Born Under the Sign of a Different Star: Kapriel of Chald
My birthday is the last day of March and to honor myself I am posting one of my own favorite OCs every day of March: The OC Jubilee.
Kapriel is my evilest son and I love him dearly. Note: not my evilest character, my evilest son. There are characters who are more evil but less interesting and do not get to call themselves my sons or daughters. His whole story is about the question: okay but seriously what would happen if a child had psychic powers? And the answer is: nothing good, that's for fucking sure.
Kapriel is an artifice child, made to order for a wicked man who found his natural heirs disappointing. The only suitable soul was repurposed from a woman, and while Kapriel firmly identifies as a boy, there's definitely a liiiiiittle bit of The Genders going on. He's also blatantly autistic. He inherits the notoriously bad-for-your-mental-health Aspect of Secrets at the age of six, and suddenly he is on the psychic end of the autism spectrum. It is emphatically Not Fine.
He lives under a ceaseless deluge of fleeting impressions of mental states of every person whose eyes he meets, most of whom have minds structured very different from his own. Having gained this power before he was old enough to understand the extreme ethical issues inherent to it, young Kapriel finds abusing his knowledge of other people's secrets as natural and harmless as routine playground teasing. Like other artifice children crafted from a mature soul, his intellectual abilities far outpace his personal development and he gets himself into a lot of trouble by following logic that would only ever make sense to a genius ten-year-old with no social skills. Glory in the Thunder is a story told over a long timeframe, and Kapriel's presence in it ranges from age 6 through his 30s, so we get to see every step of this disaster unfold.
Young Kapriel cares about exactly four people: his older cousin Barsamin, his fanatically loyal guardswoman Oseni, Erasmin Arcocelli (who is the first person he meets who is an artifice child like himself, and his first puppy dog crush despite her being a decade older than him) and Korrisel Varodahn (who is the second, and the absolute love of his life). I suppose that when he's older, we might be able to add Erasmin's three children to this list? He... doesn't exactly treat them that well, and his relationship to Constans in particular is unhealthily obsessive and, uh (*checks age gap*) yeah.
As the God of Secrets, Kapriel sees himself as having been volunteered by the heavens to be the Necessary Evil that keeps the nation of Chald stable and prosperous. Assassinations, blackmail, seduction, trying to murder a toddler because Varodahn said she'll destroy the world one day, whatever, he'll do it. And being a bisexual twink who always, always knows whether someone's attracted to him sure does make seduction an effective strategy.
Kapriel and Varodahn have a hell of a strange basis for their relationship: as the Goddess of Sight burdened with often decontextualized or metaphorical glimpses of the future, Varodahn has foreseen that one day she is going to kill Kapriel with her own hands, and as the God of Secrets burdened with knowledge of others' inner mental states, Kapriel is aware of this even though she never said so, and yet they're still dating. While Kapriel sleeps with half of Tarim. (That might be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, then, Kapriel...)
If you want to read more about Kapriel, oh boy can I ever help you, because the darker aspects of his arc have been on my mind a lot lately. The title of this post, "born under the sign of a different star," is something he snaps at Barsamin out of frustration that the elder Chaldic god does not realize that Kapriel's been busy fending off sexual predators while Barsamin's off having moral crises in the woods with his boyfriend. The Star of Secrets is not known for having ever made anyone happy.
Vibe music:
Kraid's Lair (Metroid)
Tartaglia/Childe Battle Theme
I once described Kapriel as being "drawn into a mutual murder-waltz with like six different people at the same time." Kraid's Lair would be the specific murder-waltz in question. Childe's theme captures the feel of Kapriel's attempts to win over the younger boy Constans Veraldo, which starts getting pretty unhinged when Constans repeatedly tells him to fuck off.