The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

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Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » March 1st, 2022, 11:19 pm

Aemilia Drusilla

Image

Full Name: Aemilia Drusilla
Birthdate: Unknown
Birthplace: Kaduraas, Vitaveus
Birthsign: The Angel

Appearance

Age: Somewhere between late teens to early twenties
Height: Remarkably tall
Weight: Average
Eyes: Green
Hair: Black
Skin: Olive
Scent: Olibanum, ginger, ginseng, lilac and wormwood

Physical Description: She appears statuesque, a tower of a woman with long limbs such that it may take a few more years for her to grow into them but unflinching nonetheless. Her bronzed skin is complemented by daring green eyes, and there is a strength about her face that brings weight to the rest of her presence. Long dark tresses from from the crown of her head to obscure high cheekbones and the point of her olive chin. A faded scar runs along the front of her throat. The faint scent of medicinal herbs hangs on her clothes.

Personality

General Health: Questionable, particularly her lungs
Profession: Allopathic Physician
Voice: Smoky with a bit of a rasp. Speaks with the quality of an educated Decusian, but a perceptive individual may detect a faint Collatian accent when she speaks Common Decusian.

Personality Description: She is somewhat austere in the setting of those unacquainted with herself, but she is typically agreeable in kind company. Her behavior plays into established or suspected pecking orders as well as evident ego. With greater familiarity, she may be warm and exceptionally compassionate. She places high importance on honor and repeatedly tracks and repays debts. Although fairly intelligent, she may become selfish in her ambitions and lose sight of the bigger picture in her pursuit to attain mastery in her practice, which may concern those who find themselves the subjects of her work in allopathy.

History: She was born within a war-torn territory and became a refugee as a child, at which time she was given a second chance by the Venerated Republic. She swore her life to serve it. She spent most of her time gathering intelligence to pass on to further the Republic’s aims until a Torian physician serving the Venerated Legion that had saved her life thought to make her his protégé. The physician and his wife, who had come to serve as his accompanying apothecary, adopted her. With the world at war, the girl was insatiable in her mission to master the science of mending the broken.

Many years later, after her mentor succumbed to his own sickness, his wife fell ill and expressed that her final wish was to return to the First Province so that she could die in the land she still considered to be her home. The girl had grown up by then, and she dutifully agreed to deliver her mentor’s wife home. The journey from the West to the East was not an easy one, and a hefty sum was paid to mercenaries to ensure their safety. Those days spent near the Rumbling Pass would be the ailing companion’s final ones, and she would leave the woman to her own devices within the First Province.
Last edited by Domna on March 24th, 2024, 9:44 pm, edited 7 times in total.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » March 1st, 2022, 11:22 pm

The sky was crimson with the proud banners of the Venerated Republic as the Legion’s forces painted the barren dirt with the blood of volatile heretics just beyond the walls of Antongrad. The witch had paralyzed a young Tyro, hardly more than mere boy, under her spell. The panic etched into the Tyro’s expression provoked something in the native who had been hiding amidst the ruins, and she gave up her cover to try to break the witch’s hold over the legionnaire.

The point of her blade came to the back of the witch’s ribs before being ripped from her hand by some unseen force. It took less than a second for the blade to sink deep into the native’s abdomen. She collapsed to lie among the corpses, her own blood spilling over the battleground. Her nails dragged at the dirt, but she could not move herself to find shelter. The world had never felt so quiet as it did while everything she had known faded from her. Before she lost consciousness, she thought death might bring peace.

“Oh, One True God,” she heard as she began to stir, “You give strength to the weak. You fill the soul that is empty. As the light of Men extinguishes, You command: Endure! So let us drink from Your cup, for You fill it with all the good of Men.” The priest’s palm lay upon her chest. Wounded legionnaires and civilians surrounded her, still bloodied on cots. A few physicians tended to them, only just staving off death. The field hospital was loud with the rasping breaths of the dying. She had never felt so cold or weak. The world faded from her again.

She awoke in what felt to her to be a cold sweat, but a physician was placing cold rags on her skin. He said she was blistering hot with a fever. All around her, she could smell the blood, the excrement, and the death. She tried to speak, but she was too weak. The physician, taking notice of the attempt, reassured her, “You’re going to live.” She immediately knew it was a lie. He began to sing a Northryian lullaby, and she let the cold clutches of sleep take her, expecting to never wake again.
Last edited by Domna on March 7th, 2022, 9:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » March 5th, 2022, 7:18 am

They had made it just in time. It had happened the way Cornelia had prayed it would. Aemilia couldn’t bear to hope for an end to the woman despite how long she had suffered. With every consumption, Cornelia had passed blood, and it had gone on for so many years until, at last, the illness took her. It had waited for them to reach the First Province though. That was all Cornelia had asked for. She had known better than to ask for a cure. Nonetheless, it weighed on Aemilia that she had never been able to give her one.

She knelt on the shallow grave, bare hands compressing the loose earth to try to keep the animals from disturbing the deceased’s resting place before it had settled. It wasn’t the cemetery plot they’d planned, but it was close by. She hoped that the blessings spoken over the graves adjacent would somehow reach Cornelia’s remains there, wrapped in fresh linen and tucked into a pit. Aemilia would have dug deeper, but the roots of the surrounding trees were too thick for her shovel to split.

That night, Aemilia lay awake in a stained hostel cot, mulling over it all. A man had discovered them shortly after Cornelia’s death. He had offered to help bury her for a price, but it wasn’t one that Aemilia could afford. If she’d had a handful of silver at the time, she wouldn’t have been wondering if the body would stay where she’d left it. It would have been buried deeper. If she’d had the coins, she might have been able to afford a plot in the cemetery, and then she could have asked a priest to come consecrate it. Even if she had been stronger, she might have been able to at least break through the roots herself. They had made it just in time, but it felt like a failure. Since she couldn’t pray for wealth, she prayed for strength.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » March 6th, 2022, 11:13 pm

In all of the stories of the Eastern Baronies, the luxuries known within them had been the most foreign concepts for Aemilia to hear as a child. They had made her laugh at the absurdity of perfectly coifed wigs, powdered faces, and the talents of the theatre. The First Province had shown its ugliness to her the moment she entered the Rumbling Pass. With Cornelia dead and buried, Aemilia felt numb among the rest of the soul-injured refugees. She noted their routines and their monotony. They rarely deviated from their patterns, and they didn’t care to involve themselves with the likes of her.

Then she met the prima donna, and she was everything the stories had been made of. Although she’d never known the name of the woman her mentor, much to the disdain of his wife, had commissioned portraits of, Aemilia felt certain that Vespera was the woman Drusus had been so enamored of. She could sense the magnetism about the beauty from the moment she met her. She’d given Aemilia a glass of wine before apologizing for how quaint her villa was. The imposing woman even thought nothing of the lion’s head mounted on her wall, and she’d gone on to describe the party she was planning to host there. Parting ways later, Aemilia felt she’d glimpsed a life she had never dreamed could exist.

Her life stood in great opposition to the life of the prelacy’s daughter. The days after were spent primarily in the putrid air of Fort Praesidium’s central hospital. The patients arrived at nearly all hours, beaten and bleeding. Aemilia exhausted most of her medical supplies on them, and none of the patients could afford payment, so the physician soon found herself without the means to afford further supplies for treatment. She continued her residence at the hostel, doing her best to avoid its owner in case she might be expected to leave after a few nights’ stay. She drank water from the river and survived off of the plants she could pick from the woods nearby.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » March 7th, 2022, 12:05 am

There was a certain isolation to be found in Fort Praesidium despite all of its inhabitants. Quarantined from the rest of the continent and within a few days’ trek from a Torment outbreak at its Eastern shore, Fort Praesidium was a place in limbo. The rest of Vitaveus wouldn’t take them, and they were seemingly just out of reach of the dangers of imminent death nearer to Tor. That position kept so many of the fort’s inhabitants paralyzed in place, afraid to step too far out of their sanctuary that would surely prove to be temporary one day. It’s what kept them in those holding patterns, stuck in their same routine from day to day. The physician expected that is how they’d stay until something showed them that they couldn’t go on that way. It’s how she slipped into a pattern herself.

Brogan found her leant over her notes in the hospital, and without any mention of hunger, he’d offered her a meal. By then, she’d been eating scant fruit and vegetables, no more than a handful, for about a week. Aemilia had wondered if he could see it on her face. That would have been enough of him, but he went further, always without her asking. She wouldn’t have asked anything of him. She had expected he came to seek treatment like the rest, but he had brought food for the patients instead. Later, he shared books with her, taught her how to navigate the dangerous landscape, and showed her both places as colorful and eccentric as the Bright Lantern and places as bleak and horrifying as the burning island of the Venerated Inquisition Corps.

Aemilia had asked Brogan if he worried that their fate would be the same as that of each of the charred, animated dead they faced on the burning island, and Brogan said he hoped his sons would be farmers and foragers one day in a world without Torment. He described that dream, a world without Torment, more than once throughout their travels. Each time, Aemilia was surprised by how much he believed in it. The man had all the hope of a fool, but he wasn’t the least bit foolish. He made her begin to hope for it too even when the idea of that world was so unnerving. The constant threat of Torment and the compounding toll it’d taken on Eden was felt everywhere and by all of its people. Aemilia started to dream of a life unburdened by the weight of the fear she’d always known.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » March 10th, 2022, 11:01 am

The dead were so common that her soul could not afford to mourn each one, but Aemilia still paused in the street to watch as a nameless woman’s body was thrown deeper into the pyre by a pair of men after it had failed to catch light. The deceased had weathered skin, a practical dark haircut, and was nearly as tall as the physician. The men collected the next body to throw onto the pyre as Aemilia observed the first corpse catch fire. It contorted before her eyes, tissues contracting until the joints flexed and the corpse assumed a pugilistic stance for one last battle. The only violence was that of the fire itself, flames causing the skin to tear and the tissues to be devoured. It had been a silent struggle, and then all that was left was skeleton and ash.

A third man was raking skeletal remains out of the pyre and taking them to a wagon to be ground down to ash themselves. In the end, all that would be left was ash and dust. The burning operation carried on incessantly. There were always more bodies to be fed to the fire. Vitaveus would soon be surrounded, with the eroding civilization of the Venerated Republic struggling against and collapsing under forces beyond their comprehension. The crimson banners still soared overhead, proudly proclaiming the strength of a people who would overcome all adversaries, but it had been over thirty years since the war began, and the Republic was still marching without a sustainable plan to end it.

The Afflicted faced a fate worse than death, and they mindlessly played the role of soldiers, bringing death and destruction to all those they once might have cared for. The Afflicted had established themselves so well in the West that most of it was proclaimed the Blacklands and was all but abandoned by the Venerated Republic. The outbreaks of the Afflicted’s terrifying disease spotted the Midlands, creating further civil unrest that the Venerated Republic tried to quell by reasoning that they were chance tragedies. Then the Afflicted were in Tor, their primal, blood thirsty army rattling the entirety of the Eastern Baronies because they’d risen within the heart of the Venerated Republic itself.

Aemilia wondered which of the grave souls tending the dead and the pyre could mistake these tactics for coincidences or even for uncoordinated attacks. Her fingertips slid across the metallic buttons of her coat, feeling the barely perceptible concavity caused by the wear on them. She counted twenty-seven bodies in the pyre and waiting for their turn on it, and she wondered at how many more hundreds of thousands would be lost before the continent could know something beyond war. It was only after considering the complexities of Eden and its endless death that a far simpler thought occurred to Aemilia. She didn’t want to die nameless and unknown, having left the world in the same hopeless state she’d found it in.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » March 10th, 2022, 11:01 pm

The corpses wandered the damp catacomb, grasping at the living with fingernails they’d chipped on their own coffins and staring through their victims with vacant, unseeing eyes. Aemilia had passed their catacomb and their graveyard above countless times, but it wasn’t until she saw a man descending into the forsaken galleries of the dead that she had entered their domain. The man was a peculiar figure, insatiable in his blood lust for the cursed corpses. He’d kill them all, he told her without ever mentioning his name. Most of his targets wouldn’t stay where they fell, and the ones that did were simply replaced by a seemingly endless drip of slighted, animated decay. He might wear out and become one of them, she’d warned him. He didn’t seem to spare it another thought, and he showed her a pilfered gemstone.

She found herself in the monastery a short time after. Rotting vessels, some more human than others, shambled all around and within the ruins of what once must have been cherished. They were everywhere in the First Province, squelching and choking on their own guttural screams. The living walked among them, robed in nondescript linen while they freely spoke Principatus. They didn’t care to see the dead fall. Fleshy amalgamations with twisted spines and hypertrophic muscle sought Aemilia out from afar, hunting her the way they had surely been hunted before. She cut them apart, piece by piece, until she could escape. It was an unwinnable war. The dead could not be defeated. Death couldn’t be stopped. All she could do was try to outrun it for the time being.

Aemilia’s escape brought her to the Bright Lantern. Colorful flags and lanterns decorated the curious settlement. There were many caravans and wagons, but their wheels had begun to sink into the dirt they’d extended their stay in. Aemilia sat on a faded couch in Miss Dealing’s caravan. Her seat had been so worn in that it was permanently sunken, and the fortune teller placed aside her cup of tea to welcome her troubled company. The physician asked her question, and Miss Dealing helped her to decipher the reading.

Image

The Past: The Star
The Star represents inspiration, renewed hope for the future. It is the light at the end of the tunnel. The Star can be generous, opening the heart to give to others, with such actions bringing peace and serenity.

The Question: The Tower
The Tower is the release, the sudden upheaval. You may experience a crisis or a breakthrough. It is often humbling, toppling from the heights of one’s ego, but it can be a revelation as well.

The Future: The Hanged Man
The Hanged Man is at the end of his struggle; he has accepted his fate. Live in the moment. See things from a new perspective. Don’t be afraid to change your ways.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » March 12th, 2022, 11:31 pm

Fort Praesidium had made her restless, but Kaelius’s Rest created a sense of ease. The wooden walls wouldn’t keep out the Afflicted when they would inevitably arrive, and there were so many flowers that the floral scent hung heavily in the air, but it was the company that made it feel right. She sat in the tavern with Gryhun, and he passed her various editions of the local papers as he spoke of various going-ons of the First Province. “They sound guilty,” she suggested. “Guilt is subjective ou’ ‘ere. We’re jus’ a bunch o’ folk pretendin’ to be civilized on the frontier,” he replied. She gave him a bittersweet smile and retorted, “That’s the whole continent.”

Jokes aside, Gryhun didn’t pretend to be more or less than he was. Aemilia couldn’t take her eyes off of him. He told her about his painful past, but he spared her the details. He continuously did that, and he made light of all that he could. He knew of hell, and Aemilia believed he didn’t want anyone else to know it. She hoped he would let her know it anyway. “You’ve seen a lot of difficult things. You’ve survived a lot of difficult things,” she said. He didn’t want to take the credit. “I survive because I do what’s needed. I ah…” he answered her as he scratched the back of his head, “Ain’t exactly been a good person me whole life. Truth be, I was a piece o’ shite.”

The way he’d tousled the back of his hair made his chestnut-colored locks fall into a wave pattern that appeared purposefully disheveled. Everything about him looked purposeful. He played a role in the First Province that commanded no great title, but it held great cause. He didn’t appear noble, and he certainly didn’t sound it, but Aemilia felt he was. “Good people aren’t only good,” she reassured him with a compassionate smile. She expected he would deflect any attempt to call attention to the good of him, but he took her off guard by saying, “Good’s subjective too… Doctors can be bad, even worse than killers. Not speakin’ ill o’ ya.” Aemilia raised her eyebrows, surprised by his candor as Gryhun took a breath and clarified, “Had a… incident o’ sorts a couple years back.”

They had stayed there for a long while, exchanging stories and even clashing in personality before finding some recovery between themselves. It was difficult to trust anyone, but he had a disarming way about him that made her want to trust him. It was a dangerous thing, but Gryhun never appeared to sense the threat himself. Instead, he led the tour around the cozy settlement and even introduced Aemilia to the resident star chef with the greenest of thumbs, Viola. Viola had been the one to make Kaelius’s Rest what it was, a sequestered sanctuary that felt like it was removed from all of Eden. It was difficult to leave it and return to the pains of the day’s duties beyond the gardens, but Aemilia knew that the work could not be left unfinished.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » March 13th, 2022, 11:00 pm

The darkness of his robe made the pieces of him disappear into an amorphous void. When he first appeared in front of her, she thought he’d come to shake the last copper coins from her pockets. He wouldn’t have been doing it for the need of coin, but maybe for the thrill of it. He was wealthy, and she could see it on him through all the obscurity. He wore a gilded mask, the like of which she’d seen bandits use but had otherwise heard tales of use in masquerades and in opera houses. His hair curled in the most impressive ringlets atop his broad shoulders. His hazel eyes were lined with dark kohl. She saw men in pieces at the hospital, broken and imbittered. He couldn’t have known his own perfection, or else he’d known it for long enough to think little of it. She guessed that he might have had some relation to the Prelacy. He didn’t just appear fearsome or powerful. He was beautiful.

Malik hadn’t come to take anything from Aemilia, but his kind concern and his generosity were repeatedly met by her cautious question, “What’s the price?” He never named one. He was contented by his own station as though it had been one that he had earned himself rather than one that had been handed to him. “What’s the price?” she had asked again. Aemilia wanted to know more than the price of the man’s apparent charity. He was a perfect specimen. If a Legatus had described the perfect soldier or a priest had described the man amidst the flock who most exuded Justice, they might have described Malik. She couldn’t help but wonder what of life that had been closed to her might have opened if she had that man’s beauty or his power. “What’s the price?” Aemilia asked, holding his gifts and looking only to him. The price of perfection remained a mystery to her.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » March 20th, 2022, 9:27 pm

Aemilia clutched at the scorched rubble remains, and a mostly withered away oak post crumbled to ash in her palms.

Her chest swelled with every deep breath she took. The air was damp and heavy from the mixing scents of burnt wood and rain water. Life had never smelled fresher.

The bruises on her face lingered from where the her gas mask had been tightly bound to it, but the device hung around her neck then. The filters had been destroyed with the rest of the materials that could not be adequately cleansed. She could never be adequately cleansed.

The sun never found her where she had gone. Day and night, among lanterns, candles, and the ill-fated, she had tended to her work. They were all damned there, but her ministrations were tireless.

If there had been any hope for them, she might have found it. That’s what one of the patients had told her. Aemilia knew her as Livia, a woman of short stature and with more heart than any well woman could have shown.

It was unusually often, the physician had found, that people became their very best just before their deaths.

Perhaps that was why the Afflicted were brought to the brink of death and cursed to live there, just short of it. The limitations created by fearing mortality could be removed there, and the body’s last surge of energy could be redirected whichever way might be best suited.

There were plenty of the dying whose anger made them their worst in the end, of course, but that could be useful too. Aemilia knew she couldn’t have been the first to have considered it.

It was a terrible thing too that they could all arrive to die under one rotting roof. Their bodies slowly gave out in roughly the same manner. Their illness, for as long as it was allowed to persist, didn’t respond differently to their differences in character.

Drusus had told her that it was how she could be certain that all men are just the same, but as she clung to the ashes of the ruined settlement with the sick house behind her, she remembered their differences.

Livia had been a mother. Her belly still pooled in a puddle of stretched out skin while she lay there, each limb shackled by iron as the leeches fed on her and Aemilia drew a blade to the woman’s well-loved flesh to hasten the blood-letting.

Livia had lived a life cut too short by her illness. She knew what living without treatment would have meant, so she had sought anyone who would not immediately turn her away. She thought she might be able to hold her family again some day, and she told Aemilia she could have the same even as the doctor bled her dry.

Donatus was bled on the table next to Livia. He had never met her before the sick house, and there, he had screamed at her to keep away from him and his wife. His eyes hadn’t bled as hers had. He told Aemilia that it meant he could be saved while Livia’s case had progressed too far.

Donatus’s wife called herself by several false names. She was going to reinvent herself when her husband was well again so that no one would know the deplorable actions she had taken to save him. For days, Aemilia slowly siphoned the woman’s blood and administered it to Donatus. He did not get better, and his wife became symptomatic.

Donatus cursed everyone who had the displeasure of meeting him. In the early days, when he was unshackled, he stole the rations provided to other patients to secure more comfortable accommodations for himself and his wife. He drank several laxatives that were not intended for him because he wrongly believed that they were rudimental cures intended for his illness.

Donatus’s wife questioned the quality of every patient’s soul except for those of her husband’s and her own as their symptoms progressively worsened. It didn’t seem right that they should die in the same manner that kinder souls had, but they did. They had burned just the same too.

Death was, like fire, a great and impartial equalizer.

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