Oleander Haart
Oleander is the sister of Ephraim Haart, though the two no longer speak. Like him she is of Irish descent, pale-skinned, with strawberry blonde hair. Her eyes are wide and heavily-lidded, a greyish hazel, one splashed with more green than the other. There is something haughty and aristocratic to her features that harks back to an older time, though ironically she looks much younger than she is (much to her chagrin). The soft lilt of her accent generally encourages others to underestimate her.
Ollie is wilful and arrogant, as one might expect of a child born to the Di Inferi. She places her own cause above all else, quite prepared to sacrifice herself or others in the process. She considers both the Di Inferi and the Remnant a failing, too driven by selfish needs, though she would be unlikely to betray either sect to those she views as mundane.
Her life’s work is to collate and interpret the stirrings of prophecy, spurred by a sense of urgency she cannot quite place her finger to. Her extensive travels document the scraps of learning and sometimes people that glimpse of the future. Of late she searches for those who might be enough to turn the tide, should the worst come to pass.
History
Ollie’s life is a web of fiction and lies, forged ID papers and falsified records.
She drank myths like nectar as a child. Books lined the walls of her father’s home in Ireland, a cornucopia of the most esoteric trinkets of the ancient world. She grew up bookish, working alongside her father’s translation work. He lectured at the university to dwindling numbers, a throwback to a bygone time. Sometimes they had visitors in her youth, ones with interest in her father’s oddest papers. “We are the splinter of a splinter, dear one,” he would explain. Prophecy was his speciality, and usually it was scraps of information and artefact they brought to his door in seek of his expertise.
Until the time it was a creature delivered to their door instead.
She had never seen anything like it; skin smoothly scaled, hairless, its nose like slits. At first glance it had what appeared to be a human child clutched close to its chest. At her father’s bidding Ollie scribbled down all it said in its rasping voice — words she recognised, and words she didn’t. It was injured and leaking, blood as black as ink, and though it might not have been human she could feel its desperation, and its fear.
Their next visitors did not knock. They bore the mark of the ouroboros.
The Remnant, she later learned; the splinter from which her father’s people had broken away from. They came to kill the creature, and to sweep clean the cell that had fallen from the path. They burned the house. Only Ollie escaped, pulling the strange child to safety alongside her.
Following her father’s death she travelled to Moscow in search of her older brother, and stayed with him for a time. But a disagreement between them set her back into flight. Before she left, she gifted a bundle of prophetic texts to Ephraim’s younger daughter and bid she keep them secret, hoping that if she could not sway her brother, she might at least influence his child to her cause in the future.
Now she travels onward alone, a ghost.
Appearances
Connections
- Sören Lindgren; though it is unclear how or when they met, their similar interests led to them crossing paths. Ollie has tried in the past to win Sören to her cause, and though he proves reluctant, they do exchange information.
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