| Solomon Koenig | |
|---|---|
 "I have legitimate concerns that Morrow has some kind of secret, perverse desire to see us do some kind of Thunderdome thing here." | |
| Canon: | World of Darkness |
| Species: | Human / Witch |
| Hometown: | Baltimore, MD |
| Age: | 34 |
| Journal: | behindfirelight |
| Player: | Dele |
i want to build for you, madonna, my mistress[]
Solomon Koenig is a thirty-four year old attorney, ex-military and ex-Catholic (for vastly different reasons), currently divorcing to Tonya Linton Koenig and living in Ellicott City, MD, from where he commutes into Baltimore for work. He's a straightforward, relatively honest man with a serious demeanour and tendency to say things that he wouldn't be able to get away with if he went into politics like everybody around him seems to want him to. He is intimidating without trying, sassy as fuck, and an accomplished gardener with a deep and abiding love for all things natural. (Despite this, he's been trying and failing to quit smoking for the past ten years.)
He's also a Verbena priest, liaison to the Sons of Ether and has been engaging in an extramarital affair with his opposite, the Etherite liaison, Leila Yilmaz.
an underground altar in the depths of my grief[]
First of all: yes, if he appears to be deep in conversation with his roses and/or a tree, he probably is.
Solomon is a Verbena priest and a liaison with the Sons of Ether as well as being his Tradition's Maryland representative during conferences. Politics aside this means he's a powerful bloodworker; the usual focus of his magic is his own blood. (Yes, he's slightly masochistic. Verbena are like that.) Besides talking to trees and possibly turning into a rose monster (FINE, I MENTIONED IT), he could also spontaneously cause you to bleed to death internally or externally! He's got a particular knack with plants - usually roses, surprise, but he can be easily distracted by trees - and is a passable healer. Some Verbena are shapeshifters; Sol isn't into that, himself, but he has fairly shamelessly crafted his own body to be better suited to the work he puts it to. (Shut up, Gidget, he didn't do anything to his face.)
Basically, there's a lot of things he could do. If you need a blood mage to do something terrifying, hit me up and we'll see if it's feasible. If you are totally lost because this is the lousiest explanation in the world, hit me up and I will attempt to elaborate on whatever point you like. I'm pretty sure this section should just boil down to 'the Verbena are scary'.
Incidentally, he used to be a Verbena priest posing as a Catholic priest, in the mid to late 17th century, and after a recent Taxon glitch has acquired what would have been one of Ambrose Roy's scars; a crucifix burned into his chest over his heart.
and carve out in the darkest corner of my heart[]
far from worldly desires and mocking looks[]
- Leila Yilmaz → Meeting through their work as liaisons between the Sons of Ether and the Verbena, Leila and Sol's rocky start led to an extramarital affair spanning nearly half a decade, off and on. In Taxon they've agreed to try their hand at an honest-to-god relationship, and after years of refusing to make a goddamn decision between Leila and his wife, Sol ponied up after the bomb scare in Taxon and removed his wedding ring.
a niche, all enameled with azure and with gold[]
where you shall stand, amazed statue[]
Solomon Koenig was born October 25th, 1975, to a German Catholic family in Maryland, son of Isaak and Hannah Koenig. He was the third child of seven (German Catholics), and his siblings were (are) Elsa, Dorothea, Charlotte & Gitta (twins), Ferdinand, and Georgina. He swiftly formed an alliance with Ferdi that really just meant their sisters could always find both of them at once. Still, the nature of that alliance paid off for his little brother - who could often be found high-tailing it away from Dorothea or the twins on his older and longer-legged brother's back. The Koenig children grew up in the bosom of their local parish, and Solomon devoted more than just his Sundays to their church. Always a dryly bleak young man, even as a child, his faith served as a sort of reassurance for his parents - which probably served to make his eventual disassociation with Catholicism on the whole that much more difficult.
He went through highschool with his siblings in tow, looking out for Ferdi and involving himself in his sisters' business probably more than they actually wanted him to, and went on to study law at Georgetown - which he covered through with military service in the JAG, having opted to figure out a means to pay his own way rather than putting additional financial stress on a family of nine. He didn't spend quite as much time on his then slightly pathetic rose garden as he did on his studies - or it probably would've been less pathetic - but his interest in gardening dates all the way back to doing the weeding for Father Buchanan.
His Awakening and his absorption into the Verbena tradition came roughly around about the same time as he began studying for the upcoming bar exam, which in retrospect he considers could have completely fucked his chances of actually passing it - miraculously, he did actually manage to balance things as his life went slightly sideways and he began his professional career as an attorney alongside his induction into the supernatural. He was working on his four to six years of service with the USAF when he met Tonya Linton through a friend of Gitta's who realized only too late that it wasn't actually a good idea to say 'don't talk to Gitta's brother, he's an asshole' if she actually wanted Tonya not to go near him. Needless to say, it backfired and she was a bridesmaid at their traditional wedding two years later. During this time, Solomon had been slowly sliding further and further from his Roman Catholic roots as he immersed himself the tradition of the bloodworkers, but Tonya had married him as a relatively devout Catholic man who had a personal relationship with their local priest and remained unaware of what else he was and how he was struggling to reconcile two worlds.
Typically, the memories of past-lives return with Awakening; somewhat unusually, Solomon's took longer. Several years longer, in fact, and when they finally did hit him like a freight train he dimly understood why that might have been. His warm and passionate experience with Catholicism made the vivid memories of brutal torture at the hands of the inquisition not just traumatic, but a deep betrayal of everything that he'd valued throughout his life and his rejection of his faith and his family's faith was abrupt and callously harsh in his refusal to compromise on it even the slightest. To an outside observer, it seemed that he did a cruel about-face almost overnight for no apparent reason - and then refused to explain himself to anyone. At a loss, the Koenigs implored Father Buchanan to take their wayward son in hand - and hadn't he always listened to the father before, even when his disagreeable temper made it grudging at best? - which turned out to be a mistake of what Tonya Koenig at least considered fairly spectacular proportions. Nobody actually knows what it was that Solomon said to Father Buchanan, but he's been persona non grata in the church his wife still attends every Sunday ever since.
Despite the turmoil in his personal life, his professional accomplishments advanced him by leaps and bounds and his earnings easily support himself and his wife, who opted not to pursue a career of her own with, admittedly, the thought in mind that when they had children she'd like to do as both his mother and hers had done - full-time stay-at-home parenting. (That 'when' has become more of an 'if', but Tonya has yet to go back to work; Solomon suspects he'll know his marriage is over when she starts looking at the classifieds.) Their finances are slightly tighter than they might have been otherwise if he hadn't poured thousands of dollars into a greenhouse/guesthouse behind their Ellicott City home, devoted to his roses and his occasional need for absolute privacy; he can expect to pay off what he still owes on it, but Tonya is of the view that just because you can do something doesn't necessarily mean that you should and the greenhouse has been a point of contention.
Other areas in which he's been excelling include his tradition; it's not just in his day job that people are encouraging him to get into politics, and though he's seemed poised on the edge of becoming something great within the Verbena for some time now, it's not just in his day job that he's resisting and rejecting the idea. That said, his flair for it might have had something to do with his selection to act as a liason between the Baltimore Verbena and the Etherites, represented by Leila Yilmaz - who, let us be blunt, he instantly disagreed with and wanted to fuck, possibly not in that order. Their working relationship slid directly into a personal one, and for the past four years he's carried on a fairly tempestuous off-and-on affair with his Etherite opposite. The beginning of their affair sort of coincided with his transition from JAG to civilian law, and it was unfortunately very convenient for him that way; his schedule was already being shaken up and it was easier for him to slide an affair under the radar with Tonya as he was changing a lot of what he'd been doing already as he joined a top ecological law firm in his hometown, Baltimore.
BLAH BLAH I HAVE TO TALK ABOUT TAXON HERE BECAUSE SHIT HAPPENED AND STUFF I GUESS
with my polished verses as a trellis of pure metal[]
- ❝Why the fuck do you think I want to know, Leila? I'm obviously not fucking you for how relaxing and uncomplicated it is, so it can't be that. [beat] I love you, you fucking crazy person.❞
- ❝And my day just keeps getting longer.❞
- ❝I'm glad we know where we stand, Brucolac, because I really hate fucking around when I don't have to. Goes back to that 'wasting my energy' thing. Let's say we've both got bigger problems right now than a pissing contest and leave it at that- although if you want to whip it out, apparently I've got nothing better to do this afternoon.❞
- ❝Dr Yilmaz, I presume.❞
- ❝I'm not a fucking infant incapable of considering the consequences of my actions before I take them.❞
- ❝I'm severe. It's completely different.❞
- ❝Sorry I threw you into a wall.❞
- ❝Maybe you can answer me something. So in a joke about lawyers and prostitutes where the punchline is 'professional courtesy', which one of us should be more offended, here?❞
- ❝Were you keeping track? Little marks on the calendar? X amount of days without free legal counsel.❞
- ❝I think it's obvious what you really need is an interior decorator.❞
- ❝...it's easy to go down the wrong path with all the best intentions and you're so brilliant the possibilities are breathtakingly awful if you do. Imagine if I crushed my moral compass under my heel.❞
- ❝Technical term. 'Of or pertaining to scientific matters'.❞ (science-y)
- ❝I hate lukewarm baths, it's like sitting in piss.❞
- ❝Yeah, but just so we're clear, 'Velma told me to' is a good enough reason to do something that would risk my military career, 'I was really, really hard, sir' is not.❞
- ❝Tell her to play gladiators on her own time, then. Some of us aren't available at her whim.❞
- ❝No one with the ability to use google is going to elect me anything, Leila, just leave it.❞
- ❝The only thing that should make you shake is me.❞
- ❝Take me for granted a little, I don't mind.❞
- ❝Reveling in your position as craziest woman on the planet and then turning around and blaming my dick for the world's ills speaks to a certain lack of consistency.❞
studded cunningly with rhymes of crystal[]
A KING AND A QUEEN → OKKERVIL RIVER → be hands holding a knife, be a being on two feet with his heart trembling, butchering for a king he believes in though he's never seen, be the princess in that stone tower, crying for the handsome butcher's plight, and as some princess might she still calls him a knight, but the best thing for you would be queen, to be queen
NINE CRIMES → DAMIEN RICE → leave me out with the waste this is not what i do, it's the wrong kind of place to be cheating on you, it's the wrong time she's pulling me through, it's a small crime and i got no excuse, and is that all right, yeah, if i give my gun away when it's loaded, is that all right, yeah, if you don't shoot it how am i supposed to hold it
NEVER TRUST A BURNING THING → FRANCIS → don't i know better, and don't i know well, between you and me i was under a spell, it started above us to give us some light, but never trust a burning thing, never leave it out of sight, soon the piano was burning and soon our whole house, and you and me were soon to ashes become
THE BOOK OF MY LIFE → STING → there are promises broken and promises kept, angry words that were spoken when i should have wept, there's a chapter of secrets and words to confess, if i lose everything that i possess, there's a chapter on loss and a ghost who won't die, there's a chapter on love where the ink's never dry, there are sentences served in a prison i built out of lies
FRAGILE → STING → if blood will flow when flesh and steel are one, drying in the colour of the evening sun, tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away but something in our minds will always stay, perhaps this final act was meant to clinch a lifetime's argument that nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could for all those born beneath an angry star lest we forget how fragile we are
GHOSTS & LOVERS → MARISSA NADLER → winter was an island, child, some of the friends you had been gone a while, it's a dark twisted line across you sear into the wild, people are looking down you say you feel the beat of yesterday, on the street there was a big parade and a family of four, ghosts and lovers, they'll haunt you for a while
ACCIDENTAL BABIES → DAMIEN RICE → do you come together ever with him is he dark enough to see your light do you brush your teeth before you kiss do you miss my smell and is he bold enough to take you on do you feel like you belong and does he drive you wild or just mildly free what about me
A THREAD CUT WITH A CARVING KNIFE → STARS → it was a cold and endless sky above when he decided he was through with love the leaves were piles of skeletons and he was only skin and bones and then he went to the bridge so he could fall and drop down far away from it all but the water looked so black and so deep that he closed his eyes and he went to sleep 'til the next day
IN ANOTHER LIFE → VIENNA TENG → i was married at thirteen you were killed at twenty-one on a minor battlefield i was buried beside my second stillborn child my last thought it seemed a fever dream now we sink into a summer afternoon central park in june marveling at the bounty our days contain and we feel it like the shiver of a passing train that other life deep underground you and i side by side we are the next time round
THESEUS → PATRICK WOLF → why no surrender to your lover or to the dead ends of the maze with all your life yet to discover a black sail billows the sun hits your blade and you are hungry you are hungry for you only hungry only hungry for you so take a look around and a little more who is this for and what is this for your appetite so dangerous your appetite so dangerous
i shall make for your head an immense crown[]
Solomon Koenig was dreamed up by Kay, who I stole him from in order to develop him further, and he is created based on White Wolf's World of Darkness (Mage: The Ascension, iirc). I don't own those things, or Michael Fassbender's unfairly good looking image. The titles used in this wiki are from To A Madonna by Baudelaire.