FROST, Theodore

Name: Theodore Frost

Age: 29

Gender: Male

Lotus Specialty: 5th Lotus, healing magic

Teaching Course(s): Light Magic 305, Field Medicine (+ magic healing tuition), Light Magic: Healer


Description:

Theodore makes a striking first impression. He is tall, bony and peculiarly birdlike in appearance. His hair is straight and dark orange in colour, parted to the left and very short at the back and sides. It hangs limply in front of a long, wan face, pale but for the large and blotchy freckles which cover much of his complexion. He has heavily lidded eyes of a rather empty pale grey under orange eyelashes, and his profile curves down to a long aquiline nose.

He has narrow shoulders, and possesses a frame made almost entirely of sharp angles, accentuated by his preferences for garments in a clerical monotone. His shirts are always buttoned to the neck, his coats are long and black, like the wings of a crow. He wears ties or cravats, beetle-black boots with pointed toes and frequently thin black gloves over his long, iodine-stained fingers.


Personality:

If Theodore talks to you, it will be with propriety and gentility. He speaks formally, but often warmly even if there is an obvious detachment behind his eyes. He gives the impression these days of a person who must carefully filter and filter everything that occurs to them before opening their mouth to speak. This is precisely the process he goes through to survive day to day conversation. There is something queerly naive about his manner, such as it is, and certainly it comes across very easily that there are certain social concepts that Teddy no longer understands, if he ever did.

The above is the work of two years' quiet concentration, when he joined the faculty of this academy. He has come a long way from the man who wandered in from the wastes, and while he seems to have reached a point of stability within himself, he is never particularly far from a lapse. It isn't even that he dislikes lapsing into a less stable state, he simply has come to understand what is or is not socially acceptable. Reaching out to people is difficult for him, as is understanding them, although in most cases he is quite happy not to understand. His obsessions run deeper than that, and his preoccupation with the physical science of the magic he practices can sometimes prevent him from remembering that people can be more than mechanisms of flesh. He is a gifted healer, but sees himself as less of a healer and more of a magic-user, a scholar, a pioneer, a preacher and a scientist. Healing for him is a means to greater understanding of life, and the very fundamental things that make it up, What it is, how it came to be, and what makes it divine? If it is indeed divine at all.

Science, magic and theology are for him one and the same thing. To learn about the world, to experience light, pain, hope and to examine these experiences are all acts of worship to the Great Dragon of the fifth petal. He was raised with a fanatical devotion to an older, crueler doctrine than that commonly worshiped today, and while he believes inextricably in justice, his justice may not resemble humanist justice. His beliefs grow and change with his knowledge, and for the last twenty years he had increased his knowledge with a frantic desperation which suggests he is searching for something. He wondered what little world humans have left to them as an itinerant healer with a restlessness born of the same motivation. He tunnels into his mind, to cyclical discourses on divinity and mortality and the meaning of existence. It is often too much for him. He has a grim fascination with death. And not the calm and clean death dealt by The Reapers, no, with the brutal, the slow and and the unforgiven. For the deaths not only of the body but of the mind, of the soul, and for the tenacity of the undistillable essence of life. He also has a peculiar relationship with pain, wrought from a peculiar childhood. Nothing really can phase him, and pain for him is inextricably linked with rapture.

A final point is that Teddy may not be mad, not quite at least, but his belief in his own imminent descent is almost enough to doom him from the first moment. This and a peculiar memory condition he seems to have. Parts of his life black out, with little warning and less sense. He gets confused. Sometimes he remembers his current surroundings, but can't quite seem to grasp the distant past, at other times conversations he had yesterday cannot be found. The most peculiar thing about this quirk is that Theodore tends not to question it. Obviously if you knew something one day and didn't the next, you don't miss at and are fine, but day-to-day he is remarkably calm about the fact that he is swimming in a vast, black ocean of uncertainty, destined to lose his mind and his identity.

He has never been examined by another healer to find out the cause of his memory loss. 

History:

Young Teddy was the son of Elias Frost the high-priest of the 5th petal; a man whose belief in the protection of the great dragon lead him, 22 years ago, to blindfold himself and walk the pearlmist bridge believing that the mistlings could not hurt him while the light of the Lotus shone upon him. Elias’ wife and son were among those of the congregation who had come to watch their priest’s victory of faith. Thus they were there to watch as Elias Frost was brutally torn apart and thrown down into the Basin. The congregation howled and screamed as the Emperor’s forces rounded them up, fighting off the encroaching threat summoned by the smell of the preacher’s blood. And among the cacophony, the chaos, the blood mist of arterial spray which was the only remnant of his great father, Teddy looked to his mother’s face for comfort. What he saw there would remain with him, would in many ways define him through the fog of his addled memories; he saw rapture.

Elias Frost, known thereafter almost exclusively by the moniker of ‘The Mad Priest’ became somewhat of an embarrassment to the ecclesiastical community of Atlantis. It was thought the followers of the fifth had somewhat lost their way under his leadership, and when the time came to elect another, the doctrine became one of moderation, honesty and justice. The Mad Priest’s wife was given a pension to support herself and her child, but found that she was more or less outcast from mainstream religious society, which suited her fine.

On the day of her husband’s death, Ruth Frost lost a great deal of her interest in the outside world. She was a young women, barely 30 years old upon the death of Elias, who was more than double her age, and as his fourth wife she had been practically raised on his teachings. She embraced the old traditions of the 5th petal with a mystical fervour, though by no means a magic user herself she raised her son with an intensity of belief that permeated everything she touched. Elias had been a strict and authoritarian husband and father, but Ruth embraced violence of a more emotional kind to instil in her son the values of blind faith, trust and religious righteousness. Their home was simple and monastic, and the pair of them shunned old-world technology but embraced ritual to the most obscure and barbaric degree.

In later years she took to bloodletting, the same rapture in her eyes as when she watched her husband being torn apart by mistlings. It was a warped version of the 5th dogma that the healer gives something of themselves to what they wish to heal. Theodore would hold the knife and feel the frenzy of faith rise within him, a trained response, spurred on my his mother’s intensity, and they would make cuts in one another, begging the holy light to reach inside them, that their goodness might be acknowledged and save them from this beast-ridden hell.
He bears many of these scars to this day, and not only the physical.

On the day he had his mother committed to a secure facility, he was visiting home during off-term aged 17 and a student the academy. Teddy attended the school under strict adherence to dogma, and would learn only what he needed to better serve the god of the 5th. He made no friends and almost never spoke; honestly he creeped people out. When he returned to their plain home on the edge of the city he saw immediately that things had changed. The walls, at first glance covered only with a brownish tar, were on closer inspection covered in ritualistic runes drawn in dried blood. He continued through the house; some of these designs he recognised from his father’s books, others he didn’t. Some were just scrawled words. Salvation, penitence, abomination, damnation. He followed the markings upstairs and in his father’s study, scrunched up in the corner he found the barely living form of his mother. Her hair was shaved off to the scalp.

The study itself was a mess of dried blood, fresh blood and torn paper. All the panes of glass in the window had been smashed and the shards covered almost everything. He slowly, cautiously, began to cross the room to her when he stepped on something. Something soft. Something red. He had almost reached down to pick up this strange cylindrical object when he noticed the nail sticking out of the top of it and froze.

“Mama!” He cried, rushing forwards, kneeling in front of her. She resisted him with weak, shrill screams and tried to bat his hands away. Fingernails raked down his cheek and he grabbed the wrist of that hand to restrain her. It was when he reached for the other hand that his heart hit the pit of his stomach, as below the wrist on his mother’s left arm there was nothing but air. Appalled, he fell back, he wanted to cry, he wanted to throw up.

“Mama, what did you do?” He asked, weakly, tremulously. It was then that she turned her face towards him, and he saw her face for the first time in a year. He breath came in thin rasps, and when she spoke it was in a fervent whisper.

“I saw the light, darling, I saw the light. He spoke to me. The blood, you see, rivers of it, oceans. My darling. My beautiful boy, I remember your face. He left me that memory once my unclean eyes had been purged.”
He stared, transfixed, at the blood-caked voids of her eye-sockets. “All will be healed by Him. Your father knew, he had it right. It wasn’t to life he walked but to transcendence. We work in blood and pain, but our healing is a lie. It is only in blood and pain that we can reach salvation. He told me. He told me. It fills us. You are a child of pain, my love, you are perfect. One day you will join me, and we will join your father, and then they will see who’s mad.”

“Mama, your hand… your eyes.” He touched her again, taking her wrist, ignoring the shivers that wracked him, the nausea at being so close to such a creature and he closed his eyes. As he had been taught he let a fervour rise, a warmth, he led it to his fingertips and he used his training to attempt to sooth and heal.

It was a case of understanding flesh, to fuse and knit it using only what was there and the warm white light. He had never tried it in the field. His mother’s wounds were too great, even the smaller ones were imbued with an energy so rank that it sapped his fledgling strength, infecting him, poisoning him. And there is not a healer in Atlantis who can regrow bones or eyes. This he knew acutely.

“ABOMINATION!” Came the harpy-screech, the nails like claws raking against his body. He was pushed back with surprising strength until suddenly she was upon him, holding him to the floor, her empty eyes just inches from his own. “To heal is to deny God’s will! I will show you! I will show you, tainted child! You must be saved!” He attempted to get up, and cried out as he realised that she clutched a glass shard in her remaining hand, and she was holding it to his throat. It dug in. Deeper. Deeper.

When he awoke, it was in a hospital. The process of having his mother committed was simple from that point. And he never remembered what happened between this moment and the last. It was to be the first of many black-outs. He may misremember things more and more as time goes by. Sometimes he doesn’t even remember his mother. Sometimes he believes she died peacefully in her sleep, and not that she lives to this day, mutilated and restrained down on Atlantis.

Theodore did not go back to school. He dropped out of the academy, and as far as anybody knows he dropped off the radar. The intense piety of his upbringing never left him. He worked in field hospitals, mortuaries, or he wandered. He knew now that this madness ran in his family, and he knew where it was leading him, and all he wanted to do was to understand it. Aged 21 he found a dying Sprite while healing at one of the Orichalcum mines, he brought it back to his quarters and took it apart but by bit while it still lived. In its screeches he thought he understood something of what his mother was saying.

In many ways self-taught, Teddy became a great physician, although he lived more or less itinerantly, and as time went by found he could trust his memory less and less. His fascination with enchantments led to him using many experimental spells on those he healed, and on himself as well. But true to the old doctrine, the more he gave to his craft, the more it took from him. When he stumbled back to the academy he was in a bad way, aged 27, pale as death and losing touch with the world. The Headmaster found him, and knowing something of altered states of mind he took pity on him, putting him to work assisting the school physician. It soon came to light that Teddy was extraordinarily gifted, and perhaps too dangerous to be of any real help. He was also too valuable to let go.

In the stable and safe environment of the school, Theodore began to regain himself a little, and turned out to have quite a good way with the children. It was controversial, and he is still under a great deal of scrutiny, but the faculty took the decision to make Teddy one of them, so that his gifts could be passed on to the next generation of healers. Though hopefully not his obsessions.


Other:

In his own time, Teddy has been given perhaps unusual amounts of freedom with regards his research. It is all very secretive and perhaps not necessarily above-board or even legal. He is monitored, but it is a matter of controversy among the staff the amount of freedom he is given. A gifted healer he may be, but one cannot heal death. No. Definitely not. It is absolutely impossible, just like one cannot regrow bones or eyes.

But why not?

If you know what flesh is made of - it's only elements after all - and knit it with the healing light of the Fifth, then why do you need to bend to these rules? And why must a thing heal precisely as it was before? What if it can be made better? What if humans can be made better? What if the Gods want us to strive towards them, would it not be the perfect act of worship to attain godliness in ourselves.

And if we can find out what life is? Change it, bend it, perhaps even master it. Then why shouldn't we be able to master death?

You might now understand why Theodore's experiments are a matter of some controversy.


Relationships:

Here is a thing to think about. The incident in which Teddy's father was eviscerated by mistlings was big news 20 years ago when it happened, and the memory of The Mad Priest is infamous to this day. And while the surname Frost may not be immediately associated with The Mad Priest, it would certainly be an interesting bit of trivia to know that you'd met the son of the man who had himself slaughtered in front of his congregation.

Also, being from such a strictly religious family it is impossible that Teddy wasn't promised in an arranged marriage when he was younger. Now he ran away and never graduated from the academy, so that probably ended when he disappeared, but that person presumably still exists. Interesting, perhaps, if the betrothal was never formally cancelled