No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.
Chaos Theory: The Wild Magic of the Witch Danielle Obrove; Or, Disorderly Conduct; Or, No Rest For the Wicked
There exists, beneath everything we know, a remnant of the earliest stage of reality, a vestige of the former, unstructured state of the universe. Beneath the orderly veneer still lies that discordant madness into which the gods injected their systems and laws, a chaos known to learned individuals as
the Weirding.
There are those who are able to recognize this underlying existence and rely on it as a powerful resource. Danielle Obrove is one such individual, part of a group of spellcasters known as
Weirding Witches, who draw from that primordial madness to fuel their magic. This renders Danielle capable of casting powerful, if at times unpredictable, magical spells.
Just because Danielle utilizes the madness of the Weirding as the
source of her power doesn’t mean that she is herself insane. Danielle Obrove is
not crazy, and she will be the first to tell you so. The woman is very level-headed, in fact. Rather than attending the
barbaric gatherings of traditional Weirding Witch covens, Danielle took an
academic approach to chaos magic. Instead of attending nightly revels in the wilderness, Danielle Obrove took classes at Suinaegoiters Academy for Spell-sling and Ensorcellment. While institutionalized education might run contrary to her magic’s chaotic nature, it allowed Danielle to learn to wield the Weirding with a degree of finesse unmatched by traditional witches.
Of course, no power is without its costs. Danielle Obrove, like all Weirding Witches, periodically enters a state of uncontrolled, animal frenzy. The episodes of madness are very inconvenient, even considering the fact that they only occur once or twice a year. Danielle cannot stay in one area for any extended amount of time, lest she have to pay for the disruption she might cause when she is inevitably driven to howl in the streets or shred a body to pieces with her bare hands. A real bother, that.
As with all Academy witches that elect to study the ways of the Weirding, Danielle eventually had to leave civilized life behind. It is an irony that even Danielle must recognize that, despite trying to escape the traditions of chaos magic through formal learning, she is still driven to the wilderness to commune with the Weirding in a traditional manner. In order to abate the frequency of her frenzies, Danielle must seek out places of power where the barrier between perceived reality and the Weirding is thinner. By suffusing herself with the universal madness that bleeds through the cracks, her lapses into madness decrease. Not only that, but the exposure to the Weirding increases Danielle’s understanding of it, and by extension her power.
The witch Danielle is beginning to admit that the traditional route to harnessing the raw power of uncreated creation may have been to correct path to take from the start. Still, she holds onto the skills she learned in school, embroiled in civilization, even as she seeks out powerful loci in the world’s wild places. Just because her magic is savage and discordant doesn’t mean
she has to be, does it? Danielle is intent on proving to her Weirding Witch contemporaries that their power can be harnessed with
class. Danielle Obrove will see to it that she tames her magic so that it doesn’t untame her.
Balancing Act: The Creation of the Witch Danielle Obrove’s Familiar; Or, Don’t Sweat the Smol Stuff
As great as the power of the Weirding was, uncreated creation does not make for a very good conversationalist. Danielle began to long for pleasant company, for friendship, or at the very least for someone to show off her magic to. Towns and cities no longer interested her; she loved the wildernesses that surrounded each font of chaotic energy. Danielle simply wanted someone else to share it with.
The solution seemed to be a special form of ritual magic practiced by certain powerful magicians and deities. With the proper components, one could create and bind a familiar spirit unlike any other, a servant with aspects of a beast, yet the form and faculties of a human being. Danielle had become powerful enough to call upon one of these beastkin servants herself, the only problem lay with the
execution of the spell required to summon one. It was
ritual magic, steeped in
structure and
rules and well outside the raw, uninhibited form of spellcasting Danielle was used to. She traveled further abroad, seeking tutelage from masters of this much
tidier form of magic, so that she could learn the ritual, call her familiar, and return to business as normal with a new companion by her side.
Danielle hoped to model the creature’s body after that of a panther, for eons a tangible symbol of the intangible chaos of the Weirding. She had felt some guilt for “betraying” her specialty magic, and thought creating a familiar in the form of a panther was a way to make up for it. Besides, to attempt to create a living thing out of madness, especially one intended to
serve her, was likely to not...go completely according to plan. As well, the beastkin’s great body would be able to withstand any unforeseen assault from the witch when she was caught up in feral ecstasy. Danielle’s new servant (who she hoped, deep down, would become her new
friend) would be protected from her.
The day of the summoning finally arrived. Danielle was strong enough to perform the task, and everything was in place to create a mighty panther guardian. The circle was drawn large enough to accommodate the creature’s form, the glyphs’ position around the circle had been checked and double-checked, and the various other component esoterica had been measured out perfectly. Danielle commenced the ritual, and after what had seemed like a lifetime, her familiar appeared!
It
appeared to be much too small. Where was the great beast, the symbol of her savage power given form? Standing in the center of the overlarge circle was a
pipsqueak, a
small fry, a...
Gerbil. The small thing in the center of the witch Obrove’s magic circle was quick to correct her, to hit home the fact that she was not a
dust speck, microbe, and especially not a
rat, but a
gerbil.
Not that Danielle was listening. She was too shocked by her apparent failure. What in the multiverse had gone wrong that the powerful creature she had intended to create had been replaced by this
shortstack gerbil? Danielle looked over her arrangement once again, triple and quadruple-checking every aspect of the ritual, but everything seemed in order, according to her various teachers’ instructions. The most logical explanation seemed to be that one of the “great masters” of the art of creating familiars had mislead her, either through incompetence or trickery. She hastily granted her new gerbil
her name and then scooped her up to take her with, to use as evidence of the perpetrator’s folly.
Each teacher had no idea what the sorceress was talking about. The ritual as she had described it should have worked as intended. It had no chance of error if done correctly, and it sounded as though Danielle had her circle set up exactly to specification. It wasn’t until she came accusing the most powerful of the tutors she had sought out, a venerable mountain spirit, that the truth was laid bare.
The old sage’s home sat directly upon a wide gulf of primordial chaos. He was familiar with Danielle’s Weirding power, and suspected that the reason for Nanashi’s form still lay with the witch. The old sage set up his own version of the ritual and confirmed with Danielle that it was as she had made it before. He then cast the spell himself, and, lo and behold, a fully-formed panther familiar appeared in the circle. Danielle’s set-up
had been correct. What had gone wrong was, at the moment of summoning, Danielle had lapsed into the
briefest instance of her madness, and impregnated the spell with enough of her magic that it superseded the intended result and gave her an unforeseen one: The gerbil familiar Nanashi. The witch’s servant was born of a blend of the Weirding and the foreign ritual, created at the meeting point between order and chaos.
Eventually, somehow, Danielle would come to like Nanashi. Hopefully.
Weird Sister; Or, Tools of the Trade; Or, Implements and Accoutrement; Or, Other Information
As mentioned above,
the Weirding is the earliest state of reality, the unstructured existence that was present
before powerful gods, spirits, and dungeon masters arrived to engage in the act of creating the universe. Despite all the
orderliness layered on top of it, the Weirding exists, still buried beneath Creation. It is a realm of utter disorder, where the landscape shifts and twists according to the arbitrary flow of wild magic. Few beings travel to the Weirding itself, as becoming so immersed in its chaotic energies could have effects far more dire than an annual episode of madness.
Despite being the deepest and most chaotic layer of reality, the Weirding is still a
part of reality, and is still essential to the universe’s function. It acts as a sort of foundation to existence, the bedrock from which the universe we see was built up from. It also acts as a barrier between the ordered universe and the even
wilder frontiers that exist outside and in between each universe, wherein dwell
Things humanity was not meant to know.
The benefit of drawing upon the Weirding for magical power is the ability to cast powerful spells at little cost. The energy of the universe’s pre-prehistory is, in a way, much “purer” than the magical forces other mages rely upon, having not undergone a “refinement” process to bind it to reality’s natural laws. Weirding Witches can summon powerful storms or tear great fissures in the earth with ease. The trade-off is that sometimes the magic works on its own, resulting in a magical effect that the witch did not intend. They
are dealing with an inherently chaotic and unpredictable source of power, of course. Luckily, Part of a Weirding Witch’s training involves becoming able to adapt when a spell does something unexpected. Most often, a Weirding Witch’s surprising magic fails to catch them off guard.
Because using one’s body as a conduit for the energy of the unshaped state of the universe isn’t always the healthiest activity, witches such as Danielle Obrove use magical tools to help channel primeval forces. Danielle in particular possesses a magic wand called a
thyrsus, wound with an ivy vine and tipped with a pinecone. Like the panther, a thyrsus acts as a physical symbol of the Weirding’s power. The wand can be transformed into a pine-bristled broomstick for hasty transit across the wilds.
Traditionalist Weirding Witches periodically enter a trance state meant to
induce their maddened frenzy, believing it is only then that they come closest to the Weirding. Key to this meditative practice is the imbibing of alcohol. Danielle glady keeps a wineskin and the ceremonial drinking cup on hand, but until she sees proof that purposefully abandoning sense is in some way beneficial, she prefers to remain lucid as much as she can. Madness remains for her merely a means to power and not an end in and of itself.
Danielle Obrove keeps an iron cookpot in her bag that she shrinks and grows to different sizes as is required. She would rather no one call it a
cauldron, thank you kindly.
The familiar Nanashi isn’t as vulnerable to Danielle’s frenzies as she appears. During moments of madness, the gerbil is able to tuck into a small pocket dimension to wait until her mistress has calmed down.
The Hither and Thither Expanded; Or, Drawing Back the Curtain!
The witch Danielle Obrove is the alternate universe analogue of the brilliant yet stifled technomancer, Daniel Obrove. She is not his former life, his blood relative, or a close acquaintance. She's the Obrove if Obrove were a sorceress pulling her strength from an unshaped form of the universe, while
the inventor is Obrove in the form of a techmaturge kept from ever leaving his home world. Arrangements are, of course, being made to change that.
One might think that other possible Obroves are somehow less volatile than this madness-afflicted witch. A brief skim through their alt list,
here, reveals that this is hardly the case at all.
There are more "Danalogues" to come, eventually, so we kindly ask that you...
STAY TUNED!
