Cecily Ó Móráin
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Out of Character
Cecily is named after Scout's best friend from primary school. She was mildly autistic and gave a very little Scout quite an insight into the world.
This Cecily is designed to do the same thing.
In Character
Specifics
Full Name: Cecily Ó Móráin
Nickname(s): Witch of Tory and Binne (bin-ya).
Species: Angel, but she would call herself a reader
Birthdate: 1 June, 1810
Birthplace: Oileán Thoraí, Contae Dhún na nGall, Éire (it might have been Oileán Thúr Rí when she was born, but what do I know about 1810)
Hometown: Oileán Thoraí, Contae Dhún na nGall, Éire
Currently Resides: Oileán Thoraí, Contae Dhún na nGall, Éire
Family: Parents, Tómas and Afric Ó Móráin, both crossed. Daughter, Isabella Fitzwilliam (horribly estranged). Lives with aunt, Aoife Dunne.
Sexuality: Straight
Relationship Status: In love and involved with Dragomir Petrescu.
Schooling: Homeschooling
Occupation: None
Detailed Information
Physical Description
Tall (5'8" or so), dark-haired, fair-skinned. She's an angel who looks to be a little younger than eighteen years of age. Her eyes are pale grey. She's very much a product of the weather and world from which she comes and has very freckled skin. The ends of her hair, which is extremely curly, are so old they have become bleached by the sun over time and look blonde.
Naturally slender, two centuries of working outside and sustaining a household with no modern amenities means her overall appearance tends to mimic this. She usually has dirty nails, which are always short, rough hands, and sunburnt skin. She doesn't look fragile. She has lean, muscular limbs, especially her arms (she's been churning butter for most of her life). She can hold her own quite well.
As with the rest of her family, both those she accepts and those she does not, her beauty will haunt anyone who is fortunate enough to see it.
However, not many do.
Personal Information
Cecily is an angel of extreme tradition, both as an angel and as an Irish woman. Due to her upbringing away from the rest of humanity, Cecily learned, over time, how to harness everything that being an angel means. She was taught by her mother and other family members who, as the years wore on, crossed over. But with Cecily and her aunt remained the utmost knowledge on every little secret that the earth holds in its depths.
She keeps journals and has dozens of them, filled with her small writing, stacked away in the cottage. In these journals are accounts of what it means to be what she is and every little secret she has learned over time.
Cecily is a hard woman to get along with, especially if you don't know her at all. She is stubborn and driven and strict, upholding the family with an iron fist, a fist that scared her only child away.
As she has grown up living completely as an angel, she does very little work by hand, but what work she does is typical of your old Irish families. They cut their own turf, live in a white-washed stone cottage, thatch the roof, and live in overall very barren conditions, especially considering they live in an incredibly rocky and uninhabited end of the island, above the cliffs. They have a garden that is always successful, despite the conditions. To the locals, this is a spot of incredible magic and it is forbidden to touch or interfere with the supposedly haunted cottage sitting out at the end of the island.
She is known by myth and legend only as the Witch of Tory (Cailleach na Thoraí).
Years ago, there were sheep, dogs, even goats and pigs. A cat once lived there, as well (it bred with some local cats and now the Tory Island cats have an interesting lineage). During the time of keeping ewes, there was a spinning wheel in the sitting room and the women in the family, Aoife and Cecily included, spun beautiful yarn, dyed it with natural colors, and knitted intricate blankets, sweaters, and anything else you could imagine for a family with no means to go shopping. Recently, they have been unable to knit anything, and even more unable to spin their own yarn, so the spinning wheel is in storage. However, Cecily and her aunt do fine needlepoint and sew their own clothes using fabric Aoife gets from the towns, as well as recycling old clothing that has worn its last days. They can also weave baskets and do quite a bit of craftwork.
These are farmers. Cecily and her family are made from tough stock.
Named after a character from an English novel, one brought over and read to her mother sometime before Cecily was born (her mother couldn't understand anything but she loved the name). She doesn't like to talk about it.
As for her stance on immortality, Cecily told her daughter that no angel (or 'reader' as they call it) would be happy with a mortal, for fear of death. She also said that no one even deserves to serve a naturally immortal life except their kind, but that even readers cross because an immortal life is not ideal.
Backstory
Cecily was born the only child of some angels (a long time farming daughter and a sailor). Her family has lived on Tory Island and other sparsely populated, island, or very rural locations in Ireland for thousands of years and is one of the few remaining lines of angels with very little human integration (there is some but those people are quickly forgotten). As such, they have come into living as angels instead of living as humans. There is thousands of years of knowledge stockpiled between them, and Cecily (along with every member of the family) was instructed in all of it. All angels across the world are equally powerful, but not all know everything about what they are and how they came to be or live long enough to understand. This family does and only because they haven't moved since the very first angels appeared amidst the dead. They have achieved all that angels can achieve, only because they know what they are capable of doing.
Cecily has lived on Tory Island since her birth, and her parents built the cottage in which she lives now. Unlike her daughter, Cecily accepted the strict rules of the society into which she was born, rules meant to protect them from outsiders and to hold onto their secrets. While it is arguable that her parents were not as bigoted as their daughter came to be, they still restricted her interaction with the children on the island and kept her on a tight leash. They forbade her from marriage, forbade her from having children (ideally not for centuries, if at all), and especially forbade her from mixing with anything mortal. As this was 19th century Ireland, they also forbade her from interacting with anyone speaking that language, angel or not (that language being English).
Still, her father did speak English. His reasons for banning the language were simple: he hated England and everything it was doing to Ireland. Though Cecily's mother did learn a bit of English (and so did Cecily's aunt), Cecily never learned anything beyond songs written in English and doesn't know how to use the words in other contexts.
They were also strict and disciplined because of their way of life. They lived in barren conditions on an island not known for its agriculture (it doesn't even sustain non-magical trees). The only reason they were able to farm was because everything around them was magic. But because everything around them was magic, they always had chores to do, from dawn until dusk.
Tough love is the name of the game in their family, which is probably to be expected, as they have lived off the land in relative isolation for millennia. In any case, Cecily had a good, pleasant life until the 20th century. They farmed, they fished, they worked on the house. Sometimes they had family visit from far away, or Cecily's father's sailor friends. But by the end of the 19th century this had stopped being a common occurrence. Tory was difficult to get to and the English made it more difficult. And everyone knew that Cecily's parents were going to cross over soon.
They did, early in the 20th century.
It's unknown whether or not any human specifically hurt her. The more likely reason for her distaste for all things that aren't angels (or 'readers' as they call themselves) is simply homegrown and internal and grew more bitter within the last hundred years. She has met all manner of other supernatural beings, but she finds her species superior to the rest.
For the first century of her life, until her parents crossed over, Cecily, though always stubborn and elitist, was slightly easier to get along with. Unlike her aunt, she never sought the company of anyone outside of family, but she enjoyed laughing and singing when her family did come to call. All-in-all, her life was very normal and very tame. She lived quietly and did chores and had magical chickens and other livestock and what have you. When her parents crossed, leaving quite a farm behind, Cecily was shaken. The attitudes and terse behavior she has today were strengthened and solidified by the first proper unhappiness in her life. Until the day her parents crossed, she never had much conflict. Still, she moved on and never intended to have children of her own. She lived with her aunt, her mother's twin sister, Aoife, and was content to weather the environment until she felt like crossing. She never left the island, she never learned English, she stopped bothering with the humans, presumably because the English weren't as nice and they (humans of all sorts) regarded the cottage and its inhabitants with fear. The locals already had their own legends that kept them away.
But then one day, in a momentary loss of self-control, something she carried with her all her life, Cecily found herself absolutely seduced by the charm of a sailor, a son of one of the original sailors to come through the island and join her parents for parties. His name was Francis Ryan. This sailor, like his father, was an angel. He descended from another line, one not as ancient as Cecily's. Blond, blue eyed, tall and strong. He spoke English, he spoke Irish, he played the accordion. He and his mates decided to go to Tory just to see the family his father talked about. He and Cecily's affair was brief, but she became pregnant and he was gone before she could tell him. Though she didn't love him, she waited for him obsessively and began to believe she actually did. She had never been with anyone before him and had no intentions of ever having a family of her own. That he didn't return, that he never came back, left her cold.
From 1912 onward, Cecily changed her demeanor. She was no longer quietly angry, but entirely resentful. Though she learned to love the pregnancy, though the birth of her daughter brought her joy she never expected and her love was unsurpassed, she still felt trapped in the situation and betrayed by the man who left her there. She was strict with her daughter but her daughter had a rebellious streak that many people in the family carry. Isibél, as she named her, wanted friends and to explore. She didn't enjoy chores and she didn't enjoy her mother's strictness. She often wandered away and was punished severely (Cecily was never abusive, but she was rough, and her punishments came in the form of lots of heavy chores).
Cecily feared, even more than her daughter's human friendships, that the girl would leave them one day. Aoife was set to cross once Isibél had manifested and was old enough to do work on the property, and Cecily hoped that by such time, her daughter would no longer be so wild. Children have their ways, Aoife always told her. Cecily simply couldn't handle them.
Again, that by no means meant that she didn't love her little girl. She did, more than anything. Isibél brought her joy and happiness and love that she had never known before, and when the girl was still a toddler and mostly listening to her mother, she was always on Cecily's hip and never left her side. Their happy moments outweighed their fights, but their fights were always brutal. They were two opposing sides with a similar personality.
By the tender age of nine, Isibél had enough. Her mother had given her rag curls in the fashion of the human styles of the day after Isibél had begged and begged for them, but they broke out into another fight that raged for most of the evening. By morning, however, it was obvious that this fight had gone beyond any other. Isibél's bed was empty. Cecily assumed that she was already awake and playing outside, but panic still gripped her. On the hearth, she noticed Isibél's doll and a note.
The morning Cecily woke to find her daughter missing marked the start for a months'-long torrential downpour that wore Tory down. The gale was relentless and the island was cut off for the rest of the summer and into the autumn. Records still remark on how horrible it was, how freakish it was, and how summer is rarely the time for weather like that. This was also one of the few times the people in the town saw the woman who lived in the cottage, as she searched for her daughter and was not hesitant to ask for help. But no one could find the girl. No one ever did find the girl. The men who had seen her run off the boat on the mainland went searching all across the coast for her, but to no avail. Cecily lived with the knowledge that her daughter had intentionally run away, and every day that the girl didn't return, Cecily retreated into a cloud of resentment. She expected to never see her little girl again. It took years for there to be a sense of normalcy in the little cottage on the cliff. Cecily hid every possession her daughter ever had and all but screamed whenever Aoife brought her up. She was edgy, angry, and felt a burning hatred for that sailor who had condemned her to this absolutely miserable new life.
Only one possession of Isibél's ever stayed out of storage. Her doll, which was made by Cecily when the girl was two. She was a ragdoll, stained and well-loved, but she still smelled like the little girl and was so much a part of the little girl that Cecily kept her by her pillow and held her when she slept. She assumed that was the end of ever seeing her baby again and the memories hurt. She couldn't believe her daughter had left her. She couldn't believe everything had gone so wrong. Within two decades, her parents had crossed, she had lost her virginity to a one-night-stand that left her pregnant, and the child ran away. Life had never been so harsh.
But then the little girl came back. Twenty years after disappearing, Isibél returned home to her mother to tell her about her new life with a human husband and three children by him. This was not news Cecily ever wanted to hear. She went from elation at feeling her daughter's presence on the island, to horror at knowing she had willingly stayed away and found a new life and new happiness and a new name. Either jealous or simply carrying the wounds of a mother whose child abandoned her, Cecily banished her, said she was dead, and disowned her from the family. She scratched out the girl's name on the family tree, attempted to burn some of the memories (Aoife stopped her--and later, Aoife filled Isibél's name back in the tree), and nearly went mad.
She most definitely regretted the decision to disown her daughter, although she found what her daughter chose to do absolutely deplorable. Unfair. A mother's love, if she ever shows compassion, is impossible to be rid of, and though Cecily was hard on her daughter, she loved her dearly and felt as though she had been replaced by this man and the children. And, of course, this was true. To Cecily, who probably never felt unconditional love outside of her parents and aunt, such a thing was unfathomable. And cruel. The girl was far too much like her father, in appearance and demeanor. It was a nightmare.
It was a nightmare that she lived through for another twenty five years before she finally made a bizarre decision.
In 1967, she left Ireland for the first time ever, traveling all the way to England only to find that her daughter was in South Africa, a place she never heard of, never knew. She returned home to Ireland and waited until the family returned. Though she never spoke to Isibél, now Isabella, she met her grandson and great-granddaughter before finding the situation too much to bear and leaving without saying a word.
Cecily's love for her daughter remains as strong as ever but the past century has not been kind to her and where her aunt adjusted and accepted the unkind fate, Cecily remains bitter and unforgiving. She clutches to the past when the future surges on--and yet, at the same time, refuses to properly revisit the past at all. In the years following her venture to England, she began to let her daughter go, just enough to survive. The farm dwindled to chickens and sheep, then chickens. The island changed. Life began to resume its pattern of normalcy. She was now angrier than she had been a century earlier, but she never got worse.
In 2002, Cecily and Aoife received letters from a distant relative. She wanted her three young girls to live on the island but was going to see the rest of the country before they arrived, so they did not expect to be there for at least a few months. Only mildly interested at the prospect of more family, Aoife and Cecily prepared the house.
But the family never arrived, so they assumed interest was lost. No one ever came back to Tory.
In 2006, she began to notice a change in the atmosphere. Certain things that had been easy for them were now unpredictable, and most of the chickens on the property died, leaving them struggling to maintain a stable existence on the land. And then, in January of 2007, Cecily's daughter returned and begged for her help in restoring the situation, but Cecily refused. She was shocked and horrified to see the girl and their relationship continued to be as strained as ever, but it had been sixty years. Sixty years in which Cecily begged to see the girl again just to hold her and said she would give anything to have it happen. And then it did. But it wasn't as easy as she hoped. Cecily allowed her daughter to see her more vulnerable than she'd ever been seen before, and all but begged her daughter to see that she loved her. Isabella was properly confused but nothing changed. Cecily now knew her daughter thought she hated her and her own pride kept her from knowing how to change it. Eighty-five years had passed in which all they did was harbor resentment. There was no fixing it.
Her daughter even returned again just a couple weeks later and this time, Cecily and Aoife left the island together at Aoife's insistence, to see the rescued angel family that had been behind the disturbances. It was discovered to be the angel family meant to live with them. Why Cecily cooperated enough to leave the island, she doesn't even understand. Part of her simply wanted to help her daughter. Part of her felt terrible because her daughter's husband was gone. Part of her was elated. Mostly, Aoife had talked her into it.
The family with Cecily and Aoife for about a week before it became clear the girls needed familiar settings. Aoife soon left to go to Dublin with them when their stay was over, leaving Cecily alone.
On the 8th of February, 2008, a demon came to her island. He wasn't there for her. In fact, he was there as a private investigator tailing a couple who chose Tory as a cozy destination (and it is--but not in winter). Cecily was alone at the time and she watched him carefully until he noticed her. And, curious, having never met a demon before, Cecily tended to him when he passed out and let him come into the cottage.
They saw one another for two days before he had to return. He was fighting back headaches most of the time they spent together and Cecily wasn't sure what to do (they also couldn't speak to each other, having different languages). But one thing was certain of all things. She fell in love with him. She gave him the family's journal, the one dedicated to demons, in hopes that it would make him return. He gave her his business card.
Almost two weeks later, she sneaked into his dreams and the tension between them was finally manifested into some sort of completion. She became certain she loved him and he promised to visit her, but she began to question the validity of a dream. However, Cecily still waited for his return. Her near-obsession with whether or not he will come back may seem a bit odd, but she waited for Francis to return for years--possibly even after her daughter ran away.
Aoife discovered this quite by accident (and quite by the way Cecily acted), and though she remained skeptical that anyone would come back, she hoped he would, for Cecily's sake.
When Dragomir did come back, Aoife relented. She saw that they loved each other, though she couldn't understand how it would work. She still doesn't. Even Cecily believes they are condemned to giving up one day, but for now, she loves him too much to care. She sneaks into his dreams nightly now, not finding her day complete until she can touch him, even if it isn't real.
And still, she waits.
Backstory: Simplified
Claire's great grandmother.
Chronicling the Present
Until 2006, there was no mention made of Cecily, other than passing stories told by characters who descended from her. Now, however, there's quite a little story, so I will organize it here. The numbers just keep it all in order.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39.
Chronicling the Past
These are the major events in Cecily's past.
And She Would Wait for Him: The story of her affair with Francis Ryan and the conception of Isibél.
