Ranne de Arneou

Ranne de Arneou, also known as the Arneou Witch, is a self-taught scholar and researcher of the arcane. Despite having interest in arcane magic, she prefers learning how to control the winds of magic herself, rather than enroling in Shimmerhand Association as a student.
==To make a deal==
Ranne knew that a single lifespan is not enough to learn everything. Learning a skill or a field of study took months, even years, but to become a master at it? A life. To become the true master of all trades, to be like the Goddess of Knowledge Vidya, one either had to prolong their lifespan or seek aid of greater powers. Ranne did not simply wish for knowledge to be given to her, so instead of praying to The Knowledge Seeker for aid, she needed help of someone much different. During her studies of the divine, both of Imperial Pantheon and not, she stumbled upon what she was looking for - a god to grant her a heightened ability to pick up talents and skills - Berghabund. Communicating with the deity was not a simple matter, for despite being born of an imperial god Telian, the New Imperial Church did not recognise it as their own. Ranne needed to somehow find a berghabundi and convince them of letting them commune with the Father of Talents, and a best place to look for such news is the Artisan Guild.
Ranne's father Gaston was artisan himself, and a good one at that. Recognition of his skill allowed him to take on apprentices and employ artisans to make his job that much easier - and profitable. Needless to say, a daughter of such a master was welcomed in the guild, where she keenly listened in on gossip, the knowledge of the city. It took longer than she would have hoped for, but a rumour of an imposter, a person who took a deal with Berghabund to reap benefits of mastering a skill without putting in any work themselves, blessed her ears. 
It was one thing to learn of a person who took a deal with Berghabund, but it was something entirely else to convince them to help Ranne get one herself. Just like her connection to her father was a blessing at first, now it might be the greatest hindrance. She believed that a person shunned by the guild and artisans at large would come to hate the ones most known, and by extension the people related to them. The old man Kalfred was a bitter person. Never quite reaching the skill he aimed for, being outperformed by people younger than him, and in the autumn of his life, feeling like a failure of a man. Knowing all this, she had to illicit sympathy from the jaded man, by presenting herself as someone not having any talent to call her own, and never being able to reach her father's expectations. Ranne was not entirely lying though; she had little interest in the work of an artisan to the disappointment of her father, and despite having a knack at various skills and fields of study, she did not pursue mastery in any of them just yet, so she was equally mediocre in all of them, a jack of all trades. Perhaps it was her convincing story, perhaps Kalfred felt kinship in the young girl, or maybe he just enjoyed her company, but he begrudgingly obliged. Old man's warnings and advice to rethink her choice did not reach Ranne, for she was already set on getting Berghabund's help. Kalfred took out a sheet of lead, and described in detail the ritual of contacting the daemon: "On this sheet, carve out your desires, what you wish to master, what talent you wish to gain, and at the very bottom of the sheet make his symbol - a circle with stylised sun rays coming out of it, with an eye the middle of it. Make a cut on your finger, and soak the letters and symbol in blood. If Father of Talent deems your potential worthy his attention, you might awake with what you desired." Later that night, the deal was sealed, and she woke up with what she desired - the talent of learning.
==The arcane and divine==
WIth her newfound prowess and ignited ambition, Ranne ran to Avenwolf's library to test its limits. Tucked away in its corner, surrounded by walls of books, she read like she was enthralled by each word written. In span of the entire day, she read and memorised the contents of six books, only for her to come back again next day, and the day after. Having read what one avid reader would in a year, in a short week, she slowly but surely started to burn out. The excitement of such an ability could only take her so far without losing its novelty, and to avoid losing interest completely she needed a purpouse, a direction. She long new of the Shimmerhand Association and its mastery of magic, but in a heat of ambition mixed with arrogance, she wanted to do what the mages of old, the wizards of the Old Empire did - create a brand new magic system. Committing to such a feat did not have any practical reasonings behind it. That path would be a lonely one, without a guide, a path laid out in front of her if she were to become a student, her system being innately incompatible to that of the common wizard, meaning nigh impossibility of them deciphering her spells, and in general her magic being plainly worse in comparison if she were to become a wizard. Despite all that, Ranne wanted to do things her own way, just like she did not become an artisan despite her father's wishes, she will make her own magic.
Controlling winds of magic is not an easy feat. The arcane and divine both take from one source, as Planarists believe it comes from a different plane. Curiously enough, what's missing from wizard's repertoire are spells used to cure people of their ailments and heal their wounds. Instead, such abilities are delegated to those concerned with nature, like druids, or those serving the divine, like clerics. In Ranne's vision for her magics, she wished for her assortment of spells to be as diverse as her skills, and so she began her research into the arcane and divine.
The most important part was obviously the very basis of how she will control the winds. The commonly used system is the three-component system of verbal, somatic, and material. Psychic, a type of a sorcerer, depend solely on their minds, being able to ignore those components, but one needed to be born or made into a psychic. She decided to forgo hand movements and spoken words and opt into subtlety, while putting more importance on the focus item and concentration. For her first spell, she took the simple Magic Missile, and rearranged the standard way of writing the spell down into a magic circle, allowing her to visualise it better. Then, she replaced the parts that require precise hand movements with visualisation and eye movement, and spoken words with a focus item. The result was... a strictly worse version of the Magic Missile that lacked the usual tracking mechanism, being the result of forgoing the hand movements which were responsible for it. An additional quirk of casting a spell this way is the sheer awkwardness of it - instead of visibly showing what the caster is doing, they remain motionless leaving a question whether they are actually doing anything. Nevertheless, it was a success in a way, creating Prototype: Magic Missile. Having created the foundation in the arcane, she could now turn to making a foundation in the divine. 
No matter how passionate one was, there's only so many religious texts one can read before getting sick of them. Psalms and prayers did not answer her questions of the nature of the divine magic, and she felt like a fool for ever believing such information would be contained in such books. She understood the arcane magic well enough for her to be able to cast the basic wizard spells, but the divine magic eluded her completely. A theory she originally believed in, was that deities worked as a middleman between the winds of magic and the cleric, translating the chaos into order, thus allowing them to cast divine spells such as healing magic. The same must have been the case for spirits of nature too, in case of druids. If that theory was true, then there was indeed a way to figure out the mechanics of that translation, allowing Ranne to be a godless healer, independent from deities or spirits.
Ranne's experiments in the divine-arcane were promising. She paid off some cleric of Arianne that was down on their luck to allow her to observe the process of divine spellcasting. With a special magic glasses, she observed how the cleric manipulated the winds of magic as they chanted their prayer. When sorcerers, those with innate magical abilities cast spells, the winds behave in almost organic matter - they respond to the spellcaster's breath, movements, and feelings. When a wizard cast spells, they wrangle them into submission by precise instructions, forcing their wills unto the world. But with clerics, it was like the winds of magic moved mechanically, all by themselves. It was almost like they were a dog responding to a command, and all was needed was the correct password, known only to the gods. She needed to break it.
She, in fact, could not break it. It is one thing to not be able to do something despite your best efforts, but it is ever so more frustrating to someone like Ranne, who effortlessly gained proficiency in all the fields, only to fail at one thing that truly interests her. Further observations of a cleric at work revealed a connection between the divine spellcaster and their deity, through which Ranne assumed the chant reached the deity's ears, and through which the deity responded with a command to the weave. Repeating the same chants as a cleric predictably did not work. Bruteforcing the theorised password, as it turns out, was a bad idea, for giving randomised and uncomprehensible instructions to the winds results in an unpredictable result as one could guess. Berghabund did not help her either - his ears (if he has any) fell deaf on the sound of her painstakenly engraved onto a lead sheet letters. He is known as a reclusive deity afterall.
Ranne was convinced that the divine spells were not simply a result of a deity casting them themselves, for in case of Greater Deities, even in their greatness, they could not manage the load and micromanaging it would impose on them. To harness some divine wind for herself, she constructed a device - Divine Wind Harvester Mark I - that exploited the connection between her and Berghabund, but the deity quickly took notice and sent her a lead sheet with a letter X written on it, obviously a demand for her to stop. Having once been lightly smited by Cleyera for plugging the Divine Wind Harvester into a statue of hers, Ranne knew the device was not viable. This also ruined her plans for Mark II, which was supposed to be connected with the lead contract sheet. Her third idea, the Divine Eye-catcher, worked by attracing the attention of deities which carried divine energy in of itself. It was a curious trinket covered with religious symbols, most being rather vague as to which deity it was supposed to represent, simulated prayer by having the Encode Thoughts embedded into it, while trying to avoid attracting any easily offended gods. Because of the need to keep the blasphemy to the minimum, it did not harvest enough divine wind to cast spells consistently, and needed constant breaks to fine tune and upkeep.
== Breakthrough at Badenbach ==
To continue her studies, Ranne had moved to the city of Badenbach, where knowledge of the arcane was easier to access than a room in a tavern. A month-worth of experiments with Divine Eye-Catcher yielded meager results - she now was able to create light once every few hours, sometimes few days. She needed something more than mere attention of a deity to fullfil her ambition of godless divine magic, and ironically, she needed a deity to achieve that, a part of a deity to be more precise. Perhaps some god listened in to her wishes, for the very same week, the scourge of the north, Emberot, attacked the city. At first, like everyone, she panicked. Her unconventional spellcasting was not of much use on the walls, and so she decided to hide along with a group of students. It was then, that she saw blasts of light, and sensed surges of magic coming from the cathedral. Divine magic. Ignoring her instinct to hide, she rushed through the burning city, at one point having joined a group of paladins rushing in the same direction. On the very top of stairs to the cathedral, a creature resembling a Skyfallen, but whose wings were replaced with flesh and eyes, Mariel, the opened Eye was fighting the saint of Stranghan, Nerys the Purifier. The deities were blasting each other with incomprehensible amounts of magic, which killed some of the paladins through mere collateral, while the cultists were fighting some adventurers. Ranne hid in a nearby bush, awaiting for her perhaps once-in-a-lifetime chance to secure a body part of a deity, or at least some of their blood. And bled they did. The flesh-skyfallen and saint of the blood god both acted like fountains of blood, as the red liquid gushed through even the smallest nicks. Having made herself unnoticed, she sneakily started to collect the precious life essence into her waterskin, odd glass bottles, and a bucket she coincidentally found nearby. The task was surprisingly easy, as she only needed to aim the buckets opening in the very general direction of the fight. Having filled her containers, she excused herself and retreated into hiding.
After the siege was over, the city simply flying away, because apparently it could do that now, Ranne purchased enough rations for a month and locked herself in her rented room. Her theory was, if she used the divine blood as a conduict or filter of her mundane, arcane winds of magic, she could convert it into the divine winds of magic, with which she could cast the spells of the deities she produced the blood from. The blood provided orders of magnitude more divine winds than the Divine Eye-catcher, and the only thing she now needed to do was to exercise caution so she does not blow herself up by accidentally casting some destructive spell. It seemed that she worked with roughly equal mix of daemon and saint blood, which was not very stable, but provided her with a potentially wide repertoire of spells she could discover, and that she did. Using whatever funds she still had left, she crafted a staff, with the blood serving as its core, now ready to show the world her own version of magic.
== Personality ==
Despite being well read, quite intelligent, and thirsty for knowledge, Ranne could not be more of a fool. She is obsessed with doing things her own way, and is arrogant enough that she thinks she can reinvent the circle. Before taking a deal with Berghabund she was driven by one thought: If she cannot be great at anything, she might try being good at everything.