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A artisan jeweler who repairs and makes jewelry, and also some pottery for trade. A relative newcomer to Dornie, she came in 131AE. when she was brought to work in the Ammunition Factory. Her skills in jewelry repair and creation helped earn her a place outside of the factory and to eventually begin her own shop in the community. Her status as a mage came rumored knowledge, though she doesn't often show it off, except in saying it is partially responsible for her skill in jewelry. There's other rumors involving her lack of a husband or child, and her tendency to dress in non-feminine ways.
Info
Full Name: Niyati Malik
Age: 34
Hair: Black
Eyes: Brown
Status: Alive
Occupation: Artisan, Bench Jeweler
Origin: United Kingdom / East Asian-Indian descent
Allegiance: None
First Seen:
Last Seen:
Description: Small and slender, in the wrong light this woman could be mistaken for a boy, but that's mostly because of the hair and dress that she tends towards. Dark hair cut short and close to her scalp rarely gets long enough to fall in her eyes or frame her face in a feminine fashion, and her naturally dark skin is too dark to be attributed to a tan.
Most often dressed in trousers, coats and vests, she tends towards leathers and solid fabrics of simple earthy colors. Occasionally she walks around completely barefooted. Despite her known profession she often doesn't wear the jewelry that she makes, but her belt sports many satchels which may contain her wares. And they rest right next to a short sword that she often carries.
Family:
- Singh Malik †? - father
- Asha Malik † - mother
- Rakesh Malik †? - older brother
Portrayed by: Anjali Jay
History
It's unclear at what point in the days of human history that this woman's family moved from India to the United Kingdom, but them, and many others like them, settled in the country and lived among it's people. And when the dragons and magical creatures of old swooped down upon the earth to take it back, many of them died alongside all the others. While some families probably intermingled, to preserve the human race beyond the separate colors of man, a few families kept with their beliefs.
Niyati Malik comes from one such group of families. In all likelihood there's at least some true Brit or true Scot blood in her line, but both her parents and her were raised with what survived of their Indian traditions and lifestyles. Their traditions were muddled, some things lost in time, others barely held onto. Even then they blended with the English and Scottish traditions some, and what they had, they took seriously. Style of dress, languages in the home, names and even some of the basic skills that were passed down from their families. What they held onto, they held onto firmly, but much was lost in the years of turmoil.
From her father's family, Niyati gained her craft of making jewelry. Her father worked mostly as a goldsmith, making new jewelry to trade and also restoring broken or damaged jewelry that was brought to them for a price. The children, a boy and a girl, were both trained to assist in these arts, though Niyati's brother Rakesh was favored to take over the family business. While they held onto some of the traditional forms, much of what their family did had to be relearned and adapted, due to lack of resources.
The father's profession kept them on the move, always searching out new resources and new communities that wished to purchase their wares. They lived out of four wagons, primarily, going from one place to the next to peddle their wears. This was also a defense mechanism, because the longer they stayed in an area the more likely that bandits might try to raid them for their objects of value.
From her mother's side, Niyati got something much different. She was born from a line of women who gained magic in the aftermath of the extinction of man. Her mother's mother, and her mother both, all had magic. Her mother's magic was focused on plants and cultivation and health of plants, which allowed her to transplant small gardens from soil to pots in the wagons and back to soil again without damaging the growth. This helped them stay fed, and for much of her early life, Niyati was raised a vegetarian.
Unlike her father's trade, her mother did not advertize what she could do. In fact no one outside the family was privy to such special information. The only times it would come out is when her familiar was forced to change forms in order to defend the family from bandits or other threats. Usually in the form of an ox, Chitta-prasadana would be dismissed as a beast of burden among the other draft animals that carried their wagons. And thanks to Niyati's birth, the familiar had a companion and a second set of eyes.
While Chitta-parasadana watched over the family during the day, Sarva-vata-saha watched over them at night, often in the form of small hedgehog, or on warm nights a tortoise or grass snake. Even at a young age, Niyati could use her magic to sense metals and other minerals in the earth. Often she would walk behind the carts, barefooted, sensing. Occasionally she would call them to stop, and dig out scrap metal and relics from ages of old, having sensed the worked minerals in the ground.
Her family's motto of staying on the road kept them from forming any lasting friendships, but as they traveled along an island nation, they occasionally made it back to the same places more than once. A few times in Niyati's young life, they'd stopped by the Dornie community. It was during one such stop when she was in her early teens that her older brother traded some of their craft for a firearm and some ammunition, the only pistol their family would ever own.
In some ways it was that pistol that would end up killing her family.
While they were never raised to be violent, her brother had a lot of pride, and the firearm turned the pride into almost arrogance. The more their wagons and wares passed through a place, the more that people decided to "tax" them. It was in one such community that the "tax" was given. Usually, their father would either pay the tax, but that morning, he was not feeling well, and her brother was at the head of the wagon. He did not wish to hand over goods just to continue on, and his firearm became involved. Their mother, attempting to intercede, took a stray bullet. Chitta-parasadana died with her.
In the following frenzy, most of their wagons were put to fire and many gunshots. Her father and brother were presumed dead based on sounds and the burnings. Niyati survived by being in the back wagon. With a handful of belongings, she and Sarva-vata-saha escaped. After days of travel on foot and near starvation and heartache over losing her family, she found her way into the community of Blackmoore. She was seventeen years old.
Mrs Blackmoore was one of the first to take an active interest in the dirty young woman of sparing education. She spoke English well enough to be understood, but Hindi was her first language, and she could only read and write in Hindi. Despite this, she had skills that were put to use by the townsfolks, able to restore damaged jewelry. But there was one set of skills she kept quiet, just as she had always been raised. Magic was a private and personal craft with her family, so it continued in Blackmoore.
Especially with Ivan Blackmoore visited the town. As a mage who used fear to control the people of the town, she tried to avoid any signs he might notice about her. The townsfolk would not have understood. Keeping her magic secret was assisted by the steam-powered machines of sorts that they utilized. After a few years of practicing her trade and educating herself outside the mines, she was able to get a steam-powered press, which she used mostly to make glass beads. The actual furnace to run the steam-press was more important to her, as a small forge. Her skill may not have reached her father's, but it was good enough to get her accepted.
Besides jewelry, she worked hard to learn new skills, in order to be useful to her new community. Not everyone wished to spend their savings on new jewelry. She taught herself how to work with ceramics, making pots, plates, cups and other more common items. Some she decorated using some of the same techniques she learned making jewelry but many were far more simple. That and restored jewelry were among her biggest feats.
It became somewhat of a mystery why she never married, bared children, or showed any interest at all in the men of the community. For one, many were coal miners. While she had an affinity with the earth, she had no interest in men who worked that deeply in it, or in any of the men in town at all. In other ways it had to do with how she was raised. Traditionally, her parents should have arranged her marriage, and without them around to do such a thing, she was never interested in giving up her womanly freedoms.
And she had never met anyone, man or woman, who she felt close enough to let into the most intimate part of her life.
That privacy, and her livelihood in general, would not remain a constant, however.
In 131 A.E, when Niyati was around thirty years old, the community of Blackmoore was raided and razed to the ground. The people she'd come to consider as close to friends as she'd ever had were scattered, murdered or enslaved. Niyati was taken along with others, and her home and garden were burned. It was a memory much like the original loss of her family— and it cut almost as deep.
At first, when she was brought to Dornie, she was positioned with most of the others, to work in the factory or around the town. It was her familiar who gave her away as a mage. The proximity of many mages and familiars made it difficult to hide what she was. What she held so private in her life was revealed to all, even if she was able to hold back the extent of her abilities, downplaying it's usefulness outside of her craft.
That wasn't the only violation she suffered that year.
But like her familiar was named, she bore the wind that threatened to push her down. Niyati adapted, coped, and worked her way out of slavery. In the next two years, she repaired many a piece of jewelry, earning enough to get her out of the factories. After months of working out of a wagon, she was able to trade for a small home, and instruments to continue her trade as much as possible.
Personality
In general, Niyati Malik comes off as extremely calm and practical. Most would consider her cool-headed to a fault, but she does have things that grate at her. Her emotions, positive and negative, are often hidden behind a guise of neutral politeness, which is as much a survival mechanism as anything else.
When it comes to men and relationships that would be considered normal for a woman her age, she seems aloof and uninterested. Men were never a top priority in her life beyond her family, and while she has started to gain some friendships in Dornie, she holds most of them at a distance. Though she is eager to be useful, she is less eager to please everyone. When there's a call for assistance, she will usually answer it, as long as she feasibly can, though she tries to stay out of mage business. Even if she is a mage. That part of her life is still considered private to her, and even if most everyone knows, she does not advertise, brag or otherwise get overly involved in the mystical unless forced.
Firearms are one thing she does not abide, which is part of what motivated her to work extra hard to get away from the factory when she was first brought into Dornie. She blames the pistol her brother owned for her family's death, and tends to avoid the militia whenever it is allowed.
Magic
There's some people who are born with magic who seem to get it from nowhere, and others who come from lines of mages. Niyati Malik is one of the latter. Her mother was a mage, her mother's mother was a mage, and perhaps further back than that. Their family kept this a secret from outsiders, choosing to remain hidden so as not to be used for their abilities. But that didn't stop them from taking some advantage of their powers.
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| सर्ववातसह, as a tortoise. | |
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Niyati's magic is elemental in nature, focused on earth magic. In the most basic form, she can passive sense natural minerals compositions in the earth that she stands on, down as deep as a kilometer, and within a hundred meters of where she stands in a circle. The most passive use can be done with very little trouble. She does have to be touching the earth to do it, whether laying a hand down, or being barefoot and she has to sacrifice one of her major senses in order to do it. She either loses her sight or her hearing, and she chooses which one goes.
The sense she chooses to sacrifice dictates how she senses the minerals. If she loses her sight she "sees" the minerals instead, almost as if they're laid out in a map for her and she can search for the ones she wants. If she loses her hearing they are like different sounds, different minerals have a different song. She will be aware of how deep, how much and in what quantities and qualities and whether they've been previously worked.
The more advanced forms of magic allow her to magically mine small portions of the minerals she senses out of the ground. The deeper the mineral, the longer it takes her to magic it out. These require rituals, drawings of a mandala on a rock or dry ground, and the minerals, usually silicates, carbonates, oxides or native metals will rise up through the ground magically and deposit inside the circle. There are limits— it usually takes a few hours to get even a small handful of the mineral, and she can only choose one type. The ritual requires so much time that she needs to stand guard. If the mandala gets washed away or messed up, the ritual is broken.
More simple rituals usually involving just a soft mantra chant and allow her to draw out impurities and fix fractures and breaks and flaws. This is often coupled with actual skill in jewelry-repair, but helps her in things that would often require instruments she does not have access to, due to the lack of technology. The more complex the fix, the more complex the ritual. Like repair, she can also plant flaws and other available minerals inside them. This is usually used to add color or details.
Her familiar, Sarva-vata-saha (meaning: Able to Bear Every Wind) is usually seen in the form of a tortoise (of many sizes), a grass snake, or a tiny hedgehog when it's too cold to be either of the others. Possessing a feminine personality, Sarva seems to take the form of a quiet sister-mother figure for her mage. It is rare when she communicates to any of the other familiars, and she seems to speak in broken, unpracticed English when she does, as if she doesn't normally speak that way. Sarva prefers to be close to the ground, so she has never been known to take the form of a bird. When Niyati is placed in a position of conflict, she tends to stand back and observe, offer quiet support and steadiness, but does not try to interfere or force events.
For more, see: Character Notes for Niyati Malik
For logs in which Niyati appears, see: Logs for Niyati Malik
