scorched Information
Player Name: Emma
Player Journal: atraphoenix
Character Name: Talia
Fandom: The Princess Series
Timeline: Following ‘The Mermaid’s Madness’
Character's Age: Physically, she is in her early twenties. Because of her long sleep, she is actually over a hundred.
Canon History: Princess Talia Malak-el-Dashat was born in the desert kingdom of Arathea, the firstborn child of the ruling royal family and the heir to the throne. Her birth was celebrated across the kingdom and her parents invited seven powerfully magical fairies to the festivities that were held in the infant’s honour. According to their customs, each fairy blessed Talia with a great gift towards the end of the celebrations. The first six fairies gave her extraordinary beauty, the ability to dance like a goddess, the ability to sing like a nightingale, grace, courage and wisdom. Before the seventh fairy could bestow her gift, however, an eighth fairy arrived, furious at having been left without an invitation. She cursed the young princess to die on her sixteenth birthday. Fortunately, although the remaining fairy wasn’t powerful enough to remove the curse entirely, she was able to change it so that Talia would fall into a deep sleep instead of dying, to be woken when the time came.
Despite the dark cloud hanging over her, Talia had a happy childhood. Her parents did her best to shelter her from the truth about the curse and protect her from the world and she was, for the most part, content. Inevitably, however, her happiness couldn’t last and the curse had to catch up with her. On her sixteenth birthday, an assassin wielding a weapon known as a zaraq infiltrated the palace. The poison on the end of the zaraq’s needle sent her into a deep sleep.
The seventh fairy cast a spell that caused the rest of the royal family - including her beloved younger siblings - to sleep alongside Talia. In the absence of their rulers and with no obvious heir to the throne, Arathea descended into a brutal and bloody civil war. For a hundred years, the war raged and innumerable warriors attempted to fight their way through the dense hedge of thorns that cut that sleeping family off from the world, hoping to claim the throne by waking the famed princess from her slumber. None of them succeeded and many of those who did not die swiftly remained caught in the thorns, dying slowly and despite the care of the Sisters of the Hedge, a religious order than sprang up to tend the hedge and the victims it claimed.
Eventually, the fighting drew to a close and the winning faction stepped forward to take the throne. The self appointed prince succeeded where no others had, fighting his way through the hedge to Talia. When his kiss failed to wake her from her sleep, he raped her while she slept and slaughtered her slumbering family to make sure that they would never wake to challenge his family’s rule. (He would have killed the princess as well, but refrained because he didn’t know what effect that would have on the curse.)
Nine months later, Talia was woken up not by a kiss but by the agony of childbirth. Dazed and grief stricken, and carrying her twin sons, Talia stumbled out of the hedge - which had started to die as soon as she’d opened her eyes - and into the care of the Sisters of the Hedge. They tended her for as long as they could but, sooner rather than later, the prince heard what had happened and rode to claim her. He took her sons away from her, saying that it would be best if the people didn’t learn that she’d given birth out of wedlock. She never found out what temple they were spirited away to. Talia was forced to marry the same prince that had raped her to solidify his claim on the throne. Filled with hate for the fairies that had lavished her with gifts only to abandon her and her family when they needed them most and refusing to accept the marriage or her fate, she murdered him on the night of their wedding. She was then forced to flee for her life, leaving her children behind.
The Sisters of the Hedge offered her shelter and aid once again, but it was obvious that she could not stay in Arathea indefinitely. With no other option available to her, she stowed away on a cargo ship destined for the island kingdom of Lorindar, a long way from the land of her birth. To Talia’s great surprise, she was met on her arrival by none other than Queen Beatrice of Lorindar herself and another runaway princess, Ermillina Curtana, better known as Snow White. It seemed that the story of her life had spread out from Arathea, though nobody knew the whole truth. The translators had mistaken the zaraq whip for something like a spinning wheel’s spindle and, of course, the storytellers had given the sleeping princess a happier ending. Beatrice had seen her arrival in a prophetic dream and, despite Talia’s initial misgivings, the shelter that she offered her soon became a home.
Talia learned that her grace and her dancing skills could be put to a very different use, training hard to become a ferocious warrior and, eventually, serving as a secret bodyguard - disguised as a common servant - to Beatrice and her family and teaming up with Snow White to deal with problems that Beatrice didn’t trust to the ordinary guards. Their adventures included an encounter with the infamous Lady of the Red Hood, once known as Red Riding Hood, one of the deadliest and most feared assassins in all the kingdoms. She missed her home and her family greatly, but she came to care for Beatrice deeply and see her as almost a parental figure. She even came to trust and, eventually, fall in love with Snow White, though she determinedly kept her feelings to herself, believing that Snow could never possibly return them.
After Talia had been in Lorindar for four years, Prince Armand, Beatrice’s only child, fell in love with a young woman named Danielle, nicknamed Cinderella by the men and women who told stories of their strange courtship. A few months after their marriage, Armand disappeared. It seemed that Cinderella’s stepsisters had joined forces with a powerful practitioner of magic to get revenge on Danielle. Together with Snow White, Danielle and Talia - who was less than happy with the new addition to the team at first - travelled to the magical stronghold known as Fairytown to try and find him. It was a difficult battle and their victory - the successful rescue of Armand - did not come easily.
During their journey through Fairytown, it transpired that Danielle’s stepsisters had summoned the malevolent spirit of Snow White’s mother when trying to bring their own mother back from the dead. Even without a body, she was a powerful sorceress and crippled the team by snatching away Talia’s fairy gifts and reawakening the curse that she’d once used to send her daughter into a deep sleep. Her aim was to take Danielle’s unborn child and use him to take control of Lorindar in the future.
With Snow asleep in a glass coffin and Danielle a helpless slave to the will of her stepsisters, it looked as if everything was lost. Talia threw herself into the river to try and escape, hoping to get back to Lorindar and get help. She hated herself for her failure and was consumed with such self loathing that, for a while, she considered running away entirely, believing her friends lost and unable to face Beatrice again. In the end, however, she returned to Fairytown. On her way back to Danielle and Snow White, Talia encountered another fairy and exchanged any future child she had for the removal of the spell and the restoration of her gifts. Back to her normal self at last, and filled with a new determination, she set off to rescue her friends.
She managed to recover Danielle first, then, to the astonishment of her watching friend, woke Snow White with true love’s kiss. She swore Danielle to secrecy and, with Snow still unaware of Talia’s true feelings for her, they got to work. Snow White summoned the ‘dwarfs’ - actually anthropomorphic incarnations of the elements of magic - to defeat her mother and, after a difficult battle, Armand was free. The three friends returned to Lorindar triumphant and, in time, Danielle and Armand had a son, Jakob, that Talia came to dote on.
The next major adventure that Talia, Danielle and Snow White shared had a less pleasant outcome. They managed to avert a war between the merpeople and the humans by discovering the mermaid princess, Lirea, had only attacked Beatrice because of a spell cast by her grandmother, Morveren. However, the attack on Beatrice left the queen with only a year to live. It is at this tumultuous point in her life that Talia will find herself in Anatole.
Personality: Talia is a rather cynical individual. She tends to think in worst case scenarios, partly because her life has been lacking in happy endings and partly so she can prepare for the worst and be ready for whatever fight is on the horizon. (She doesn’t want pity, though. She has dealt with and is dealing with everything she has been through and pity will only weaken the hard protective shell that she’s built up for herself.) When she does find herself face to face with a problem, she wants to confront it head on and immediately. She is stoic, sarcastic and speaks bluntly, meaning that she isn’t always very good at offering support and often forgets to consider the feelings of others when carrying out a task. Furthermore, she isn’t very patient with people and has a hot temper and an unforgiving nature. This is clearly demonstrated in her feelings towards fairies. She hates them all indiscriminately, not just the fairy who cursed her, blaming the capricious nature of their race and their tendency to interfere with mortal lives for her family’s fate.
She is fairly violent, taking a certain feral enjoyment in fighting because it is the only time when she is truly free and truly in her element. Snow White often teases her by suggesting that she takes pleasure in hurting people, which isn’t strictly true. She just wants to protect those that matter to her and she has experienced so much injustice that she can’t abide letting it occur. Talia won’t hesitate to kill if it is the right thing to so, but it isn’t enjoyable. It just is. And the influence of her friends - particularly the kind and gentle Danielle - is teaching her to be a little more merciful, though she isn’t always entirely happy about that. She wonders if it is a sign of weakness. After all, caring for people does make you weak. Talia is fiercely loyal to those that she loves, though it can take a while to earn her trust, friendship and respect and she has a tendency to try and avoid getting close to people if she can. She is terrified of losing the friends she has because she has already lost so much. For this reason, she does her best to keep her feelings and emotions - about Snow White in particular - to herself. They make her vulnerable and letting them out might open a dam that she won’t know how to close again.
For all her bravery in battle, Talia is surprisingly vulnerable. She hates being helpless and, consequently, doesn’t sleep at all. She rarely relaxes and is constantly tense, even when she is in the relative safety of Lorindar. When you relax is when they strike and when things start going wrong. She is always looking out for the next treat and the next enemy. She is also reliant on her fairy gifts. As much as she hates them and hates the fairies that gave her then, they do give her a certain strength. She doesn’t know what she’ll be without them or how she’d cope without them and she doesn’t ever want to find out.
Powers and Equipment: When Talia was a child, she was visited by seven fairies. According to their customs, they each blessed her with a gift. These gifts enhanced her existing natural abilities and were selected based on virtues that the people of Arathea considered desirable in a woman at the time. They were woven into the very fabric of her being when she was a newborn child and only powerful magic can separate her from them. The first fairy gave her beauty, though, as Talia pointed out to Danielle over a century later, tastes change between countries and over time. The second gave her a beautiful singing voice, the third gave her courage and the fourth gave her wisdom. The fifth and sixth fairies gifted her with grace and the ability to dance flawlessly and these gifts were the ones that gave her the poise and a preternatural sense of balance that allowed her to become an incredibly skilled warrior after she woke from her long sleep. She considers fighting to be another kind of dance and her fluid movements in battle are, in a way, beautiful as well as deadly.
The seventh fairy used her gift to save - theoretically, at least - Talia from a powerful curse cast by an eighth fairy that was furious at not being invited. Although she didn’t die as she’d originally been intended to, the curse lingers in her blood and can be detected by skilled practitioners of magic.
Talia’s natural abilties have been enhanced by fairy magic, but she is still a remarkable warrior and has trained long and hard to perfect her skills. She is highly skilled in hand to hand combat and, although she favours knives (and usually carries enough of them about her person to equip a small army), she can also improvise and fight with whatever comes to hand, from cutlery to broken furniture. She also carries and utilises a zaraq whip, the same assassin’s weapon that was used against her on her sixteenth birthday. The thick whip is tipped with a needle that resembles, superficially, a spindle from a spinning wheel.
The final thing that she always carries with her is a mirrored bracelet that was a gift from Snow White, who channels her magic through mirrors. It allows her to communicate with Danielle and Snow across long distances, though it is useless in Anatole. She continues to wear it for sentimental reasons and because she refuses to give up hope of seeing them again.
Other: Fourth walling! Canonically, the story of Sleeping Beauty is well known across Talia's world, though even the people who realise that it is more than just a story often fail to connect the princess from the fairy tale with the acerbic Talia. The same rule applies to the Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Cinderella of her world. For this reason, fourth walling when Talia’s true identity is revealed is not only allowed but expected. She’s resigned herself to it.
Player Journal: atraphoenix
Character Name: Talia
Fandom: The Princess Series
Timeline: Following ‘The Mermaid’s Madness’
Character's Age: Physically, she is in her early twenties. Because of her long sleep, she is actually over a hundred.
Canon History: Princess Talia Malak-el-Dashat was born in the desert kingdom of Arathea, the firstborn child of the ruling royal family and the heir to the throne. Her birth was celebrated across the kingdom and her parents invited seven powerfully magical fairies to the festivities that were held in the infant’s honour. According to their customs, each fairy blessed Talia with a great gift towards the end of the celebrations. The first six fairies gave her extraordinary beauty, the ability to dance like a goddess, the ability to sing like a nightingale, grace, courage and wisdom. Before the seventh fairy could bestow her gift, however, an eighth fairy arrived, furious at having been left without an invitation. She cursed the young princess to die on her sixteenth birthday. Fortunately, although the remaining fairy wasn’t powerful enough to remove the curse entirely, she was able to change it so that Talia would fall into a deep sleep instead of dying, to be woken when the time came.
Despite the dark cloud hanging over her, Talia had a happy childhood. Her parents did her best to shelter her from the truth about the curse and protect her from the world and she was, for the most part, content. Inevitably, however, her happiness couldn’t last and the curse had to catch up with her. On her sixteenth birthday, an assassin wielding a weapon known as a zaraq infiltrated the palace. The poison on the end of the zaraq’s needle sent her into a deep sleep.
The seventh fairy cast a spell that caused the rest of the royal family - including her beloved younger siblings - to sleep alongside Talia. In the absence of their rulers and with no obvious heir to the throne, Arathea descended into a brutal and bloody civil war. For a hundred years, the war raged and innumerable warriors attempted to fight their way through the dense hedge of thorns that cut that sleeping family off from the world, hoping to claim the throne by waking the famed princess from her slumber. None of them succeeded and many of those who did not die swiftly remained caught in the thorns, dying slowly and despite the care of the Sisters of the Hedge, a religious order than sprang up to tend the hedge and the victims it claimed.
Eventually, the fighting drew to a close and the winning faction stepped forward to take the throne. The self appointed prince succeeded where no others had, fighting his way through the hedge to Talia. When his kiss failed to wake her from her sleep, he raped her while she slept and slaughtered her slumbering family to make sure that they would never wake to challenge his family’s rule. (He would have killed the princess as well, but refrained because he didn’t know what effect that would have on the curse.)
Nine months later, Talia was woken up not by a kiss but by the agony of childbirth. Dazed and grief stricken, and carrying her twin sons, Talia stumbled out of the hedge - which had started to die as soon as she’d opened her eyes - and into the care of the Sisters of the Hedge. They tended her for as long as they could but, sooner rather than later, the prince heard what had happened and rode to claim her. He took her sons away from her, saying that it would be best if the people didn’t learn that she’d given birth out of wedlock. She never found out what temple they were spirited away to. Talia was forced to marry the same prince that had raped her to solidify his claim on the throne. Filled with hate for the fairies that had lavished her with gifts only to abandon her and her family when they needed them most and refusing to accept the marriage or her fate, she murdered him on the night of their wedding. She was then forced to flee for her life, leaving her children behind.
The Sisters of the Hedge offered her shelter and aid once again, but it was obvious that she could not stay in Arathea indefinitely. With no other option available to her, she stowed away on a cargo ship destined for the island kingdom of Lorindar, a long way from the land of her birth. To Talia’s great surprise, she was met on her arrival by none other than Queen Beatrice of Lorindar herself and another runaway princess, Ermillina Curtana, better known as Snow White. It seemed that the story of her life had spread out from Arathea, though nobody knew the whole truth. The translators had mistaken the zaraq whip for something like a spinning wheel’s spindle and, of course, the storytellers had given the sleeping princess a happier ending. Beatrice had seen her arrival in a prophetic dream and, despite Talia’s initial misgivings, the shelter that she offered her soon became a home.
Talia learned that her grace and her dancing skills could be put to a very different use, training hard to become a ferocious warrior and, eventually, serving as a secret bodyguard - disguised as a common servant - to Beatrice and her family and teaming up with Snow White to deal with problems that Beatrice didn’t trust to the ordinary guards. Their adventures included an encounter with the infamous Lady of the Red Hood, once known as Red Riding Hood, one of the deadliest and most feared assassins in all the kingdoms. She missed her home and her family greatly, but she came to care for Beatrice deeply and see her as almost a parental figure. She even came to trust and, eventually, fall in love with Snow White, though she determinedly kept her feelings to herself, believing that Snow could never possibly return them.
After Talia had been in Lorindar for four years, Prince Armand, Beatrice’s only child, fell in love with a young woman named Danielle, nicknamed Cinderella by the men and women who told stories of their strange courtship. A few months after their marriage, Armand disappeared. It seemed that Cinderella’s stepsisters had joined forces with a powerful practitioner of magic to get revenge on Danielle. Together with Snow White, Danielle and Talia - who was less than happy with the new addition to the team at first - travelled to the magical stronghold known as Fairytown to try and find him. It was a difficult battle and their victory - the successful rescue of Armand - did not come easily.
During their journey through Fairytown, it transpired that Danielle’s stepsisters had summoned the malevolent spirit of Snow White’s mother when trying to bring their own mother back from the dead. Even without a body, she was a powerful sorceress and crippled the team by snatching away Talia’s fairy gifts and reawakening the curse that she’d once used to send her daughter into a deep sleep. Her aim was to take Danielle’s unborn child and use him to take control of Lorindar in the future.
With Snow asleep in a glass coffin and Danielle a helpless slave to the will of her stepsisters, it looked as if everything was lost. Talia threw herself into the river to try and escape, hoping to get back to Lorindar and get help. She hated herself for her failure and was consumed with such self loathing that, for a while, she considered running away entirely, believing her friends lost and unable to face Beatrice again. In the end, however, she returned to Fairytown. On her way back to Danielle and Snow White, Talia encountered another fairy and exchanged any future child she had for the removal of the spell and the restoration of her gifts. Back to her normal self at last, and filled with a new determination, she set off to rescue her friends.
She managed to recover Danielle first, then, to the astonishment of her watching friend, woke Snow White with true love’s kiss. She swore Danielle to secrecy and, with Snow still unaware of Talia’s true feelings for her, they got to work. Snow White summoned the ‘dwarfs’ - actually anthropomorphic incarnations of the elements of magic - to defeat her mother and, after a difficult battle, Armand was free. The three friends returned to Lorindar triumphant and, in time, Danielle and Armand had a son, Jakob, that Talia came to dote on.
The next major adventure that Talia, Danielle and Snow White shared had a less pleasant outcome. They managed to avert a war between the merpeople and the humans by discovering the mermaid princess, Lirea, had only attacked Beatrice because of a spell cast by her grandmother, Morveren. However, the attack on Beatrice left the queen with only a year to live. It is at this tumultuous point in her life that Talia will find herself in Anatole.
Personality: Talia is a rather cynical individual. She tends to think in worst case scenarios, partly because her life has been lacking in happy endings and partly so she can prepare for the worst and be ready for whatever fight is on the horizon. (She doesn’t want pity, though. She has dealt with and is dealing with everything she has been through and pity will only weaken the hard protective shell that she’s built up for herself.) When she does find herself face to face with a problem, she wants to confront it head on and immediately. She is stoic, sarcastic and speaks bluntly, meaning that she isn’t always very good at offering support and often forgets to consider the feelings of others when carrying out a task. Furthermore, she isn’t very patient with people and has a hot temper and an unforgiving nature. This is clearly demonstrated in her feelings towards fairies. She hates them all indiscriminately, not just the fairy who cursed her, blaming the capricious nature of their race and their tendency to interfere with mortal lives for her family’s fate.
She is fairly violent, taking a certain feral enjoyment in fighting because it is the only time when she is truly free and truly in her element. Snow White often teases her by suggesting that she takes pleasure in hurting people, which isn’t strictly true. She just wants to protect those that matter to her and she has experienced so much injustice that she can’t abide letting it occur. Talia won’t hesitate to kill if it is the right thing to so, but it isn’t enjoyable. It just is. And the influence of her friends - particularly the kind and gentle Danielle - is teaching her to be a little more merciful, though she isn’t always entirely happy about that. She wonders if it is a sign of weakness. After all, caring for people does make you weak. Talia is fiercely loyal to those that she loves, though it can take a while to earn her trust, friendship and respect and she has a tendency to try and avoid getting close to people if she can. She is terrified of losing the friends she has because she has already lost so much. For this reason, she does her best to keep her feelings and emotions - about Snow White in particular - to herself. They make her vulnerable and letting them out might open a dam that she won’t know how to close again.
For all her bravery in battle, Talia is surprisingly vulnerable. She hates being helpless and, consequently, doesn’t sleep at all. She rarely relaxes and is constantly tense, even when she is in the relative safety of Lorindar. When you relax is when they strike and when things start going wrong. She is always looking out for the next treat and the next enemy. She is also reliant on her fairy gifts. As much as she hates them and hates the fairies that gave her then, they do give her a certain strength. She doesn’t know what she’ll be without them or how she’d cope without them and she doesn’t ever want to find out.
Powers and Equipment: When Talia was a child, she was visited by seven fairies. According to their customs, they each blessed her with a gift. These gifts enhanced her existing natural abilities and were selected based on virtues that the people of Arathea considered desirable in a woman at the time. They were woven into the very fabric of her being when she was a newborn child and only powerful magic can separate her from them. The first fairy gave her beauty, though, as Talia pointed out to Danielle over a century later, tastes change between countries and over time. The second gave her a beautiful singing voice, the third gave her courage and the fourth gave her wisdom. The fifth and sixth fairies gifted her with grace and the ability to dance flawlessly and these gifts were the ones that gave her the poise and a preternatural sense of balance that allowed her to become an incredibly skilled warrior after she woke from her long sleep. She considers fighting to be another kind of dance and her fluid movements in battle are, in a way, beautiful as well as deadly.
The seventh fairy used her gift to save - theoretically, at least - Talia from a powerful curse cast by an eighth fairy that was furious at not being invited. Although she didn’t die as she’d originally been intended to, the curse lingers in her blood and can be detected by skilled practitioners of magic.
Talia’s natural abilties have been enhanced by fairy magic, but she is still a remarkable warrior and has trained long and hard to perfect her skills. She is highly skilled in hand to hand combat and, although she favours knives (and usually carries enough of them about her person to equip a small army), she can also improvise and fight with whatever comes to hand, from cutlery to broken furniture. She also carries and utilises a zaraq whip, the same assassin’s weapon that was used against her on her sixteenth birthday. The thick whip is tipped with a needle that resembles, superficially, a spindle from a spinning wheel.
The final thing that she always carries with her is a mirrored bracelet that was a gift from Snow White, who channels her magic through mirrors. It allows her to communicate with Danielle and Snow across long distances, though it is useless in Anatole. She continues to wear it for sentimental reasons and because she refuses to give up hope of seeing them again.
Other: Fourth walling! Canonically, the story of Sleeping Beauty is well known across Talia's world, though even the people who realise that it is more than just a story often fail to connect the princess from the fairy tale with the acerbic Talia. The same rule applies to the Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Cinderella of her world. For this reason, fourth walling when Talia’s true identity is revealed is not only allowed but expected. She’s resigned herself to it.