Oliver

A geist with a shadowed countenance, sad heart, and sharp teeth. Best to keep your distance.
Loneliness incarnate.

Canopic Jar Trinkets A decorative jar that contains the remains of an ancestral dragon. It is a bad omen to touch, move, look at, or sell this type of artifact. 72 Owlcat Journal Trinkets Embossed with a colorful owlcat, this journal is filled with the hopes, dreams, and cookie recipes of a young dragon. 24 Sparrow Skull Organics It smells as if it was soaked in... rum? 15

Generation 1 Ad Vitam Aeternam Memento mori (Latin: "remember that you have to die") is the medieval Latin Christian theory and practice of reflection on mortality, especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits. Memento mori has been an important part of ascetic disciplines as a means of perfecting the character by cultivating detachment and other virtues, and by turning the attention towards the immortality of the soul and the afterlife. The driving goal of the geist-dragons is to spy; to obfuscate themselves among the living and they're wholly drawn to those dragons with second sight, those dragons who can spot peeks beyond the veil to see the undead, those who speak to ghosts or follow ley lines or dream of the underworld. The geist-dragons want to live forever, and they need to haunt the living to do it.

Day 13: Temptation

To defy the Underworld and slink along a plane you don’t belong, spreading your kind along the way, is one thing.

To dig razor claws into one’s own soul and form a secondary being fractured off the first is… well, quite another.

We are not the judges of morality here – neither of these perceived sins are of greater or worse merit than the other. Nor are they equal. They simply are, as things are, and once things are done they cannot be undone.

We distinguish between the two doings because the first belongs to Oliver’s parents, the conniving geists Ouroboros and Ariia, and the second belongs to Oliver themself.

Oliver was young the first time, the time they created Shimmer. Young, alone, scared, and bored – the four things most dangerously likely to sway a creature baring magic and power towards temptation. The loneliness tore at little Oliver, for this was their forever curse to carry – the burden of being alone, for they were born loneliness incarnate, and no company would be enough to sate the vice’s craven hunger. No mortal nor immortal could withstand the crushing weight of the young coatl’s presence.

Our Oliver resisted their fate, as geists are wont to do. They wanted companionship, just one soul to talk to, to ease the burden of silence and the ringing of the skull that never ceased, and if neither mortal nor immortal could provide that then, well, they would create something else.

And so, through this indulgence of temptation to alter destiny, Shimmer was made.

Shimmer wasn’t real. Not in the way Oliver wanted him to be. He was a specter patched into existence through a fragment of Oliver’s soul – the essence of a troubled mind entwined with desperation. Every day he danced the boundary between existence and abyss.

But still, flickering and flashing, he remained. He warbled speech, and he provided a facsimile of companionship. He didn’t fill the hole, but it was a start. An auspicious one.

Temptation and sorrow would pull Oliver deeper. There would be more to come.


Give or take the mane.