The sorceress Eleanor, accompanied by her disciple Merula, first approached the magi at Evasendia in 194. She claimed that she had been aware of Aegidius' search for several years now and that, tired of waiting for him to approach her, she was resolved instead to come to him to request that she and Merula be permitted to join his new Order. Upon learning that Aegidius had just declared his search at an end, Eleanor rebuked him: he had missed one magical practitioner who had been living under his very nose, she pointed out; who knew how many others he might have overlooked? Chastened, Aegidius left Evasendia to resume his search, and Eleanor and her apprentice were admitted to the Order of Cholae.
Eleanor's admission to the Order effectively ended the debate between Lem and the other Founders over whether or not women were capable of practicing magic. Even the misogynist Palenti, while he disliked Eleanor, could not deny her magical power. She claimed to have been taught by the Oracle of Vestra itself, and her magic bore sufficient similarity to that of the students of Trismagistus to be recognizably Cholaeic in origin.
Eleanor was unique, however, in her ability to manipulate the very stuff and substance of magic itself, the art which Lem had only hypothesized and had named vim. Her facility with this art combined well with the novel techniques for physical enchantment which Touccio had brought to the Order, and although Eleanor and Touccio did not get along very well personally, their respective talents neatly complemented each other.
Eleanor was also responsible for the introduction of the complicated and intensive vis-dependent spells later known to the Order as "ritual magics." While many of the ritual spells introduced by Eleanor and her descendants made their way into the shared knowledge of the Order as a whole, Eleanor trained her own students in an even more complex form of ritual magic which she refused to teach to anyone else.
The Order of Cholae was officially founded in 198. Eleanor, already given to secrecy in the training of her students, enthusiastically supported Palenti in the formation of House Manere in 200 and founded her own House, House Eleanor, shortly thereafter.
While the other founders generally held the proper term of apprenticeship to be fifteen years, in 203 Eleanor declared thirteen years to be the standard length of her own House's apprenticeship. She also instituted a rite of passage from apprenticeship to magehood peculiar to her own House: Eleanorean students were only declared mage upon their return from a long journey which master and student conducted together in isolation from the rest of the Order. None of the members of House Eleanor would ever reveal precisely what occurred on this journey, but the name which the student took upon her return was understood to be in some way connected with the mystical revelations which were a fundamental part of this process. These mage names, which Eleanor's followers adopted as their own upon their ascension to magehood, were first introduced to the Order by Eleanor, although the followers of Lem would later claim that they had been their own founder's innovation.
Always a voice for mage autonomy on the Council, Eleanor defended her third filia Ascia's right to privacy even after Ascia's death in the explosion of 223. She was an outspoken opponent of Aegidius' motion to prohibit Council members from political activism and a supporter of her own descendants' involvement in Evasendian revolutionary politics. Eleanor was to maintain her defense of mage autonomy even when her second student, Fucina, renounced her teachings to embrace those of Aegidius in 229: her unwillingness to use her position as the leader of her House to contest Fucina's decision established precedent for the permissibility of changes in House affiliation within the Order. She was, however, never to speak to Fucina or refer to her by name again.
While Eleanor herself remained aloof from the revolutionary partisanship of 230-232, her students were among the most politically active of the Council members. Even after the disastrous events of 232, Eleanor only agreed to the prohibition on political service after much persuading, and then with the greatest reluctance. She was, however, a supporter of the Cholaeic diaspora, and while she chose herself to remain in Evasendia, she sent her followers both north and south to found the new covenants of the diaspora.
The first of the Council magi to recognize the significant shift in power represented by the Cholaeic diaspora, Eleanor actively encouraged her student Xyris to leave Evasendia upon her ascension to magehood. Her public statement that the new diaspora covenants were the proper place for the young and magically-innovative of the Order became well-known, causing tension between Eleanor and the Council Cristofereans, who were deeply concerned with the steady decline of the Council in the post-diaspora years.
Once again in keeping with her belief in the rights of magi to make their own decisions, Eleanor at first refused to comment on her filia Erix's apprenticeship of a male student in 235. Her followers divided on the issue, some of them reading her silence as consent, others as disapproval. When this divisiveness threatened to damage the unity of her House, however, Eleanor formally declared that men were not to be banned from House Eleanor.
Cristofer's death left Eleanor the sole surviving founder of the Cholaeic Order in 252. As such, she succeeded him as the Council's First Speaker, and she was particularly honored at the First Tribunal in 269. Shortly after the opening ceremonies, however, the long-vanished founder Lem reappeared and accused Eleanor of being both a theocrat and a natural grand-daughter of Isdanor. Dismissing the charges as ludicrous, Eleanor walked off the Tribunal in protest and returned to Evasendia. She refused the Tribunal's summons to return to Annalum to respond to the charges levelled against her later that year, but when she heard that a deputation of Savacion magi was on the way empowered to use force, if necessary, to bring her back to the Tribunal, she fled Evasendia along with her filia Erix.
As evidence mounted in favor of Lem's claims, a mixed group of magi from Houses Savacion and Lem set out in search of Eleanor. When she was captured by them in 270, she consented to submit to the test of the Seat of Tyr. The test, which was administered by her accuser Lem, killed her in a manner which left no doubt in the minds of witnesses that she had, indeed, been both a theocrat and a grand-daughter of Isdanor; and confronted by this final proof of her guilt, and also by the growing body of evidence of an Eleanorean plot to dominate the Order through theocratic means, the Order embarked on a purge of all of Eleanor's descendants and their allies. House Eleanor was utterly destroyed by the end of 271.
All of the writings and creations of House Eleanor have been destroyed, and Eleanor's name is often omitted in the list of the founders of the Order.
She taught four students,
- Merula (E2), until 198
- Fucina, later Melia (E3/Mel1), from 198 to 211
- Ascia (E5), from 206 to 219
- Erix (E6), from 216 to 229
and also completed the training of Ascia's orphaned student Xyris from 223 to 235.
