Tatterdemalion

"This power... Magic, miracles, sorcery... Whatever you want to call it... Nothing good's come of it... Yet."

Summary
Tatterdemalion is a budding heroine who fights against supernatural threats. Her most iconic powers are her sorcery and her grey flames, and her most iconic traits are her aloofness and resilience.

PART 1
Ophelia still does not know who her parents are. Until she was twelve, Ophelia lived in a small, sleepy rural town. Thousands like it dot the map. It would have been unremarkable if its secrets were not so arcane. The monstrosities that wandered through the town on foggy nights were normal to Ophelia. The rites were a part of life. The Darkness that Whispered would one day take her. This was an honour, the adults who cared for her told her. She called them Mother and Father, but she was not their child. It was important that she was kept away from the other children, and so the adults who raised her kept her in their basement most of the time, with the old television and the old books with the strange words. The shadows in the basement spoke with many, many voices. There was one voice among them, clear and resounding, that commanded silence when it spoke. This voice taught Ophelia her first fumbling spells. It was not a kind teacher. When she erred, it punished Ophelia with terrifying visions she could not understand.

One night, the darkness was finally pleased. On her ninth birthday, her fifth father, the eyeless man, took her. He promised her that she would at last have friends and a proper family among his many children and many spouses. The eyeless man’s house was dark and dirty, but its darkness was quiet, and the dirtiness came to be comforting.

In her hometown, Ophelia had been special. This peculiarity isolated her. In the eyeless man’s house, everyone was odd. Other people could do strange things, too, and there were many among the eyeless man’s children and spouses with odd features.

Ophelia would not know until later that the eyeless man was using her. He was using everyone there. Unlike some of her siblings, she did not find the eyeless man’s appearance unsettling. In her hometown, there were many people with different appearances. The eyeless man’s sharp teeth and spindly limbs did not worry her. It was comforting to have a family like the ones she had read about and watched through the static on the old television in the basement. She did her best to tell her siblings how lucky they were.

The things they could do were not to be called magic. They were miracles. Everyone there could use miracles. Some could only do things as small as making a spark or changing the colour of their hair. Ophelia was told by the eyeless man that she was special. Among all his children, she had been chosen by the Angel in the Dark; she had been blessed with the Angel’s blood. If she would but follow the eyeless man’s guidance, she would one day be his bride. When that day came, the Angel in the Dark would be free. The Angel would walk among them, and the Angel would bless those that walked the dark paths of knowledge.

The eyeless man taught Ophelia that knowledge was not something to be gathered. Knowledge was not something truly found in books. It was found in blood and conquest. For the Angel to walk free, the eyeless man and his family needed many, many keyes that held vestiges of power.

The forms these keys took seemed random to Ophelia. Some of her siblings could find them without fail. Ophelia could hear them, though, when they were near, whispering like the darkness she had left behind. The eyeless man did not scare her, but the things he collected did. That fear was a seed that was watered by blood.

Ophelia’s siblings could locate the keys easily. Of all the eyeless men’s children, though, it most often fell to Ophelia to collect them. The keys were rarely abandoned. They were protected, and the punishment for failure grew more dire.

At first, the punishment was disappointment. The eyeless man did not resort to drastic measures immediately. When disappointment was clearly insufficient, Ophelia went without food. When physical punishment failed, the eyeless man began to take out his frustrations on his siblings.

Eventually, Ophelia gave in. She neither wanted her siblings to suffer nor hate her. There were rewards. The extra food was nice, but it was the encouragement that warmed her heart. Ophelia had always wanted to make her parents proud. They had kept her at arm’s length. The eyeless man and her family embraced Ophelia fully. If the price for their acceptance was breaking the bodies of the people who stood in their way, Ophelia could accept that.

By the time she was fourteen, however, her ability to reconcile the increasingly brutal requests of the eyeless man with her rewards was strained. In the year she had been there, members of the family had disappeared suddenly. Ophelia was the last child brought into the fold. The eyeless man assured Ophelia that her worries were needless – they had gone to join the Angel in the Dark, and when the Angel walked among them, so too, would her siblings.

One night, after retrieving a potsherd from a museum, Ophelia asked the eyeless man if she could meet the Angel in the Dark. The eyeless man brushed blood from his child’s face and smiled, his mouth full of needle-like teeth. If she would meet the Angel, she needed to be prepared.

The preparation was painful. It was not mere physical pain; though there was that, too; the rituals the eyeless man and his spouses used to prepare Ophelia pulled at her mind. They tugged at things deep inside her. These long rituals were by turns cacophony and deathly silence; freezing flame and burning frost. Her soul soared, communing with something far greater than herself; something that had been part of her since before she was born. She glimpsed parts of plans that were at such a grand, cosmic scale that her mind trembled. She saw the past and countless futures.

The past grew dimmer in these rituals. It was not that Ophelia could not see it. She could. The darkness was something within her. Something calling for her. It was the whispers in her parents basement turned into screams. It was nightmares on cold, moonless nights. It was the malaise of knowing something bad was imminent while not knowing the form it would take.

It terrified her. The eyeless man promised Ophelia that her fear was normal. It was the human part of her. All the siblings that had joined the Angel had overcome this fear. The eyeless man recognised that, for Ophelia, it would be harder. She was not entirely human, after all, and her connection to the Angel would make the process longer. She was less fragile, and the eyes of her mind would not open so quickly.

Her preparation to meet the Angel was not entirely a passive affair. The eyeless man’s miracles needed the power of the keys. Each one could open a door but once, and there were many, many doors to be opened. The doors to Ophelia’s mind were special, and the keys needed for them were gruesome.

The last was within her own body. The eyeless man wove miracles over Ophelia, and she drifted off to sleep. The sleep was not dreamless. There was darkness. It spoke. It was not the darkness of her hometown. It was not the darkness inside her.

This darkness warned her. She saw herself from the eyes of the people who had held the keys. She lived through the pain she knew she had inflicted. She saw herself through the eyes of her siblings who had joined the Angel. She did not see the Angel through their eyes, but she felt what it was like when they met the Angel. They told her that she needed to leave. She needed to run, and she needed to make sure the eyeless man never found all the keys.

When Ophelia awoke, her body ached. Dawn’s grey fingers crept into the rundown house the eyeless man and his family called home. The family would be sleeping. They worked at night. Ophelia did as she was told, and rebelled for the first time in her life.

Ophelia left the eyeless man’s house with little more than the clothes on her back and the necklace one of her siblings had once owned. Ophelia had always had someone to look after her. The sudden freedom was dizzying. There was no one to tell her what to do or how to live. There was no one other than the whispers in the dark to tell her what was wrong or right.

It was a few months before child welfare found her. She was bounced around houses, psychologists, priests, psychiatrists, counselors – all manner of well-meaning, highly-paid professionals who grew frustrated with her talk of miracles and angels and nightmares. Her siblings followed her, talking to her in that darkness just between twilight and night, when the shadows seem deeper and darker than the night itself. She knew the eyeless man was looking for her. She couldn’t stop running.

This was her life for years. She never laid down roots. She rarely had to try too hard to get families to give up on her. The ‘miracles’ – the word had ironic quotation marks about it in her mind – made sure of that. Without someone guiding them, Ophelia’s emotions took control. Without someone teaching her to hone them, they grew wild and overwhelming. At some point, she realised she could hear the feelings of others. It was worse than the voices in the darkness. She could hear the anxieties of foster parents and siblings. She would play into their fears, stealing valuables or causing trouble. She remembered what it was like to have someone suffer because of her.

PART 2
When she was sixteen, she was adopted by the Oaks, a Starlight City family. Mary and Maxwell Oaks had never been able to have children. Maxwell had grown up in the foster care system himself, and he had hoped to provide a stable home for a troubled young person. Despite her best efforts, the kind couple refused to give up on her. Eventually, she opened up to them. She did not expect them to believe her when she awkwardly spoke to them about her life until then.

“We were worried it was drugs,” Maxwell said, relieved. He adjusted his glasses. “I can’t say I understand everything you just said, but I believe you. I’m not afraid, and neither is Mary – right, dear? We’re adults. It’s an adult’s job to protect young people. We don’t mind if you take money or borrow jewelry, but don’t take our responsibilities from us. If you really want to leave, Ophelia, we won’t stop you, but take it from someone who tried – you can’t run forever.”

Ophelia cautiously accepted their invitation. She began to grow comfortable. There were still nightmares. There were still the voices. She still panicked when she saw street lights blink out. Life wasn’t easy, but it grew easier. Her parents encouraged her to explore spirituality. There were a lot of failures. At the end of her patience and without answers, she went to her high school’s ‘Wicca Club’ that was a grand total of four other people. They talked a lot about things Ophelia didn’t really understand. She sat on the outside of their circle, listening. That would have been all she did if it hadn’t been for Renee, the leader of the group – the ‘coven’, as they called themselves.

Renee stressed to Ophelia that Wicca was not just about magic. It was not about worshiping the devil or blood sacrifices beneath a full moon. It was about connection. Renee sensed that Ophelia lacked connection, and that the deficiency ate away at her. Renee and the other members of the coven – Ash, Riley and Mavis. Wicca was not really the answer for Ophelia, either, but she came to enjoy the afternoons spent with the coven as they communed with nature and spoke about what magic really was. Ophelia was quiet during these discussions.

The coven was big on meditation. Ophelia was not. Memories lingered in the darkness behind her eyes, in the throbbing pain at the base of her skull that she tried so hard to ignore. It made her anxiety a great, black beast. She was restless during the group meditations until one day Renee held her hand.

It was around then that Ophelia started paying attention to the world. It was around then that she began to open up. She had her first sleepover, inviting the Coven over to the Oaks house, and watched her first horror movies. Renee introduced Ophelia to Sailor Moon and Pretty Cure. Riley introduced her to sewing. Ash tried to introduce her to video games, and Mavis to paranormal podcasts and poetry. For a few months, Ophelia found a sort of peace.

Ophelia had, of course, seen people with powers. She knew of them. She just didn’t see how what she could do – what she was – fit into it all. Even when the coven talked about the responsibility that came with the use of magic – and the mere ability to use it – Ophelia separated herself. The coven’s understanding of magic was very different to her own, and besides, Ophelia never joined them for their visualisation rituals and the various other ways they built intent. The one thing Ophelia allowed was a little horseshoe charm that the coven gave her; a charm that was supposed to bring her luck and keep her safe.

PART 3
Ophelia never thought of herself as someone who went with the flow. She considered herself a passive, powerless person. The tides pushed and pulled her, even if she resisted. 'Going with the flow' implies a sort of agency; a choice to drift along. She was resigned rather than relaxed. Her powers, such as they were, had never really been in her control. The eyeless man had used her like some sort of deadly multitool. The voices came unbidden. The feelings she heard were there, whether she wanted them or not.

She didn’t think she was heroine material. Not with everything she had done. The few times she had tried to use her magic, she felt as though she was being watched. She felt the shadows around her deepen, menacing and portentous. She did not use magic until she was forced to.

The coven was out on an overnight hike – it had nothing to do with Wicca. One of Mavis’s podcasts had detailed an urban legend about a haunted cabin deep in Blue Glade National Park. Renee and Riley had done some sort of ritual at the start of it, spraying everyone with some pungent herb water that was supposed to help protect them from both bug bites and any supernatural monsters that stalked the woods on the night of a full moon.

The day had started out well, but the sky grew dark and heavy as the sun hit its zenith. It grew darker still, rumbling, promising a deluge. The heavy rain forced them to take shelter in what was probably the cabin. Mavis tried to reassure them that, even if there were ghosts in the cabin, they probably couldn’t touch them.

The shadows of that dusty, overgrown cabin whispered to Ophelia, though. They raked at her mind like claws and made her heart race with anxiety. Something horrible had happened there. No, not just one something; hundreds. She stayed quiet. If she voiced her concerns, she worried it would make them more real.

The group shed their backpacks and soggy outer layers. Ash and Mavis; the bolder ones; poked around the house, shouting out their finds with nervous, elated laughter. The cabin had a basement level. The door to it was not locked, but it would not open.

It was around midnight when Ophelia excused herself. The cabin’s atmosphere terrified her. It had grown more oppressive as the night settled around them. Ash and Mavis had curled up next to the basement, trading theories about the door, scaring themselves as they ate nuts and marshmallows. There must have been something blocking it; the basement door had cracked open, Ophelia noticed as she passed the pair, flopped over each other in their sleeping bags, surrounded by half-empty snack bags and a couple of bottles of beer Ash had pinched from his father. The rain fell like a curtain outside. Its white noise seemed to dull the voices. Sitting on the creaky porch, she drifted into an exhausted sleep.

The voices were quiet, but the night was not. Renee’s scream woke Ophelia. At first, Ophelia thought it was the tail end of a nightmare. Then she heard something. It was a strange snickering sound. Ophelia looked through the window. A crack of lightning illuminated the world in a blink of stark light. The creature from Mavis’s podcast was there, standing so tall its twisted, broken antlers scraped at the rotting roof. Its head was covered in eyes, and its long arms were covered in what Ophelia first thought were thick hairs. Its many, many long fingers seemed to sprout from its wrist, stretching out and dragging where they did not wriggle and writhe. They were so long and tapering that it was hard to see where they stopped. Long fingers curled around Mavis’s still sleeping bag. The basement door was open. Maybe that was where it had been. Its body was covered in thick black hair. Another flash of lightning showed Ophelia the thing closer to Renee and Riley, and that the thing had turned its head to look at her.

It had no eyes where they were supposed to be. It was from those sockets that the antlers curled. Ophelia’s little silver bracelet was burning on her wrist. It was something she’d taken when she lived with the eyeless man, and she had kept it as a reminder of everything she did not want to be. But it burned. The little horseshoe charm seemed to glow with an odd darkness.

Ophelia doesn’t quite remember what happened next. She knows she used her magic. She remembers flames. She remembers the beast charging at her. She remembers its huge feet ending in talons, and the way her fire left deep wounds in its body. She remembers fear and a feeling of elation as she threw the monster around, her friends cowering.

When she found her friends, the storm had broken. Dawn’s light shone through the forest. Somehow, the flames had protected her enough that there were only a few rips and tears in her dark jeans and shirt. A rescue team had been called in as soon as the creature had been thrown through the side of the house. Renee and Riley had helped with the search for Ophelia, but they had feared the worst. Ophelia made up some sheepish story about running away when she heard the monster, and her phone running out of batteries.

When she was home, she told her parents. She told her parents about the monster, about her magic, about the bitter, horrible, guilty feeling it left her with. Her parents did not admonish her. On the contrary, they were encouraging. This proved that her magic was not something evil. It was a tool, and like any tool, it could be turned to good or evil. If she was ready to reconcile her past, her father suggested, then it was time to start taking on responsibility for her abilities. Responsibility was not guilt, he said. It was using the power she had to improve the lives of others, and she had taken a massive first jump.

As Ash and Mavis recovered from their injuries, Ophelia started her first major sewing project. Using raggy old clothing from second-hand shops, she stitched together a raggedy outfit. The magic she pulled through the horseshoe had some sort of strange property that prevented most people from recognising who she was, but she made a dark, hooded cloak part of her outfit, too. It hid her face in shadows, preparing her to face the night as Tatterdemalion.

Trivia

 * Her favourite anime series is Go! Princess Precure.
 * Her favourite horror movie is Noroi.
 * Her favourite poets are Elizabeth Browning and William Yeats.
 * She enjoys sewing small plush toys, often sub-conciously working weak protection spells into them.