Sesilius

**Sesilius** is the current 'leader' of the Banished, a group of eldritch horrors sealed beyond the Veil. Due to the excruciating and unfair nature of this sealing, Sesilius is doing everything he can to try to find a way to free his people. In the process, he also seeks to champion any group deemed to be "monsters".

## Background

Sesilius isn't old enough to remember when his people were locked behind the Veil, nor does he remember when Akievans used to be willing to cooperate with them. What he does remember, and can never forget, is the slowly dawning realization that he was going to be trapped behind the Veil for as long as he lived. Paradoxically, that realization directly led him down a path of increasingly bold attempts to break free that would eventually cause his spark to ignite, and for him to gain the ability to planeswalk. However, even though he was now able to leave Akieva, if he ever returned home, the Veil would inevitably call him back. Not wanting to leave his compatriots behind, and not wanting to be permanently exiled from his home plane, Sesilius resolved to try and break his people free of imprisonment by any means necessary. It didn't take long for him to be chosen as Speaker for the Banished after this, and unlike past Speakers, Sesilius really focused in on diplomacy, negotiations, and shows of force, to try and find some way to open up the long sealed riftways.

## Discoveries of Akieva

During 60 PM's Multiplanar Festival of Arts, Sesilius had two different tasks to juggle, neither of which left him in a good position. The first of which was Volta Hearth's work on the Clocktower Project, an Achievement aimed at creating a powerful golem with total control over its position in the time stream. Sesilius feared that any damage that the Golem did to the plane's temporal stability would have repercussions disproportionately affecting the Banished, and so he sent a team to try and stop the project. It didn't work out.

Additionally, Alia gets a proverbial group of townsfolk and pitchforks together, and attempts to wage war against the Banished. Although Sesilius ultimately ends up siphoning enough of her power away to repel the attack, numerous Banished and Akievans die in the process, and on her way out, Alia destroys the few remaining riftways, ensuring that the Banished can't even get out in the form of Veilborn or contracts. Now, they are well and truly stuck.

## Animus Vox

After the events of Discoveries of Akieva, Sesilius begins to look for solutions on other planes. How do other people planes travel between parts of their worlds? What technology exists to break barriers? While searching for this, he stumbles across Terra, which doesn't appear to hold the answers he seeks at first glance. While precursor technology has left behind waygates, they are as impossible to reverse engineer as the riftways on Akieva. However, Terra does possess something else: a group of people, much like his own, who are on the verge of being wiped out by an overeager planeswalker.

Sesilius joins the war on the side of the Abominations, and successfully and rapidly turns the tides. The Guardian forces are scattered, even despite overwhelming firepower, and if Sesilius had been able to corner Glitch alone for just a few minutes longer, he would've been able to overpower her, kill her, and end the war. At the last moment, however, Remi Amber swoops in and stops Sesilius. Sesilius attempts to kill Remi, but in the process ends up igniting the boy's spark, and the two planeswalkers quickly overpower Sesilius. He gives up on this plane, abandoning the Abominations to their fate with guilt in his heart.

As Sesilius flees back to the Veil, however, Glitch swears to hunt him down and raze everything he holds dear, and manages to tag him with a stray blast before he can fully vanish.

## Return to Akieva

As a result of his disrupted planeswalk, Sesilius accidentally ends up overlapping with a random Akievan citizen when he arrives on Akieva. This causes Sesilius to possess them, and bypasses the typical limitations on how long he can stay outside the Veil. This is incredibly exciting, at least in terms of the ability to let normal Banished, and not just Veilborn, exit their twisted mirrorworld and live out lives on the infinitely more hospitable Akieva. However, he still needs to find a way to open up the Veil and let the Banished begin this process.

## Capabilities

Sesilius is able to read and control minds. The longer he spends in someone's proximity, the deeper thoughts and memories he's able to retrieve, and the more forcefully he's able to exert a mental influence. Planeswalkers and powerful mages are resilient to these abilities, but not fully safe. In the same vein, Sesilius constantly has a draining force around him that passively saps energy from nearby magical and technological objects. While he can't devour the magic or energy of mages directly, he can often cause their runes or magic items to cease functioning. More worryingly, Sesilius can drain the magical powers of planeswalkers. While he can't fully steal sparks, Sesilius' unique strength against planeswalkers makes him able to overcome almost any planeswalker, if given enough time. He trivially sapped Lady Mari's power from Alia, and wore through Glitch's reserves in the span of several minutes. This is also not something that most planeswalkers notice initially; it starts subtle, even if it rapidly spirals out of control.

Sesilius has also developed spells to rip holes in reality, from attempting to free his people. The end result of this is the ability to create portals that travel between distant points on the same plane, and can transport himself or other people through them. Alternatively, he can simply teleport people directly. Active resistance makes it harder to teleport people, but he was able to teleport Remi tens of thousands of miles in a single moment, once Remi had run out of energy to continue fighting him. This reality tearing also takes the form of jagged strikes that traverse space and rip physical objects apart, that he can launch by clawing the air. Sesilius is also an amateur necromancer; he isn't as capable of as people who make it their life's work, but he's able to raise groups of undead rather quickly, and animate fallen allies (although he can't restore their lives).

Being a Banished does also have some unique advantages. Sesilius can alter his physiology somewhat, and particularly can turn his body into something more monstrous, given he's always suppressing some element of that natural tendency. Sesilius is also an excellent strategist.