MOTIF: THE WARDEN
Introduction
Taelian is the Warden of a single door, imbued into his Rune, known as the Lychgate. While his Rune prevents him from accessing additional portals, his Lychgate - often called his Ward - offers him a level of persistence that alters not only the way in which Taelian fights, but the way he lives. The Warden is a motif of mastery over versatility, sacrificing much of the combative applications of Transposition in order to shepherd his own unique style from beginning to end.
The Lychgate - Apprentice
Taelian's Anchor is intrinsically tied to a single portal, known as the Lychgate. While he is capable of creating Nodes and Streams to perform other abilities, his Anchor can only tame and feed one construct or pair at a single time. The abilities limited by this are: Window, Aetheric Redirection, Disarming, Vacuity, Portal, Spatial Chakram, Interplanar Portal and The Chasm. This means that only one of these abilities may be active at any time.
However, his Rune resonates with the Lychgate which has learned to siphon from surrounding aethereal clusters. Both creating and sustaining this portal - though it is only one - is now a much more cost effective feat, allowing for the consistent presence of the Lychgate in combat and Taelian's daily life. The Lychgate also has one immediate, useful property: its boundaries are constantly shifting and cycling, appearing much like ignited sparks circling at high speeds, and this makes the boundaries of the Lychgate fairly difficult to strike (and therefore collapse).
It should be noted that the Portal ability itself is now physically distinguished from other abilities: while most of Taelian's Lychgate portals are teal, surrounded by whirling sparks, Taelian's Portals appear to borrow from the features of the environment surrounding them. For example, if he uses the Portal ability in a desert, it will appear to form its shape with the sand around it, being encircled by the grains as if they were drawn by a gust of wind. The same applies to the ocean with water, a savannah with golden grass or a forest with bark and leaves.
Reverb - Journeyman
Taelian can no longer Blink. While it was at first possible to perform, at the risk of collapsing the Lychgate, by Journeyman he loses the ability to Blink entirely. Instead, Taelian gains access to a new ability known as 'Reverb'. This ability allows him to tether himself to a node he has created - the one nearest to him - and be pulled along by it as it collides with another node, resulting in a blindingly fast spatial charge, always in a linear direction.
This appears as a teal-blue aethereal flash surrounding his body. There are benefits and disadvantages to this: firstly, this movement is not restricted by the limit given by Blinking, and can therefore be performed in rapid succession. Additionally, this ability costs less than Blinking to perform. Taelian also moves at half of the speed of Mach-1 when dashing, meaning he accelerates at an incredible speed. In exchange, Taelian is not intangible while dashing, meaning death to wide-scale attacks, object collision, crashing into terrain and several other possibilities open him up to the vulnerability of high velocity suicide. In addition, as he can only move linearly, the range of Reverb is often significantly less than that of Blink, forcing Taelian to further rely on his singular Lychgate in order to cross large distances.
