("The Bridesmaid")
filia Lynx, of House Cristofer
apprenticed 330; mage 345
Felchester: 330-345
Talchester: 345-406
Niveum Pomeridianum: 406-
The most talented and versatile member of the Talchester Trio; also generally acknowledged to be the ugliest mage in Order history. Founder of the Covenant at Talchester in 345; founder of Covenant Niveum Pomeridianum in 406.
See: The Talchester Trio
As an apprentice, Pronuba's parens Lynx cautioned her against entering into an Amicitian arrangement with her colleagues Rosamund and Julian. Lynx felt that the other two were using her as a go-between; she also pointed out that Nocturnus, the Cristoferean member of the Talchester Trio's role models of the Power Trio, never seemed to receive due credit for his participation in any of the Power Trio's joint-creations. "Go with them," she cautioned, "and you will be always the bridesmaid, never the bride" --and named her such, just as a reminder. In fact, however, Lynx was quite mistaken: Pronuba was to have a fruitful and mutually beneficial working relationship with the other two founders of Talchester for the next sixty years.
Less passive than either of her companions, she alone of the three was willing to strike back in response to Julian's brother Falx Astartis' constant harassment of her covenant. In spite of having no combat training or physical competence in the slightest, she repeatedly offered to take arms against him in defense of Julian's honour--offers which Falx, who had chivalrous if disdainful notions about women, found deeply annoying and embarrassing--and on one memorable occasion, she retaliated against his bullying behavior by causing him to fall madly in love with his horse.
She also countered his slanderous accusations against the Castrians with a good number of libels of her own, most of them revolving around accusations of sexual inadequacy. Falx did not fight women, but he not scruple at returning their verbal insults, and he wasn't bad at vituperation himself. Pronuba was very good at goading him. Their encounters more often than not turned into something akin to a spectator sport: the competitive exchanges of personal insults in time became both so excessive and so well-known that more than one mage speculated on the possibility a burgeoning romance between the two -- an insinuation which infuriated both magi, whose mutual hatred was both deep and sincere. In the long run, this did a good deal to harm Falx's reputation within the House, as his apparent inability to refrain from returning Pronuba's verbal assaults (or "screeching like a fishwife in the street," depending on how one wished to view it) came to seem to many magi quite ludicrous.
Pronuba inherited her parens Lynx's distaste for Order politics, and she could be quite harsh with any magi who dared discuss the Manerean Schism in her presence. She considered the entire affair an illustration of "rampant busy-bodiness," and when Annalum, scrambling in a last-ditch effort to prevent mage-war, summoned her to service in 360, she rudely and brusquely refused to have anything to do with them. It was bad timing: the Cristoferean High Council was under tremendous stress, and they reacted with force, going so far as to send troops to Talchester to make it clear that their threats of reprisals were genuine. Pronuba knuckled under, but the Castrian Amicitians were never thereafter at all friendly towards Annalum -- nor Annalum towards them.
She was utterly devastated by the deaths of Rosamund and Julian in 405, not least of which because she could not help but think that her inability to pine away and die of grief, as Rosamund had upon hearing of Julian's death, spoke to some severe defect of character on her part. Early in 406, in the middle of a winter storm, she left Talchester altogether to wander up onto the moors of Ballicastra, resolved to die there in the snow. There she ran into a group of similarly aged, depressed and death-seeking Plenilunial Elementalist magi, who had also chosen Ballicastra to serve as their final resting place. Deciding that it was probably better to die in company than to die alone, Pronuba joined with them: the group founded their hermitage as Covenant Niveum Pomeridianum later that year.
Over the next few years, Pronuba and the other magi of Niveum Pomeridianum became far too caught up in the entire process of making their final resting place a comfortable one to have any time to waste on that silly dying thing. Soon enough they had even taken on new apprentices: from 407 to 422, Pronuba aided Meles in the training of his last student Postumus, and she is currently raising students in Amicitian Fellowship with the Plenilunial Elementalist Sappira of House Touccio.
- David, from 353 to 368
- Sponsa, from 370 to 385
- (also the other members of these two fellowships: see The Talchester Trio)
