Mildmay | Fox

Mildmay stands a little shorter than average, at around 5'8". He's also chronically underweight, although this is somewhat less obvious due to the amount of lean muscle he has. His face shows the signs of having lived a hard life - the most noticable of which is a scar that runs from the left edge of his mouth, puckering the skin. His default expression tends towards an emotionless 'stoneface', which he's spent a long time perfecting. He doesn't tend to smile, and if he does, it's because he doesn't like you - the scar on the left side of his face resulted in muscle paralysis, so when he smiles, it ain't pretty. If you can look past that, though, he's surprisingly young - in his early twenties - and also actually fairly attractive (if the number of interested suitors he's got is any indication, anyway). The red hair is, in fact, natural - loose, it comes down to near mid-back, though he usually wears it braided and tied off with a black ribbon. His eyes are green, and his skin is pale (other characters refer to it as being corpse-like, though light-skinned people are fairly uncommon in his city).

When he moves, it's with a careful, ingrained grace - a grace that's rather jarringly thrown by the noticeable limp in his right leg. He gets by okay without a cane (but would do better with one), though he can't move as quickly as he used to, and stairs are hell on his bad leg. If left to his own devices, he dresses in black - mostly to make a not very subtle point about his relationship with Felix due to the binding-by-forms. He's also a man of few words - he's very self-concious about his speech, and thus only tends to speak up if he has a point to be made, or has been addressed. He has a typical Lower City accent and grammar, and usually makes very little effort to correct either - the muscle paralysis also means his speech sounds somewhat slurred, which gets worse when he's tired or upset. As a result, he has problems with people not being able to understand what he's said semi-regularly (which reinforces his self-conciousness about speaking). The 'real world' equivalent of his accent and dialect is a heavier, rural Southern drawl.

Character name | Shadowsphere name: Mildmay | Fox

Character canon | Canon point: Doctrine of Labyrinths series | Between the end of The Virtu and the beginning of Mirador

Background: Mildmay (who’s full birth-name is ‘Mild-may-your-sufferings-be-at-the-hands-of-the-wicked’) was born in Melusine, capital of Marathat, to a prostitute named Methony and an unknown father. When he was three, he was sold to a thief-keeper - an adult who buys children to raise and train, generally as thieves working under the adult. Mildmay’s Keeper, a woman named Kolkhis, was the one to give him the shortened form of his name, and originally trained him as a pickpocket, which he was quite skilled at. He also picked up knife-fighting at some point, favoring a butterfly knife, and when he was fourteen he got into a fight which left him with a massive wound on the left side of his face. This got infected and healed badly, leaving a very noticeable scar, and nerve damage to the point where he has almost no feeling or and limited muscle control on that side of his face.

Given that having a facial feature as distinguishing as a scar was a liability in a pickpocket, Kolkhis decided to train Mildmay as her new pet assassin, her previous one having been killed several years before. He was skilled at this work and eager to please her, and by the time he was in his mid-teens, he was the most feared assassin in the Lower City, which is what earned him the nickname of ‘Mildmay the Fox’. His most infamous murder was that of Cerberus Cresset, a wizard of the Mirador given the job of ‘Witchfinder Extraordinary’ and charged with rooting out ‘heretics’, wizards who had not sworn the Mirador’s Cabaline oaths. Wizards of the Mirador have powerful protection spells on them, which Mildmay only circumvented at the time through the use of a talisman that temporarily directed the protections spells that would have killed him onto it.

When he was seventeen, he finally had the courage to leave his Keeper and quit assassination work, switching instead to cat burglary. This led him, several years later, to meeting a woman named Ginevra, whom he became romantically involved with. Not long after, a powerful destructive spell shatters the Virtu, the focus of the Mirador’s protections, and more or less turns Melusine upside down. The spell was wrought by one Malkar Gennadion, using his former apprentice, Felix Harrowgate, as a catalyst, and snapping parts of Felix’s mind in the process.

In the midst of it, Mildmay gets word that the city guards are looking for him again, and splits from Ginevra, whom he’d been having problems with anyway. He manages to keep from getting caught, but Mildmay gets word that someone has murdered Ginevra and her new boyfriend. Poor, in hiding, at a loss for what to do, and sick with Winter Fever, Mildmay makes a snap decision to try a hotel break-in to get some quick money. This leads him right into the hands of a wizard named Mavortian von Heber, who had worked a spell to draw someone who could help him find the man who crippled him and murdered his fiancee - that ‘someone’ being Mildmay. After he more or less collapses on their floor because of his illness, Mavortian and his half-brother/bodyguard Bernard take care of him, and when the illness passes, Mildmay agrees to work for Mavortian on the basis of not having any better options.

When the Mirador begins to burn - an unthinkable thing, given it’s protection spells - Mildmay convinces his new employers that they need to leave the city, now. Several divinations and a few changes of plans later, they end up in a smaller town called Hermione, where Mildmay comes face-to-face with the infamous Felix Harrowgate - who he realizes rather rapidly is actually his half-brother, sold before Mildmay had been born. While in Hermione, the Mirador’s curse on Mildmay is reactivated, and begins to kill him by twisting him apart inside. Felix realizes what’s happening, and while his own magic is bound, he manages to talk one of the wizards into using his magic through him, as Malkar did, and transferring the curse on Mildmay to a piece of glass, which seems to mostly work - Mildmay is plagued by insomnia following it, but no longer dying horribly and painfully.

Unfortunately, having his magic used like that sends Felix back down the well of his broken mind, and, care of a moment of dreamwalking, gets it into his head that he has to go to Troia, to the Gardens of Nephele, an empire that is borderline-mythical for the Melusineiens. Mildmay decides immediately that if sides are being drawn, he’s on Felix’s - his need to be needed seems to be triggered deeply by seeing Felix so broken. Mavortian and Bernard come along as well, along with another wizard who had befriended Felix, Gideon Thraxios. Together they set off to cross the vast, unfriendly empire that separates Marathat from Troia as best they can.

This plan works fairly well for about two weeks, at which point Felix and Mildmay are seperated from the others by the sudden appearance of imperial dragoons, and left to make the journey on their own, Mildmay alternatingly gently shoving crazy-Felix in the right direction, or quietly enduring the stings of his temper when the madness recedes. Shipwrecked, they wash up on the beaches of Troia, the piece of glass holding the curse shattered, and the curse most definitely trying to do its worst to Mildmay. The pair are, thankfully, rescued, and taken to the Gardens, where the Celebrants manage to undo the damage Malkar’s spell wrecked on Felix’s mind, and, somewhat grudgingly, lifting the curse on Mildmay, though not after it’s severely and permanently maimed one of his legs.

Felix eventually decides that they need to return to Melusine - both because Mildmay doesn’t like being in the Gardens, and because the Virtu is still broken, and Felix is the only one that can fix it. Their travels across Kekropia are somewhat more comfortable than the previous trip, and along the way they pick up their former companions, somewhat worse for the wear for being held prisoner, and an actress named Mehitabel Parr. As they get closer to Melusine, Mildmay begins coming to the uncomfortable realization that as it stands, he can’t return to the city. With a bad leg, he’s no use as a cat burglar, and too many people want him dead. In the Mirador, he’s the murderer of Cerberus Cresset and would be executed for treason. And he’s bound his lot so much to Felix that he feels leaving him would destroy whatever meaning his life had. So he goes to Felix, and asks him to perform a spell considered heresy by the Mirador - the obligation d’ame, or the binding-by-forms. Once bound to Felix, he is answerable only to Felix - any other law is overruled.

This now in place, they return to the Mirador, where Felix manages, with Mavortian’s guidance in seeing the patterning, and the strength the obligation d’ame allows him to draw on from Mildmay, to fix the Virtu. The victory is short lived, however - Vey Coruscant, a powerful blood mage in the Lower City, challenges Felix to a wizards’ duel, and Felix, panicking, decides to solve the problem in a more permanent way by using the obligation d’ame to force Mildmay to go kill her, against Mildmay’s wishes. The setup is a trap, and Mildmay ends up a captive in Malkar’s hands. Malkar takes him to the Bastion, and tortures him for several weeks before Felix manages to pull together a rescue mission. At the end of it, Mildmay has repressed most of what happened at Malkar’s hands, but he and Felix are, for the moment, both free.

Personality: What most people immediately think when they see Mildmay is that he’s a thug, only good for fighting and with about two braincells to rub together. And he’s generally happy to let people keep on thinking that - about half the time he thinks that of himself, that he’s too stupid to be anything more than what he was raised is. A lot of this is is due to the influence of his Keeper - particularly after he was maimed at 14. In order to best use him for her own purposes, she kept him reliant on her attention, telling him he was too stupid to think for himself, that the scarring on his face made him ugly, etc, and even after he ran away, he kept internalizing those things. As such, he has a deep-seated need to be needed and wanted by other people. Kohlkis fills this role for him at first, followed by Ginevra until her death, and after that point, his focus turns to Felix (who does, at the time, genuinely need his help and an ally). Even after Felix is cured, though, Mildmay refuses to give up on the bond that’s grown between them, instead very nearly clinging to it like a lifeline. He outright tells Felix that he’d die if they were separated, and talks Felix into performing a spell that makes him, essentially, Felix’s magic-bound servant, answering to no power other than Felix himself. This is despite Felix’s proven history of short temper, difficulty with empathy, and general poor life choices. They argue sometimes, but Mildmay never actually leaves him. Felix is also one of the few handful of people Mildmay shows some of his true feelings around, instead of the stoneface facade he taught himself to usually wear, to avoid being manipulated and hurt. He’s also deeply self-conscious about his appearance, both because of the noticeable facial scar and his unusual hair color. He says as little as possible (which doesn’t help his appearance as unintelligent), and hates eating in front of other people.

Behind all of his problems, Mildmay is surprisingly intelligent - both in terms of the lore of the city he’s picked up over the years, and in his ability to read other people. He’s also capable of caring for people quite deeply, despite people’s first impressions of him - his relationship with Felix highlights it the most, but he has several other friends in the series who are important to him as well. And despite what he’s done in the past, he does have his own set of morals, of lines he’ll only cross if he absolutely has to - liking killing, after he quit being an assassin because he hated how it made him feel.

Powers and abilities:
No superhuman powers - he is, however, a very skilled thief, assassin, and cardsharp, despite the injury to his leg. He also has a better-than-average direction sense.