Nepenthe
From Changeling Venue
Name: Nepenthe
Concept: Love Lies Bleeding
Real Name: Kevin Wheaton
Alias': Amaranth, Heartbreak, K-Dub
Age: 23
Seeming: Fairest
Kith: Shadowsoul and Flowering
Freehold: Lawrence, Kansas
Court: Winter
Motley:
You’re going to buy me a drink, and then I’m going to humiliate you.
And you know, and you’re going to do it anyway. Because I want you to.
-Quote from the Fairest in Changeling: the Lost
Character Livejournal: IC Stories and OOC Fun
Mask: Short cropped dark red curls and hazel eyes set in a face that's finely formed but falling well short of 'striking'. Trim, cared for physique, tanned skin, and multiple obvious body modifications (tattoos and piercings both). His typical clothing involves a great deal of leather and tee shirts or loose-knit sweaters.
Mein: What is simply a tan in his mask is deepened to a more dusky, shadowed coloration with strangely green veins and a tendency to attract and blend into nearby shadows. The fine shaping of his features has been subtly, delicately sculpted to seem perfectly symmetrical, striking because such symmetry is very rare, and interspersed in the curls of his hair are tiny clusters of deeply red petals of some arcane flora that give off an earthy, spicy fragrance often left in his wake.
Mantle: The details of his seeming have an austere sharpness to them akin to a blossom poised at the brink of the first frost. Invocation of contracts draws an ephemeral flake or two of snow and a momentary rime of frost on his lips.
Character Information
Nepenthe hasn't been back for very long. There's plenty about him that's retiring, quiescent, and poignant and consequently most people haven't gotten the chance to know him well enough to ascertain details about his past. His decision to join the Winter Court seems to be very much in keeping with some palpable private sorrow he contains, though even his peers within his Court have yet to penetrate his silence on his history. It's rumored that he works as either a stripper or a prostitute, possibly both, and said that he recently took up a position with Winterbourne Ventures, Inc. though there isn't any confirmation from anyone about either.
His Keeper: There isn't anything publicly known about the being that kept Cereus and Nepenthe, save that it was beautiful and terrible at once, and seemingly a creature of the night. One brother claims to remember almost nothing about his time in Faerie and the other refuses adamantly to speak of it.
Curiatus - The people and circumstances around me do not make me what I am, they reveal who I am.
Morag MacGillivray - A friend and boon companion.
Erised - Helped him keep track of Cereus after their fight.
Cereus - His younger brother that he strives always to protect.
Vestigere - An old compatriot as a Harrier, and one of the few who understands.
Bianca Snow - His employer at Winterbourne Ventures, Inc.
Nathaniel Fellows - Mentor within the Winter Court, they share a disdain of the Duchy.
Evie Greene - Sometimes employer in the arena of procurement of goods.
Eros - Another innocent changed by the same Keeper, but made flame to light the dark.
Kalevala - The fourth Lost soul marked by their shared enigmatic Keeper, made to stand in the snow and watch others from afar without being allowed their warmth, he brought her home because she yearns only to grant wishes.
Lorcan Blackwood - An associate for whom Nepenthe supplies various exotics and to whom he seems to have a strange attraction, which he has firmly disavowed.
Mnemosyne - The leaves of memory seemed to make a mournful rustling in the dark.
In keeping with this, Kevin and his brother Derek lead pretty average, normal lives though Derek decidedly favored their mother's delicate features more than his brother and it got him teased quite a bit. Kevin only stopped some of it, because he believed fatalistically that Derek would just have to get used to it because he'd always be teased about it. Teenagers have no concept of becoming comfortable in their own skin and growing up to be beautiful and accepted rather than strange because they're different.
During Kevin's junior year of college, he was home and waiting to see Derek off to his High School Prom when things went horribly awry. A couple of years prior, he'd pulled their father off of his younger brother who had had the courage to do what he could not and come out, and since then, he'd made himself Derek's appointed protector. The details aren't entire clear to him, but he remembers chasing after the man that had come into their home and was attempting to spirit Derek away.
Excido - When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.
The reality was something more akin to having been allowed to roam freely during the daytime hours that he ought to have spent resting, existing steeped in the position of a beloved treasure but without the attentions of his Keeper or any of the other True Fae who would visit and fete with them. He roamed in gardens, swam in warm pools and luxuriant baths, radiant in the light of the sun for it was the only form of freedom that he could find, this existence in the sun.
At night, his Keeper would come, and the world would once again become the fantasy. He loathed his Keeper, and more he loathed himself for loving his Keeper, fighting and striving with every inch of his being to please but never succeeding. Being given to others of the Gentry to please them, he would succeed in doing so but ultimately fail when his Keeper chastised him for success in pleasing another and failing to please him. After all...his sweet little blossom must be trying harder with the others...and didn't he love his Keeper? Ever after, there would always come the symphonic agony and brilliant amour as he tried again and again in vain to be what his Keeper wished.
The breaking came, one night, when his Keeper returned from a party where he had not taken Kevin but had indeed taken Derek. There was no little bit of resentment in Kevin that Derek was favored and beloved, and taken to fetes where he was not but was instead kept as a plaything, a concubine and toy of the darkest hours and desires. Derek was more beautiful than he, and thus could be shown off as a prize. The night of the breaking, he finally succeeded in pleasing their Keeper, but was rewarded with poisoned whispers that destroyed him from within.
"Derek..."
The word on soft breath, the final truth, a poisoned dagger sliding between his ribs to pierce his heart.
Renascentem - Life, death and rebirth are inevitable.
And so he left, as their Keeper drifted into sleep, running blindly in the gloaming dawn as the better part of the nocturnal realm drifted into slumber and sought after his freedom. Eventually, he came into contact with something he barely remembered from before...a shining, silvery hedge with thorns long enough to pierce through his entire torso and short enough to embed and hook into his skin to tear it from his flesh. Driven by the anguish of betrayal and the memories of nights whose torment could surely be no less than this, he fled into the hedge and found the strength to continue through it in spite of the pain and loss it caused him.
His resurgence into this world was peculiar as he looked upon his home once more...a place where he had apparently never stopped living, because there he was, happily married to a girl he had loathed while at University and managing the farm while his father looked on proudly. No going back to even that small comfort either.
And so he drifted, learning to make his existence from one place to the next, to feed this need for glamour from the rapture of others as they came to him, drawn by his sorrow and feeling the need to protect him from himself. Even those who would otherwise remain cool and aloof found themselves drawn to him as if he were the single most intoxicating thing they could recall and loved him though he did not truly love them in return. Eventually, Derek returned as well, and not terribly long after Kevin's own flight into this world. He found his brother quickly, watching Derek's anguish as he realized that the thing left behind in his place has destroyed the love he had known before and soon forgave him. It had never been Derek's fault that he had been best loved...the sweet nature and delicate beauty of him had made it inevitable.
In the last year, he's come by a nom de guerre of his own, something that conceals as much as it reveals and taken his place among the ranks of the Winter Court, standing beside a newfound friend in Nathaniel Fellows.
Laudare - A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Quotations here from PC experiences, history, etc., are welcome!
Wounds of the souls often leave the deepest scars. Yet from these wounds, a chance to forge new strengths are form. ~ Nathaniel Fellows
"Many common flowers strain for the sun at their bloom, reaching ever towards the light in their fear. The blossoms I have come to adore, however? They find their beauty in the night." ~ Lorcan Blackwood
Sermonis - "The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins"
- "All things must exist in their time, one growing into another, but each stems from a common source. The winding route traced in achieving their current location may be a cycle from one into another but certain truths remain. Desire springs from the absence of something and the desire to obtain it. Fear is born of denial, and wrath is documented time and again as a secondary emotion, always coming forth in response to another emotion, typically from loss and the recognition thereof. From winter do all things come, and to winter must they all return." - Nepenthe
- "Fear can be a useful emotion, as is anger, because it heightens your awareness and makes you ready to protect yourself." - David Mandt
- "I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in my life. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make someone's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a person humanized or dehumanized." - Dr. Haim Ginott
- "It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive." - W. Somerset Maugham
- "Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state." - George Eliot
- "The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived." - Oscar Wilde
Rumusculus - "The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
"Rumored to be true"....
- Nepenthe was once a member of the Duchy of the Icebound Heart, but left because the members were entirely too proletarian.
- Nepenthe's chosen name has something to do with the number of individuals he has driven to the Duchy of the Icebound Heart.
- Where another member of his family is known to be a fairly high class Escort, Nepenthe is said to be a stripper and a hooker.
- Some people whisper that Nepenthe is a spy of the Spring Court, considering the time he spends with their Courtiers, especially having been seen with The Morning After crew.
- Nepenthe goes out of his way to hunt down and seduce members of the Duchy of the Icebound Heart, who are rarely seen again afterward.
- At some point, Nepenthe fell in love with a Courtier of Spring who spurned him, driving him to the Winter Court rather than the Spring Court where he belongs.
Praecentio - Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
- Paralyzer - Finger Eleven
- November Rain - Guns n Roses
- Slept so Long - Orgy
- Holiday in Cambodia - Dead Kennedys
- Thanks for the Memories - Fall Out Boy
- Free Bird - Lynyrd Skynyrd
- Remember Me - Hoobastank
- One - Korn
- Cherry Lips - Garbage
- The Nameless - Slipknot
- Build God, Then We'll Talk - PANIC! At the Disco
- Closure - Chevelle
- Angry Johnny - Poe
- Eternal Rest - Avenged Sevenfold
- Save Tonight - Eagle Eye Cherry
- The Fantasy - 30 Seconds to Mars
Out of Character
- Name: Clinton "Kennifur" Cole
- OOC Email: Kenny Cole
The above poem is my own work. It's titled "Scent of Sunlight, Soul of Shadow".
Categories: Bio | Fairest | Winter Court | Shadowsoul | Flowering
