emily falke

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The Worshipful Company of Tidewrights

An occupational guild native to Limsa Lominsa, the Worshipful Company of Tidewrights serves the Vylbrandian populace by licencing and regulating specialised arcanists (known as Tidewrights) who provide a myriad of solutions to seafaring ills: wave-cutters, wind-shapers, seer-like navigators, and otherwise. Their contributions can be so valuable, in fact, that many of La Noscea's largest shipping guilds will rarely send a vessel out without a Tidewright aboard to soothe that greatest foe of any sailor: the sea.With a reputation for being clannish and insular, outsiders have drawn many parallels with it to a kind of 'maritime knighthood,' with most of the guild's members being lifted from the many families that hold ancestral ties to the guild, such as the Falke's, and suffused with an endlessly strange brand of pageantry: oaths, rites, traditions, chanting, and dancing, most of which are regarded as eccentric, superstitious, and ritualistic by many of the other more modern and secular guilds. They even host their own personal pantheon that (largely to assuage the mob in older times) is still subordinate to Llymlaen, if not the rest of the Twelve. The second most commonBeyond their smaller chapter houses in many of Vylbrand's ports, the Tidewrights' ancestral home is the Drowned Stacks: a sprawling, members-only library carved out of a coral grotto a few miles up the coastline north of Limsa Lominsa. All that humidity must be terrible for the books, you say? That’s probably one of the reasons it was chosen. Just like artists, sorcerers – real sorcerers – love to show off. It’s a statement: we own the ocean; it doesn’t touch what we don’t want it to.

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The Falkes of Dunpool

An ancient family on the decline [...] their clan sprawling through great marshes and backwoods in the suffocating heat of Vylbrand’s southeastern countryside [...] their middling kin wasting away in grand homes, drenched in sweat and starving [...] their lowliest skulking beneath the shadow of cottongums and spanish moss, through stilted bog-shanties and bayou boardwalks, inked in spells, lousy with lice and bloodflies [...] the slow death of a once-great legacy.

Along the shores and hinterlands of southeast La Noscea, a person is liable to find all manner of influential officials, merchants, and industry barons bearing the Falke name – and from an unexpectedly diverse stock of hyur and miqo'te (even the occasional, albeit rare, au ra, elezen, or viera). This is due to the Falke clan's complex and formalised series of adoption traditions, which have steadily transformed them from a simple blood-ties family into a career path, administrative apparatus, and politically-dominant force deeply rooted in the local governance and trade of their remote region.Although there is one main line, the clan consists of four additional cadet branches, each overseen by an elder responsible for managing their branch’s regional duties and representing their interests at the family-wide level. An elder's authority includes:•   Adopting new members into their branch (typically based on exceptional skill, arcane talent, or political value).
•   Disowning members of their branch should they bring shame, danger, or disruption to their interests.
•   Nominating the individual who'll eventually inherit their seat as elder.Together, the five elders form the Falke diet, a ruling body that convenes quarterly to make decisions about the wider clan. Included below are example motions as well as the amount of votes required to pass them:Three-Fifths
•   Decide the family’s overall direction.
•   Compel a family to provide compensation and damages for a dispute.
•   Ratify the successor of a branch where nomination is ambiguous.Four-Fifths
•   Disown a member of another branch.
•   Override and choose a successor for another branch.
•   Replace the elder of another branch.
•   Notably, the main line's decisions cannot be challenged by vote for these three.Members can also be born naturally into the family, but there is subtle pressure to produce few biological children, as the Falkes value contribution over lineage, preferring those who have “earned” rather than “inherited” the right to be a Falke.This complex system of adoption and self-governance has allowed the Falke family to remain clannish while still being adaptable and capable of balancing ritual with bureaucracy. Whether born into it or brought in from outside, to be a Falke is to serve Falke interests.

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The list of ships belonging to Emily's retinue including their naval rating, personal visual touches, captains, and noteworthy crewmembers.

HMS Dandelion

True frigates of the fifth rate are often preferred by skilled Tidewrights over the gun-heavy ships of the line, since their smaller, quicker builds can make better use of their brand of magic, which makes the HMS Dandelion the ideal choice as Emily’s personal vessel. A former Werlyt prize refitted and sold into the Falke Estate, the Dandelion has a single gun deck fitted with thirty-four guns and a lower deck retooled for cargo. She is painted in loud colours and her figurehead bears the likeness of a blindfolded woman. She has been described as haunted and graceful, like her captain.Alongside a quartet of Tidewright journeymen, Emily is accompanied by First Lieutenant Ophelia Mott as well as her cousin and understudy: Doru Falke-Musat.

HMS Pardoner

The Pardoner is your standard old faithful: a two-decked, seventy-four-gunned ship of the line of the third rate. She is made of dark wood and has a figurehead shaped like a mythical bird. Her crew say that she is slow, diligent, and stubborn due to being the the longest-running ship (and a warship at that) in the Falke’s arsenal, which will be celebrating her seventy-third birthday in a few months. The merry, cavalier, and exceedingly-chummy-with-crew Captain Eleanor Falke commands her. Emily’s childhood friend and cousin, Eleanor is one of the few people in her extended family she feels particularly close to, and Emily has occasionally (affectionately) described her as slothful, sensible, and prone to sudden spells of overprotectiveness. Her crew is large and so generally… eager for spoils.

HMS Pauper

While not an official member of the Falke fleet, it is rare to see the Dandelion without the Pauper trundling ponderously behind. A first rate ship of the line, she has a dizzying one hundred and fourteen guns spread across three decks. Painted bright blue and pale yellow, her figurehead is that of a personified hermetic sun. She is commanded by Captain Cuthbert the Red, described as quiet and withdrawn while still managing to be one of Emily’s most vocal supporters in the Tidewright’s Guild. To those who know him better, they say he is eccentric and possessed of ‘fits.’The Pauper is a veritable wizard’s tower made seaworthy and mobile, with Cuthbert an obsessive scholar of nearly anything he can fit into his extensive library in the ship’s abnormally large aftcastle (compensating, some might say), which is treated far more like his permanent home than even his land-side estate. It’s unclear whether this is due to an insatiable sense of wanderlust, reclusive paranoia, or simply because he finds spending time with family ‘disagreeable.’ Due to his proclivity for directing his time and attention on arcane pursuits, long-suffering apprentice and First Lieutenant Madeline Knight and her quartermasters often run the general, day-to-day affairs of the ship.

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Exiles, Conversos, and the Kokkish Heartland

“Solomon? That short for Sau’li Moht or something?”

Adalwolf, Emily, Doru, Solomon, Tabitha, Qiqyat. From the Arlwich Highlands in the western foothills of Coerthas to the White Maiden shoreline of the Twelveswood, from the eastern Vylbrandian fishing settlements of Dunpool to the Sharlayan island-colony of Tuhl, the Kokkish ethnic group presents a persistent challenge to ethnographers and anthropologists seeking cultural definition. This difficulty arises primarily from their wide geographic dispersal and an above-average tendency towards cultural assimilation: Kokkish populations frequently adopt local naming conventions in place of their ancestral lexicon, and their traditional practices are often embedded – intentionally or unintentionally – within the dominant cultural frameworks of their host regions.Recent academic consensus, however, has begun tracing their likely point of origin to an archipelago within the Strait of Merlthor. There, the extant island tribes preserve what are regarded as the most unadulterated forms of Kokkish language, ritual practice, culinary tradition, and religious observance – forms notably absent or significantly diluted among their Vylbrandian counterparts. Likewise, the caldera-like sea geography separating the islands of the archipelago is frequently cited as a contributing factor in their early exodus, particularly up through the western riverine corridors of Aldenard: ancient volcanic activity had most likely fragmented the island communities and necessitated their early migrations and subsequent integrations.Emily's tribe, the Tahn, is one of several that belong to this particular archipelago, and there is little fondness between them and their neighbours who tend to view the islanders and river-nomads as pirates at best and sirens and witches at worst, thanks in no small part to their above-average aetherical affinity and their tendency to use magic in directing their small, maneuverable watercrafts to attack moored and anchored vessels, ferries, and harbours at night.

Metaphysical Ecstasy & the Kokkish Thrill

“It’s in the blood. Matters not for all the makeup and silk, the polished boots or knock-off knight-spurs: they’ll never unknot the wild from their souls.”

Commonly referred to semi-academically as the ‘Kokkish Thrill,’ the most obvious physiological difference that separates the Kokkish from Keepers and Seekers are their intense relationships with aether, which can produce an increased sense of euphoria comparable to hours of spiritual ecstasy or even moderate doses of opium – and, like opium, it has been shown to be addictive, and thus ethically-inhibiting. Naturally, this has informed several aspects of Kokkish culture, most notably their religious sectors, which incorporate vast pantheons of spirits and extensive occult, aethero-arcane rituals that often utilise mythopoetic-charged summoning practices.

Broken Oaths & Busted Stars

“They say they owe devils of their own making a due.”

You can take a bureaucrat from the Isle of Tuhl, a fishwife from Dunpool, and a trapper from Arlwich, and they’ll all agree on the same thing: better to let a lord flay you than to betray an oath. The kind of oath they mean, however, is of a distinct kind called a j'hat which is formalised through a particular ceremony that is believed to render it bound by 'the gods.' This fear transcends one's usual bravado or cultural sense of honour, and instead presents itself as a kind of natural instinct or compulsion with the breaking of one paired with something like mortal terror. Like they know what happens when they do – in their bones.There’s the sadness, too, of course: at the end of evenings – when all their friends depart, when the project comes to a close, when the silence crowds in – sadness is what remains. As if, after everything else is brushed away, that’s what comes natural to them. Sadness, longing, and obsession. Children of nowhere who never know how to leave well enough alone. Some say they’re cursed.

Marital Practices & Black-hearted Lovers

“[...] she tried to crawl inside him as gentle as falling snow. Love can have its own ways of biting, though, and he still has the scars left by her eyes.”

Most Kokkish communities practice some form of Tesharic clan-laws. Taken from the Ilaat root teshar, meaning “to knot or braid,” it refers to a set of hierarchical polyconjugal marital practices — a genderless form of polygamy or polyandry whose hierarchical rules concern themselves chiefly with the question of inheritance as a compromise to the predominantly and legislatively monogamous cultures they often find themselves integrated in. As such, there is often little restriction or care towards affection, so long as the core estate, holdings, land, and/or property do not come under threat because of it. Generally-speaking, the one who inherits will be the firstborn of the parent agreed upon, generally between the first and second union-ceremony, and formalised on the third (and final) one. It is rarely contentious who that will be, as who has the largest holding, prestige, or resources is often self-evident.This laissez-faire, almost practical mentality towards love would come as some surprise to many outsiders that have found themselves on the receiving end of Kokkish affection, however, which is markedly far more intense, emotionally-charged, and… toxic than what is considered modern and popularly-practiced among the city-states. It is no accident that the words “love” and “black” are cognates in many Ilaat dialects, as it often tends to sweep through them with an overwhelming and addictive force that has had some scholars suggest a possible link between it and their aetherial responses. Furthermore, there is no end to myths and stories of black-hearted lovers as cultural heroes, humiliating and destroying their love rivals, kidnapping the objects of their affection, and defying the gods to cataclysmic results in the name of their ardour.

Gender & A Magus’ Subtle Puberty

Fully-clothed in androgynous attire and style, it would be hard to distinguish between pure Kokkish male and female adults due to the low range of visual secondary sex characteristics that present itself during puberty. Certainly, females experience a widening of hips and enlargement of breast tissue, but beyond this gendered signs are modest, easily overlooked, and not exclusive to one or the other. Instead, their body focuses far more on internal mechanisms, with special attention given to an abnormally high metabolism to support what seems to be its central component: maturing the exceedingly abundant number of aetherial glands throughout their body. Due to this, along with one’s usual ‘catastrophic’ range of emotions during this tender stage in one’s life, Kokkish youths often have to deal with and learn how to control a rapidly developing, abnormally high, and often runaway capacity for sorcery.

Chitin, Caldera, Cuisine!

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Lexicon

In a worldbuilding sense, I will occasionally use invented words or words I've somewhat altered the meaning of to suit the character or setting. I've provided a non-exhaustive, work-in-progress list of some of these: