About

[hellonspectacles]

ABOUT PERSONALITY ABILITIES BACKSTORY NAVIGATION CODING

ABOUT

Palamedes Sextus

NAME

20

AGE

5'11

HEIGHT

Brown

HAIR

Grey

EYES

Mannerisms

Restless, perpetually moving. Palamedes paces, he fiddles with his glasses until they’ve been twisted to bits, he’s often toying with a pen or pencil. When he goes still, it means he’s concentrating extra hard on something, and everyone is in big trouble. Talks to himself all the time. He can seem standoffish and has a serious case of resting bitch face, but he warms up if you stick around, and he has a smile like the sun.

Dress style

Like he has never for a minute thought about clothes in his entire life. Tunics, t-shirts, and sweaters, jeans and chinos, scuffed boots. Just about everything is shades of grey, and it’s all a little baggy on him because he’s just that skinny.

PERSONALITY

The Master Warden of the Librry

There are two driving forces in Palamedes’ life: the quest for truth and a commitment to kindness. His obsession with knowledge-seeking is the most obvious of his traits. He is effortlessly able to set aside good sense and his own health in the quest to understand something about the world, something his cavalier is keenly aware of. Though Camilla is a remarkable swordsman, her job of cavalier often becomes one of research assistant on the one hand, and babysitter who must remind Pal to eat and sleep on the other. This can lead him to get trapped in his own head, to develop unhealthy obsessions, and even to neglect those he cares about most.

That said, Palamedes is no emotionally stunted stereotype. He might be a genius, but he’s rarely a snob about it; he might accidentally neglect those around him from time to time, but he always seeks to make amends. While hardly effusive with his affection, he believes in treating people with kindness, dignity, and trust. He might be willing to neglect himself for the sake of his ambitious quest for truth, but he would never put others in harm’s way for the sake of it.

Through a series of strange and increasingly harrowing events, he holds fast to his most important values: that the truth is sacred and that other people matter. He refuses to let go of his values, regardless of the consequences.

ABILITIES

The greatest necromancer of a generation

Palamedes is a necromancer with a wide variety of abilities that relate to the manipulation of thanergy (death force) and thalergy (life force). His specialty is psychometry, but he can also, with varying degrees of skill, observe and manipulate the human body on a cellular level, reanimate dead bodies and skeletons, summon ghosts, and create force fields and wards to protect himself from natural and supernatural threats. All of these skills require access to a supply of thanergy, which will be less abundant in Earth and Earth-like environments than he is used to, but not nonexistent. He's also very polite about his abilities and generally won't use them on unsuspecting people unless they're, say, trying to murder him or his friends.

BACKSTORY

Palamedes’ life has consisted of a series of puzzles. Born on a planet of scholarly necromancers—the sixth House of nine resurrected ten thousand years earlier—he was always expected to excel academically, to soak up centuries of knowledge in service of the emperor who brought the world back to life. Even by these standards, though, he was a particularly determined solver of mysteries from a young age. At eight years old he discovered the puzzle that would define the rest of his life.

Dulcinea Septimus, heir to the Seventh House, was fifteen when they began their correspondence, and already dying of a congenital cancer. Yet she was full of life—wry, playful, and fiercely committed to knowledge. Palamedes fell in love with her and began to search for a way to save her. By his side was Camilla Hect: his cousin, best friend, and eventually his cavalier, a position given to someone who swore to protect a particular necromancer.

Palamedes’ quest to understand the world and save Dulcinea, along with natural giftedness and determination, pushed him to excel. At thirteen, he was named Warden of the Library, the youngest person to hold the position. At nineteen, he proposed to Dulcinea; she refused him, and his world broke open.

Then, a mysterious letter arrived. It called the heirs of each house and their cavaliers to the long abandoned planet of the First House, where they would have a chance to become Lyctors: immortal saints that served the Emperor. Palamedes’ never-ending quest to know the unknowable made it impossible to refuse.

Besides, broken heart and all, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to see Dulcinea.

The invited heirs gathered at the grand, crumbling castle called Canaan House and began to solve its mysteries. Soon they found a door into a chamber called the Facility--a warren of laboratories equipped with experiments that tested necromantic skills in exchange for keys to secret doors found around the sprawling building. Palamedes and Camilla remained uninterested in the rising tensions among the Houses, too focused on solving its puzzles. That was certainly easier than thinking about Dulcinea--who was in attendance, and seemingly committed to treating Palamedes with the polite curiosity of a stranger. But those tensions came to a head when the Fifth House pair showed up dead in the Facility.

After attempting to solve the crime without success, Palamedes returned to investigating the Facility’s puzzles with a new purpose, determined to discover what was putting them all in danger. He started to develop an allyship with the representatives of the Ninth House: the icy but brilliant Harrowhark Nonagesimus and the brash, indefatigable Gideon Nav.

As more people were killed and horrors mounted, Palamedes became increasingly aware that becoming a Lyctor would require a terrible, violent sacrifice. Simultaneously, he grew more and more certain that many of his fellow House representatives would be willing to do anything for that power, regardless of cost.

Palamedes was correct. In the end, it was one the acidic and power-hungry Iathe who completed the path to Lyctorship. The task required doing the unthinkable: killing her cavalier and absorbing his soul. At the same time, Pal realized that only a Lyctor had the power to create the horrors that had stalked them all. Dulcinea was the Lyctor in question--or, to be more accurate, the person they had all thought to be Dulcinea was actually Cytherea the First, the Lyctor who had founded the Seventh House ten thousand years earlier.

Palamedes confronted “Dulcinea” where she lay swooning in a makeshift sickroom. She confessed that she had murdered the real Dulcinea and her cavalier and had come to sow chaos in hopes of luring the Emperor to Canaan House to kill him. In revenge for Dulcinea and to protect his friends, Palamedes created a necromantic explosion to stop her--and blew himself up in the process.