Corylus the Poetess, Bard of Amurgsval, filia of Visitor Somni, follower of Criamon

Description and Reputations

Corylus ["Hazel"] is a smallish, slim woman, with long wavy blonde hair and dark, wild eyes. She is unusually pale for a Byzantine, and her face and arms are covered in Criamon tattoo's of mystical symbols in many colors. (Anyone with a score in Enigmatic Wisdom will be able to tell from these that she has gone Twilight several times: some of the other symbols are obscure.) She appears to be in her late twenties or early thirties. Typically she wears a green dress with yellow, green, and red floral embroidery. When adventuring she sometimes wears a men's brown tunic, grey trews, sleveless embroidered sheepskin jacket, and brown cloak. On certain ceremonial occasions she wears a blue hooded, full-sleved bard's robe. She normally carries a slim hazel staff, topped by a masterfully-worked statue of a thrush and foliage in seelie and unseelie iron set with many gems. Her eating knife and the metal fittings of her clothes are all bronze or copper.

Corylus is original, creative, fey, curious, strong willed, driven, ambitious, and loves teaching. She has an aversion to logic (much prefering metaphor, intuition, mysticism and poetry), shows no interest in men, and tends to blush on those occasions when she notices rude jokes or flirtation. She is, surprisingly for a Criamon, a politician and diplomat, as well as being a poet, a theoretician, and a mystic.

Corylus has a reputation (particularly amoung those interested in Hermetic Politics) as one of the few people to have managed to outmaneuver House Tremere at a Grand Tribunal, gained when she masterminded Amurgsval leaving the Transylvanian Tribunal and joining the Novgorod Tribunal, while also winning control of a disputed vis source, defending several covenmates from charges of breaking the primary code during an incident in which a Tremere died, arranging the exposure of a Tremere vampire, and forcing the Transyvanian Tribunal to make recompense to the faeries of the area for the many instances in which the faeries had been molested. If asked about this, she will explain it away as a combination of beginner's luck and surprise, which she does not expect to be able to replicate. "The fact that we had almost a quarter again as many sigils as any of the Tremere factions believed we could possibly have upset their political calculations: we will not have that advantage again!"

Corylus also has a repution (particularly amoung Criamon) as someone who can ask riddles which, if solved, may send the solver into Twilight. One story that might be heard from a Redcap or other traveller is the time that she, with the permission of his covenmates, summoned the ghost of Pyreseus, a senior Flambeau from the Constantinople Covenant who had recently died (while attacking the Hagia Sophia during the confusion produced by the Crusade that attacked Constantinople) and propelled his ghost into Final Twilight with her riddling. In the course of his Final Twilight he left behind something resembling a fire elemental, which damaged the private chapel of a Christian member of the Constantinople Covenant before it could be destroyed.

Corylus is atypical for a Criamon in that she is not secretive (she is a member the Juliasta faction). Indeed, she believes that entire order should study some Enigmatic Wisdom. She will explain to anyone who seems willing to listen that a journeyman's knowlege of Enigmatic Wisdom, such as that gained by two or three seasons study of a good text, considerably decreases the amount by which an episode of Twilight pushes a mage towards Final Twilight, and noticably increases the chance that the effects of that Twilight are beneficial rather than harmful. She recommends that all apprentices should be taught this much as part of their standard hermetic training, and is writing a text entitled "Upon Returning From Twilight and Gaining Power From The Experience" [an Enigmatic Wisdom 4 text, with a speciality of Twilight, written for a non-Criamon audience].

Corylus is also fascinated by the boundaries of Hermetic Magic, and by those forms of non-hermetic magic that show promise of allowing those boundaries to be broken. She knows some Faerie Magic (taught to her by Felis Umbrosus), but regards that field as not requiring her further study: there is, after all, and entire House devoted to combining Hermetic and Faerie magic, and the subject is well understood. She is currently training to become a shaman (she and a senior shaman have apprenticed each other - she is slowly teaching him Hermetic Magic and he is slowly teaching her Shamanism). She is also actively doing research into Morphogenic Structure, which she explains is an extension to Hermetic Magic, utilizing some of the ideas of Pythogoras upon the relationship of shape, number, and music to reality, that promises to make it possible to detect and change the fundamental nature of creatures and places. If pressed for proof, she will mention that she has researched a rank 9 MuHe(ViAqAuIgTe) ritual to create a strain of true-breeding blue roses the like of which never existed before. She will also mention that she has successfuly detected the true form that a seed should grow into in a way that would not be decieved by Muto magics.

Corylus loves teaching, and despite having been a magus for less than four decades, already has three graduated apprentices (two are twins, and she will hasten to explain that while they have two bodies, they are only one magus/maga, having one Gift between them).

Corylus has an interest in Vim, particularly in metamagic. The Hermetic spells she is proudest of inventing are Wizard's Throw 40 and Wizard's Hold 40, two variants of Wizard's Boost that affect Range and Duration respectively, rather than raw Power, and Pierce the Arcane Shield 45, a Rego Vim metamagic that will, if it penetrates magic resistance, carry another spell of equal or lesser rank through.

Attitude Summary

More Information

A character sheet! for Corylus is also available.