Arden Weitkamp



Arden Weitkamp is a former Bell Prix Wizarding Academy novitiate and abjurer in the employ of Harlowe's Adventure Brokerage Service. He is accompanied by his bloodthirsty white hawk familiar, Otalmo. What Arden lacks in wisdom and charisma he makes up for in passionate existential crises. He is a monster of love and fear, priest of intellect, and he can make any disparate circumstance relate in some traumatic way to his little brother.

He has to grow cold, and he does not want to grow cold.

In some circles, Arden Weitkamp is known as Arden the Bold for his bravery, cunning, and loyalty for grappling a lich.

Early Life in Thimbleriver
Arden is the eldest son of the weavers Magerin and Werla Filkey, once-noted artisans and reasonably successful business people, as well as the brother of Eusebio Filkey: spree killer. He lived thirteen comfortable years along the Gruskott Delta in Thimbleriver, a village so miniature as to be ignored on most maps and then so ill-fated as to be excluded for fear of depressing tourists.

Arden was unpopular with his peers as a child, due to his filial piety and intolerance of brutality, as well as an unabashed enthusiasm about books. He was labeled a wet blanket at best and narc at worst, and spent a great deal of time alone, reading in the fields amid his parent's sheep, or tagging at the heels of grownups whom he annoyed with somber interrogations about practical life.



Among the adults he idolized, in particular, Thimbleriver's original claim to fame: the small-time Consortium druid Elty Treetalker. Plain and matter-o-fact, with a voice as ponderous and lilting as wind in the cattails, Elty was twenty-two. She had been born in Thimbleriver but traveled wide, only to attain employment and return as a field & game surveyor on her home delta.

When Arden yearned for a greater world, Elty told him stories with sparkling eyes, and when he yearned to meet the authors of the books she lent him, the druid made it clear one could escape Thimbleriver. But when Arden could not imagine living anywhere else, among any other people, Elty made it clear one could always return. She was his mentor, his friend in a way, but often absent.

So Arden's academic ambitions developed on par with his loneliness, and his desire for a respected, earned Place. Regarded with patience as a kind of curio, and under the encouragement (sometimes funding) of Elty Treetalker, his parents indulged his scholarship with a diet of ragtag manuscripts procured on trade sojourns to the larger cities.

Little Brother
If a life such as Elty's became Arden's goal, it was distant, and in the meantime he had only his brother Eusebio to improve against. Three years younger but infinitely more charismatic, Eusebio served as playmate and liaison to the other children when he felt benevolent towards Arden, ringleader in ostracism when he did not. His capriciousness made him a tenuous ally.

But Eusebio displayed magical talents to rival and reflect Arden's. As works-in-progress they were indelibly bonded against the mundane backdrop of a farming village and parents of middling intelligence and little arcane aptitude. Still, Eusebio scoffed at Arden's bookishness, his staunch reluctance, not to mention his inability to perform magic without text.


 * "You need permission from old dead people," he said, "So that you can hide behind them when something goes wrong."


 * "I don't want to get anything wrong," Arden replied on any number of occasions.


 * "That's why you'll never get anything terribly right."  And then, laughing, Eusebio went out to play.

Arden feared his brother's lackadaisicalness and admired his force-of-living. How he led screaming children like a pack of devils through the marsh. Made daytime mythologies from his midnight will-o-wisps. And it became obvious that Eusebio held back in their small magic shows for grownups. He held back in practice together. He made a condescending, smiling secret of his real talents.

And they were far greater than Arden's, developing far more quickly.

Wild Things

 * "If I go away to the Wizarding Academy," Arden said, looking up from a crumpled old copy of Finroy's Common Cryptics to watch Elty Treetalker comb the marshbed, "What do I do with Eusebio? Just leave him alone to run amok?"


 * Elty smiled and did not look up to see his knit brow, his genuine hand-wringing. "Why not?" she said. "What's wrong with wild things?" she said.


 * "When you go to Wizarding Academy," she corrected.

Dreams
Eusebio nearly choked from guffaws when Arden suggested they become wizards of the Elder Consortium. He offered two dreams in kind:

1) It spreads quickly to humans: soft bodies like bagworms, swelling, swelling, then bursting, like great balloons, cascades of blood spilling from every doorway in the village and the river rises an inch, all red. Then the blood boils, sets fire to the town, or perhaps it's you who sets the fire, Denny. I shovel the pulp of bodies with my hands to choke the flames but it's too late.


 * Don't you think bodies oughta be sturdier by now? How can bodies be improved?

2) We run a kind of highly lucrative business in which one puts a speck of dirt, or a pebble or some solid irritant onto a person's eyeball, and the eye produces a protective glaze that, over time, grows into a pearl. It seems to be painful, but the pearls are a highly sought-after spell component. I know you're involved because you've invented a way to keep people from crying and washing the irritant out.


 * Real-world application? You have these concerns about people crying.


 * Will your kindness allow you to create anything unique? Will your kindness prove useful to anyone, Denny? Yes or No. If yes, kindly tolerate fifty lashes from us townschildren with the cattail of your choosing.


 * If no: same.

Daylit World
Arden felt that something terrible on the horizon had its sights trained directly on he and Eusebio. That he should prepare amid his disparate pamphlets bearing the stamps of seemingly unattainable cities. The words he could not comprehend until he solved some pattern in them. He and his brother laid in the dark on stacks of their parents' opulently dyed carpets, and Eusebio whispered brutalities. Arden's efforts redoubled, driven on borrowed nightmares.

Yet during the day Arden tried to squash his imagination, so frequently paranoiac. As if two wizard boys were special! As though Eusebio was more than a simple sorcerer, unfocused and running feral! His macabre interests posed no threat to a daylit world. The adults laughed with Eusebio. Beloved Eusebio. Advised patience rather than sullenness, and at the time he found adults inherently worthy of faith.

Arden worked to keep the chip off his shoulder. He made an habit out of stoicism mistaken for dignity. Thimbleriver told him to sleep more, sing more, be more of a child who ran in the marsh, and he tried to obey and failed. Spring in the Delta was spectacular, flowers wreathing their patron fertility icon's hair. But the honeysuckle and blood orange breath of their goddess never blew the dark clouds from his mind.

How can bodies be improved?

Waterfowl
On a particularly warm day buzzing with insects, heady despite the acrid undercurrent of livestock, algae and still water, Elty Treetalker summoned Arden to a short journey down the Delta "to help her catalog waterfowl," she said. To discuss his leaving for the Academy a bit sooner, she meant, treating him seriously inasmuch as she mistook his growing stress for run-of-the-mill backwater restlessness.

Arden made for the ford to meet her, kicking along the water's edge, when from the corner of his eye he spied bright threads of wool tied in the bulrushes. Colors from his parents' workshop. Eusebio demarcated his secret paths this way, but these were much further from Thimbleriver than Arden had suspected his brother of traveling.

''Will your kindness prove useful to anyone? Yes or No. ''

''If yes, kindly tolerate fifty lashes with the cattail of your choosing. ''

If no: same.

Arden investigated one trail picketed through the deep reeds, idly collecting threads as he went, and then stumbled into a clearing, and then found his brother's altars. Fifty lashes of your choosing, he thought. Odes to vivisection sinking in red-foamed mud.

Eusebio's specialties in necromancy and blood magic, distinctions Arden would only identify in retrospect, paled against his brother's bloodstained humor. His churches. Cattails of your tolerance.

Arden stood very still, and looked down at a dead frog bobbing, over-inflated, by his right foot. Cattails of your kindness. He remembered, suddenly, at random, that their Winter goddess patronized fire. Winter was months away, but he turned and ran home as quickly as he could, ciphers gone to pieces in his mind.

How can bodies be improved?

Family Business
Arden found that Thimbleriver was not boiling its blood. And that sitting in their home, impossibly nonchalant, up on a tower of carpets eating strawberries, was Eusebio. Arden crept past him, their stares locked and grim. His fists trembled, stuffed with bright thread.

Finally, Eusebio rolled his eyes and grinned. Arden thought about beasts, shrikes. Mindless things without Eusebio's humor. His brother once folding a pile of tiny bones into his hand, "You could crush these in an instant. Isn't that frustrating?" His brother often poking at the fat of his belly, "A pin could pop you. You'd flood the house... Stain all these carpets. Forget wizarding, let's take up the family business."

Arden looked out the window at his parents hefting drums of dye. Numb as dreams his body moved outside to help them. "Do some work for once," he chastised Eusebio, a whisper catching halfway.


 * "Do a little less," his brother automatically replied.

Werla and Magerin smiled to see him, inquired after his journey, and Arden levered his fingers open. The breeze carried Eusebio's threads in lazy somersaults away across the field. He hefted a drum of dye with care, imagining as he always did that it might burst in his arms.

Eusebio's laughter from somewhere indoors.

Arden thought this chill should never leave his spine.

Calcifying Theory
Nothing occurred and nothing was said until Winter, when the hearth goddess came into her season. Arden kept his brother's secret because he had no idea how to confront it. What to do with it. What the villagers would do to him. Elty had gone on another survey; Arden was on his own.

Eusebio casually terrorized him: feinting honesty in the middle of normal family dinners, parading townschildren away from Arden who spluttered insane-sounding protests.

But in private Eusebio admitted that he had been quite scared of the soft bodies. The seeping fragility in things. (His eyes lit up in nothing close to fear when he said this). He had a calcifying theory in the works, based on exoskeletons, that might be prepared in time, but they'd just have to see.


 * "In time for what, exactly?" Arden asked, his stomach forming a fist.


 * Eusebio smiled at him in faint pity.


 * "What if I turned out to be a seer, Denny?" he said. "Wouldn't that be just like me?"

Arden thought his brother was very sick. He thought he loved his brother anyway. And this madness-- these mad ideas of his-- were a puzzle. Like a spell in a book. It could be solved, with time.

So it could not be said he was surprised, or entirely faultless, when Eusebio's Spilling sickness took Thimbleriver. It could be said that Arden simply ran out of time.

Promised
It took two days, at the end of Winter. One forgets how much blood can fit inside living things, until it's no longer inside them. The little streams criss-crossing the village, feeding the Delta, flooded three inches as promised. Thimbleriver dressed in red.

World of Color
Arden recalls being dragged to his feet by his father at sunset on the third day. He was wedged half-beneath a sodden log, filthy and nearly drowned in marsh water. Completely numb, agonizingly stiff. He wondered if this was the "exoskeleton," if that was what saved him, if that was why Eusebio seemed cheerful. Dancing before them like a puppy through the reeds. Red foam frothing around his ankles.

In truth Arden had fled during the first day, spontaneously produced a Shield, and hidden beneath it. Hence the exhaustion. The winter: this cold. His flesh remained flesh. Fifty lashes for your secrecy. How had they survived? Eusebio's cheerfulness. His father all ashen; mumbling about leaving town immediately. Arden mumbled an apology no one heard.

He dreams of this often. Cattails whipping his face. Sliding, sinking in the mud. Becoming colder and colder. His mother listlessly observing, beside him on the back of a hay cart, "You've got your nice white clothes dirty, my love."


 * "He's branching out into the world of color," Eusebio's defense.

Peel
Werla and Magerin removed their sons to a scorch mark of a trapping town called Peel, near West Midden. They adopted different names (Jarod and Mirryl Oshman), attempted new trades, and wore new clothes. They avoided long conversations; had nothing whatsoever to say about Thimbleriver. And though they tried to carry on in the role of loving and optimistic parents, they inadvertently treated Arden and Eusebio like aliens. Wasted away from them by depression and fear.

Arden never forgave them, or adults in general, for abandoning him to the horror of his past. And in so doing, making him the sole keeper of Eusebio. Making him alone the person who would, or could be responsible for this creature on earth. He knows that blaming them is quantifiably ridiculous, besides hateful of him. But there is nothing quite like looking into the faces of parents who had loved you, who had always reassured you, begging them to be there for your pain-- only to watch their expressions turn plastic with denial, before they turn away.

If he brought up the question of Eusebio, there was no past, there had been no murders, and Eusebio was no more clever or dangerous than a lazy family pet. The question and the problem were his to answer alone.

Stained Delta
Loose ends remain: Elty Treetalker may have survived the Spilling by virtue of being completely absent from Thimbleriver while at her work. Or she might have returned, and been liquefied like the rest of the townsfolk-- like the rest of her family. Made into a stain on her Delta.

In any case Arden has not heard from her since. He hopes she is alive, but cannot contact her out of shame and protectiveness. Questions have occurred to him lately: how could a druid surveying the marshland miss Eusebio's happy tableaus? Had she known about them all along, and kept the secret for her own reasons? Was the massacre a Consortium trap, an experiment? Did Eusebio simply dispose of her first, and nobody noticed?

Even knowing the true nature of the Elder Consortium now, Arden is disinclined to doubt her sincerity. He still combats his paranoia. Elty had seemed a true friend to him, without ulterior motives. She had wanted him to enter the Academy at Bell Prix to meet his potential. In the next two years of hiding in Peel, this became Arden's goal more firmly. Salvaging the ghost of old dreams, that had made an old friendship, and any hope whatsoever feel real.

Dachech the Witch
He lived in his studies. Spoke hardly, averted his eyes from everything beyond books and his brother. Eusebio made no particular nuisance of himself, though the slyness in his carriage became more pronounced, maybe smug. Without friends and the support of total popularity, he quieted. Seemed to be waiting.

Arden was busy with the puzzle of his fate-- knowing it would be up to him to reach Bell Prix. He was advised by various drunken Peel trappers to contact somebody named Dachech. She helped one gain a new life, apparently. And conveniently, made her home in the Bell Prix slums. A few questions and coins taught him her full title: Dachech the Witch. Still nothing could scare him more than Eusebio.

Upon turning fifteen, Arden-- still called Arden Oshman-- accompanied his father to Bell Prix for trade. He had nagged for this trip to occur, in fact hostilely demanded that it occur on pain of Truth. He did not intend to return to Peel. And Bell Prix was beautiful to his eyes, splendid, every dream Elty had ever given him. (It could have looked like a trashcan and he would have loved it, and made it viciously his own).

A few "wrong" turns, a few more questions and coins, and he found Dachech. Her rodent hole of a house wound downwards between two crushed-together old buildings. Ancient but upright, not the unkempt crone he'd imagined, she met him with heterochromic leering and severe haughtiness. Swept him into a room stuffed floor-to-ceiling with sheaves of paper and weirdly taxidermied cats.



She recognized him, Dachech said. Knew his brother. (Whom she enjoyed quite a lot more). No not recently; she claimed to have met them when they were tiny, though Arden swears he'd remember this.


 * "Your brother has become famous. In some circles," Dachech said.


 * "What circles?" Arden snapped. Certain she was reading his mind, certain she was lying to upset him.


 * "My circle. With skills like his, the Consortium will either wanna have him or kill'm. Yours are less interesting. You have somewhat less to worry about. But how would you like the Consortium to receive you, dear?"


 * "I don't want to be famous," he said. Hating her then, this enemy of the Consortium. Enemy of his then-hope.


 * "No fear of that. History is made by people like your brother." She scribbled in her million ledgers, sometimes glancing up at him with boredom.


 * "Murderers?" he said.


 * "Doers," she laughed. "Those who do, Mr. Filkey."

Dachech asked him why he wouldn't keep the fake, unremarkable name he had then, Be an Arden "Oshman," achieve nothing. Be the pulpy, unpleasant brother. He just wanted to enter the Academy, he reasoned, gritting his teeth. To improve himself. Without anyone knowing his connection to the Filkey family, or that he even had a brother. Her specialty, namely.

Dachech considered, and sneered and sent him away, then called him right back. She waved her usual fees, in honor of his interesting brother. That Arden might learn something, she said. That he might become something better than himself. An ambition she could get behind.

In no position to question the motive, Arden accepted the miracle.

Weitkamp
So she forged him into a "Weitkamp," pen flying across ledgers. Some recent-orphan in need of a scholarship, hardly more rich, or more honorable, or more-known than a Filkey or an Oshman. But a good Ostberg name, should he not prove entirely inept at magic when the Academy recruiter asked for a demonstration. And anyway she'd have the recruiter drugged with a potion of idiocy, beforehand, so odds were even someone useless as him could get through.

If he somehow managed to get murdered or found out, not her problem. The papers would be in order; her reputation was sound. Just don't count on further handouts. This debt goes the other way, Mr. Weitkamp. And perhaps do not contact her again, she'd contact him first. (But Eusebio, welcome anytime).

Arden thought he would not contact her again if he was held at knife point. This criminal he has used as a witness protection program.

He told his father the truth and sent him back to Peel alone.

And he entered the Academy alone. Shortly thereafter receiving word from his mother ("M. Weitkamp") that Eusebio had run away from Peel, and his parents would not follow him. He reassured her that this was the right thing to do while grinding his back teeth together. And though it was too late for him to turn back from the Academy, he was determined; fate had been decided:

Eusebio was too strong for him. So Arden would take up abjuration, and study at Bell Prix in order to defeat him in the future. Destroy him. Or save him. Just... stop him. His overwhelming, pathological need to Protect everything a direct result of the events at Thimbleriver.

Though how he sees this quest ending changes by the hour of the day. Arden is constantly confronted by, and berating himself for his weakness, always reminded of Eusebio's early out-striding that got everybody he knew murdered. In his mind, as the single responsible party, he MUST become strong enough, smart enough to face Eusebio. Or everybody else pays the price.

This has become his obsession and his quest, but the feelings behind it-- the helplessness and homelessness and self-sacrifice-- often explode without direction. Inflict themselves inordinately. His loves compulsive, his home-making unseemly. His confusion unbearable. He somehow manages to remain hurt by a world that gets progressively worse, in novel ways. As though he expects better from it. Or wants better so fiercely that all life can do is disappoint him.

Luckily, he blames himself rather than others for the dissonance. The universe will hold itself together when he has grown strong enough to do his work, he believes. Entropy is the only Constant, he believes. And then there will be rest, he believes in his wildest dreams.

Adventures
At Bell Prix he suffered the Enchanted Fish episode, and upon accelerated  "graduation" from the school, won an inauspicious work assignment to Marla Harlowe's brigands in the Tome and Void saga.

Quotes
"I can't go! I have something to live for!"

to Susuru: "We both look like doe-eyed students, so..."

"I can't believe I signed up for this." / Brecca: "You'll say that many times throughout your life, Arden. Get used to it."

"Do you like it when people cause themselves to get hurt, Zacharias?" *mic drop*

"Can that be our name? 'Schwertkind's Throwaways'?"

Arden: "And if we are bleeding from our bodies... you can STOP it, right?" Geleon: "Oh yes. I can use my DIVINE GRACE to save you all. from wounds. and death. and evil." Arden: "Especially evil ;)" Geleon: "ESPECIALLY that :D"

Arden: "What's the point in anything, Caiaphus?" /  Caiaphus: "There is no point. Only an end."

"I wanna wake up from the dream now!"