TheNexusProject/GreenStarRising
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Green Star Rising
by OhJames
- "... To my beloved daughter, Green Star Rising, I bequeath my home and half my fortune, on the understanding that any rooms to which i have not provided the keys are to remained locked under all circumstances. And to Philidis, my faithful, furry companion, I bequeath..."
- Excerpt from the last will and testament of Black Acre's Claim.
- "You had a dream of a man made out of poetry, my dear? And he was telling you to come away with him, into some swirling vortex of chaos? And he bore a striking resemblance to me? No, I'm sure it didn't mean anything."
- The Poet, Sirrah! in conversation with Green Star Rising.
- "This? I got it near that singing bitch's house. You know, the big one with all the ivy. Lucky bitch don't know what she got. The stuff grows like crazy over there... but I didn't tell ya nothing, got it?"
- Gilfleng Fem, drug dealer.
Green Star Rising is gorgeous, talented, and the owner of a lovely mansion home. She is also, slowly, going insane.
Born to the noted actress and socialite, Black Acre's Claim, Star was surrounded by glamour and its excesses from her earliest childhood. She never knew her father, although she later surmised that he must have been a foreign art patron of some sort, and her mother left much to be desired as a caretaker. Being alone in her mother's vast mansion led Star to develop a clinging, slightly paranoid personality. To this day, she is secretly terrified of people walking out on her, but puts on a callous, uncaring façade in an effort to remain in control. But despite her obvious ineptitude in the sphere of child-rearing, Star's mother was a peerless vocal coach and helped develop her daughter's prodigious natural singing talent.
Star began singing at parties around age sixteen, at the behest of her mother. From there she moved to lounges and high-class bars, where her deep, sultry voice snaked through the smoky air and shocked straight to the libidos of various high-class men. She has remained chaste, however, unlike her late mother. Now thirty-two, she has sung arias at the Opera-House of Careless Love, to a teary-eyed standing ovation and a shower of long-stemmed roses.
But now, the roses have wilted in their vase, and Star's eyes have grown darker and darker as she struggles to maintain control of her failing lucidity. She has inscrutable dreams in which she makes deals with men built out of sticks and liquid sin. She sups with high-class ladies, dining on the innocence of children and still-beating hearts. The dreams have been growing steadily more vivid and Star is terribly worried. Her only solace is The Poet, Sirrah!, a miniscule man who everyone seems to forget. But Star remembers, oh yes. She tells him her secrets and fears, and he smiles and nods sympathetically through it all. His smile is getting wider as the days pass and Star becomes even more inconsolable.
Green Star Rising retains all her beauty and talent, diminished only a little by the desperate, paranoid gleam in her emerald-green eyes. They're like lanterns, those eyes, big and gorgeous. Her black hair is cut to shoulder-length, although it's growing considerably ragged from lack of care, and her skin is still smooth and pale as polished marble. Her face is getting thin and haggard (sometimes she forgets to eat), and she's got bags under her eyes.
Rumours
- According to various young, upwardly mobile women in and around Bastion, Green Star Rising's recent eccentricity is the result of her newfound addiction to Redstar. In fact, she created the plant. Did we mention she's also a demon-worshipping botanist extraordinaire?
- The Poet, Sirrah! is just a figment of Green Star Rising's imagination. Poor thing.... All that talent, and those looks, but she's talking to hallucinations...
Secret
- When she first inherited the mansion, Star made a costly and terrible mistake. She picked the lock, using a twisted hairpin, on one of the doors that her mother explictly ordered her never to touch. In a swirling flash of rainbow iridescence and terrifying feelings of guilt, lust, and hatred, whatever was in the tiny, bare room vanished. That was two years ago, when the dreams started. Unbeknownst to her, she released three raksha that her mother, the real demon-worshipping thaumaturge, had caught and bound. Black Acre's Claim was milking the creatures for their powers, which is where she got her success and fame. Originally, these three Fair Ones wanted to devour the soul of their captor's daughter, but over the years they've taken a liking to Green Star Rising. Now they want to open up the Graces of her soul and let her taste the nearly-infinite freedom of the Middlemarches of Rakshastan. The Poet, Sirrah! is, of course, one of the raksha. The other two exist as subliminal Wyld taints on Star herself, visible to Essence-sight as two pairs of glowing wings, one white and feathered, the other prismatic and crystalline.
Comments
Nice work :) I envisioned her as a him, and a painter, and as actually being a secret Raksha. But this is much more interesting! -- Xarak
