( basics )

Katarzyna Samandrin Demarra, changed in accordance with Andrei, just because, seventeen years old and born on November Fourteen, on a caravan trail heading east through Tyra. Called Katarzyna, Katarzyn, Zyn ( and this is, actually, also how she introduces herself ), as well as Katzchen, on occasion, an affectionate derivative of her given name, only used by her Gallan family members. She's currently drifting between multiple residences, including, but not limited to, the room at the Divine Realms II held in Shana's name, a dormitory room of her own at the University, and, occasionally, rare nights spent with her father at Shana's house. She's not much one for settling in any one place.

Currently, she's taking classes at the Royal University, self-funded, using money that she earns by selling her services as a mage along the side as a Healer and Warder on days when she's not occupied with classes.

( magic )

( a/n. I wrote Zyn a very, very long time ago, as a supporting character who simply... grew. Her magic is pretty much all of her sue-points come from, and I make no apologies. This section is also under heavy renovation; expect it to change and grow soon )

Zyn is, unapologetically, an exceptionally powerful, brilliant mage. There's just no getting around it, even if you dismiss her skill, there's still the sheer level of raw power she can access, which is undeniably large. On the mage scale she's right up there between a 90 and a 95; she's just enormously powerful, to the point where it's silently assumed ( by her ) and acknowledged ( by her peers ) that she's exceptional, just banking on her raw power alone, though no one's ever come out and said as much directly, probably for a number of reasons, but especially because her Gift's sort of slippery - though whether that's just the nature of it or she does it intentionally she's not telling and no one dares to ask. One of her more peculiar and delightful magical quirks is knowing the time wherever she is, to the second.

Mostly her Gift runs to the positive aspects of magic; she's a talented and natural healer, especially when it comes to the purely physical aspects of healing, and she's particularly skilled as a Warder. Something she's not exactly naturally talented at but has proven to be fairly skilled at picking up is tracking, specifically tracking people via the Essence they leave behind. Obviously it's not an exact magic, and that's partially why she finds it so fascinating; she's happiest when she's chasing after flashes and tentative shadows than something solid and easy to see. When things are too easy all the joy of what she's up to just drains away and she loses interest rapidly.

She's fairly hopeless with any kind of terribly destructive magic ( war magic, calling fire beyond basic flame summoning, undoing the being of things, so on and so forth ), and she tends to go out of her way to avoid doing workings that are excessively large; firstly because she's aware that, over time, the way she works with her magic will give it a more permanent shape, and secondly, less logically, because she has a very private, silent fear of ever being completely tapped dry.

( people )

father Andrei Demarra has always been a part of her life, but in a sporadic, unreliable manner. She loves him, with her own peculiar brand of affection, and is aware that he loves her dearly, but they're not as close as people might expect. He spent a lot of time when she was younger unintentionally resenting her for her magic, something she grew aware of at a young age, and then was conspicuously absent for several years, leaving her in Corus while he sought distraction elsewhere. She makes time to see him often, letting herself into Shana's house if he's not there and occasionally tries to cook for him in a misguided attempt at looking after him in some peculiar role reversal. She calls him Andrei, rather than anything else, and always has.
mother Chayla Ruthmony of the K'miri Sovann was her mother. She died on the road between two towns just before Zyn's seventh birthday from an injury that progressed to severe infection; there was no Gifted healer attached to the caravan they chose to travel with and Zyn was untrained and unaware of anything she could've done to save her. Zyn knows little about her, other than that she was kind, and has even less to remember her by. Chayla's death doesn't trouble Zyn, and it never has.
aunt Shaaaana, who she gets along with like a house on fire. Shana sees her less as a niece and some-time ward and more as a really weird friend, and to that end, they used to get up to all sorts of devious shit together, magically speaking. She'll occasionally think about Shana and miss her, but she knows she'll be back, so it's not a huge thing.
stella malloy Stella. Oh, oh, Stella. Here's the long and the short of it; Zyn loves Stella. If she properly understood the concept of "best friends" she would probably ask Stella if they could be besties, especially after the time they broke into the menagerie at the palace and stole a lemur, just because they were bored and wanted to see if they could do it. No one even remembers how they got to talking about lemurs! But it happened and was wonderous. It's lovely, really, because a lot of people just don't interest Zyn, but Stella does, and it grounds her a little more as an actual teenage girl. With vague thieve-y tendencies.
&etc. She’s vaguely aware that she has aunts and uncles and cousins and whatnot in the K’mir, and even some in Galla, but hasn’t ever bothered to seek them out. She really just... doesn't care.

( appearance )

hair Deep, deep inky black, without any hint of brown at all, and exceptionally fine and soft, almost entirely without form. Even when she wears it very, very short it's just lanky and mostly straight, with a slight curve from lack of weight, but because of its fine, almost feathery nature she keeps it long, the longest parts of her hair level with her breasts, staggering up in shorter lengths that are generally uneven, except for her fringe which is, remarkably, even; she cuts the whole thing herself unless someone else pins her down and does it for her.
face She most definitely takes after her mother in looks; there's very little of her father to be seen in her softly rounded face with its delicate bone structure, high but not particularly prominent cheek bones and a slightly pointed, almost sharp chin. Her lips are full, but not overly so, with neither being plumper than the other, though her upper lip formed with a slight cupid's bow to it. Her nose is fairly unremarkable as far as such things go; not as flat as it might've been, it sports a slight bump on the bridge, reminiscent of her father's nose. Her eyes are a warm, slightly golden brown with an obvious almond shape to them, framed by fairly short, feathery black lashes and set beneath smoothly arched dark brows. Her lightly golden skin doesn't freckle, as much as she sometimes wishes that it would, though she does tan when she spends time in the sun, rather than burning.
body Tall, for a young girl, and slender; it's not that particularly bony, just incredibly lean, with a thin, slight frame and very little in the way of curves, even accounting for her bust, which, while there, couldn't be called exceptional. She tops out at five foot eight, and has started to reach that stage where she's really started to properly grow into her body, losing what childish softness she might've retained up until now. To her utter delight, though, her elbows are still double jointed, something she's ridiculously fond of. I have no idea why.
clothing Flaunting the recent trend of “breeches!” amongst other young women in her age group, Zyn owns a full wardrobe of gowns, skirts and shirts in a selection of darker, fairly bland colours. She tends to enjoy dark, solid colours in her clothes, sticking to a selection of dark blues greys, and black, occasionally reds. She’s not at all fond of green and doesn't own anything in any shade of the colour, barring a coat she stole from Andrei with moss green accents. When it comes to footwear she's generally quite practical, owning several sturdy pairs of well-made leather boots, as well as some lighter slippers with thick soles for the warmer weather. Worth mentioning is her complete lack of any social agenda when it comes to clothing; she dresses to impress no one but herself, and in doing so tends to circumvent all the trends as they come and go, unless she enjoys any of them, in which case she'll generally wear those particular styles long after they've dropped out of mode.
scars Othe than the general assortment of childhood scars from scrapes and falls and other generic types of pre-teen shenanigans, there's the long-faded remnants of a dog bite on her left thigh, just above the knee, but that's it, really. She keeps herself in one piece, remarkably.
&etc. She's not at all fond of wearing jewellery, but that's not to say she does own a lot of it, because she... really does. She enjoys looking at it and holding it , so she tends to hoard various pieces with a magpie-like tendency. She just never wears it.

( personality )

She’s kind of all over the shop, really. She comes across as very disconnected, and very involved in her own thoughts and... she really is, but she’s also very, very clever, and doesn’t much mind the fact that some people see her as flaky or kinda strange because often she views everyone else exactly the same way as they see her. Yeah, the sky’s a funny colour in her world. She goes through varying periods of lucidity; sometimes she’ll act entirely normal and can walk and talk and act like a normal person, but most of the time she's too involved in her own thoughts to put up a front.

She’s usually very calm, to the point of utter placidity; it’s pretty much impossible to ruffle her feathers, and a lot of the time when people try, she ends up turning it back on them and making something of a game out of it. She actually has a fairly sadistic component to her, occasionally being downright cruel or nasty, and she's definitely got something of a wicked streak; she honestly enjoys messing with people's heads at random intervals - not for any reason in particular, usually just because she can. She's one of those people who prefer to go for the hurt on first instinct, rather than the kill and quite often, it's what she does. It takes a signifcant amount to actually anger her, and it's about the only time she's ever really blunt in any way.

Her magic makes up a massive part of who she is; without it, there's no way she'd function as a person, as a human being even remotely close to the person she is now. Being without magic is something that's honestly never occured to her, because she's never put so much into any one working that she's drained herself entirely. It's not something she'd ever admit to, but she has a tendency to look down a little bit on people who don't have some kind of magic; it's not something she was taught by her parents or Shana, it's just a part of her that's always been there. By her reasoning, Mages are the bastard children of the Gods ( not in the literal God-born sense, but that they're God-chosen ), who were Gifted by the hands of the Gods and are therefore superior in some sense.

( history )

Kinda patchy! She was born pretty much on the road, though the caravan her parents were travelling with had put into a town until Chayla had given birth and was okay to travel again. The first six and a half years of her life followed a stilted sort of pattern of travel until winter because it was often too difficult to keep going, so they'd return to Cria ( though they didn't always make it back in time ) and weather winters out there. When she was almost seven, Chayla managed to injure herself, and came down with an infection that spread before they could find a Gifted Healer who knew what he or she was doing, an she died; it doesn't really weigh on Zyn at all that she couldn't do anything to help her mother, because she was too young to really be of any use without instruction