Character Name & Pronouns: Hayden Sorrows (he/him) Character Age: College Aged (time is somewhat wonky in the Bleak Academy beyond reality) Canon: Chuubo's Marvellous Wish-Granting Engine. Not an OC per se, but this version somewhat altered/fleshed out over the course of actual play in some ways that aren't strictly canon. Canon Point: Chronologically before his appearance in the Glass-Maker's Dragon module
History: Far out beyond ordinary Earth, there is a Town. It was first home to Youkai and Jotunns, then to human settlers, then to vampiric interlopers, and then again to the human refugees of the death of the Sun which drowned the rest of the world in the primordial chaos of the Outside. On the coast of Big Lake, where most of those refugees arrive by boat, and the Outside rages as a psychoactive storm of delirium and dust and color, the warm and welcoming district of Fortitude is nestled. There, the Shrine Families handle the duties of purifying and disposing of the toxic dust which blows in from the Outside; they are holy and grand and touched by magic of the Outside to become magical themselves.
It was to one such family that Holden "Hayden Sorrows" Sosunova was born. It was his birthright to learn empty-mind meditations to purify the Outside dust, to visit and protect the dreams of Fortitude's sleepers (from Witches, youkai, or the agents of the Bleak Academy), and to carry on the Sosunov family business as maritime navigators and merchant communicators. But while he was talented, and intelligent, and spiritually potent, he was not enough. Soon, by his mid-teens, he tired of the relentless pressure of a family from which not even sleep was a reprieve. And so he ran away from Fortitude, sailed into the Outside, to the Bleak Academy.
He, the Lord of Death's Dominion he, the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy is he named, built this monastery and university before the gates of oblivion and at the edge of Perdition, to tutor students in the unmaking powers of the Bleak and the futility of existence. Here, at the end of the world, Hayden learned to crave the comfort of the smooth black vistas of the not, to see past the abominable Lie which most believe to be existence. He became a thing of void and nonexistence, whose eyes sometimes give way to yawning windows of night sky and falling stars. But only sometimes. For however hard Hayden may study the lessons of the Bleak, he has yet to truly believe them.
Personality: Nervous, needy, moody. While he's jovial and friendly enough in casual company, underneath it all he's wound tight and worn down and hopelessly lost. Around strangers, he tries very hard to present an air of erudition and sophistication, like someone smart and likable and worth your time. The slightest sign of disinterest or displeasure is usually enough to shatter this façade as he dissolves into apologies and stammering. He gets easily worked up about little things, sometimes in geeky and verbose and manic infodumps, often in neurotic mental spirals. Hayden wants people to be happy, and for things to be OK. When they are, he must stay vigilant for whatever might disturb the peace. If they're not, he needs to fix it as quickly as possible.
He has a history of disappointing others, you see, and thus he is both eager to please and resentful of expectations, as desperate to be loved as left alone. The other Sosunovs were never cruel to him, never meant to hurt him. They saw greatness and talent in him, and they wanted to foster it. But this meant no mingling with common, ordinary souls who might hold him back or drag him down. No time for frivolous distractions or idle pursuits. No room for error. Not even sleep gave him rest, as it was in dreams that his relatives trained him in the Sosunov Family Magic. You ever had a nightmare about missing some big school assignment? Imagine if your grandmother appeared as your teacher, scolded you for it, and remembered your C grade the next morning. But it broke his family's hearts whenever he fell short, fell behind, didn't give his all, because they knew he could be great. So he kept at it, did everything he could to earn praise and approval and respect; even when he fled from reality and cut his psychic ties as thoroughly as he could; they stayed with him, if only in that way.
The secret, awful truth behind his agreeing to Callie's invitation; he does not believe in love. Not the way the Everbloom sees it; anyway. He thinks that you have built the world out of lies. He thinks the whole of existence is a jungle of deceit that you have put up to keep from seeing yourself the way we really are. Romance, friends, family, all are traps, lures, temptations. To be "loved" by those who believe in the Lie is to be judged and tied and controlled, to languish under the glare of others' perceptions, to be told you are other than you are by a billion lying eyes and forced to chain and harm others just the same. Indeed, he'll tell you, true connection is futile, and to pretend to know others is tighten the binds in which every living soul struggle. The Bleak Academy has taught him that the only solace lies in the peace and solitude of nothingness, in forgetting everyone you know, everything you believe in, everything you think yourself to be. He does not believe in love, but that's okay; he loves you just the way he knows you could be.
Not that he'll tell you of his Bleak philosophy, not unless he knows you. Not unless he can trust you to listen. Not until he's confident he can convince you. Because the one thing that scares him more than anything else is to learn he's been led astray. Because obviously, that would make his family right, and that the problem with his life, with the world, has always been that he wasn't enough.
Abilities: As an heir of the Sosunovs, Hayden has a passing knowledge of sailing and commerce, but a particular natural talent for the Sosunov Family Magic. This patented mystical art deals in dreams, whether shaping dreams, appearing in the dreams of loved ones, spiritually attacking/defending in dreams, or even (with a great effort of will) sending dreams backwards or forwards in time. While he was always bookish and fit, his training at the Academy has made him both a decent athlete (running and swimming mostly, but he dabbled in archery, fencing, and equestrianism too) and a rigorous and astute scholar. In addition to a broader liberal arts education, he also learned the esoteric philosophies of the Bleak Power of Despair and the falsehood of existence as we know it. Most of this is ivory-tower discourse and theory, but he still picked up a few more practical sorcerous tricks.
Hayden can alter his body as if it were a dream, allowing him to shapeshift (and disguise himself effectively). He can speak to anyone/anything without a language barrier, it's strangely hard to be hostile to him, and sometimes even apparent strangers will know him like an old friend. He can share and solidify visions of the textured nothingness beyond reality. He's studied the raw essence of Confusion and Ambiguity which blurs the edges of the world and conceals cracks in the Lie, and learned how to cut through it and provide others with clarity and certainty. He can do this indirectly, lifting or exacerbating emotional burdens with his other magic, or directly, by pulling the Confusion from someone or something in the form of a floating onyx prayer strip. These prayer strips are useful tools themselves, allowing one who holds them to draw on the traits of their original source/subject/victim, perceive through the subject's senses, or even act through the subject's mind/body. Finally, he has studied, though not quite mastered, the Rite of Second Skin, a powerful Bleak spell that allows the user to copy the powers of another.
Most of these seemingly more broken abilities are actually pretty self-limiting. His shapeshifting is still limited by his existing talents, being either really clumsy with shapes he hasn't practiced with or dreamlike/illusory for shapes too significant. His power copying might sometimes lead him to climactic victories or narrow successes, but can easily unravel should he overreach. While the prayer strips he pulls from people or things are powerful tools, they tend to be fragile or ephemeral, often dissolving without warning as fate/the Everbloom/entropy intervenes and the stolen Confusion and Ambiguity returns to the source. The main powers that might need nerfing here are the ones that could meddle with player agency. While I will obviously respect and negotiate the details of his active dream-sharing and psychic contact/control abilities per OOC boundaries and preferences, I am somewhat concerned about his "you know me well," beam and his "you can't hate me," aura. I think those two abilities are already subtle enough that they can largely be rendered cosmetic; they exist as options if another player wants to play up struggling to dislike Hayden or suddenly connecting to him on an inexplicable level, but they'll otherwise not matter or come up. Maybe at most, Hayden will just inexplicably "know a guy" once in a blue moon when it'd be helpful, or have a soothing effect on animals or spirits that might otherwise attack him, but nothing for major characters to worry about. And finally, one minor note, it's implied that Sosunov Magic's apex ability to send dreams across time runs on stable causal loop rules, so A) it can't retroactively futz with continuity, and B) will probably only come up if another player wants to foreshadow a pre-planned development.
Bloom Bond Flower: Forget-me-not: Hayden already walked through the gates of Death and came back changed. The main thing, at this moment, keeping him from wandering off and unravelling into nothingness is intellectual stubbornness; he has to believe the message of the Bleak Academy is worth sharing. He has to.
Hydrangea: Hayden, secretly, wants to hold himself at a higher intellectual and spiritual position than those around him. It's part of how he guards his heart.
Tulip: From the beginning, he was exalted as a golden child, a gifted and enlightened student who be the next link in a beautiful dynasty. He still sometimes regrets leaving that purpose behind.
(Also, side note, in his native canon, some Bleak Academy affiliated things/people have a Bluebell motif. Maybe this'll show up in the Bloombond, maybe not, but I thought it worth mentioning.)
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farandsunlesslad) wrote2025-12-14 01:12 am
