help him understand them, but they are rarely coherent. Occasionally he will be possessed of such a vision while still awake. Languages: Hylian (native). Treasures and Rupees: Witch’s Broom [-30r] A handmade traditional besom, with a hooked and polished handle and binding of metal and copious amounts of string. It is knotted with strings and talismans and charmed cloths, and bears a thick metal clamp designed to hold the handle of a lantern, bag or cauldron. The besom has been customised with stirrups for more comfortable riding. Botany [lvl. 2] [-20r] Any witch must be talented in plant-craft! The skills to maintain a rich field of herbs and sacred trees, as well as to take the fruits of the earth and craft potions and poisons to make any amateur witch jealous. Basil has spent his life hunched over field tools and cauldron, and his skill with plants remains. Sacred Circle [-10r] The casting of the circle is one of the key parts of witchcraft, a space of sacred energy to protect the caster from malicious influence during the practice of the craft. Traditionally the circle is nine feet in diameter, but a circle can be made of any size, up to thirty feet. Tune of Echoes [-30r] A lilting song to reminisce times past, in the literal sense - when ritualistically performed, this song allows the day once past to repeat again, though it may only be seen and not touched. Nurse Puppet [Harvest Festival] Taking a leaf (whether a herb from his bag or one from his surroundings), Basil may transform it into a marionette that is strange in appearance, hanging from invisible strings in a bizarre parody of its caster. Basil may transfer injuries he sustains to the puppet, which cannot feel pain. 10 Equipment: Witch’s Garb A violet shawl lined with fur and soft, velvety red fabric, knotted with bones and feathers. Warm but breathable Witch’s Hat A violet hat, pointed with a wide brim, lined with velvety red fabric. Adorned with a triple moon brooch and basil leaves that seem oddly evergreen. Underclothes Both soft, dark and plain, the shirt long enough to reach the first knuckle of each finger. Fur Boots Broad furry boots, knotted with string and finger-like bones. The soles are full of sage and mint. Talismans Several pendants on fine pewter cord, including an odd birdlike skull with antlers, an eye, and several feathers and stones. Athame A slim but oddly hardy black-handled knife, made of antler etched with a triple moon. The edges aren’t actually sharp. Boline A slim but oddly hardy white-handled hooked knife, made of antler etched with a Sheikah eye pentagram. The edges are very sharp, honed for cutting herbs. Spell Kit A rectangular leather bag fastened to the back of a belt, filled with an array of coloured candles, drawstring bags of dried herbs, chunks of gemstone, and lengths of string and ribbon. Several metal and bone charms and needles are lined up neatly inside, and a sheaf of handmade pulp paper is tied to the side of an inkwell. Small jars clink inside it, some empty, some containing seeds and chips of stone, some filled with beeswax or honey. Furnace Poker A simple iron fire-iron, with a pair of backwards-facing curved prongs making it appear shaped as a large, hefty arrow. Useful for both potion-stirring and self-defence. Lantern A lantern with a wide hoop at the top, made to be able to be clipped onto a belt or broomstick. Pet: a responsive but often impassive long-eared owl named Hewistrad Appearance: Basil is not the broadest-shouldered man but is still built with the strong frame of one used to many hours each day in the field. His fingers are slim and tapered and often knotted with lengths of black string, saved from the appearance of fragility by both writing and working calluses across them. His hair is naturally quite dark but often dyed a cheery colour, cropped at the back and forming a feathery curve around his head with a swooping curl at the front. He is absent about maintenance of his facial hair, often sporting something more than stubble but less than an actual beard. His eyebrows are the same black and very thick, framing his heavy-lidded brown eyes. His nose is long and narrow, complimenting sharp cheekbones. His pointed visage would vampirish connotations to his appearance were it not for his dark skin. Basil’s choice in clothing is… eclectic, to say the least. He wears a tall, pointed witch’s hat adorned with a pewter charm shaped into a triple moon pentagram, pinning a pair of strangely un-wilting basil leaves to the fabric. The rich violet of the hat is the same hue as his shawl, draped over his shoulders and swooping down past his hips. The collar is framed with a thick ruff of brown fur, knotted with what seems to be human hair and animal bones, while the lower hem is a rich and soft fringe of featherlike red. The back of the ruff bears spindly finger-like bones, too long to be anything approaching human, protruding from under the fur to frame his shoulders and back. The lower back point of the shawl bears a bone pendant of a strange fish’s spine and tail flukes, strung together through the centre of the bones and light enough to blow in the breeze. Below this he wears close-fitting trousers and a long-sleeved shirt, both black in colour, unwittingly emphasizing his sprinter’s physique. His pants are tucked into boots that look obnoxiously larger than his feet actually are, thanks to the thick fur the outside is covered in. Much like the fur collar of his shawl, his boots are knotted with hair and bones, although his boots’ bones are much more organised than the odd bits and bobs strung around his shoulders - in descending size order, each boot bears three claw-like bones down the back of the boot. Around his right leg is a small strap bearing his athame, ready to be used to cast a circle at a moment’s notice, while his belt carries his boline, for herb-cutting, and his furnace poker, his choice of weapon when monsters encroach upon his cottage or fields, solid enough to deliver some nasty blows. The end is slightly discoloured from years of stirring potions. On the back of his belt is his spell kit, tightly buckled closed. On his left hip is a leather flap bearing several potions for quick access in emergencies, decorated with a skull-shaped buckle. Basil walks with a limp, and stands slightly crookedly to avoid placing equal weight on his left leg. He also seems to constantly smell of sage and pomegranates, as does every item of his clothing - although his boots bear a stronger scent of sage and mint rather than pomegranates, as the insides of his boots are carefully and ritually lined with the latter two herbs. Artwork (Move your mouse to reveal the content) Artwork (open) Artwork (close) unfinished coloured crop of full art, to be completed later Personality: Basil is determined and inquisitive, often enjoying seeking out the real-life versions of things he’s heard in stories throughout his life. Having spent all his years in a small village, Basil is hoping to see the world around him before he returns to the home he’s happy in. Always encouragingly social, Basil nevertheless can find himself wrongfooted when trying to forge a relationship deeper than a casual friendship, given his inexperience with actually bonding with people. Basil dislikes needless violence but deliberately enjoys new experiences and, while he's a little guilty about it, does enjoy a bit of confrontation when he has righteousness on his side. He can forget that the world has its darknesses, and while he knows objectively that his self-defence skills only go so far it often occurs in practice that he can forget to cede a face-to-face fight with someone who is actually capable of it. Basil has a spiritualistic view of the world and all its features, embodied by his commitment to his upbringing in witchcraft traditions. He eschews flashy, energy-based spells in favour of calmer earth-based rituals and the brewing of potions for different uses, including in combat. He doesn’t intend to be but will occasionally realise he is being patronising towards practitioners of traditional Hylian magic, to his embarrassment. Basil is very confused by people reluctant to do things that are either important or just seem to him like a thing that should be done; having spent his whole life in a town where the greater good was unanimously understood to be more important than one’s personal feelings. For the same reason, he will sometimes forget that he actually has a voice as well and that he should be remembering to assert his agency; not having any specific goal in mind as well as a commitment to the ideal of balance and experience means he may simply not pause to take into account his own feelings when creating a plan. Basil can be touchy about others’ reactions to danger or fear, as he proudly totes a philosophy that one should never allow trauma to change them for the worse. This belief has gotten him through much of his life, allowing him to establish himself as a lovable and useful member of his community from youth and putting a quick stop to the rumours about ‘the criminals’ son’ that had initially surrounded his adoption. Insisting on being the best person he can possibly be meant that his fellow townsfolk entirely forgot their gossip in his youth, and he carries a trust of other people into the present. The only thing that tempers this trust is the disquieted current that cannot leave his mind. Basil doesn’t exactly jump at shadows, but every situation he faces comes with a ripple of doubt about what may befall him if he continues. He may not know what the tragedy that struck his small village was, but this only makes it worse for him as his constant guessing as to what might have happened can lead him to fearful speculation and the trepidation that he is about to let it happen again without realising it. Background: Basil Hawthorne had something terrible happen that he can’t even remember. He grew up in a small village north of Nabooru. Well, he was born in Lon Lon, but after his parents had a few too many crimes under their belt he was escorted by some poor bastard in the Guard to live with his grandmother Peregrine. The Guardsman probably wouldn’t have confirmed the placement had he realised that Peregrine was a practicing witch, but. Well. That was on him, given that it wasn’t exactly subtle. The house was wooden and warm, garlands of herbs strung from the ceiling to dry, on the corner of a garden full of herbs and fruit trees. Basil had no objections to his new home, not only enamoured with the familiar his grandmother had entreated the forest behind their house for (a lovely owl she named Hewistrad, and tasked with guiding her grandson) but also entranced by his grandmother’s approach to goddess worship and the very different way she practiced magic. She explained it to him one day as he watched, wide-eyed, as she brewed a potion. “So magic comes from the Goddesses, yeah?” He nodded and she grinned at his enthusiasm. “Well, most people out there are, y’know, throwing fireballs or making their sword glow. That kinda magic is the normal kind. Well,” she said, with a mischievous smile, “I like to call it the easy kind, but most don’t like me saying that. So this common magic is done through energy, yeah? The person calls on the Goddesses in one way or another to grant them energy. Sometimes it’s cause they’ve used blessed items, sometimes they’ve practiced ancient spells that someone worked out aaaaages ago. We - and by we I mean us witches - do it differently. We know that the Goddesses put magic already in the world around us, and we work on taking that energy and using it before giving it back to the earth,” Growing up with Peregrine had Basil almost completely forgetting his origins with his parents, their criminal behaviour no more than mist in his world. He grew and aged, becoming friendly with many shopkeepers in the town as he either purchased their wares or delivered for them plants, fruits, or potions that they had ordered. It was a productive, focused, and social life, and Basil enjoyed every bit of it. When he was seventeen, a travelling show came to the village. This wasn’t unusual, as caravans often stopped here on their way to Nabooru, and the town cheerily perked up at the prospect of an exciting new entertainment being available to them. Basil and Peregrine watched the show together, enjoying the dancing and spinning performers. After the show, he went outside to find Hewistrad while his grandmother talked to the other women of the town. Owls were not allowed within the town hall, the mayor had apologetically said, even though it’s you and we know you. He wandered out of the door, past the performers’ caravan. And something happened. Whatever the something was, nobody noticed until it was almost over. When Basil had gotten free and was running, trying to escape from whoever or whatever he had been confronted by. Help in the form of a villager spotting him arrived a moment after Basil, in his terror, catastrophically mistook one area of the village for another. He leaped from what he had thought was the bridge spanning the laundry pool, expecting to land in the water. Instead he had jumped from a bridge making an overpass high above the town square to reach the tannery on the hill. It was fortunate that when the crowd began to gather around him on the ground, one of the first to find him was the healer’s wife. The older woman was familiar enough with her husband’s practices to help, and when the healer himself arrived he recognised the grandson of the source of many of his potions. The healing was pro bono, he insisted afterwards, but Peregrine still insisted on providing twice the potions he paid for in the next three months. The healing saved Basil’s leg from the worst consequences of his fall, but even magic could not return the shattered bone to its former self, leaving him able to walk but forever pained by the limb. Whatever had happened that night, Basil never said. He no longer made the deliveries into town, or tended the fields, or even left the bedroom of the house. Peregrine often found herself locked out of the room once she had left it in the morning, while Basil hid inside. The ongoing loop of nightmares and flashbacks and on-edge anxiety lasted for nigh on five moons before Basil snapped. He woke up one night sitting alone in the house, cross-legged in an already-cast circle and a ritual clearly half-complete before him. He wondered why the hell he had fallen asleep during a ritual stopped to remember what this ritual was meant to do knew to always nullify a ritual if you didn’t understand its purposewiped his eyes to clear them and read from the instructions in front of him. There. Ritual done. Basil asked himself why his grandmother and Hewistrad weren’t hometiredly went to sleep, feeling like he hadn’t slept for a thousand years. The first sign that something was wrong was the next morning, when he discovered the mess of melted candles in the bottom of a pail. Yellow and silver candles? When he checked, his spell drawer had none of either colour left. He thought why are all these candles destroyed yellow and silver, memory and dreams I hope that I don’t need any of those in a spell anytime soonthat they must have been cast from impure wax or something, making them useless in witchcraft. The second sign was his grandmother, weary, showing up at the front door with Hewistrad. They had stayed elsewhere the night before. She was crying at him, telling him he couldn’t keep pushing people away and hiding from what had happened. What had happened? Nothing had happened. Peregrine wasn’t stupid. She cast her own circle, taught Basil a songcraft spell to show the day past, used it. And they watched as the Basil of yesterday stumbled, looking nearly insane with his shaking and wide-eyes and jumpiness, haggardly stumbling around and jumping at shadows. He shouted at his grandmother, get out, get out, leave me alone, you can’t keep trying to fix this nobody can fix this and he shouted at Hewistrad, go away, can’t you see i need to do this? and he melted the yellow and silver candles into a lump of wax and then cast a circle and set up the ritual that would destroy the last six months of his life. And he made sure it was impossible to question the absence too far by himself. And he left the instructions for when he woke so that the newly cleared Basil would seal the spell himself. “Oh, Basil,” his grandmother said. It was odd, after that. Basil lived his life the same way as he always had, but the people around him had been changed by his experience. Sometimes it made him angry, wondering why they had any right to look at him with such searching eyes, like they were looking for validation of whatever they were feeling about his experience. Mostly he just took a second to close his eyes and breathe before happily moving on. It was still home. It kept him awake at night, sometimes, wondering what must have happened that would turn him, so friendly and loving, into the frightening spectre that had wiped itself out of existence. Basil wasn’t one to let the horrors of the world change him; partially because he wouldn’t give them that kind of satisfaction but also because he believed there were better things to live for than the memories of a bad deed. When he was really trying to puzzle it out, he could only conclude that whatever had happened somehow overrode the way he refused to drop to the bad in the world so much that he couldn’t stand the contradiction. Guiltily, he even figured that if his guess was right he’d probably have done the same, which… well, he kind of already had. Eventually, enough time passed that the village stopped handling him like something fragile and went almost back to the way things were. Instead of hushed voices and tentative words, the townsfolk slowly returned to their old ways with him, tempered only with the occasional broken-off sentence and frantic apology when they said something that they must have thought insensitive. Townsfolk were more suspicious of travellers, or kept weapons on them in case they encountered a monster at night, or bought protective charms against the supernatural, their trusting nature now tempered with the knowledge that something had once gone wrong in their small community and absolutely could again because nobody knew who or what it was anymore. Well. Almost nobody. Peregrine, the healer, and the healer’s wife were now the only ones carrying the truth, but even they seemed content to put the memory to rest and keep a cautious eye out in the future. It was when he grew old enough to realise that the village was overrun with new children that his grandmother sat in her armchair and pointed out that he had spent his whole life so far in this one small town. “You’ve never even travelled as far as Nabooru! Why, when I was your age my father couldn’t stop me jumping on my broom and zooming away!” “I don’t mind here, though,” he replied uncomfortably. He hadn’t been watched everywhere he went for safety in years, but to be actively encouraged to adventure was another thing entirely. “This town has everything I need,” “Maybe so,” she smiled gently, stroking Hewistrad, “but it would be a shame for you to never see the world, my boy. You don’t have to, of course, but the option is always there, okay?” And, true. He hadn’t even thought of it before. The idea of travelling afar and finding new sights he had never seen, new people with new ways of thinking. Heck, he could go dungeoneering! Several of the older townsfolk loved to share their dungeon-crawling stories. The next year saw the wanderlust grow more and more, made alluring by the concept of new people to befriend and bonds to forge outside of this tiny community. The only problem was his grandmother. He knew she still had a few decades of life at least - witches weren’t exactly inclined to die young, after all - but he still felt guilty at the idea of leaving her alone in their house on the hills behind the village. When he voiced this to her, though, she only smiled, pointing out that she hardly needed be in this house while he was gone. “I knew as soon as I took you in that this would be your house one day, Basil. And Otulissa’s been trying to get me to move into the old soup-den beside her house for years.” It turned out that she had been weaving the wire and crystal and metal to make his own set of house-charms for years, and the two of them collected Peregrine’s belongings and replaced her charms with his own, carrying them in a cauldron between their brooms to her new home. The chair was the hardest to move. When all was done and packed, his grandmother took out one last charm and fastened it to the end of his broom. A charm for protection on his journey, she had said as they embraced for the final time before he left. He lined his shoes with protective herbs and clambered on his broom, knowing that however far he flew he would always have his home on the hill to return to.
