Character Build: Tatianna

Who is she?

Tatianna is a created person out of shadow. She was Ledes’s last painting, a full-sized portrait of Atiana, a dead woman he bore unrequited love for. She was his Atiana as he saw her, perfect, dark, and beautiful. The creation of the painting and the drugs killed him.

Melies conjured her. Tatianna gained some knowledge from Ledes, her painter, including language and rough social norms, and some knowledge from Melies, including the basics of conjuration. She was given to Julian as a gift, and he wanted more, instructing her to remain with Melies and learn more conjuration. After teaching her, Melies took her on the pathways to Amber and gifted her to Julian again.

The shadow-magic conjuration of Tenthet did not work in Amber, and the conjuration failed. She fled Melies and Julian, and arrived in Amber alone. By her narrative appearance she is almost broke, and an accessory to robbery and possibly murder. It is unknown if she and Obrecht killed people.

What does she want?

1) A sense of self-worth and power over her own outcomes. Melies didn’t see her as a thing, Ledes created her as personal erotica, and Julian cared little for creatures of shadow. All her decisions were made for her until she fled in the forests of Arden. She wants self-determination as well as to be a person.

2) To be recognized as powerful

3) To live

Why can’t she have it?

1) She’s broke. Poverty cares nothing for who you are. She doesn’t have the money to buy a better life.

1a) Her conjuration doesn’t work in Amber. It’s the only thing she knew how to do in Tenthet and one of two sources of her power up until arriving in Arden. It doesn’t work any more. (The other source of power, sexuality, is somewhat less than she thought because there are a lot of beautiful women in Amber, more in shadow, and the people with true power, the scions of Oberon, aren’t limited by what’s around. Julian specifically includes a bolded asterisk.)

2) Shadow conjuration doesn’t work in Amber, and she isn’t of the blood.

3) Bleys is chasing her for her ring.

The Nine at AO3 Nine for Mortal Man Doomed to Die

I take commas out of titles. In JRRT’s original poem there was a comma. I know. I took it out.