Kahl

User Name/Nick: Isabelle
User DW: vibishan
AIM/IM: vibishantheshiny
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Other Characters: Jedao Two

Character Name: Kahl
Series: The Kingdom of the Gods by N K Jemisin
Age: OKay so he is ACTUALLY, like, at least 2600 years old, but he is an immortal being who spent most of that time in an isolated pocket universe unable to develop into his nature/heritage/maturity properly. He’s functionally a late teenager, 16/17.
From When?: After Sieh stabs his heart out with the demonsblood knife at the end of the book.

Inmate Justification: Kahl tried to destroy his entire universe, and he got extremely close! CURSE THAT MEDDLING GOD OF KIDS.

Kahl is a divine manifestation of Vengeance, and he can be cruel, capricious, and callous in pursuit of his retribution. He....sort of tricked an entire civilization of formerly oppressed peoples to be his tools in exchange for his help in pursuing their own vengeance - which, while fairly justified, would be a little bit moot after he destroyed the world, a fact which he did not elect to share. He killed about a million people for a single step in his plan, all of them innocents completely unrelated to his own suffering, and at worst the inheritors of long-dead atrocities committed by the ancestors of a few of them. He takes a vicious, vindictive pleasure in ripping out Itempas's heart at the very moment Sieh was reconciling with him after more than 2000 years, and twisting the knife by leaving Sieh with the knowledge that Kahl was only able to find Itempas because he made himself visible in order to help Sieh. He can wait very patiently and cold-bloodedly in order to Make Things Worse. Kahl is self-centered, maladjusted, deeply traumatized, and extremely ready to make that everyone else's problem.

Arrival: Kahl wants to live. He’ll accept the Admiral’s offer of a second chance. He would mentally try to negotiate for a higher starting level for his powers, on the basis that 1) what he fundamentally needs to learn is how to live with his nature/power in a sustainable way, 2) has no grudges against anyone on the barge yet, and 3) he pinky promises to behave. This may or may not be even a tiny bit successful. Kahl was originally brought in willingly, however, he will have forgotten the details of that at first and just be bewildered. He may remember as time goes on if needed to avoid him fixating on the admiral as a target of vengeance.

Abilities/Powers: Godlings in Inheritance have pretty damn expansive powers. Although they aren’t fundamental to the fabric of the universe the way the three true gods are, they do have the ability to warp reality directly with their will and/or speech. This appears to be confined by proximity, and to a degree by complexity. They have to know what they want to happen clearly in their mind will it. Sudden distractions or mental wavering can break the effect, and it won’t work if what they want is too vague, or if they don’t have the strength of mind to back it up. Kahl is capable of intense resolve, but he’s also kind of unstable, so this is a grab-bag for him. The most common application of this ability is something like ‘hold person’ - people can’t get near godlings if they don’t permit it. Also, sometimes godlings will accidentally explode stuff by swearing, which is hilarious.

The more elaborate uses of their divine power tend to be keyed into the godlings’ natures. Nemmer, the godling of secrets, can hear everything said the darkness, and speak back through shadows. Sieh, the god of childhood, can do “almost anything” because “almost anything can be done for play...and if it’s play, I have power over it.” Godlings can also sense things related to their natures, the way Sieh can tell which of a children’s toys are better loved. Kahl’s nature is vengeance. He’ll be able to tell who is a vengeful person, who seeks vengeance, and feel resonances of places on the barge where recent/significant acts of vengeance were committed. He’s much more powerful when he is seeking vengeance. For example, Kahl appears in Sieh’s dreams to talk with him, and the dreams of the dimmers creating the masks, but I don’t think ‘dreamwalking’ is actually one of his standard powers - it only works because Sieh is the target of his vengeance, and the dimmers are tools of his vengeance, so there’s a connection to his nature.

The more he lives his nature, the stronger Kahl will be; if he does something against his nature, it will hurt and weaken him. If he is weak enough from doing this, he is vulnerable to mortal weapons and pain. Otherwise, he has control over his own body and can only be harmed by 1) the will of other gods who outmatch him, or 2) demonsblood from his world, which is deathly poisonous to gods, but which would be rather difficult to get ahold of on the barge. Godlings can also teleport (and also like, send-teleport other things/people with or without going along), create/destroy small objects, and change their own shapes, although holding a shape that doesn’t suit them for a long time causes strain and effort, and may even qualify as ‘going against their nature’ enough to fundamentally weaken them if the form is sufficiently inappropriate. When they are strong/healthy with their nature, they also manifest superspeed and superstrength, simply as a matter of commanding-by-will whatever they require of their own malleable substance. They definitely can’t read minds or compel anyone telepathically, although to someone obsessed with vengeance, Kahl would inevitably be very, very compelling. If ingested by a mortal, godsblood will make said mortal kinda high, have healing effects, and possibly experience chill visual hallucinations and temporary floating.

Inmate Information: Kahl is Elontid: in Inheritance Trilogy parlance, the offspring of a godling and a god, and therefore “closer to the maelstrom” than other gods. They are inherently contradictory and volatile, in flux, with a power that waxes and wanes, natures that create and consume. Kahl both endures that volatility and inflicts it on the world. Kahl veers from soft-spoken and pensive, to soft-spoken and menacing, to sorrowful and vulnerable, to vicious fury, all over the course of a single conversation.

Kahl’s millennia-long isolation shaped him profoundly. Kahl is patient - good vengeance, he says, takes time - and in his way deeply philosophical. He is used to waiting, and he is in the habit of occupying himself with his own thoughts. He seeks Sieh out to consider the morality of his long-laid plans against someone who caused him terrible suffering, and yet was unwilling and unaware of his role. Kahl asks him why questions, plays both sides, considering different perspectives.

He is also deeply concerned with questions of choice and fate. Because of his long imprisonment, he abhors any possibility of being trapped, even by his own nature. He bewails the possibility of being a “slave” to it, and is truly grateful when Sieh insists that he still has a choice, not only over whether to follow his nature, but how to navigate and form it. And yet, he still struggles with that fear. His most terrible and destructive actions, rather than targeting those who most directly caused him harm, are all in service of the creation of the God Mask, which will allow him to be remade as a true God, interwoven with all reality, and transcend his godling nature. The destruction of all of reality, while perhaps in some ways vengeance against his dead mother, who was the Goddess of life, is in other ways just a side effect of his existential desperation.

Kahl is lonely as fuck. He’s a child who was not only isolated but abandoned. Despite his enmity for Sieh, he repeatedly has moments of abortive affection and yearning. But he also holds himself aloof and cold, remaining in the shadows and maintaining his immemorial secrecy until his plans reach fruition, and treating his co-conspirators callously as well. When he believes Sieh cares for him - and he asks about the possibility repeatedly - he lashes out with the bitterness of someone who hungered for love and nurturing but was denied, insisting that his unfortunate father is too late.

One of the subtlest contradictions is Kahl’s sense of what is fitting. It’s neither proportionate nor a matter of propriety, and yet he clearly does care about things being done right in certain ways, in things being well-suited. When Kahl uses Sieh as a stalking horse to find Itempas, with the lure of fixing Sieh’s protracted, humiliating death, he concludes “If you must die, live long enough to die like a god, in battle at my hand!” Kahl is a creature of suffering, but he is not a pure sadist. Although he would be hard pressed ever to cause Sieh some kind of equivalent suffering to his centuries of solitude, Kahl doesn’t care about causing him maximum pain, but wreaking good vengeance, the right resonant vengeance. And yet, his sense of what is fitting has terrible blind spots. In fact, with all the self-centered arrogance of a teenage god, anyone who has neither personally harmed him nor been the subject of his stymied desire for affection seems to barely register with him at all. A whole universe of innocent bystanders means nothing to him; even people who might be allies by virtue of “enemy of my enemy” are perfectly acceptable collateral to him.

Similarly, he insists of his alliance with Usein Darre that he never deceived her - but nor does he deny failing to disclose the details, while holding her accountable for breaking their bargain, and extracting a terrible reckoning. He cares about promises made, but dismisses her umbrage with the casual insistence that she could - should - have guessed the costs. The book never establishes Kahl as an absolute Devil-who-never-lies archetype, but he clearly has some of that in his make-up. Kahl is simultaneously wily in his plans and painfully straightforward in his intentions and emotions.

Vengeance is coldly pre-meditated and yet fundamentally an emotional rather than rational impulse. Vengeance constructs elaborate rationalizations, or relishes its own fundamental selfishness. Vengeance is alluring and dramatic and kind of idiotic. Vengeance is callous and ruthless - and fundamentally grounded in vulnerability and pain. Vengeance is shot through with the painful awareness of weakness, and full of the arrogance to impose one’s own wishes on the world and call it justice. Kahl is vengeance; Kahl inhabits all these shades of his nature.

Barge Reactions: Kahl has been infused with the maelstrom of all churning chaos. He is….hard to faze. He’ll assume most technology is just sort of ugly blocky magic, but it works. Having breach parents will Fuck Him Up.

Path to Redemption: From the Book:

“You can accept yourself, take control of your nature, make it what you want it to be. Just because you’re the god of vengeance doesn’t mean you have to be some brooding cliché, forever cackling to yourself and totting up what you owe to whom. Choose how your nature shapes you. Embrace it. Find the strength in it. Or fight yourself and remain forever incomplete.”

“Vengeance was his nature, but this went beyond vengeance. This was madness.”

Kahl never really gets a chance to follow Sieh’s advice. His graduation won’t look like a typical one. He will always be the Lord of Retribution. And he will always be volatile. But he can become a more mature, measured, focused version of himself. Vengeance is a domain of life that exists. It is a harsh domain, but it springs from and satisfies a real and raw human need. He does not have to be the Lord of Petty Vindictiveness. He can be the Lord of Reckoning. And sometimes - particularly when one doesn't have a brand-new Goddess of Life on hand to rearrange a tyrannical social order - a raw and vicious reckoning can be better than the alternative.

Kahl has never really received any kindness, except for Sieh’s brusque but good-faith attempts to counsel him about the trials of godling adolescence, and even (or especially) from the father he has never known and must resent as the cause of all his imprisonment, he responds to it and is grateful for it. Kahl could be very responsive to any hint of nurturing from someone with whom he had less fraught history, and his philosophical bent could easily form the basis of a serious, thoughtful warden-inmate conversation.

If Kahl can find a version of his nature that excludes both forgiveness and at least considers/limits innocent collateral, a version which is not only about multiplying pain but achieving catharsis and closure, that cares more for the mortals whose bitter needs echo his own and seeks to champion and guide them into a more empowering and cleansing version of vengeance, he could be true to his nature and yet be, in some ways, a force for good. Despite all his own tendencies toward imbalance, vengeance is also about correcting an imbalance. Kahl could strive for a regular rhythm instead of madness, for vengeance which is well-suited and satisfying, instead of all-consuming. With the mother who imprisoned him dead, Kahl is never able to really reach this satisfaction for himself, but maybe away from the worlds of his parents, with a fresh start on the barge, Kahl can build that best version of his nature.

History: Kahl is the son of death and mischief. Of Enefa, the goddess of life, death, balance, dusk and dawn, and Sieh, the god of trickery and childhood. Unfortunately, it turns out that because parenthood is antithetical to childhood, becoming a parent almost killed Sieh outright. Enefa loved Sieh, and in order to save his life, she compelled him to forget Kahl’s existence, and then sealed the newborn Kahl alone in an unbreachable pocket universe (...also known as, very literally, a personal hell). And then, due to other godly relationship drama, she died.

And Kahl remained alone for the next 2000+ years, until the ascension of Yeine, a new goddess fulfilling Enefa’s place. This transition finally caused the last of Enefa’s works to weaken, and Kahl escaped into the main universe, including both the Gods’ and mortal realms.

Kahl maintained the secrecy of his identity and went to work, over the next century, laying the careful pieces of his plan in place to create a terrifying weapon, a magical mask infused with divine essence meant to replicate the event of Yeine’s ascension, and transform the wearer from a mere godling, with resonance over some slice of reality, into a true god, one who formed a fundamental component of all existence. (And a new one would necessarily rip apart the current existence.)

As his plan drew close to fruition, Kahl finally approached his amnesiac child father, already aging and weakening, partly due to his beginning to remember Kahl, and partly due to unwisely binding himself to a pair of demons. (Sieh makes lots of great life choices.) He asks Sieh - apparently in all sincerity - whether or not to kill him, and Sieh - equally sincere - tries to give him helpful advice. Kahl thanks Sieh for his counsel, and decides that he will kill him - but not yet.

He falls victim - and how could any vengeance god not - to the Villain Monologue tendency, revealing himself to Sieh a second time, and showing Sieh his almost-completed plan. But of course, Kahl can’t gloat after Sieh is dead.

Kahl then uses Sieh as a stalking horse to get the last second-to-last component he needs to complete the mask: the heart of Itempas, the great god of order, punished to live as a mortal for murdering Enefa and enslaving some of her children (including Sieh) during the centuries between Enefa’s death and Yeine’s rise. Kahl comes upon Sieh and Itempas in a bittersweet reconciliation. Kahl is offended and furious that Sieh has forgiven Itempas - but perhaps also jealous that his nature (as well as Sieh’s continued ignorance) places such a reconciliation out of his own reach. He rips Itempas's heart out in front of Sieh and disappears.

Finally, Kahl uses his estranged allies, the High Northers, to complete the mask. They sought vengeance on the Arameri, the clan who ruled the world with terrifying brutality for all the years of Itempas’s dominion. Kahl gave them the power to achieve that vengeance, through other masks which he taught them to make, carved over generations by the thousands, which transform the wearers into unstoppable soldiers for the High Northern cause. Except that the masks are ultimately under Kahl’s control. As the maskers swarm the base of the miraculous mile-high great tree of Sky, in which sits the Arameri’s mountainous white stone palace, Kahl causes all of them at once to explode in a terrible magical conflagration. The tree cracks, and then falls, the shock wave pulverizing the earth for miles around. A million deaths feed the mask, and complete its terrible power.

Kahl dons it.

This act summons the maelstrom, the primal chaotic vortex which spat forth the first three gods who wove the world between them. It is pulled into the mortal realm, distorting and devouring its way across the sky, drawn towards Kahl to merge with him and recreate him as a god. As the maelstrom approaches, Kahl fights off Itempas’s daughter, wielding his sword of fundamental order. Then he is beset by both Yeine and Nahadoth, the great god of darkness and chaos, and although he is temporarily as powerful as one of them, he does not have the strength to stand against both for long. But the maelstrom is coming, and unless it does what it came to do, it will rip the world apart regardless.

But Kahl’s father Sieh is the trickster. Having realized the truth, terribly weak, Sieh calls out to his son and offers his life: by killing the cause of his greatest pain, Kahl will embody and triumph in his nature, gaining the strength to fight the other gods. As Kahl approaches, Sieh stabs him in the heart with a knife covered in demonsblood, powerfu enough to kill even a great god. While Itempas is temporarily held in abeyance thanks to a loophole in his mortal punishment, Sieh steals and dons the mask himself, allowing the maelstrom to transform him into full god, and then recede. Before Itempas awakes, Sieh uses the same knife to kill himself, preserving the number of gods at three, and preserving the fundamental nature underlying existence.

Sample Journal Entry:TDM, TDM Network, Network
Sample RP: TDM, TDM technically also network but most of the thread is in prose

Special Notes: I would really like for Kahl to always have his ability to at least passively sense vengeance and its influence in the world around him, and maaaybe start with his nature-dependent god-health level, because that’s something he most needs to learn to navigate. The reality warping and superstrength and shape changing should all definitely be nerfed to basically zero at first, of course. Also I’d love it if he kept the teleportation ability, just because it’s hilarious to have him constantly skipping the stairs. ETA: Porthos requested the return of his ability to bless people, but without the ability to use it to do "any harm" - which I'll take to mean he can't indirectly cause harm by giving anyone seeking vengeance the blessing of some grenades, lmao. I'd like him to keep this!

Updated for Re-App: The last time Kahl was on the barge, he made a good chunk of progress! He had a close bond of mutual respect with his warden, Porthos du Vallon, who made him talk and think about some aspects of his nature. Kahl didn't always agree, but just considering different angles of the issue was good for him.

He learned to care about other individuals and made several good friends/surrogate family, including Klaus Hargreeves, Nadia Vulvukov, and even had a mostly-oblivious crush on Nokov. He also became attached to, and protective of, Harry Goodsir. When Harry was targeted by one of the Leitner books Jonathan Sims unwittingly brought into the library, Kahl was able to use his vengeful power to find and contain the Leitner. He did it to avenge Harry, but also to protect him, and in doing so, protected others as well. He was even able to give Harry a divine blessing, allowing him to feel some closure in the revenge he'd already completed - an invaluable glimpse of some of the good he might be capable of while still following his nature.

However, he still had a long way to go, firmly resisting Porthos's anger at seeing the million casualties of his destruction of the Sky Tree. He gained a lot of pieces that would be important to his graduation, but not really put any of them together.

In the Don't Worry, Wilson Port (the Island of Doctor Moreau), Kahl went overboard, transforming into one of the uplifted, vengeful animals of the House of Pain, interested in taking human-looking creatures and mutilating them into joining the animals' ranks. Afterward, Kahl had to struggle with the idea that - by his own judgement that floods/ports/breaches all count - he himself was a legitimate target of someone else's vengeance. Unfortunately, of his three man victims (Iris, Nokov, and Flint), one forgave him, and the other two dropped not too long after, leaving Kahl unable to really resolve that plot.

During the Barge of Leaves event, Kahl was sort of swallowed up by the chaos, manifesting as the same reality-destroying Ultimate Reckoning he'd become with the Maelstrom Mask, but it was largely offscreen, and when the event ended, he fell from the sky and was pulverized on impact.

These two plotlines, representing his own culpability and his potential for megalomania, both ultimately going nowhere, left me in kind of a stagnating dead end with his character, and that combined with mental fatigue and real life stuff lead to his drop. Furthermore, 90% of his old CR has departed now in one way or another. With all that in mind, I want to do a soft reset, where he starts off not remembering the barge, with the potential to regain spotty/hazy memories of some pieces down the road - enough to draw forth some of the lessons he learned his first go-round if there's nothing comparable this time, but not enough to be hung up on Porthos, Nokov, and the other events of the past.