#18 – Tavia

| November 21, 2012 | 0 Comments

Most little girls want to be a princesses. Tavia actually got to all but be one for the first ten years of her life. The third child and only daughter of Octavius, a man who took his name from the Roman Emperor, she lived a life of absolute luxury and excess with her family. Her father doted on her, and spoiled her as best he could. Tavia saw her father as the warm, loving family man who was devoted to his children and always made time to read her stories before she went to bed.

What Tavia did not know was that her family’s lifestyle came off the backs of an entire nation. Her father was the “President-for-Life” of the nation of Gamarra, and had been so for her entire life. Octavius was, like his namesake, a dictator, ruling through fear and violence for nearly 33 years, maintaining control through nepotism, corruption, political repression and torture and persecution of any “enemies of the state”.

Octavius’s reign came to a bloody end just days before Tavia’s 11th birthday, when Octavius’s crumbling regime was finally defeated by rebels. The presidential palace was overrun, and Tavia’s mother, father and eldest brother were all captured by the rebels and executed on national TV. Tavia, who her father had always kept semi-hidden from public life, was saved by one of the family’s servants, who brought her to live with distant relatives of the family who had fallen out of favor with Octavius during his rule.

Initially disliking the daughter of the cousin who had treated them so harshly, the family nevertheless opened its arms to Tavia, and over the course of time, she became a member of their family. As she grew, her Aunt Kira slowly told her more and more about her family, and what happened to allow her to live the life she had for those ten years. Horrified, Tavia refused to believe the truth for a time, and is only starting to accept the life her father led as the leader of the nation.

Now, ten years later, in a nation still riven by anger and discord, still dealing with upheavals of violence, ten years after Octavius’ rule, Tavia is 20, and trying to find her place in a world where she is the child of a man who caused so much pain to others. In a nation where her family’s name is still cursed, where many people would turn her in to the authorities or simply kill her if they knew her heritage, Tavia finds herself driven by the desire to do something to begin to atone for the sins of her family. She knows she cannot undo the damage that has been done, and that she and her family will never find forgiveness to many, but she is driven to prove that the evil her father committed, the evils that she may have benefitted from do not define her entire family.

Tavia is an pleasant, somewhat mousy young woman, prone to losing herself in books, with deep brown eyes that already show a lifetime’s worth of experience. Quiet and soft-spoken, she cuts her brown hair short, and after a decade of hiding, works hard to avoid being the center of attention. She is still somewhat frustratingly blind to the details of what was going on in Gamarra to fund her family’s lavish lifestyle, but she is a deeply compassionate, kind woman who, for better or for worse, feels the guilt of her entire family now rests on her.

Category: 2012, Drama, Scifi

About the Author ()

Amateur. Writer. Voice-actor. Always interested in learning for it's own sake.

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