General
Name : Iliril of the Chant (Ih-lih-rihl)
Age :
Birthday : March 8th
Gender : Male
Species : Human, alternate universe
Nationality : School of the Chants
Birth Place / Hometown : The World of the Diamond
Category : Student
Class : College
Major : Undecided, most likely Veterinary Sciences and Magical Studies double major
Occupation : Student
Appearance Description : Iliril is five feet and ten inches tall and, to be, totally honest, looks a bit like a girl. He has medium length white hair with a right sweeping side bang and purple eyes. Sometimes there's a mark on his face, sometimes not. It's usually ink because he tends to pass out on top of his inkwell.
He normally dresses in light blue, which is the color of his school. In addition, he wears a headdress that consists of a pair of black horns and a stiff white veil on the back of the head. Sometimes it's hard to see, but he wears an earring on his left ear as well, which is really a colored light blue pin and in the shape of a diamond.
Personality
Worst Memory: tba
Best Memory: tba
Likes: tba
Dislikes: tba
Weaknesses: tba
Strengths: tba
Fears: tba
Habits/Hobbies: tba
Skills / Talents: tba
Iliril has issues with dealing with people, stemming mainly from the fact that he has a very permanent seeming stutter. Raised into a small campus of the School of the Chants with high expectations, he became paranoid of criticism because of the fact that his school of magic is very vocalized. This is why he hides the pin he was given for the purposes of recognizing others from his world. He is easily shamed by people for his disorder but at the same time, his magic worked more easily when he was with large groups of people. Since his stutter is the result of him being unable to properly process sound patterns, he needs people to actively correct him.
People who were part of his school were somewhat used to him and because of that, he felt more comfortable with them and far less comfortable with members of the other schools. Even now, he avoids contact with everybody, desparately hoping that someday, somebody else from any campus of his school will appear. When confronted with anybody else, he will feign mute until forced to speak and when he does, it will normally be very quiet and faint, to disguise his stuttering.
Though Iliril was trained to be polite, often times, his nervousness overrides that and he can be quiet rude in his desperation to ignore people and sink away into the crowd. At the same time, however, he is feverishly loyal to his friends and any connections he might have had to his original world and, against all odds, wants to go back. He left some people behind when he came to Earth and he needs to go back for them. Even if they're dead. Blind loyalty is simply a part of the community he was raised in. In the School of the Chant, the collective is more powerful than the individual and if one person messes up, everybody goes boom.
He is very sensitive about being seen as useless or a burden. People should also not interrupt him too much or try and solve his stutter by telling him to just cut it out. It doesn't work that way.
In terms of things that he actually enjoys, that would be animals and music. Music is pretty much his life and can play essentially what equates to a guzheng. Which he also doesn't have at this very moment. He doesn't know it yet but he's very much a cat person. Also, he is terrified of birds because where he lives, they're all giant vultures and condors.
Powers
Discovered when: tba
Discovered how: tba
How/Why they have it: tba
School of the Chant : Magical Composition - Within his school, Iliril has only one specialty and that is composing chants, which is an. Interesting activity for him because it's more or less a mental exercise for him. Chants are more powerful when they are executed by a large number of mages in unison and are far less powerful when done alone. Since Iliril is now separated from the other mages of his school and none are known to have made it to Earth, he is severely handicapped in terms of power on top of having a pretty power crippling disorder.
With chants, a mage is capable of producing what is normally seen as being under the umbrella of general spellcasting. This would mean things like creating shields of magic, blasts, enchantments, and so on. The range of possible things is quite large but one has to be mindful that chants can take a while and depend much on proper timing and inflection. Thus, it is not practical to keep using them for everyday tasks and utilities. Again, for a normal mage from the School of the Chants, solitude would mean that all of these possible spells would be done a low level. For Iliril, however, being alone means that he almost may as well not have magic at all.
Though Iliril is perfectly capable of putting together into something actually pleasing to hear, he is incapable of vocally producing it. Every single chant for him is either on paper or mental, because there's a large disconnect between his brain and the rest of his body that prevents him from properly being on beat and making the correct inflections at the right time. He depends largely on other people to cast chants for him and if he tries on his own, he will fail. Having never been truly so alone in his life, he is incapable of performing any chant at all because there was never a real need for him to stand by himself. And depending which chant it is, failure to preform it correctly can mean either something as benign as fizzling out or something much more explosive and dangerous.
It should be noted, however, that Iliril really is very good at what he does. He is basically a prodigy in composition but never knows if what he creates will work properly unless somebody else tries it for him first. So yes, he is capable of creating large scale destructive spells and teleportation and transformations and healing spells. The entire general load, given time. But the main questions are as follows.
1) Can he do it by himself? For now, the answer to all of these is no. He can't properly perform any of them and if he ever learns, they will be small chants made smaller by him not having the support of other mages. The learning will be slow and it will be hard and it may not even be worth it to some but if he could just summon a small flame like most five year-old children. That might just make his life.
2) Is there enough magic available for this? If the spell is too big, probably not.
3) Are there enough mages trained in this particular magic? Definitely no.
4) Are there enough mages who have trained enough with each other to not make a single mistake that may be fatal depending on the chant? Hahahahahaha....
So for now, Iliril sits in his room in a strange world, scribbling chants that sound lovely in his head but which are totally useless to him and may or may not be utter failures. He just doesn't know and may never know.
History
Father : Words mage
Mother : Words mage
Childhood : Iliril is a native from the World of the Diamond, a parallel Earth where magic is an integral part of everyday life. And where it also completely ran out.
In a world where the only known intelligent life consists of humanity, he is part of a small collective that believes that they are not alone. Centuries earlier, a being never seen before appeared near the place where his campus would be built shortly afterwards. Though it looked like a human being and acted and spoke like one, it was observed to be capable of suddenly transforming into a creature of massive size, covered with scales from head to talon-spiked toe and possessing large, fleshy wings. With a roar that seemed to be capable of causing the ground to quake, it breathed out a burst of elemental magic more powerful than any one mage could usually produce.
It was a dragon but nobody knew that and as quickly as it had appeared, it vanished, back to its own world. The couple of dozen onlookers who bore witness to the event confused this dimensional shift for teleportation and soon dispersed to spread the word of this wondrous new species.
However, with no proof beyond a span of scarred earth and a small handful of scales, nobody believed these people. They were laughed off as fanatic dreamers, mages who whose unremarkably average talents were unable to sustain larger, grander dreams. Thus it was widely believed that these people had fabricated the story for attention. After all, if such a being existed, then magic would have already revealed its existence.
Shunned by the world, these people quietly returned to the general populace, speaking of the being to nobody else but their closest family. It became the subject of folklore to these people, credited as the perpetrator of explainable miracles and tragedies. The belief became a cult of sorts, where the being was not a god but rather a watchful guardian who was above both good and evil, like magic itself. Here, the people thought, would be the answer to all of the mysteries whose answers had eluded them since the beginning of recorded history. If only they could call it back.
For centuries, these mages worked silently not only to bring the being back but to also discover where it fit in the wide network that was magic. When at last the four main schools of magic formed, the believers banded together to take their vote of which one to join. They looked to the School of the Staves and remembered that the stories of the being included no such devices for channeling magic. They looked to the School of the Ritual and recalled that the magic that the being performed needed no materials. They looked to the School of the Words and could not agree that the being had said a word of magic at all. And finally, they looked to the School of the Chants and found that the magic that the being had performed was near instantaneous.
The mages were puzzled. This being's magic seemed out of the bonds of all of the schools. Though some wanted to bring this subject back into the open, some were fearful of being scorned. Perhaps, a few thought, it would even incur yet another war that they were all sick of. They kept quiet about the matter and debated for years. But as the schools became larger and larger, they knew that their time was running out. Eventually, one fed up mage made a revolutionary suggestion. Before the being had produced its elemental magic, it had roared. Perhaps, then, the roar had been the instigator of the magic. This would place it as being in either the School of the Words or the School of the Chants.
Since there were records of people having heard it speak normally, both in an understandable tongue and one which was not, then had to have been something different. The single mage pressed on that perhaps, with the descriptions of the echoing roar and the quaking of the ground, that this was similar to a chant. Certainly, it brought to mind the vocal power of a choir. By this time, there was no more room for further deliberation. At risk of their knowledge being forgotten completely, the group finally became part of the School of the Chants, where they became known for producing some of the most beautiful sounding chants. But also for having fanatic beliefs and collective delusions.
Embracing their newfound niche in the world -being seen as eccentric but gifted was already a few steps up- the mages adopted an unusual style of dress, trying to replicate what their ancestors had seen the being appear as. That was the reason for the odd headdresses, which were attempts to recreate exactly what the being's horns looked like. Different types could be traced back to different ancestral lines. As families became split, they became tracers for master and student lines instead. This was the type of community that Iliril had been raised in.
Iliril had been abandoned by his parents at the age of four but, unlike some others, is capable of hazily recalling them. They, in actuality, were promising mages from the School of the Words. With bright futures ahead of them, they were ashamed of having a child who seemed to have no future among them due to his incurable stutter and decided to simply give him up. To erase the possibility of their fates crossing in the future, no matter how brief, they took their young son far, far away from any campus of the School of the Words and left him there.
To this day, Iliril believes not unwaveringly that they had either died trying to return for him or became lost. He was found by a group of mages from the School of the Chants and raised there from that point on. As he grew, Iliril displayed a remarkable talent for composing and editing chants -but being unable to actually execute any of them.
It was only through the patience of others on his campus that Iliril was able to get something of a rein on magic, through the study of much music theory and linguistics. Maybe it wasn't the best but at least he could do something. And others seemed to benefit from the work he did so he was satisfied. Though he couldn't say that he was entirely content with studying what he did, he took immense pride in being able to create something with his hands, if not his voice.
Teenage Years : And then, there came the countdown to doomsday. All of a sudden, it seemed like the world had been turned on its head. There was a scramble to consolidate knowledge and then divide it. To the mages of Iliril's campus, a move to a different world would be highly beneficial. Maybe they would finally be able to prove their claims which had been shot down century after century. The only problem was that there was no way to know where they would all end up. Though he was terrified of being parted from the comforting community he had grown up in, Iliril agreed to go simply because he was part of them, wasn't he?
A sense of duty compelled him to, so thus he went, crashing landing into a world that brimmed with magic. To his delight, he was not alone. Several mages that he knew had successfully reached the world with him and all were relieved to know that they were not alone. However, as they explored the world, the group made the realization that the place was barren. There was magic, yes, but the sheer amount of it, which they had initially viewed as a blessing, was soon viewed to be the reason why no life seemed to thrive. The power was too pressing and calm. It snuffed out life as it bloomed, like it was trying to maintain a planet wide stasis.
Resources were plentiful but food was scarce. The seeds that the group had brought along refused to sprout and their foraging efforts found only fistfuls of food. Survival was a strenuous effort that was agonizingly prolonged by an almost taunting abundance of water. They could not stay, that was clear. But neither could the group leave. The magic on that world was too stable and unmoving. It would not be bent and for the first time ever, all of them were entirely powerless.
There were fifteen mages total who made it to this oppressive world, with Iliril being the third of them. He deteriorated as the others did and watched with cold horror as their numbers quickly dwindled. Within the month, only six of them remained. The eldest was a woman in her fifties, the youngest was a little girl at age nine. In between them were two more women, Iliril himself, and another junior mage who was a close friend.
A few days later, the eldest merely walked away and never returned, hoping that the rest of the group could survive for a little longer on their meager supplies until help from somewhere arrived. The rest of the group was not so optimistic.
A world away, however, a young priestess was trying to work a miracle. Her family had held the gift of magic for generations, at least a thousand recorded years. Yet, to everybody's despair, one of her cousins had been seemingly cursed, unable to see even a glimpse of it being produced. It was a bittersweet discovery to find that he could never be pursued of magic's existence because his own innate powers nullified all that touched him. She searched long and hard for a solution, delving into tomes from places far beyond her world. At last, she came upon a ritual that perhaps could answer their prayers. She prepared everything as exactly as she knew, for this spell that could make magic something wonderful and natural and perceivable to her white-haired cousin with iris-colored eyes.
She made one mistake, however. She forgot to specify a specific limit on the spell - which worlds it was to be contained to. In her studies, she had indeed found the one time spell which could have been their ultimate miracle but had underestimated its power. Its reach leaped out one of the nearest worlds and ripped away a look alike who already lived the life that others had hoped of this cousin and who shared enough similarities in soul for the girl to call across.
And that was how Iliril was torn away from his dying circle of friends and into this world.
Additional Information : Iliril is from the School of Chants in the remote city of Sard, which is located in western Khalkedon. This area is known for being generally inhospitable towards humans, having both scorching deserts and generally desolate mountains. Most people live in elaborate cavern systems.
The priestess who performed the spell was Ishikawa Chinatsu, the older sister of Ishikawa Yuuto and her cousin is Saitou Yuzuru.
Also see Enelen of the Stave and the wiki page for more information.
There's also two different timelines for the World of the Diamond. Only one of them was visited by the dimension traveling dragon so in the other, the School of Chants in Sard was never founded because the founders never had a reason to band together. In that timeline, after his parents abandoned him, Iliril wandered into the desert and died of exposure because nobody ever found him.
