Cariel
Cariel (born Cara, and also known throughout history by her aliases Selenia, Magona, Segena, Mirra, Myriani, and Calarel) is one of the primary antagonists and arguably the most powerful mage in the history of The Metalwood Saga. She is a one-hundred-thousand-year-old Prime Mage and the younger sister of Lorelei (Lara).
Forged by unimaginable trauma and abuse, Cariel's soul was irreparably broken at a young age, leaving her devoid of empathy and consumed by an endless thirst for power, revenge, and control. Across millennia, she utilized her mastery of soulmagic to adopt countless identities, orchestrate the fates of entire planets, and manipulate the lives of millions. Her ultimate goal was to seize control of Xyclami and rewrite the universe in her own dark image.
Appearance and Personality
Because Cariel possessed unparalleled mistweaving and shape-shifting abilities, she rarely appeared in her true form. However, a few constants remained: for the vast majority of her incredibly long life, Cariel was completely blind, her eyes destroyed during her enslavement on Eryn. She hid this blindness by maintaining permanent soulbinds with surrounding animals (such as birds, wildcats, or spiders), allowing her to see through their eyes.
When forced to reveal her true, underlying elven form, Cariel appeared as a slim, beautiful young woman with long brown hair, deeply tanned skin, and milky-white, sightless eyes. Additionally, she lost the lower half of her left leg during her time on Eryn; she replaced it with a complicated, exposed prosthetic device of metal and plastic.
Throughout history, she wore many faces:
- Cara (Childhood): A young girl with blonde hair, green eyes, and a white dress.
- Selenia (The Senator): A regal woman with a long blonde braid, small dark glasses to hide her milky-gray eyes, and a flimsy, see-through cream gown.
- Magona (The Remnant God): A massive, terrifying, muscular woman with jet-black skin, tight black curls, and a black leather corset adorned with chrome spikes and skulls.
- Segena (The Remnant Leader): A tanned, white-haired woman with strange white eyes, wearing practical green and brown leather rags.
- Mirra (The Crone): A short, deeply tanned, incredibly wrinkled old woman in a faded purple robe with scraggly white hair.
- Myriani (The Mentor): A breathtakingly beautiful High Priestess in Sylrantheas with long golden hair and a plunging green gown embroidered with two trees.
- Calarel (The Resurrected Mage): A tall, bulky woman with long black hair, often utilizing mechanical stilts and a black cloak.
Personality-wise, Cariel was a sociopath driven by the desire to ensure she would never be weak or victimized again. She viewed all other living beings—including her own sister, lovers, and children—as tools to be used, discarded, or harvested for energy. She was deeply manipulative, infinitely patient, and took genuine, sadistic pleasure in the physical and psychological pain of others.
Biography
Cara and the Awakening
Born on the planet Valaralda one hundred thousand years ago, Cara grew up on a farm in Errenmel alongside her older sister, Lara (Lorelei). During the Great Awakening, her father discovered magic and accidentally performed a permanent soulsplinter, splitting himself into a "good" and "evil" half. The evil half murdered his good counterpart, and later murdered Cara's mother. To save herself, Cara killed her father using a butcher's knife and her nascent magic.
Sentenced to burn at the stake for his murder, Cara was secretly freed by a shadowy figure. She fled into the forest, where she endured a decade of horrific sexual abuse by a hermit. The trauma fractured her soul, but it also unlocked her ability to use mindmaster magic (dark poplar). Rechristening herself, she traveled to Ilyrion, infiltrated the University, and joined the inner circle of the brilliant scholar Aten (Orym).
Enslavement on Eryn and Ambarhal
When Aten decided to imprison the alien Operators known as The Twins, he utilized Cara's gatesending magic to transport the expedition to the brutal jungle planet of Eryn. The creation of the Prison Tree killed the entire expedition team, casting Cara's soul into the purgatory dimension of Ambarhal.
Cara eventually deduced how to resurrect herself and escape Ambarhal, but the journey wiped her memories. She awoke as an amnesiac elf on Eryn, where she was immediately enslaved by the native wolf-men known as the rylak. During a brutal attempted rape by three rylak, she was severely mutilated, losing her eyes and half of her leg. Left for dead in the jungle, Cariel subconsciously unlocked the ancient art of soulbinding, linking her soul to a wildcat (kabul) to heal her bleeding and see through its eyes.
Embracing her newfound power, Cariel systematically soulbound massive cavek beasts, sakul birds, and monkeys. She unleashed her animal army upon the rylak village of Skallgr, massacring its inhabitants in a horrific display of vengeance. Though she achieved her revenge, she was fatally stabbed by the pack leader, Svalya.
Cast into Ambarhal for a second time, Cariel retained her memories. She struck a bargain with The Twins: if she freed them from their Prison Trees, they would grant her unlimited power. She then used her knowledge of Prime Trees to resurrect herself back onto Valaralda, her memories fully intact.
The Desert Mistress and Akhenaten
After escaping her enslavement on Eryn and navigating the dimension of Ambarhal, Cariel returned to Valaralda and adopted the name Selenia. Disguising herself as a blind beggar on the streets of the desert city Nekhrumet, she was taken in by her former mentor, Aten, who did not recognize her as his old student, Cara. Selenia became his mistress, ruling beside him while secretly trying to uncover the location of the Key (Edrafen) to seize control of magic. She ultimately realized she had genuine romantic feelings for Aten, but was too late to stop him from committing suicide to thwart the Twins.
When Aten resurrected two hundred years later as the god-king Akhenaten, Selenia confronted him and demanded he surrender the Key. Akhenaten refused, and the two immortal Prime Mages fought a bitter, centuries-long war across the desert. To escape her relentless pursuit, Akhenaten built a tomb filled with seven tests specifically designed to thwart her, and faked his own death using mistweaving magic.
Senator Selenia and the Sending
Over the ensuing eighty thousand years, Cariel adopted numerous other personas, but eventually revived the name Selenia to infiltrate Valaraldan politics as a powerful Senator. Twenty thousand years ago, when her sister Lara (now known as Speaker of the Senate Leriaar) and the scholar Tarathiel (Trey) attempted to pass the Sending Act, Selenia violently threatened Leriaar in private. She forced Leriaar to cast the tie-breaking vote against the measure. Selenia orchestrated the failure of the official vote so that she could manipulate the illegal, secret Sending expedition for her own ends, intending to force her sister off the planet.
The Remnant God
Over the ensuing hundred thousand years, Cariel adopted numerous disguises. On Earth (Mar), she appeared to the struggling human survivors as Magona, teaching them survival and warfare, uniting them into the Remnant, and establishing herself as their prophesied god.
She also infiltrated the Eldrim village of Sylrantheas under the guise of Myriani, the beautiful Sculpture Mentor and High Priestess. In this form, she gave birth to Silanar and raised him, secretly placing a "soulbleed" on him and all her other thousands of offspring (including Zel and Arra) to perpetually siphon their physical energy to fuel her own massive magical exertions.
The Final War and Death
During the era of the Conjunction, Cariel shed her disguises and accelerated her plans. She attempted to trigger a supervolcano on Stromboli to destroy Earth, but was thwarted by Phoenix, who sacrificed herself to freeze the eruption. Arra subsequently shot Cariel through the heart with an arrow, but Cariel survived.
Retreating to the Thesserin Desert on Valaralda, Cariel raised her magnificent, subterranean Palace of Memory into the sky. Capturing Trey, Arra, and Rylan, she crucified Arra on a makeshift bookshelf, using her daughter's agony to power her magic. She forced Trey to unlock Edrafen, finally unleashing the Twins upon the universe.
Her victory unravelled when Trey traveled along her soulbind into her mind, distracting her long enough for Arra to physically sever the soulbleed. Though Trey used a soulcircle to miraculously heal Cariel's blind eyes, she refused to abandon her evil. Trey then used the soulmirror artifact on her; the mirror reflected her horrific, traumatized past, shattering her mental control and severing her thousands of soulbinds. Stripped of her army and reeling, Cariel engaged in a brutal physical and magical brawl with Arra, which ended when Arra slit Cariel's throat with a steak knife.
Moments later, Orym and Lorelei found Cariel bleeding out on the forest floor. In a final moment of reconciliation, Lorelei comforted her dying sister. With her dying breath, Cariel used dark willow to trigger a cascade of gates over both Orym and Lorelei, returning the entirety of their lost ancient memories to them before she passed away.
Resurrection as Calarel
Unbeknownst to the heroes, Cariel had prepared a fail-safe. At the moment of her death, she fractured her soul into thousands of pieces, scattering her consciousness into a horde of spiders. By swarming Orym and attacking his soul directly, her spiders successfully forced Xyclami to reboot, ending the era of magic.
Years later, prior to the events of The Savage Wild (Adventure 2), Cariel's fragmented soul finally coalesced back into a physical body on Eryn. Adopting the name Calarel, she hijacked a trade ship to Earth (Mar) and seduced a CEO to steal the dormant Xyclami device. However, she discovered that her fragmented soul was too weak to serve as an Operator. Needing two people who were strong enough to activate the device but weak enough to fall under her influence, she kidnapped the former Operators, Rylan and Elanil.
Calarel intended to drug them for only a few hours to force them to reactivate the machine. However, a simple mistake in the drug's formulation—caused by the rylak Thrombir—accidentally placed Rylan and Elanil into a decade-long coma. This catastrophic error completely thwarted Calarel's plans, stranding her without magic for nearly eighteen years while their daughter, Lysa, grew up enslaved by the rylak in the Kalmansa Wilds.
Calarel returned to Eryn and built a fortress in the Kryptan Mountains. When Rylan and Elanil finally awoke, she attempted to force them to reactivate magic so she could seize control of it and rule the universe. However, her plans were thwarted by Lysa, her rylak companion Jascyn, and an army of newly-awakened dragons. During the final confrontation, Lysa trapped Calarel in a forcefield while Jascyn pummeled her with a massive blast of darkprime shockstriker magic. As she lay paralyzed on the ground, the rylak elder Thrombir drove a spear through her neck, permanently ending the ancient mage's life—at least as far as they could tell.
Powers and Abilities
Cariel was universally recognized as one of the most powerful and terrifying mages in existence. Because of her immense age and deeply fractured psyche, she was a Prime Mage capable of utilizing all fourteen Gifts of the Soul.
- Soulbinding: Cariel's signature and most devastating ability. She could forcibly bind the souls of animals, insects, and people to her own Will, controlling them like puppets. At her peak, she controlled tens of thousands of entities simultaneously, including rylak armies, Remnant soldiers, cavek beasts, and swarms of bekal flies. She could also see and hear through her binds, entirely mitigating her physical blindness.
- Soulbleeding: Cariel secretly placed parasitic magical tethers on her thousands of offspring, constantly siphoning their life force and physical stamina to fuel her own exhausting Prime magic without burning out.
- Woodless Magic: By soulbinding fourteen miniature Prime Trees and keeping them near her, Cariel could draw on their power remotely, allowing her to cast devastating Prime magic without needing to hold or burn physical primewood chips.
- Splintering: Cariel frequently utilized mistweaving to splinter her soul into multiple physical bodies (Aspects) at once, allowing her to lead armies on different continents simultaneously.
Key Relationships
- Lorelei (Lara): Her older sister. Cariel brutally psychologically tortured Lara during their childhood. Despite their millennia of bitter rivalry and hatred, Lorelei held Cariel as she died, admitting that she had always loved her.
- Orym (Aten): Her ancient mentor and lover. She manipulated him and spied on his work, but genuinely loved him. She ultimately orchestrated his assassination by swarming him with soulbound spiders.
- Arra (Alleria): Her biological daughter (via her Myriani persona). Arra despised her mother for her cruelty and ultimately killed her to save the world.
- Zel: Her half-elf son from her time leading the Remnant as Segena. She routinely emotionally and physically abused him, viewing him as a weak disappointment.
- The Twins: She struck a bargain with Velion and Nelenor in Ambarhal to free them in exchange for power, though she fully intended to murder them and steal Xyclami for herself once they were released.