Saidra d'Honaire
Duchess Saidra d'Honaire (a.k.a. Black Swan of Port-a-Lucine)
Duchess Saidra d’Honaire, Darklord of Dementlieu, is a tragic specter of longing and delusion—a wraith sustained by shattered dreams and social pretense. A creature of refinement without root, grace without lineage, and power without truth, Saidra embodies the hollow pursuit of status, style, and acceptance at any cost. Her charm is haunting; her elegance, spectral; her duchy, an elaborate masquerade of lies curated to maintain a fantasy of nobility she never truly possessed.
Saidra’s curse is a mirror of her desire: she rules over high society, but nothing in her world is real—not her title, not her peers, not her love, and not her form. Her efforts to create meaningful connections are always undone by her need to control the narrative. Her realm reflects that: all surface, no substance. All illusion, no heart.
Duchess Saidra d’Honaire is the wraith of the ballroom—beautiful, bitter, and forever chasing a dream of nobility that turns to ash beneath her touch.
Physical Description
General Physical Condition
- Aesthetic Illusion: Saidra appears as a luminous, raven-haired noblewoman clad in gowns of silvery mist and shadow-dyed velvet. Her features are flawless—but vaguely remembered, as though painted from memory by someone who had only seen portraits.
- Wraithlike Nature: In candlelight or under scrutiny, her true form leaks through: insubstantial limbs, hollow eyes, and the faint smell of mildew and crypt dust. She glides rather than walks. Her garments never rustle. Her reflection does not smile back.
Mental characteristics
Personal history
Saidra was not born to power, but she believed she deserved it. Raised on a remote farm in mortal life, her soul fractured when the world denied her romantic ideal: the duchy, the title, the adoration. Her undead state was not born of vengeance—but of disillusionment. She pierced the heart of a false duke, only to awaken as something false herself. Her phantasmal body flickers between radiance and ruin, beauty and horror—much like her perception of the world around her.
Social
Reign
Under her rule, Dementlieu is a realm of endless pageantry and paranoia:
- Port-a-Lucine thrives with salons, masquerades, and royal proclamations—none of which are sincere.
- Nobles appear wealthy but are often impoverished.
- Invitations arrive for balls hosted by ghostly aristocrats.
- Gossip is a weapon, fashion is survival, and status is all.
Saidra herself hosts lavish banquets in her ever-shifting manor, where guests dance until dawn… or until they collapse, their life drained to sustain her illusions.
Mannerisms
- Refined Yet Hollow: Saidra mimics upper-class poise and refinement with theatrical precision—laughing at the right jokes, making biting observations, toasting with empty glasses. Her manners are flawless, but never natural.
- Romantic and Delusional: Her heart still aches for fairy-tale endings, courtly dances, whispered suitors. Yet each new encounter is cursed to decay. She falls in love often, and kills as easily when truth shatters the illusion.
- Vindictive and Insecure: Saidra is pathologically envious of women who possess the things she desires—true nobility, youth, beauty, authenticity. She views them as threats, rivals, or pretenders, depending on the day.
Comments