Came the last night of sadness, and it was clear that she couldn't go on

PLAYER INFORMATION

NAME: Liz/EC
AGE: 35 years young
CONTACT: Plurk: madwomanwithabox, Discord: madwomanwithabox#1521
CHARACTERS PLAYED: Allison Argent (TEEN WOLF CRAU)
RESERVED? Nope!

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: The Shade {born Josiah Cole}
CANON: Original Character
CANON POINT: N/A
AGE: N/A {Josiah Cole was born in 1880, and died in 1911 at the age of thirty one. He's been a death god for approximately a century or so.}

HISTORY: In nearly every mythology, he is there: the Grim Reaper, the ferryman Charon, or has a woman's face and goes by the name valkyrie or banshee. In some circles and lesser known cultures, however, he is a myth unto himself, and among his many names, the one he answers to most readily is that simply of The Shade. A minor death god, he collects his own souls and is known best for comforting the ones he claims. His appearance is a sign of impending death, unstoppable and unavoidable: he is seen, he speaks, and seven days later those to whom he has spoken will die.

Those who call him Lord of the Vale and Reaper of the Wayward say he glories in the destruction of his calling, others who know him best as Gentle Death or the Angel of the Grave say he is just that: a fallen angel that has never shaken his benevolent nature. Real accounts exist from those left behind, and those before their end of the steadfast ally with sad eyes and a deep voice that brings not just warning, but solace in their final days. To the lonely, he is a friend. To the frightened and confused, he is a guide, leading the condemned through the terrible task of settling their affairs, and to those who question what comes next, he speaks of a place where life continues with simple tranquility in a world of eternal twilight.

This world, whose name is never spoken, is a source of wild speculation for those who study the mythology of the Shade, and for the supernaturally gifted with an affinity for death...for while he lays visible claim on those about to die, it has been said that no soul he collects ever reaches the Other Side.

This is the myth of the Shade, the one he prefers to share...but the truth is far stranger than fiction.

Though he has been connected to various existing myths associated with death deities and harbingers of death, the origins of The Shade can be traced back as recently as 137 years ago to the birth of a human named Josiah Cole in Silverstone, a small town just outside of Santa Fe in 1880. The son of Elton and Katherine Cole, Josiah's upbringing was an unconventional one. Katherine, a woman of impossible beauty and pure heart, was from a well to do family that didn't look kindly on a marriage below her station to Elton, the town undertaker. Still, it was a happy one that gave her two beautiful children, both sons. Ezekiel Cole was slim and fair haired like his father while Josiah, a branwy youth, took after his mother with his cold grey eyes and blood red hair that didn't quite match his mother's ginger coloring.

There was little question about Josiah's origins at first: the Coles were a happy family and the brothers were close as brothers ought to be. There was still no question when Josiah was orphaned at the age of seven, a sweeping fire destroying the Cole mortuary and leaving only the eldest boy alive. No, the questions came later when Josiah was grown and quietly took up the family profession. The questions came when he would be heard by his assistant speaking quietly to the corpses he managed, or calling on people he rarely spoke to shortly before they passed away. The questions turned to suspicion when a red-haired stranger as big as Josiah and just as strange entered town to spend several weeks as the undertaker's guest...and then several years as Josiah's mentor, rarely ever leaving his side.

Believing there was witchery or demons about, the townsfolk ran Josiah out of town along with his strange friend, never knowing that Josiah's visitor was Death itself...or that Josiah was a wild death mage, the first in an entirely human bloodline born with a spark of magic, one so powerful it could destroy him without proper instruction...or, with improper instruction, change his family's fate.

Josiah did just that with Death's guidance, attempting to raise his parents and his brother from the dead. He didn't realize, however, that he'd been set up: his brother had not been destined to die, but his parents had. His brother returned, but his parents were forever lost, torn from Paradise and forced to wander the earth aimlessly until the end of time. Enraged, Ezekiel Cole, now a grown man's soul trapped in a boy's body, and a fire mage in his own right, turned on his brother and killed him. Josiah's actions damned his soul to Hell, where he languished for over a decade before Death claimed him as his own, marking him with the brand of the Grim Reaper. The mark, designed to hollow all the power out of a soul and turn them into a mindless slave, ravaged Josiah as he escaped into Limbo, fighting oblivion and madness with all his strength.

It was his unchecked power that saved him: with magic Death had taught him, Josiah learned to harness the power of the mark through mystical tattooing, claiming its magic rather than letting its magic claim him. Emboldened, but still lost, Josiah made his home in Limbo. Other lost souls and creatures of the Other Side began to gravitate towards him, pledging their loyalty in exchange for safe harbor. When angels and demons from the ranks of Heaven and Hell, however, war broke out. The battle was brief, but bloody and merciless...but in the end, a peace was forged. In that peace, the Devil swore revenge, and the Lord recognized him as a god by name: Sorrow's Shade.

So it was that Josiah Cole died, and in his place, the Shade found power enough to break free of Death and claim the Vale, the valley at the heart of Limbo, for his own.

Scarred by his ordeal, spurred by blind grief when he looked over the trials that shaped his path to the Divine, Josiah gave up his quest for power for good.

Meanwhile, rage festered in his brother as he grew to physical manhood, discovering his own mystical gifts in time. Over the years, their power and their reach has grown, their story infecting mythologies that never knew them. Josiah as The Shade still wanders, like his parents do, comforting the lost and lonely dead in their final days, then giving their souls solace in a world of his own creation, all while his brother, known only as the Scourge, hunts every soul his brother seeks to bring peace and forces him to relive that night all over again: driving innocent souls mad, the Scourge claims each one and sends them to kill his brother, all while searching for an object known only as the Vessel of the Shade, the one mystical tool that has the power to enslave the brother that tore him from his eternal rest.

So the battle rages on: the Shade, struggling to put his past behind him and lay claim to the Vessel to ensure his freedom, and the Scourge, hellbent on destroying all his brother loves and hoping to lay claim to the Vessel in order to ensure the eternal suffering and enslavement of his last living relation.

PAST GAME MEMORIES: N/A

PERSONALITY: To understand the Shade means understanding two men: the god, and the man. There are common traits both share, but there are also major differences that affect the entity he has become in very different ways.

As a living man, Josiah Cole was a simple soul: kind, God-fearing, and deeply compassionate. Though raised by a local widow, Josiah was very much shaped by those early years of simple contentment in the bosom of his family as he learned to embrace the joy of living from his vivacious mother, to respect and honor the dead as he watched his father work, and the love and loyalty of family in the few short years he got to be a big brother. Losing them all devastated little Josiah, but having been raised with death he learned to accept the loss, though he never truly healed from it.

In adulthood, Josiah carried that sorrow with him, believing he had no right to the normal life his father tried to carve out. Though he loved in his time, he never courted or sought to take a wife. Rather, he found an almost religious calling in his work with the dead, and found satisfaction in losing himself in the day to day. Always, he was conflicted by the strange things he could do, and turned to faith to try and save his soul.

In death, however, the soul forgets much of the passion of life. Fear, rage, and bliss—the tranquility of the grave—are all the dead can truly feel, sparing them the pain of separation from the life and people they cared for. This stripped away much of the sensitivity and sweetness of the man he once was after he died, and his rise to power only heightened the darker aspects of his personality and warped his virtue. Personal strength grew until he cared for naught but that which belonged to him. Affection became jealous obsession, while his affinity for death became a thirst for blood and an Irish temper became black, calculating rage that earned the fear of the Devil himself.

However, once he'd thrown off the shackles of Death and earned his place on the Other Side as a minor god with a realm of his own, the Shade began to remember pieces of himself. Where he initially claimed souls for greater power, he soon became selective, choosing those who would better fit the community he'd started to build. Where once he gloried in the fear he inspired and the blood he shed, he soon used intimidation only as a tool to protect the world he'd built, and when soldiers from Heaven and Hell came to his realm to pledge their allegiance, he accepted them so long as they had something to offer.

With power, he feels a little more than some, but at the end of the day he is still very much a man who lost his life...and while he's found ways to fill the hole left behind, and has remembered at least a small part of what he used to be in life, he knows that he is forever changed by the battles he fought and the trials he's endured, and has made peace with the fate he saw for himself as a living man.

Sorrow is his bride, solitude is his calling, and death is a beloved friend that will never betray him.

POWERS/ABILITIES: The Shade was a death mage in life, and is a death god now. His powers are as follows, but most will be nerfed in very simple fashion: he will be alive when he arrives in Ainmhian, with a beating heart in his chest. This will strip his powers brought by godhood, leaving him the simple gifts of a death mage.

MARK OF DEATH: the Shade can see a soul marked for death, and feel the pull of the same. The mark is transitory in nature (example: a man with cancer is marked for death, if he is not fated to die the mark will fade when he seeks treatment), and will not draw him to a soul unless their death is fated. (NERFED: his primary gift as a death mage is the ability to sense impending death, often in the form of clairvoyance: he will see specters of death like grim reapers, and hear auditory hallucinations speaking the name of the condemned.)

DIVINE SIGHT/AURA READING: the Shade can see into a soul, discerning the true nature of a being: good or evil, dark or light. This is the power that allows him to judge a person, and assess their worthiness to join his flock on the Other Side. (NERFED: this power is associated with godhood, and will be stripped.)

SPELLCASTING (NERFED: while he can cast small spells and enchantments (think small lights in the dark, start campfires, even modest glamours), he will be easily exhausted if the spells grow too large.)

IMMORTALITY (NERFED: he will be a living man, with all the vulnerabilities that entails.)

INVULNERABILITY: being that he's the walking dead, the Shade cannot be killed by conventional means, nor wounded. He can, however, be harmed through the use of powerful magic of any sort. (NERFED: see above.)

MINOR SHAPESHIFTING: the Shade has a human guise, one that lets him blend in with the world of the living (essentially, the face and body he wore when he was still Josiah Cole), and his form as a god. He can shift between the two at will, and has greater power in his true divine form. (NERFED: though alive, he will be stuck in his divine form: approximately seven feet tall, a living storm in his irises--storm clouds render them deep grey, with visible flashes of lightning if seen in close proximity.)

TRANSLOCATION: the Shade can transport himself between realms and locations through the use of magic, often appearing as a cloud of inky fog. (NERFED: this power is associated with godhood and will be stripped.)

LIFE FORCE: the Shade is capable of manipulating life force, primarily to take life, but also in small measures to restore it (example: he can restore a small plant to life or heal minor injuries in others) (NERFED: this power will be stripped.)

SPIRIT MEDIUM: he can see and communicate with the souls of the dead. (NERFED: This power will be stripped.)

SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH, SPEED, REFLEXES (NERFED: this power is associated with godhood and will be stripped.)

STORM LORD: the Shade can manipulate the weather, specifically for the creation of lightning storms and summoning of fog. (NERFED: this power will be stripped.)

CLAIMING SOULS: the Shade can claim souls by branding a creature, living or dead, with a mystically imbued tattoo. This lets him draw power from the soul to make his magic stronger, sense the welfare of that soul, and allows his souls to summon him at will. (NERFED: this power will be stripped.

MYSTICAL TATTOOING: the Shade is capable of creating tattoos out of pure magic, imbuing them with spells, and branding them on skin with bare hands and no ink. Every tattoo he wears is one he laid upon his own flesh, save for the skeleton on the nape of his neck, posed for combat. (NERFED: the Shade will have no access to this ability. The magic and spells of the tattoos he wears will be completely dormant, save for three: the skeleton on his nape, a small coffin on his left arm, and a runic sigil on his abdomen. These tattoos are responsible for his existence, allowing him to draw the strength he needs to stay alive from any plane, as well as preserving his realm on the Other Side. They serve no other function, but they will glow with a pale grey light, merely signifying that they are active.)

NOTE: if the nerfing outlined does not suit the mods, feel free to impose your own restrictions!

SAMPLES: The story of how the Shade died.

The Shade claims a soul in a frontier town on the edges of space.

ANYTHING ELSE? Nothing I can think of! His permissions will include options for players to give permission for those of the Shade's godlike or omniscient powers, should they be restored to him, that bears mentioning, I think.