Caelum Cadere

Description

A young noble marked by fire and shadow, descending into darkness while desperately clinging to fragments of the person he was, his romance with Prince Vis a thread of warmth in an ever-deepening void. Pale and gaunt, with heterochromatic eyes that reflect sleeplessness born not from insomnia but from the cessation of nightmares, Caelum walks the world as though hollowed from within—a vessel slowly filling with supernatural hatred and the silver flames of a forbidden power he is finally beginning to understand. Once obsessed with reclaiming his house's liege lordship, Caelum's quest for justice has metastasized into something far darker after learning that Lady Ruben orchestrated the fire that claimed his family and that Trophis, a dragonborn servant of the Children of the Sun, burned them alive. The revelation shattered what composure remained; he speaks coldly of wearing his enemies' skin like garments, of the pit of hatred inside him growing deeper and blacker with each passing hour. His limp vanishes only when he grasps Shadefall, his demon sword wreathed in silver flames—a transformation that makes him feel whole even as his companions watch with growing horror at what he's becoming. Yet he has begun to accept gifts of heretical artifacts from Prince Vis, even sought the prince's lips in stolen moments, suggesting that some part of the noble who deliberated carefully still flickers beneath the shadow-fueled rage. The great question haunting Caelum is whether the person he was still exists beneath the hunger for vengeance, or whether his patron—born of some forbidden bloodline not his own—has already consumed him entirely. Thalara and Daria watch him descend and can do nothing to pull him back; even his investigation into assassination attempts on the Stormweather siblings and his discovery of aberrant creatures dissolving into moths feels like the grasping of a drowning man toward anything that might be meaningful. He knows he is becoming the monster he fights against, and this self-awareness may be his salvation or the final cruelty before the darkness takes him completely.