Full Name: Talia hin'Elric (TÄ-lê-ä hín ÉL-rík)
Species: Immortal (Daedra, former Uncursed human)
Allegiance: Vampire Syndicate, Church of Eternal Brotherhood
Religion: Universalist
Social Status: 5 (vast personal and corporate wealth; draws as needed)
Age: ~1330 as of 999
Eyes: Variable (usally pale blue)
Hair: Variable (usually long, black and straight)
Height: Variable (usually 178 cm = 5'10")
Physical Notes: Usually appears as a beautiful, fair-skinned human woman of indeterminate age, but she can alter her appearance at will to suit her audience.
Behavioral Notes: Moves and speaks with absolute confidence. Rarely raises her voice because she has no doubt that she will be obeyed. Polite, gracious and elegant when seen in public; she rarely lets this facade slip. She has a dry sense of humor, and can be highly seductive when it suits her purposes. Lara Flynn Boyle could probably play her very well.
Supernatural Abilities: Immortal traits; daedric traits; Lothanasi healing powers and inherent spells; arcane magical prowess equivalent to master wizard, with a specialization in enchantment. She gives off a scent like a mixture of forest plants and a predator's musk when she uses her powers, unless she deliberately chooses to mask it.
Titles
- The Vampire Queen
- Mother Wolf1
- Mistress of the Undead
Background
Talia is the Vampire Queen and the Mistress of Dark Life, patroness of lycanthropes and the undead, a position she stole from Lilith when she killed the daedra lord with the assistance of one of Lilith's own artifacts, the Ankh of Lilith2.
Talia was the middle child of the Lothanas of Metamor Keep, Elric, during the Battle of the Three Gates. During that battle, Elric was killed and Talia (along with her mother and elder brother Aramis) was trapped in soul gems by Lilith, the Queen of Vampires. The only member of the family to survive was Talia's little sister, Karenna hin'Elric.
Holy Symbol
The Ankh — an inverted teardrop with short lines extending left, right and down from the tip.
Symbolic Creatures
Dire Wolf
Holy Day
Due to the influence of the Lightbringer Order the daedra lords were considered the "bad gods" or devils. As such, the Daedra Lords did not have individual holy days, but were all combined into one night, Daedra'kema (similar to the real world’s Halloween & Walpurgisnacht, with *much* sharper teeth and claws).3
History: From Human to Daedra Lord
Talia Imprisoned
Talia's attack (and eventual victory) was motivated by revenge for her imprisonment in that soul gem and the loss of most of her family. After nine years of being trapped, Talia's soul was restored to her body by her sister, now known to everyone as Raven, and the Necromancer Rickkter, shortly after the Great Fall.
A Mind Unbound
Unfortunately, the act of restoring Talia to her body proved to be misguided, as years of imprisonment in the soul gem had driven Talia into severe solipsism. Unable to accept the world she had been returned to as anything other than a deranged fantasy of her own mind4, she did not feel bound by the moral strictures of the civilized world.
At first, Raven and the other Keepers were unaware of Talia's condition. To spare her from the Curse, Raven sent Talia to the Midtown temple. At this time, the Curse's range was confined to the area of the Metamor Valley. While she did travel to Metamor keep frequently to consult with Raven, she did not stay long enough to be affected by the Curse.
An Insane Goddess
When the opportunity to exact her revenge on Lilith presented itself, she took it — she may not have believed it was really happening, but it would feel satisfying nonetheless. She was quite surprised when she found that killing Lilith granted her the power and position of the Vampire Queen. Even Lilith's death and absorbing her power did not help Talia realize that something was wrong. After all, in the world she knew before her imprisonment, killing any of the daedra or aedra would have been impossible. The fact that she could kill Lilith further convinced Talia that she was still living in her fantasy world.
With no self-imposed moral restraints on her actions, Talia immediately began to use her power to her own whimsical ends. Being granted the abilities of a goddess, after all, gives you a very big sandbox to play in.
In addition, being a daedra lord meant that Talia could now travel anywhere on Earth and not be affected by the Curse.5
Return to Reality
After several failed attempts to take over the world during the early 700s by military means, Talia finally regained her sanity through the actions of her sister Raven, the God of Wisdom Samekkh, and the new God of War Rickkter6. Sickened by the deaths she had inadvertently caused, Talia rejected the path of war and conquest, and even forbade her vampire subjects from killing mortals unless she commanded it. She later turned her focus toward the conducting of "quiet business", organizing her disciples into a worldwide underground organization. The Syndicate, as it is called, is a fusion of secret society, religious cult and organized crime outfit, with Talia as its head and the vampires as its ruling class. One arm of this organization is the Church of Eternal Brotherhood (CEB), a Universalist religion that serves as a cover for many Syndicate operations.
Current Activities
Talia is now one of the two nature goddesses in the Pantheon. Neither she nor Artela completely encompass the character and spirit of the natural world, but each exists as a mirror image of the other: while Artela represents nature in its mutualistic aspect, in which creatures form partnerships that help each other to survive and prosper, Talia embodies the predatory and competitive aspects of nature. Talia's domain is the world of nature "red in tooth and claw," in which the weak are killed and eaten or simply starved out of existence, while the strong prosper and pass on their traits to the next generation.
Talia's metaphysical focus on predation and competition does not mean that the benefits of cooperation are ignored, however. First, one must take into account that Talia inherited her daedra powers from Lilith. While Lilith did not feel the same sense of joy and wonder in mutualism that Artela felt, she knew that mutualism is a part of life and that even carnivores must protect their vulnerable pups and work together to take down prey that are larger than themselves. When she created the vampires, Lilith instilled strong lawful instincts in them for that very reason, and gave them an inborn sense of duty to their sires and bloodlines so that their predatory instincts will not drive them into self-destruction. Nor is it a coincidence that the best-known lycanthropes are werewolves: Lilith had a particular admiration for lupine society, and chose the wolf as the ideal animal to blend with humans in creating her new super-predator.
Talia brings to this power an idealized feudal mindset, one where loyalty and protection flow both ways through the power dynamic: Masters should care for their servants well, and servants should obey their masters faithfully.
The Public and Private Faces
Most people are aware of the vampires now, who are often employed in the highest levels of the business world and use their political power to ensure equal rights and protections before the law. The CEB itself keeps a low profile, generally known only as a social club that is active in charity work. While some of its trappings are seen as a little strange, and the membership of the vampires in the church is generally known, most people are content to dismiss it as a harmless, benign organization.
Behind the scenes, though, the Syndicate is heavily involved in organized crime. With arms involved in gambling, prostitution, drugs, racketeering, graft and a thousand different "respectable" commercial ventures, the Syndicate is enormous beyond all comprehension. All of the profits of high-level Syndicate members and Syndicate-run businesses go to Talia, who then distributes finances back to her disciples according to their level of productivity. She is generally quite beneficent with her followers, and most of them are fanatically devoted to her.
Talia, through the Syndicate, owns hundreds of companies, large and small, in countless areas of interest and in dozens of countries. Most of these companies are controlled through big holding companies, much like the keiretsu business model followed by Mitsubishi, Toyota, Fujitsu and other large Japanese conglomerates (or like Virgin Group and Berkshire Hathaway in the Western world). Each of her princes controls one of these conglomerates, and she owns one directly as well. There is nothing on paper to tie any of these keiretsu to any of the others; only the blood bonds between the princes and the queen ensure that they continue to operate in pursuit of her interests.
Forests of Power, Home to a Queen
Talia lives in a large mansion in Elderwood in the province of Mirador. The entire forest is owned by the Syndicate (along with the Forest of Darkness, The Murk and numerous mana-rich parts of the world). She also has a large estate in the Arctic Territories east of Taikroisa (where the Forest of Darkness is located), but she works mostly out of the Elderwood campus for the comfort of her human staff.
One of the Syndicate's ongoing areas of study involves the Nexuses, which Talia hopes to one day be able to tap into at various locations around the globe, expanding her divine power. She is already the most powerful member of the Pantheon of Fallen Gods, however, and has little to fear from any rival.
An Old Rival Dead, but the Rivalry Continues
Talia's predecessor, Lilith, and the daedra lord Suspira had a rivalry. Before the Great Fall, Suspira held sway over her fellow daedra as their Queen to Ba'al's leadership. Lilith felt that she deserved the position. This rivalry still continues past Lilith's death, but the reasons have changed. Talia's Church of the Eternal Brotherhood and Suspira's Church of Hedonism are powerful and influential organizations and Talia's power currently outstrips Suspira's.
This may be in part due to Talia's experience as a mortal giving her a greater understanding of working within the mortal realm than any of the other aedra and daedra (possibly combined) despite their own time in the mortal realm. The gods (all of them) originally existed as forces of reality, and while they had (and still have) immense power and sway over mortals, they didn't have the training and life experience that Talia had before becoming a daedra lord. Beyond her own abilities and personality, she was trained in leadership and how to work with people, as befitting someone intended to become a high-ranking Lothanasi Priestess.
Talia and Malcolm ard'Valos [SPOILERS]
Malcolm ard'Valos, one of Talia's childer, serves as Talia's Syndicate Prince for Metamor City, but there are some key differences in philosophy between them.
Malcolm is a true believer in the ethos of Lilith (despite his sire being Talia), which states that vampires help to strengthen the human species by acting as the top predator in the food chain. Malcolm believes that he's not just making the world better, but that he's making humanity itself better through natural selection.
The way he's doing it, though, has Talia concerned.
Talia has given Malcolm a large amount of leeway. She can't afford to micromanage him because she has too many other concerns to worry about, being the head of a global corporate and religious empire. That said, she IS taking some steps to rein in his excesses. When she finds out he has gone against her wishes, she pulls strings from behind the scenes to bring him back into line. This may force her to eventually remove him from power, but this is not a course of action she wants to take against any of her Princes.
She has to make any moves against Malcolm subtle, behind the scenes, so as not to disrupt the balance of power in her court. The feudal mindset she grew up in dictates that a queen should not interfere in the internal affairs of her vassals unless they are engaged in gross misconduct, so she tries to live by that principle — or at least to keep up the appearance of it, for the court's sake. A personal appearance from her will only happen in the most dire of situations.
Talia's Motivations
Talia wants a world that is peaceful and orderly, without wars, ethnic and religious strife, etc. She wants everyone to be united in a clear hierarchy where each person is responsible to someone above them and responsible *for* the people below them. Masters should care for their servants well and servants should obey their masters faithfully. The world she has in mind is an idealized picture of feudalism — not surprising, since she herself was the product of a feudal society.
Talia doesn't trust any of the other fallen deities to be the one on top in this scenario. She *would* trust Kyia, but Kyia doesn't want the job, and she allows her subjects more freedom than Talia thinks is wise. Because of this, Talia believes that the only way to get the world she wants is if she's the one in charge of it. She realized centuries ago that open military conquest would never lead to the world she wanted, so now she uses the vampires to build a worldwide shadow-society whose loyalties supersede loyalty to tribe or nationality. She doesn't like vampirism — the vampires are creatures of darkness, and Talia was raised to be a priestess of the light — but she will use the vamps as tools to build the world she wants to see.
Thralls
none known at this time
Known Childer
- Malcolm ard'Valos7
- none others known at this time, but her childer are usually placed at the highest levels of the Syndicate and the CEB.
Known Allies
- none stated to date
Known Enemies
- none stated to date
Story Appearances
none in the MK2K universe to date
Sources
Pantheon, Rickkter, comments from Raven/Etherius on TheCursed.org, Conversations with our fearless leader (including an "interview" with RavenB/Etherius at the SSDWC 2010 Summer (not) Picnic)
Author Notes
d20 Notes
Alignment: Lawful Neutral (with some evil, or at least ruthless, tendencies)
Divine Portfolio: Nature, Lycanthropy and the Undead
Domains: Animal, Plant, Undeath
Voice Actor
none set
