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bloodychangeling) wrote2023-05-27 04:06 pm
[Info Sheet]
October Daye has never belonged to one world. Maybe if her mother had been given more time with her as a child to bend the balance of her blood, she might have. Maybe she would have grown up unable to see pixies waging war in the aisles of the local Safeway and with no kelpies trying to coax her onto their backs as she walked home.
Maybe. But that would be the story of another girl. Maybe she would be softer, growing up with two parents who loved her without restraint, instead of a mother who suddenly stopped touching her and only half a memory of a father she never got to say goodbye to. The story Toby has, though, is that of someone who has always been torn between two extremes that can never quite meet, and the friction has worn her away in places she barely remembers being soft. Being the daughter of Amandine, the greatest bloodworker in Faerie, made nearly every noble she met place high expectations on her before they were introduced--but being the daughter of a human man also made them expect her to fall short of those expectations before she could even try to prove herself. Everything Toby has for herself has been hard won, and she is never able to forget that. While the fact she openly detests the trappings of Fae courts and avoids formal functions as much as she can, this is because she knows she is always being held to a higher standard than nearly anyone else because she is not only Amandine's daughter, not only a Knight of the Hero Duke Sylvster Torquill--but that she is those things but also only a changeling. She has risen higher than many believe she ever had any right to, and there will always be someone looking for any excuse to remind her of that and to try to kick her back down the ladder she's barely been able to cling to for as long as she can remember.
Despite the prejudices and unfair expectations surrounding her, though, Toby is not inherently prejudiced against purebloods herself. Some of the people she loves most in he world--including her squire and the girl she now calls her twin--are purebloods. What she hates, from anyone, is when they heap expectations about what someone can be on them before that person has even opened their mouth. Being both her mother's daughter and a changeling made Toby both sharper and gentler than many would have expected, a woman who drops every swear in the book when it's appropriate (and sometimes when it's not, just to shock an uptight pureblood), but who also tears up when she sees pixies being trapped in glass to be used as lights in a noble's dining hall and will hold a dying Cait Sidhe kitten to her heart.
Toby would have been a mess of contradictions even if she had stayed in her mother's tower to live out the centuries, but running away to Devin's flophouse for changelings, discarding her courtly manners for lessons in lockpicking and fighting and becoming lover to a man who primarily wanted her to show that he'd been able to take the child of the strongest bloodworker in Farie left her with even more strange, jagged edges. She believed that every insult or abuse Devin gave her was deserved, a price worth paying for having her own life. Except even that life wasn't hers, it just made her even more confused about what real love truly was. She made herself believe that because Devin was a changeling like her, he had to understand, and it took her years to see that she was little more than a shiny bauble in his collection, only more precious than the others because of her bloodline. A bloodline she was never sure she wanted to share, given what it had already cost her.
However, when she lost everything she fought to earn after leaving Devin, she still felt that she loved him in the smallest way, that is another horrible truth about Toby: it is almost impossible for her to stop loving people who have hurt her, even if it just with one small corner of her heart. Toby knows that Rayseline Torquill killed one of the men she loved and tormented her daughter--but she also remembers Raysel, the little girl who had once played in her yard and asked Toby if she and Gillian were going to be friends. Toby remembers people before they were warped by pain and time, because in some dusty part of her mind, she remembers a little girl with ashy blonde hair who was having a tea party with her teddy bears when a man came through her wall and asked her to choose which world she belonged to.
The one thing Toby never wanted to be, though, was a hero. Because she knows what happens to heroes, and more importantly what is expected of them. Heroes are supposed to save people, and for the most part, Toby sees only the people she has failed. She knows she didn't bring Luna and Rayseline home and lost her own daughter because she wasn't quick enough, that too many people died at ALH computing because she didn't see the truth sooner, that Connor died in vain--and, most importantly, despite knowing that a part of Dare lives on in May, Toby remembers that a fourteen year old girl with apple-green eyes and too much courage took a bullet to try to save her life because she just wasn't enough. While she knows now that she is a child of Oberon and is expected to be a hero , and even before then stepped up to take the role because no one else would either because they weren't there or didn't care about the same people she did, she hates being one because it means there will always be one person she couldn't save, one casualty she wasn't quick enough to prevent, and those deaths will always weigh on her.
She knows she will always see people she knew among the faces of the night-haunts, and that's something she's never going to be able to quite come to terms with. Still, she is reluctantly taking up the mantle--even if she isn't sure she will ever be fully able to bear its weight. And even knowing that she has lost, and will continue to lose, Toby will never stop fighting to have a life that is hers with people she knows love her exactly for who she is. She may sometimes forget why the fight is worth it, and insist that she doesn't deserve their love--but she will never stop fighting for a world and life that is not her mother's, or Devin's, but hers.
Blood magic
Tasting someone's species/heritage through the air around them, recognizing individual magic signatures, 'riding the blood' to get the last memories a person had before bleeding (often but not always before they died), shifting the balance of the blood for people who are mixed species, temporarily borrowing abilities by drinking someone's blood, and in VERY extreme circumstances bringing back the dead. Is easier for her to work by tasting her own blood.
Rapid healing
Toby heals from minor cuts and the like in seconds, will heal from a gunshot wound in minutes, and given enough time (and if she's not injured again), will even heal from being almost disemboweled within an hour. However, she will feel the affects of severe blood loss and will need to hydrate/eat soon after.
Illusions
Limited, but can hide people under an illusion for a short time, as well as hiding her own fae nature with a glamour. Her illusions are stronger/easier to work when she is angry.
Wards
Limited, will not keep someone out but will show if they've broken in
Combat
Better at hand to hand, can use a sword if she has to.
Lockpicking
Not good with magical locks, but very adept at human ones