Touch · of · the · Dreamreaver

So here I am sneaking onto LiveJournal. I've got less than half an hour before I have to skulk off to work for the morning, so I probably won't be making any very impressive splash with my premiere entry - it takes a lot of time and a few hundred revisions for me to generate anything particularly clever or fascinating.

So. Alydhian Ironheart, aka Allan Cardian, was a character - a couple of them, actually - from my divirse background as a role-player. He is a tragic fellow, in many senses of the word, and perhaps one of the characters I've created and played with whom I share the most identity. Why did I name my blog after him, though? Hmmm.

Alydhian was originally a character from White Wolf's Changeling game. If you've never heard of it, I'll summarize - the characters are fairies, imaginary beings from the Dreaming, which is the world made by human imaginings. These fairies have been banished from the dreaming and must live in the real world, with its Glamour - the raw stuff of dreams and fantasies, which sustains and empowers Changelings - and its Banality, which is when you say "I don't believe in fairies" and they keel over dead, pretty near. Alydhian was a Sidhe, one of the noblest and fairest of the Dreaming's denizens, a ruler and lord who had a run of bad luck. In short order, he lost: His brother, his wife, his land, his children, his title, his self-respect, his power, his place in the dreaming, and his moral center. Driven by despair and some fair bit, it can be imagined, of sheer insanity, he sought out a legendary weapon of purest evil - the Dreamreaver, a sword forged of Cold Iron that paradoxically held within it both fairie magic and the harsh, cold touch of Banality.

With the Dreamreaver at his side, Alydhian ventured forth from the Dreaming into his exile as a Changeling amongst men so mortal - and it was here that he found his true calling as one of the Dauntain, fallen fairies who give themselves over to the dark power of Banality, sacrificing themselves - for no fairie spirit can long survive Banalities cold caress - for a brief life as one of the most terrible and tragic threats to their own kind. With the aid of the Dreamreaver, Alydhian might have become one of the darkest and most legendary enemies of his own kind in the mortal realm, had not chance intervened in the form of a woman the once-Sidhe Lord had come to love centuries before... the now-vampire Jaquilene (forgive the likely misspelling, Orryn). Reunited more than 300 years after their final parting, the once-and-future lovers began a wild adventure through the modern landscape of the World of Darkness, and no one lived happily ever after.

Time's up, I've got to head towards work now... but now you know who Alydhian was, I'll be able to get into what his name is doing on the top of my blog next time, eh? Until then, dream a little dream, my freinds.