Leland
Name: Leland of Bremenium
Aliases: Leland of High Rochester, Leland Rochester
Gender: Male
Ethnicity: English (Briton)
Age: Apparently 21 (though he could pass for older)
Occupation: Vampire elder
Clan: Brujah
Height: 5'7" (this isn't unusually short at the time he was alive, but in the modern day he's a bit on the small side)
Build: Lithe, strong. Has a tendency to appear to be skinny when he wears loose clothing, but he's really very cut.
Hair: Long (mid-back length), wavy, black, usually worn loose. When necessary, he cuts or styles it, but it grows back to its original length after a night.
Eyes: Pale blue. In extreme darkness, they can take on a feline or wolflike iridescence.
Skin: Pallid, bloodless, dark (bruise-colored) around eyesTattoos/Piercings: None
Other features: Fangs are visible when he wants them to be (feeding, fighting, etc). While fighting, Leland can also grow talon fingernails. While not inhumanly long, they are sharp, durable and effective. When he wishes, he can turn into a golden eagle or a completely black deerhound, but this is rare and he uses his animal forms mostly for traveling long distances.
Clothing: Leland tends to dress in whatever type of clothing is most "normal" for the age he's living in. While his clothing is always of fine quality, it's almost never really impractical, as it needs to be suited for travel. Leland has been a vampire since the year 381, and can be depicted as far back as that time. An outfit cross-section and summary can be found here.
Weapons: Between the 400s and 1400s, he uses mostly his own fangs and claws, and occasionally a silver dagger to be used very rarely against supernatural creatures such as lupines. As a much younger vampire (circa Bronze Age), he used a sword, spear and shield because he didn't know how to grow the claws yet. During his travels in Asia in the 1500s, he acquired a Chinese dao sword, which became his standard weapon for several centuries. He resisted the early use of firearms, considering them slow, impractical and overly complicated; after 1852, however, he does use a revolver (of his own construction- structurally similar to the later Lemat revolver) for distance fighting. Even in the modern day, he still uses a revolver rather than a more contemporary pistol.
Personality: As a human, Leland was among the remaining rebel Britons that fought entrenched Roman occupation of Northumbria near Hadrian's Wall in the late 4th century. Mortally wounded by the Inconnu vampires that aided the Roman army, Leland was turned by Cormac of Armagh, a nocturnal undead ally to the Briton rebellion. By the time Leland sired his own childe, he was nearly 800 years old. Well-traveled and well-informed, Leland is a huge believer in self-improvement through education and the freedom of information. Because of his age and experience, he's gained a very wide and first-hand view of the history of humanity far beyond the understanding of the average mortal scholar. Very much an idealist at heart, he sees the value and virtue in the idea of an egalitarian society, and one where vampiric Cainites can coexist with all social classes of humans (who are often referred to as the "kine" by vampires, though Leland prefers the less derogatory term "flock"), and he has little patience for hereditary nobility. Amid Cainite society, Leland has fairly low standing because of his reputation as a bit of an upstart, and there's a good deal of residual bitterness between him and many local vampire princes. On the surface, he's very calm, level-headed and reasonable, but has very deep and serious passions that few have really bothered to probe.
Relationships:
-Childe / Consort: Claris of Reidona
Claris is Leland's first and only vampire childe. Ostensibly, he viewed his siring of her to be part coincidence and part fate, and claims he chose to Embrace her simply because she wasn't unique, special or remarkable- just someone with unexplored potential that he could give an avenue to success. He was genuinely invested in helping her inform and improve herself and gain her own views and opinions, and was in love with her since shortly after they met, although for a long time he was unwilling to say anything about it to her. Several years after settling in London with her, Claris and Leland became blood-bound. Although they could never legally be wed, he referred to her as his bride and he, her consort. They were "married" for over a century, and their emotional connection to each other was very strong and deep.
In the fall of 1317, Claris accidentally glimpsed one of his memories of his mortal wife who bore an uncanny resemblance to her, and Leland was forced to confess that, far from Embracing her for "egalitarian" reasons of coincidence and fate, he had been unable to resist the idea of being forever with a woman who so closely resembled his first love, and had allowed her to become prey to a feral vampire to put her in the kind of peril that would get her close enough to death that he could Embrace her. Although he tried to do right by his childe and never tried to make Claris be anything other than what she was- and in fact, by the end of their time together he found he loved her better than he had ever loved his mortal wife- he still couldn't erase his own guilt that he had done this to her in the first place. Thinking himself a monster who had stolen an innocent girl's life and love for his own gain, he left her and implored her not to waste another thought on him, although their empathic bond persisted for years even after his parting.
In 1630, while Claris and her childe were traveling in Romania, they happened across Leland as a staked prisoner in the castle of Volodya Iliescu, a Tzimisce lord, and freed him. Although she tried to avoid it, Leland and Claris spoke again, although not on the best terms. He had tried to return to her almost immediately after leaving but had been detained by hirelings of Iliescu, brought to and imprisoned in the same castle, and tortured. When he escaped, it had already been a decade, and knowing she would be totally unwilling to hear any explanation from him at that point, instead of returning to her, he spent the last several hundred years wandering throughout eastern Europe, Russia, China, India and the Himalayas trying to do enough good to ease his conscience from the sting of having abandoned her. Although he didn't ask her to forgive him or take him back, he did refer to her as the love of his whole existence, and his loss of her as his "second death"; when she had no request of him other than to be well, he insisted that "I was only ever well when I was with you." They parted ways, and she returned to France while he went back to England, made amends with their old friends Gregory and Rose, and took up residence in and around London.
In 1666, Claris visited Rose and Gregory in London without prior knowledge that Leland was living there, and they encountered each other in the events leading up to the Great Fire. When a large portion of the city was destroyed in the flames, the vampire prince of Britain banished Claris from his lands due to her inadvertent involvement. Leland attempted to redirect the punishment onto himself, but because of the prince's short temper and displeasure with their whole lineage, both Claris and Leland became the victims of a blood hunt: a standing order to all vampires within the prince's realm to capture or kill the offenders on sight. Claris remained in France and avoided hunters for a time, but Leland was pursued by would-be assassins for over fifty years, until he finally managed to track down Claris in 1720, convinced that if she hadn't already been found by the English prince's agents, they would soon take care of her. When he spoke to her again, he was harried and paranoid out of frantic concern for her safety, but she was unmoved by his insistence that she allow him to protect her. It wasn't until he broke down and confessed that he would rather die than live without her, and that he needed her simply because he loved her and not because he felt like he owed her something, that she acted on the feelings she retained all along and consented to go with him to the colonies in America and escape their pursuers.
Once in America, they lived together again, albeit with some degree of separation from one another. It took him some time to recover from the stress of having been chased and attacked almost every night for years, and though she was more than content to provide whatever he needed, they both agreed that they would conduct themselves like close friends, and that when and if the time came, he would court her properly as if they had never been together. Eventually, when he brought up the prospect of the two of them becoming blood bound again as before, she was amenable to the idea but would only agree on one condition: that he have no reservations or qualms about thinking of her and referring to her as his wife, not his consort or "bride" as before. While she didn't want to force him not to remember his first wife, she simply wanted assurance that he considered their relationship on a level equal to his first, and that he wasn't using their being immortal as an excuse to think of himself as anything other than a widower who had since remarried. He agreed without hesitation, and later proposed. They bound themselves to each other again, and have been together since.
Their relationship is the linchpin of both of their lives, and they're more than a little codependent. Without her, Leland is fatalistic, aimless and reckless; without him, Claris is desolate, withdrawn and unfeeling. On the flip side, they literally live for one another and share every part of themselves, and because of this they're constantly acting to improve themselves through each other's actions. Her efforts to provide for those in need make him more in touch with his humanity and spirituality; his passion for protecting the downtrodden makes her more courageous and strong in her convictions. Each of them would go to the ends of the earth if it would ensure the well-being of the other, but neither of them wishes to endure an eternity without their match.
-Familiar: Desmond
Desmond, a supernaturally large gray Irish wolfhound, is Leland and Claris's pet. Though Leland had dogs in his mortal life and still loved their company after he was turned, he found that their relatively fleeting lifespans were problematic and so never kept one after he began his un-life. When he and Claris started living together, she (being young, and having little sense of the eventual expanse of time ahead of her) convinced him that a dog might be worth having for at least a little while. Eventually, Desmond became a vampiric familiar: Leland gives him a dose of blood in his food each month, and Desmond remains untouched by age and retains supernatural strength and size. Desmond is an excellent guard dog and hunter, and even though he belongs to both Leland and Claris, as Leland's familiar the two are particularly bonded. When he left, Leland took the dog, although the two were separated during Leland's capture and Desmond found his way back to Claris, living with her, her ghouls and eventually her childe. After they met each other again in 1630, Desmond defected back to Leland; when he and Claris were permanently reunited 90 years later, Desmond remained Leland's familiar, although he's equally loyal to both his masters.
-Wife: Brenna (deceased)
Brenna was Leland's mortal wife from before he was turned. At the time Leland underwent the Embrace, the two had been married for six years and had one child together. They were deeply in love, and though his transition to becoming a vampire forced him to leave his wife and daughter, Leland made sure they were protected and taken care of for the rest of their lives. He does not speak about them to Claris; although her nearest theory was that speaking about them to his second family made him feel like he was betraying both, in actuality he was trying to avoid thinking about Brenna because of his guilt about the circumstances of Claris's making.
-Daughter: Selby (deceased)
Selby was Leland and Brenna's only child, and she was five years old when her father was "killed". She grew up to have children of her own, and as a result, Leland has mortal descendants who are still around as of the 1200s. He looks in on them from time to time out of casual interest, but prefers not to interact. Again, as with Brenna, Leland does not speak about Selby to Claris.
Reference Images by me:
Guest Art:
