Hecate Moon

Hecate is one of the two current Witch Queens on Pantook Mountain. She resides with the rest of the royal family in Caddo Castle.
== Physical Description ==
Willowy and ephemeral are often used to describe Hecate. Her skin is pale and contrasts with her dark hair and big dark eyes. She doesn’t often smile, although on the rare occasions she does it’s a big, bright one that seems out of character for someone normally so somber and composed. There is a quiet, graceful beauty to the Darkmoon, she is not unaware of her appearance and while she isn’t overly concerned with how she dresses she takes pains to at least appear presentable at all times to her subjects. Hecate’s choice of dress are dark colors, blacks, dark blues and deep purples are all colors she’s been spotted in. It is her jewelry which is often commented on though, often seemingly at odds with any sense of fashion, contrasting and uncomplimentary colored gems and different metal fittings all seemed to change, day in and day out with no real noticeable pattern or logic behind it.
 Hecate in the end, prefers to remain in the background, not quite in the shadows but far enough from the limelight to go unnoticed in her actions. Thus when she knows she’ll be seen with her sister in an official capacity she works hard to ensure that she always appears properly majestic but always a muted compliment to her sisters in clothing. 
== Personality ==
One may wonder why Hecate works so hard to remain in the background. Some people with more time on their hands than is healthy for them, theorize that she schemes in the background against her sister. That isn’t quite a lie, she does indeed scheme, but her schemes are well known to her sister and always to the benefit of their Kingdom. Indeed, finding information has become a hobby, passion and life’s mission all at once. Mysteries intrigue Hecate, they always have magical mysteries especially. 
This lifelong curiosity led to a childhood of voluntary seclusion in magical studies. From a young age, Hecate showed a heightened sensitivity to magic, having an uncanny control from a young age, her fascination with her talents was not discouraged, in fact, her love for magic and it’s study were seen as a good omen by some of the older witches. At times it may seem that the adult Hecate seems obsessed and possessed of a one-track mind. What few people aside from her closest family is that Hecate is deceptive. While her sister's personality has always been outgoing and bright, her own had always been reserved and shy. 
Many people took these traits as signs of timidness, this was a mistake. As a young girl she simply found it easier to let her twin do the talking, she still does in moments of extreme fatigue and as a sign of trust, but as she grew older she soon found the value in simply waiting and watching patiently for the right time to act or speak. As the two grew older her and her sister often knowingly used this to their advantage, Hecate watching as her sister interacted with particular people. They would then compare notes about their up close and distant observations. This method of interacting with people helped Hecate and her sister to develop a deep working bond and contributed to their eventual election as Queens. 
In Private Hecate is warm to those she holds dear, although her warmth is only shown in private. Her first love though is always to knowledge and its discovery. She learned as much as she could of divination magic. Not the common fortune telling that some lower beings engage in, but the magic that dealt with the discovery of specific information. Her primary use for this magic is in finding more lost magic, an incredibly painstaking process and one that doesn’t always end in success. Indeed, Hecate has frequently spent months, and in some cases years, casting various divination spells or laying out spread after spread with the Tarot decks she had designed and painted by hand, no less. It was a frustrating and laborious process, one she hasn’t had as much time to commit to since she became Queen but she will maintain that the end result is all worth it when she recovers some tiny scrap of knowledge.
Sometimes it’s as small an amount of information as a name, but regardless, she records everything she finds out in a large leather bound book that can only be opened by her hand. This has had the happy benefit of giving her experience in finding more mundane information as well. Hecate has scryed plotters engineering a coup as well as other enemies both internal and external. Her divination magic, while not always precise in the way that non-magical mortals would wish them to be, but to beings born and bred to magic, such magically acquired information has proven time and again that the current Witch-Queens are more than capable of holding their thrones. 
== History ==
Hecate and her twin sister were both born under an auspicious sign, or so Hecate’s later in life divinations would reveal. At the time though, they’re birth under a full-moon seemed more a matter of coincidence than anything preordained. As a child Hecate tended towards shyness and seclusion, preferring the quiet cool of her family’s home to the wild outdoors...that being said, the darkest nights of the month are the ones where she felt safe enough to venture out. Unlike many children, the cool, gentle darkness of the night comforted rather than frightened. The darkest nights were the most alive to her, the quiet spirits of the shaded moonlight glades, the oldest ones, the ones who preferred quiet continuation over bustling growth were the spirits who attracted her the most. In them, she found a sort of kinship, her quiet nature and young thirst for knowledge endeared her to many of these ancient locii. These early conversations with ancient spirits in the mountain glades would always remain with her as she grows older and her interests in the night skewed more towards the serious magical ritual rather than her innocent wanderings. However, her friendship with these ancient spirits would be something she continues to cherish to this day. 
Her proper magical education in the ways of her people came to her easily where other areas did not. She cared little for making friends outside of her twin and she cared even less for the other skills she was expected to learn. Magic, to her, was the only thing that would make sense to her, even it’s mystical and mysterious natural state. As she grew older and it became more and more clear that her magical talents, while by no means extraordinary or wholly unique, were still cultivated with patience, practice and an intensity often reserved for older masters. Her devotion to her studies and the dogged determination with which she pursues a topic until she feels she understands it is what endeared her to her magical teachers.Many she sought out on her own, spending far longer as an apprentice to a handful of older witches in her clan than most other witches do. Hecate herself views this as a point of pride however, she has often argued to the few witches who have attempted to make a point of her longer than usual apprenticeship that her extended and completely voluntary education has gifted her with patience, humility and most of all, she is fond of pointing out to such dullards, an understanding of what is and what isn’t conversational topics for those with little to talk about and even less to think on. 
Hecate decided to end her long apprenticeship, an apprenticeship that lasted for twenty years, by undertaking a bit of an adventure. This was when her divinatory skills were based on scrying, casting auguries and bones, even so, these most primitive of natural magic spells lead her to what years of careful research had hinted at: A surviving book from the previous age. The resulting expedition into a buried ancient shrine near the foot of their home mountains, not exactly the grandest of adventures and what they found wasn’t so much a book but a few scraps of half burnt pages, however, it was by no means a failure. Those few burnt pages just so happened to be some further texts on the tarot. Divination via the cards had been known among them but it hadn’t been a magical art she had managed to quite wrap her head around. Her treasures, fragile and incomplete as they may have been still offered her enough illumination to grasp the nuances of divination through painted cards. It was with this knowledge and two years of dedicated practice that she refined her own skills in the Tarot and felt confident enough to design and paint her own deck. The Darkmoon Deck, as she lovingly calls it is one that only her and her sister have seen. The divinations she works with her deck are the foundations of many of her decisions and, when used in conjunction with the various other divinatory magics she has picked up over her years has proven to give her and her sister enough information to start gaining a following amongst the other Witches in they’re clan. 
By this time, Hecate had made a name for herself as a knowledgeable witch with uncanny divinatory skills. 
== Storyline ==
The Human Report- Hecate and Pasiphaë hear their first report from Sabine and Felicity on the Coalition.
The Man With the Screaming Brain- Hecate disguises herself as a shadowy crone to hire Ace for a secret mission.
Within the Stygian Depths of Sleep - Hecate has a very disturbing dream.
Category:Characters
Category:Witch