…some of you have made known your disagreement. I understand. What I claim is not that the Unchosen are incapable of sympathy or help for us; indeed, I myself have experienced both. But the nature of the problem remains: whatever the inclinations of individuals, the Unchosen, as a group, fear us and mistrust us, and they do the same to any among them who question this state of affairs. To undo this mistrust would take a thousand cycles, for all of which we would be at risk… no. The gods have made the future for our use. If we are to live long enough to reach for it, then the Unchosen must be removed as an obstacle, though I say it in sadness.

Dlyss' First Sermon

• Common name: Dlyss
• RP status: RP character, played by Shyriath

• Full name: Dlyss [dɮɯsː]
• Nicknames or aliases: Dlyss daughter of Ybess (birth name); the Oracle (epithet); Telyth (Zadireth's pet name)
• Date of birth: 78 Cloud 21:15
• Place of birth: Kassi, the Velestrin

• Biological sex: Female
• Gender identity: Female
• Sexual orientation: Androphilic in choice of partners, but her actual level of attraction to anyone is unclear

• Species: Takma (Chosen)
• Race: Highland
• Ethnic origin: Velestric
• Current ethnic identification: Ghyezramsi
• Native language: Velestric
• Other languages spoken: Contemporary Imperial, Ghyezramsi

• Alignment: Srian
• Magical attunement: Span

Dlyss is largely blue-violet in color, shading to purple on the underside of her neck and chest. She is a fairly typical representative of the Highland race of takmar in terms of shape, with a wide head, a short, blunt muzzle, and a thick chest, though for a Chosen of that race she is slightly tall. She is heavyset, and has some padding around the stomach and thighs resulting from motherhood, but is nonetheless remarkably trim and a healthy weight for her size.

Dlyss has a wide face with prominent cheekbones, a well-defined jawline, and a relatively short, blunt muzzle. Her eyes, which are icy blue, are surrounded by facial markings in the form of concentric arcs, somewhat like ripples on the otherwise calm surface of a pond.

Dlyss habitually wears a rough, fleecy white robe, which she is rarely seen without, and resembles the garb of an Imperial priestess, though it is also provides warmth in the sometimes chilly weather of the highlands. She is even more rarely without her marriage-chain: around her neck is a thin silver chain with three charms attached to it, one for each husband.

Dlyss is driven by the aim of the dominance of the Chosen over avishraa, and the extermination of all other takmar, though it is unclear whether either the xtauh and the orghysh are similarly targets of her mistrust. All of her actions are, ultimately, devoted toward these intertwined ends, which she believes are the will and intention of the gods.

In many ways, Dlyss is a genuinely selfless person; she is strongly concerned for the welfare of her fellow Chosen and is willing to personally intervene to promote it, not merely pulling strings with others but spending her own time and resources to do so. She is also brave, and will risk her own life if the need is there and the cause is just. (If there is a dark side to this, it is that she is also quite willing to risk others' lives and fortunes as well.)

Having superior knowledge of the future, and what she feels is a superior knowledge of the will of the gods, Dlyss long ago came to the conclusion that she is best placed to direct the Chosen to their destiny individually or as a group; others are acting on imperfect information, flawed reasoning, or both, and their opinions and needs are secondary even when they are reasonable. As a result, she has strong autocratic impulses and has no qualms about issuing orders to those who she is able to have obey them. She prefers willing cooperation and understanding, but will resort to deception, fear, or violence as the situation requires.

Her ability to see various futures does not free her of her own biases in choosing which ones are desirable. Peace with the Unchosen takmar is a dream of many Chosen of the Citadel, but Dlyss has done much to minimize the possibility of it, to the extent of deliberately underestimating its likelihood as a future.

She is, by nature, a cold and calculating individual; she feels that one's passions should have no place in one's thinking. Within the bounds of her own convictions, therefore, she tends to think things out logically - though whether the convictions themselves are logical might be open to dispute.

The twin pillars of Dlyss' worldview are religion - specifically her own interpretation of the imperial_religion - and the manifest destiny of the Chosen. She believes that the gods have created the Chosen to inherit the world over their nonmagical brethren, and that it is the duty of the Chosen to accept that mantle.

She has argued that this requires the Chosen to act both toward each other and toward the Unchosen. In the former case, it is incumbent upon them to pull together and support one another against a hostile world and a hostile species; this is the stated motivation behind Dlyss' charitable work and sponsorship of the 'rescue missions' sent out into the world to bring back Chosen to the Citadel. In the latter, she argues that - ultimately - peaceful coexistence with the Unchosen is neither possible nor desirable. In the end, the Chosen must either sweep them away or be swept away by them, and while it is not yet possible to do the one, preventing the other must be the short-term priority.

Dlyss is willing to subordinate much to the above goals, to die for them and to kill for them, and she encourages others to do so as well. The survival and the destiny of the Chosen go hand in hand; to embrace one is to embrace the other, and to reject one is to reject the other. And what, in the end, could be more important than survival?

Dlyss espouses, and indeed preaches, a form of the Imperial religion that is not organizationally affiliated with that elsewhere on the continent, and would be considered rather heterodox. Firstly, and rather unsurprisingly, she teaches that the gods not only do not disapprove of the Chosen, but were responsible for their creation and made them to be the heralds of Their will: an improvement on, and replacement of, the takmar who had been Their first children.

Secondly, she emphasizes that the lamnar, the inscrutable gods of nature and cosmic forces, should be revered and worshiped just as the Siathar are. Clearly, many aspects of the Chosen - their powers in Lamna domains, their division between Srian and Kaean - echo the Lamnar, who must therefore have played a role in their creation and should be honored for it.

As there are too many gods altogether to worship them all efficiently, she has chosen as her patrons, and holds a special reverence for, the Diarchs, seluurin and khezri. Regardless, she invokes other gods frequently during her speeches, and often pauses for a moment of respect when passing by temples or idols.

While she will reprimand impiety, she does not, oddly enough, seem to consider following a different faith to be a sign of impiety in itself - so long as it has some god or gods governing it. When asked about this, she will tend to reply that “the gods wear many guises”.

Dlyss is introverted and prefers to have periods of solitude in which to refresh her thoughts; she has difficulty relating to others, even husbands and children. Partly this is due to her ability to see through time and space; not only does the lack of this ability in others make it difficult to discuss certain subjects - at least without causing considerable confusion, frustration, or at minimum a level of awe that interferes with the course of conversation - but the fact that she can foresee the way many given conversations will go in the first place means that she often feels no need to converse at all, or to continue with a conversation once she is able to divine its future path. She also has a natural tendency toward reticence due to the terrible futures she foresaw in her youth as a consequence of speaking out; taken together, she often prefers silence.

That said, she is not shy as such, and will speak to someone if she feels they need to be spoken to, whether it be one person or (as she prefers) a crowd of them. She is capable of considerable eloquence, but is not a passionate speaker; the air she projects is generally one of serene certainty. Though occasionally seeming distracted, to those aware of her abilities this often comes across as ethereal preoccupation. During these times, she speaks quietly and vaguely.

Dlyss has little aptitude for idle conversation; she is only erratically interested in disclosing information about herself, and her powers afford her the ability to learn much of what she cares to know about others. Indeed, being able to foresee the potential future courses of conversations, actually holding the conversation can seem like something of a pantomime to her as a result. Suppressing her impatience with social interaction is a constant struggle.

She cares deeply about the fate of her fellow Chosen; she prefers not to be unnecessarily cruel even to her enemies in the Citadel, and her humility and civility are matters of public record.

Dlyss' ear for precise spacing and timing causes her to be extremely discerning in regards to art. She is, particular, not inclined to listen to performances of music, as even tiny flaws in the rhythm can drive her to distraction.

For a Srian, Dlyss is remarkably flexible in what she is willing to tolerate; there are a few cultural taboos she shares with others, but on a personal level she will suffer much without particular complaint. She is, however, liable to chide other Chosen for deliberate impiety - even toward gods other than her own - or for choosing to remain childless, which she considers a dereliction of one of the highest duties: to maintain and increase the numbers of one's people.

She is extremely reluctant to demonstrate more than mild emotions around others.

Faced with all the horrors, tragedies, and personal threats visible to one who can see through time, one finds it very difficult to hide the knowledge of the world's danger behind pink fluffy clouds of uncertainty. An Oracle knows everything that can go wrong, how it would happen, and how likely it is to do so. Out of the ways one has available to deal with this, Dlyss has undergone a kind of emotional distancing, looking out on the world passionlessly and with a cold, meticulous eye; her symptoms are reminiscent of schizoid personality disorder.

Dlyss is an oracle - indeed, she is The Oracle, the only one currently known to be alive, Span magic being by far the rarest kind. She has also spent much time exploring the boundaries of her abilities, though she has shared them with few people.

She has the ability to navigate possible futures - to see what events lead to which consequences and how likely each one is. She has also demonstrated the ability to see into the past, and to use this knowledge to learn about those she is about to become acquainted with and to acquire insights into history. She can also see across distance. There are 'soft' boundaries to the ability to see into the future, in that the further away from the “here and now” she attempts to see, the less certainty there is, an effect she has likened to the way atmospheric haze colors everything more strongly with increasing distance.

She is able to transport herself, or other objects, between two points in space without passing through the space between them, though this has a much shorter range than her sight. To her eternal disappointment, she is unable to circumvent time; unless some contrivance involving relativistic effects could be created, she cannot travel into the past at all and can only travel into the future at the mandated rate of one second per second.

She is rumored to be able to do many other strange and terrible things, not immediately obvious, by shaping and carving space, but she has shown no inclination to share these with the public.

Aside from magic, Dlyss has an excellent ability to judge distance and time - which, given her abilities, is probably unsurprising. She is liable to notice small imperfections in pattern or rhythm and to be annoyed by them.

Dlyss lacks any formal education. That said, her ability to see not only into the future, but the past, has given her a wealth of what might be loosely termed observational data on takma nature, political currents, and historical events. Any other skills and knowledge she has acquired were achieved through experimentation and practice, and occasional collaboration with particular trusted individuals.

She did not learn to write until late in life. Although she has an impressive command of spoken language when she has the inclination, her handwriting consists of the careful, exaggerated letters of a child practicing in class.

She was an unemployed mendicant for much of her life, but since arriving at the Citadel has made her living as a sort of consultant, hiring herself out to various individuals to advise them on the consequences of various courses of action. For some time now she has been paid by the Citadel Council to act as an adviser on matters of state, and regularly attends their meetings, though she is not herself a councilor nor eligible to vote.

Dlyss is quite wealthy, and lives in a tastefully but expensively decorated mansion. The chambers are in the Inner Court, the desirable subterranean quarter of Oldstone; the mansion is on the Third Level, and therefore not quite as prestigious as the monumental compounds on the First Level, but it marks her as among the Citadel's elite. In order to maintain and protect the property, she retains a number of guards and staff.

She also owns a number of other properties, particularly in and around Oldstone but found throughout the territory of the Citadel. Currently, much of her income comes from the tenants on these properties, though some of them are devoted to low- or no-cost housing for incoming Chosen refugees.

Dlyss hatched in 78 Cloud in Kassi, a lakeside village in the Velestrin, a thickly wooded and lake-dotted plateau in the highlands abutting the Spine of Sirdanth. Her mother, Ybess, was the village priestess; her only father was Gurass, a trapper.

From an early age, she had had dreams of things that had yet to pass - some mundane, some wonderful, some terrible. Her parents paid no heed until Dlyss began to experience visions while awake. Increasingly, she foresaw events surrounding herself and those close to her, and some of them began to come true. As she neared her first cycle of age, she began to be able to direct her inner vision where she willed, to see the distant past and countless futures, each containing its share of horrors.

Her mother could not tell if this was some double-edged gift of the gods - for, however useful Dlyss found her visions, their contents kept her awake through many nights. Ybess watched her daughter become indifferent to the world, almost numb, and to shy away from affection. More alarming still, her growth began to lag behind even that of her brothers, and Ybess found herself increasingly worrying that she had birthed a witch.

Ybess was a priestess, a religious woman. A witch could not be suffered to live, even one's own daughter. But Dlyss, who saw the future bloom like a dark flower with paths ending in her own death at her mother's paws, snuck away before Ybess could convince herself of her daughter's nature.

Dlyss spent much of her formative years wandering the highlands, using prescience to find food, safe places to rest, and sympathetic assistance. She learned to disdain the latter for its inconstancy in the future, for there were far too many timelines in which, fearing for their own lives, her hosts would betray her to those who would have her executed. As she grew into adolescence and became more self-sufficient, she increasingly avoided normal takmar, feeling that they could not truly be trusted.

In the paths of the future she saw a destination, a citadel where others like her had already made their home and she could be safe, but she felt that something must be done before she arrived there. The something proved to be a meeting with Zadireth, a young Chosen and thief with a quick tongue, a charming demeanor, and a spectacular lack of morals. Dlyss saw, in being paired with him, a great opening of opportunities, and obtained his cooperation with the promise of wealth and importance.

Whether they could be said to have developed feelings for one another in the usual sense is open for debate. But it was clear that they found each other very useful, and, in an intellectual sense, were appreciative of each other. Zadireth's questions about her abilities pushed her to explore the limits of what she could do, and she learned much from him about the motivation and manipulation of people; while he profited greatly from her visions regarding himself.

When the pair arrived in the Citadel, they raised a stir. Oracles, those who could see through time and space, were astonishingly rare, and Dlyss, buoyed by Zadireth's ability to grab attention for her, brought a message of a future in which the Chosen would be pitted against other takmar, after which - should they be victorious - they would replace their nonmagical forbears, as intended by the gods. For those who were not content with the thought of forever cowering in some hidden refuge, the message was potent.

Dlyss became wealthy providing glimpses of the future to those who paid her, and soon became a source of advice for the Citadel Council itself. Already viewed almost as a prophet, she and Zadireth built an ever-increasing following through a combination of public sermons and charitable works, particularly on behalf of those who, like them, had fled from the outside world.

Dlyss is now a major political player in her own right. Her strident calls for Chosen unity and greatness appeal to many, and her public munificence seems to her supporters to be her own attempt to support this goal. The other powers that be have become increasingly wary of her and her motivations, unsure what she intends to do in the name of her crusade.

Dlyss' parents are Ybess, a village priestess in the Velestrin, and Gurass, a trapper. She has not seen either of them since she was very young and, since they are Unchosen, has no interest in speaking with them.

She has three husbands: Zadireth, Hejroth, and Keihaf. While she is cordial with all of them, she appears to exhibit a slightly more close and comfortable attitude around Zadireth.

As of 84 Cloud 27, she has thirteen children, in five clutches:

1. A daughter, Juhyriss, and a son, Pedhiss;
2. A daughter, Karuss, and two sons, Oliss and Hirass;
3. Two daughters, Enbelyss and Enkalyss, and a son, Lodiss;
4. A daughter, Toress, and a son, Abrass;
5. Three sons, Kelath, Abeth, and Hwistaf. While Dlyss had named all the previous children, beginning with this clutch she permitted their fathers to begin choosing names.

Dlyss takes a keen interest in the upbringing and well-being of her children, but is not emotionally close with them; her treatment of them has more in common with that of students or followers than family members. As her eldest daughter, Juhyriss, has become older, the two have started to connect on at least an intellectual level, though they are not much alike in personality.

Among the staff in Dlyss' employ are Rashath, possibly the most favored among her footmen; illusionist and Writer Enneth; and, more recently, the biomancer Einriss. Though often demanding of those who serve her, she attempts nonetheless to reward loyal and efficient service with fair payment and a civil attitude.

The demogogue Mortoth, by contrast, receives no easily measured benefit from his association with Dlyss, but is a far more fervent follower. Effectively the spokesman for the Friends of the Future, he represents the 'grassroots' support for the Oracle's teachings within the Citadel. Dlyss regards him highly as a loyal supporter, and they confer often.

One of her more adversarial relationships is with Jorith, a member of the Citadel Council. Jorith is openly skeptical of Dlyss' motivations and her continued accumulation of wealth and power, and Dlyss finds her constant questioning and attempts at oversight to be a hinderance to her mission.

Dlyss' only official affiliation of note is her work as a consultant and adviser for the Council, which entitles her to participate - though not vote - in Council sessions. Though her influence is often felt, there is a sizable minority that seeks to curb it: out of jealously, political opposition, or simple mistrust of her motives.

Though she has no formal ties with the organization known as the Friends of the Future, they are nonetheless closely associated, the Friends having been formed on the explicit basis of adhering to Dlyss' teachings and publicizing her predictions. Much of her charitable work is carried out with their assistance, and they are inclined both to follow her suggestions and encourage others - with varying degrees of insistence - to do the same.

• “Faith of Jevel”, Bastion Soundtrack OST
• “Cold Tectonics”, The Ur-Quan Masters, Soundtrack III: The Ur-Quan Hierarchy
• “Extraterrestrial Lifeforms”, The Ur-Quan Masters, Soundtrack III: The Ur-Quan Hierarchy
• “The Brink of Time”, Chrono Trigger OST