Vidalia

Created fully grown through Creation magic, Vidalia bears the face of Arthos Valerius’s dead wife, Yaniris—but the resemblance is wrong in every detail that matters. Her skin and hair are pale white, as if drained of color, and her pale blue eyes are almost translucent. Wild, untamed magic gathers beneath her skin and breaks loose without warning. She remembers roughly the final year of Yaniris’s life, but those memories belong to another woman and leave her with an aching longing for a husband and child she never had.

After the death of Arthos Valerius’s wife and child, Arthos devoted himself to Creation magic. For five years he filled his laboratory with failed experiments, destroying each result when it proved unable to live up to the people he had lost. Vidalia was the exception. Arthos created her fully grown, wearing the face of his dead wife, Yaniris. She possessed only fragments of Yaniris’s memories—roughly the year before Yaniris’s death—and her body had the pallor of something made rather than born: white skin, white hair, and pale blue eyes nearly clear of color. Yaniris had held no magical talent. Vidalia brimmed with wild, untamed power. Arthos could not destroy her as he had destroyed the others, yet he could not accept her as his wife. He took his own life, leaving Vidalia alone in the silent laboratory with borrowed memories and a longing for a husband and child who never belonged to her.

Vidalia treats domestic life as a set of half-remembered instructions. She folds unused blankets, sets two places at the table, and pauses outside nurseries with no child to call her own. She speaks of Yaniris in the first person until a contradiction forces her to stop, then refers to herself by name. When frightened, she grips nearby furniture and counts backward, while stray magic frosts glass, snuffs candles, or makes shadows move against the light. She wants companionship with an intensity that makes ordinary kindness feel like a promise.

Vidalia confuses resemblance with love and treats rejection as proof that she has failed to be Yaniris. She clings to people who offer familiar gestures, even when they exploit her. Grief inherited from another life can overwhelm her judgment, especially around spouses, parents, and children. Her magic answers emotional distress before she can control it, putting bystanders at risk when she feels abandoned.

Vidalia seeks the truth of her creation: whether she is Yaniris returned, Arthos’s final experiment, or a person with no past of her own. She wants to learn control over the magic that made her and prevent it from harming anyone. Beneath both goals lies a simpler hunger—to build a family that chooses her, rather than chasing one that existed only in another woman’s memories.