Cassian Ó Loinsigh

Name: Cassian Lynch

Age: Old. He's not keeping track anymore, he's 'old' years old, leave him alone.

Profession: Catholic priest/Supernatural critter exterminator/Medium, untrained necromancer

Nationality: Irish

Cassian is not a subtle, nor shy man.

Once upon a time long, long ago, he was meeker, softer, and more openly tender. However, centuries upon centuries of life have not been kind to that sweeter side of him. Repeated injuries to the same place deaden nerves, after all, and the constant wear of loss, inevitable for someone so long lived, has left him far more callous.

He appears blunt and cranky, smiles come rarely and never last long. He can't be considered morose or sorrowful however, almost two thousand years of life has rendered him more angry than sad. Ill tempered and sharp of tongue, it's hard to say what actually drives demons from the homes and bodies he cleanses; his holy aptitude, or the vicious, rapid fire stream of abuse they get when he corners them. Spite seems to be what powers him, and in the face of derision, doubt and opposition, he only becomes more energetically sour. Not like a reed to the wind at all, but a spark fed by it; the man easily becomes a wildfire with the correct kind of goading. He could be unfavorably compared to a crotchety old man, which is frankly quite fair considering that is essentially what he is.

Cassian is a rather prideful man too, confident in his knowledge of beasts and magic, and of heaven and hell. Of course, this only feeds into that stubborn nature of his, so one might find the little man to be almost insufferable, should the topic stray into certain subjects. He'll argue for hours on matters that matter... To him. It's entirely possible to convince him that he's incorrect of course, but one better have the appropriate research to back it up. It's easy to lose track sometimes of where a conversation with Cassian began, where it deviated, and where it might eventually, hopefully end. While he might not be an excessively talkative fellow typically, when set upon particular pet subjects, he takes obvious joy in educating whatever poor bastard brought that subject up to begin with, whether they like it or not.

That all being said, while tenderness has been buried and hidden away, it does still exist. It tends to show itself in disguise, compliments phrased as objective fact, assistance and aid wrapped in the trappings of begrudging obligation, insults tactfully withheld even if his tone never changes, as if incapable of being openly kind. As if fearful of exposing whatever is still soft and feeling in him. He isn't quite as wholly confident as he lets on either, and while he's very self-assured when it comes to technical knowledge and trivia relevant to his job, the matter of dealing with people is a more complicated affair. He seems to have little grasp on how to properly communicate that he likes someone, and it only gets worse when he finds that person to be attractive. The best way to gauge whether or not Cassian thinks someone looks good, is to see how cranky he gets when presented with them.

The crankier he is, the prettier they are.

As a tragic little bow on this bad tempered package, Cassian's health has never been good. Born sickly, unable to die and having lived through some of the most medically bleak eras of man's history, Cassian's lungs and body are riddled with scars, inside and out. That's not necessarily a metaphor here, his lungs might just be more scar tissue than meat and it's only by the blasphemous non-grace of the possessing parasitic outer god Hastur that he hasn't drowned on dry land.

The bitterness, while real, is a spiked shield, and the man behind it cautious and alone, and far too fearful of the consequences it might bring to lower that shield again.

Cursed

And now the meat and potatoes. Why is this one, frankly unimpressive specimen of a human being burdened with the dubious gift of eternal youth?

While the exacts aren't ever something Cassian delves into, for the sake of brevity, it comes down to the desperation of a frantic new mother, and avoiding the realization of a mother's worst fear.

Content warning for child death/Eventual familial death

Cassian is not a healthy man, by any stretch of the imagination. His lungs are weak, and his immune system is fragile and easily overcome. It was considered a miracle that he survived birth, let alone to adulthood, as his twin brother was seemingly born dead.

Horrified, Cassian's mother, a young and powerful, if inexperienced witch, dug into magic beyond her understanding in order to save the life of the second boy born. With a red hot knife, she carved a sign into the gray flesh of her limp child's palm, the strange sigil taken from a massive black tome that she'd carried most of her life. While she could only understand pieces of the warped, unsettling text within the book, this one seemed to promise the very thing she could not have given her child on her own: Life.

A shame that she couldn't understand the rest of it, nor the cost that the spell inevitably demanded, for the sign she drew eternally into Cassian's hand was that of an outer God, and in doing so, she unknowingly gave over the still yet unclaimed body and soul of the boy.

He wouldn't even realize what these consequences would be until he reached adulthood; for the most part, Cassian's childhood was unremarkable, at least for a child in the ninth century in Ireland. His mother died while he was still a young child, and his father, a monk who had decidedly strayed quite far from the teachings of the monastery, took the boy back with him to the church, forcing the child to swear never to refer to him as his father. There, Cassian would learn to read and write, and while he was never a terribly popular child, he was still a quick learner, and reasonably well liked by the adults.

Once again, one will never be told the exacts of what happened next. The barest minimum is what Cassian will tell: The monastery was attacked and raided by Vikings, the abbey boarded up and set ablaze, burning alive all those still trapped inside while the raiders made off with what little treasures the far flung monastery actually had. Cassian, by some cursed thread of luck, lived. And lived. And lived, for the next thousand plus years. Trapped without explanation at the age of twenty six, all attempts to kill him, either by his own hand, by the elements or by anothers will, were all doomed to fail. Thus we land upon the 'curse', for when his mother read from that book, she could only understand a handful of the words.

In reality, death would forever be denied the man, no matter how desperately he might come to desire it. The deity half possessing Cassian now acts as a sort of 'good luck' charm, as painfully ironic as that term now is for Cassian himself. It isn't that he somehow, impossibly, avoids death, but rather, improbably does.

A gun will jam or misfire if pointed at him, nooses break, knives snap or cannot be found, or instead strike something else upon his person. Whatever improbable turn of events that could happen, do happen, and it's been keeping Cassian from reaching Saint Peter for the past one thousand, one hundred and twelve years and counting.