("The Emerald")
filia Lapilla, of House Touccio
apprenticed 232; mage 338; died 413
Stony Hill: 323-342
Ultorum: 342-413
Witchy green-eyed Picantaean, raised at Covenant Stony Hill by Lapilla filia Daenae. The Plenilunial movement of the time was strongly interest in non-Cholaeic traditions, and its members were very accepting of them; Smaragda was imperfectly Cholaeicized at best.
She had been a mage for only three years when her parens was killed in the tribal attack which destroyed the covenant. Smaragda herself was taken alive by the Picantaeans, but shortly thereafter rescued by the Savacion Falx Astartis, who nearly single-handedly drove the tribesmen from the covenant. Smaragda was all for vengeance on the Picantaeans, but Falx would not allow her to join him in his own quest for vengeance: he had always been contemptuous of women, and he had already had to rescue her once; he considered her weak and worthless, and he made precious little effort to hide that fact. Nor was she able to convince the only other mage survivor of the battle, Gryps of House Cristofer, to remain behind in the area and help her to rebuild: as far as Gryps was concerned, her work here at Stony Hill was done; she advised Smaragda to accompany her back to Plenilunium Album, where she was off to report the demise of the covenant. In response to Smaragda's increasingly shrill insistence that Falx and Gryps couldn't just leave her there, both parties responded that they could--and they did. Hating to abandon her covenant, but far too afraid to remain behind all by herself, Smaragda finally gave up and travelled south, where in 342 she joined Covenant Ultorum, whose history she now felt that she could relate to all too well.
At Ultorum, she became interested in the subject of curses, which while they had been quite well-represented in the arsenals of the Picantaean witches of her childhood, seemed to her to be strangely poorly-developed within Cholaeic magecraft. Destructive and debilitating magics the Cholaeics had in abundance, to be sure, but they did not seem to understand very well the magics of non-specified ill-intent which filled even their own folklore and history. Smaragda took a particular interest in the unspecified curse: the Touccian Castor's notoriously cursed items, for example, which seemed to bring misfortune on all who tried to use them--but a different sort of misfortune to each; or the Curse legend claimed had been laid on the House of Lycas by the Council of Rhythnorian wizards; or all of the various cursed necklaces and gems of legend, which similarly were said to bring misfortune of a varied nature upon any who possessed them.
The mid-fourth century was still a good time for folklorists: the magae of Verbi Meliae had not yet abandoned this line of research for the rather narrower field of exorcism, and under Martia's direction, the luscirpiculae for their Horreum scienticulae were still being released on a regular basis. Smaragda, however, was dissatisfied with the Melians' work in this arena, and for many years engaged in a highly critical--one might even say 'carping'--correspondence with Martia, demanding to know why the Melians spent so little time on the darker aspects of hedge witchery. Where were all of the miscarriages, she demanded, the milk-souring and the crop-blighting and the wasting diseases? While Martia always engaged her politely, the Verbi Melians found her frankly disturbing.
Smaragda's obsession could make her a difficult mage to deal with. In the wake of the destruction of Mare Aeneum in 373, she pestered her first filia, the elementalist Sappira, and the other survivors of the disaster so persistently and indelicately for the details of what had befallen them that the magi of Plenilunium Album eventually barred her from their covenant altogether; she made herself similarly unpopular with the Lemmites in 386, when she travelled the Order to speak with those who had observed first-hand the most interesting effects of Lem's Curse.
Although she was never able to achieve her goal of replicating the effects of these curses through Cholaeic magic, Smaragda did in time become quite expert at placing elaborate and complicated conditionals into the enchantments contained within her (usually rather dire) items. The spell she used to transform her second filia's lover, the Savacion Dumtaxat, into a pig in 385 was laid with so many traps and snares set for those who might try to undo it that in the end, only through the aid of the ghostly founders of Mille Lacus could its effects be reversed. Smaragda was jealous and closed about her research and consequently unwilling to release many of her notes for publication, in spite of numerous petitions from the magi of the Hall of Touccio; what little they were able to coax from her is highly valuable material for magi interested in imbuing items with complexly interrelated or conditional magical effects.
In the 390s, when Smaragda's research first began to venture into the realms of the more directly experimental, the other magi of the Ultorum became sufficiently dismayed to forbid her from continuing at their covenant. If she really had to play around with trying to recreate the effects of powerful and poorly-understood wide-ranging curses, they told her, then she would have to do so elsewhere. She conceded the point, albeit with poor grace, and contented herself with more academic approaches to the subject until her death in 413.
When nine years after her death, the rest of the Order learned that a number of the Ultorum magi had been members of the ill-fated Last Hope Conspiracy, and that furthermore, the covenant itself had been destroyed, not a few magi found themselves wondering if perhaps Smaragda might not have continued her experimentation on the sly after all.
Smaragda
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