Hedge Witch
Physical Description
As she grows older, she will eventually come to realize that she doesn't physically age. She never even gets sick.
Physically, Auria is in her late twenties/early thirties. She is a tall, slender woman with light but ambiguously ethnic skin, and not even she knows where her family came from. That, of course, is because she has none.
She has an oval face accentuated by her long nose. Her eyes are thin and green with brown ringing the irises. A thin smattering of freckles covers her cheeks.
Her fashion sense is very cluttered. She wears long, layered skirts and wide-sleeved shirts covered in more layers of shawls and cloaks, which in turn are covered in many jangly necklaces and bracelets. A beaded coin purse hangs at her hip, and she carries a wooden staff topped with a large white crystal.
Mental characteristics
As far as she believes, Auria has lived all her life in a small town deep in the forests of northern Sylanta. She's never been further than twenty miles from her home town; she's never seen the great sand dunes of the Dead Planes, or the pyramids of Ionto, or the temples of Haolong... and yet she can picture all of them in her head.
All that means is she has a very active imagination, of course.
Less easily explained is the complete lack of memory of her parents. All she knows for certain of her childhood is Rino: her best friend, her constant companion, the radiant boy who dreamed of conquering death itself. They grew up together, and her memories of him stand out in stark relief against the fog that is the rest of her youth.
She doesn't dwell on it. She assumes everyone forgets these things as the years pass.
Chemistry—herbology and potions, specifically—has always come naturally to her, as if from a past life. As an adult she makes her modest living brewing and selling potions... rather, she used to. One day, shortly after Rino was cursed into cat form by Zosima (one of his many alchemical rivals), an Entity came to her in a dream. He offered her power—magical power, beyond her wildest dreams—but only if she would use it to find a cure for Rino. When she woke, all she could remember of the Entity was the color red.
And so began her Quest. Her life began that day, and ever since then she has traveled the lands far and wide in search of a means to lift the curse on Rino.
She has no idea that her life really did begin that day. Prior to his transformation, Rino was working on combining alchemical and magical practices to create a revolutionary, fully lifelike homunculus. As Zosima cursed him, he poured all of his power and energy into his unfinished homunculus in a desperate, last-ditch effort to save himself, giving it its first and only order: "Help me." In the process, he unintentionally transferred a part of his soul into it, and that proved to be just the spark necessary to bring it to life.
The homunculus awoke hours after Zosima had left and stumbled out of Rino's lab, hidden deep in the forest, where it was met with an aria of birdsong and a ridge covered in the bark and leaves shed from generations of trees. From that she took her name: Auria Barkridge. All that came after—and before, in her memories—was simply her newborn brain trying to make sense of everything. Her memories—the ones she can recall clearly—are actually Rino's memories. Her knowledge of herbs and potions is an extention of Rino's alchemical expertise. She often knows things she shouldn't—flashes of alchemical arrays, personal details of famous sorcerers, etc—which she attributes to a tenuous psychic ability that is, in fact, simply Rino's knowledge shining through.
Auria is intensely curious about everything, especially in the arcane studies. She's a fast learner as well, which comes in handy on her Quest. She has quickly become an expert in all things relating to curses since starting her Quest, but she has yet to find a cure for Rino.
Auria tends to "go with the flow," and she doesn't question what life throws at her, no matter how unusual. She does what she thinks is the right thing in the moment with little regard for the consequences, yet her sights are always set on the end goal: save Rino and reverse the curse. She always puts Rino's safety and well-being before her own and everyone else's, no matter what. She thinks that's just a natural reaction to growing up with him, but in reality it's an extension of Rino's order.
Personality Characteristics
First and foremost, she must protect Rino. She must help restore him to his human form. Everything else is secondary.
Auria is highly skilled in herbalism and potion brewing, and she is quickly becoming a powerful sorcerer with a particular knowledge of curses. In all subjects, she is a quick learner.
She is, on the other hand, rather naive. She trusts far too easily; she makes assumptions; and, most importantly, she rarely questions anything about the world around her, whether that be her own perceptions or other people's word.
Social
Auria believes in a vaguely defined Goddess and the Entity from her dream. Her Goddess is nameless, formless, all-knowing, and all-seeing. She is mother to all that is good in the world and a divine protector of her children. The Entity is the father of magic and fate, and he is above such things as good and evil, order and chaos. Auria's beliefs are unlike those of any major culture in Arda'aman. Most cultures believe in either a single God/Godess or, more commonly, a large pantheon of deities. Auria is skeptical of typical polytheistic religions, and she dislikes most monotheistic religions.
History
Rino is the only person in the world who knows the truth about Auria's past, but he lets Auria go on believing she's a normal human being with a childhood like anyone else. He does this partly because it's easier and partly because she seems perfectly content with her fiction. It's a flimsy excuse, he knows, but in truth by the time he began to suspect she was anything more than an unusual, though still mindless, construct it was too late to correct her. Too much time had passed, and she had too thoroughly convinced herself otherwise that Rino wasn't sure she would even believe the truth. She might even leave him, and she was his only hope to become human again.
In truth, in other words, Rino is too afraid of the consequences to tell her. To his credit, he does feel terrible about it.
Conversely, Auria hides nothing from Rino. It wouldn't even occur to her to do so. As far as she knows, it's been this way between them since they were children. (Never mind the glaring difference in age. Auria is physically in her thirties, while Rino is approaching fifty. It never crosses her mind that this might be a problem, because the human mind is remarkable at filtering out anything that contradicts its preconceptions.) She thinks their friendship is why she devotes everything to him, when in fact it's a byproduct of her creation. Rino realizes this, and it is one reason he's so wary of telling her the truth. He's afraid that, as a sentient person, she has the free will to act against her "programming" if she learns that's what it is.
Despite his dishonesty, Rino does truly care about Auria, more so than he's cared about anyone else. She's his proudest accomplishment and his closest friend, and he would do absolutely anything for her. He might even be a little bit in love with her: a fact which both terrifies and exasperates him, because it's so typical of him to fall in love with a part of himself.
Commonalities & Shared Interests
In a way, Auria is simply Rino as seen through a funhouse mirror. She is her own person with her own personality, but the part of Rino's soul that gave her life has a strong influence on her character. Her knowledge of herbs, potions, and magic comes from his knowledge of alchemy and sorcery. Her adherence to her witchy aesthetic comes from his flair for the dramatic and taste for lavish robes. Even her religious beliefs—the Goddess and God that are so different from any culture's religion—come from his reverence for the woman who resurrected him and from his own ego.
Auria has access to only a small fraction of Rino's considerable fortune—only the emergency fund he stashed in his lab—while the rest is tied up in a number of different banks that she can't access without signed permission from Rino himself, which, as a cat, he cannot give. His emergency fund is still a sizable sum, and Auria has no trouble travelling the world on it. Like Rino, she is something of a penny pincher, but she doesn't have Rino's lavish tastes, so she goes through the gold much slower than he would, much to his annoyance.
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