Rayth

Phoenix, formerly known as Rayth, is a Mastigos mage of The Guardians Of The Veil. She was a Fellow of The Consilium By The Bay, in the cabal The Rose. Rayth has abandoned her legacy, and is dating Pallas. She was elected to serve as the second Mastigos Councillor of the Consilium of the Stone Circle.

Biography
Rayth was born Anna Williams. She had a normal, relatively happy childhood as an only child, with the only thing that could have been said to be unusual about her being her apparent preference for the company of books for that of her peers.

Anna was quite an idealist and aspired to work in law enforcement, and with single minded determination she spent her time in school working towards that goal. To that end she successfully completed her A-Levels with excellent grades and set about joining the police force. Thanks to her intelligence and the variety of self taught skills she had picked up over her adolescence, she quickly found herself a job in the force. She threw herself into her training and work, determined to prove herself as valuable. Her potential was quickly noticed, and she was fast tracked to advanced training and a position of some respect.

For a while she was happy with her work, but eventually her idealism would work against her. Anna believed that too often she saw criminals that were certainly guilty receive lesser punishments than they deserved, or even get away with their crimes. Anna viewed this as an enormous injustice and set about to correct it. She began to tamper with evidence, making minor alterations to aid investigations. At first she was cautious, but eventually she grew bolder, and her methods became more extreme.

It became a routine to her. The times she would resort to tampering with evidence gradually became more and more frequent as her confidence and obsession with her work grew. In the few years in which she had been working, she had changed from a quiet, yet friendly and cheerful young woman into someone who was isolated and barely recognisable. Her obsession was consuming her; she barely spoke to people outside of work anymore, and work was the sole focus of her thoughts even when she was at home. Her co-workers simply she was determined to prove herself a hard worker and dedicated to the job. Nobody suspected what she had really been doing.

Eventually, Anna pushed too far. She became involved in a case in which a woman had been murdered and the prime suspect was the victims neighbour. Anna made a mistake in her judgement, and became convinced of his involvement, and his guilt. She immediately began tampering with the case, and planted evidence to ensure he would be found guilty. Her plan worked, and he was arrested. That was when everything went wrong for Anna. She soon discovered her mistake and realised she had framed an innocent man.

She didn’t cope well with the stress caused by what she had done. Over the next few days she was barely able to eat or sleep, and turned up to work exhausted and almost delirious, leading to her being sent home under the assumption she was ill. On her journey home she was convinced she was hallucinating and the space around her seemed to warp as she moved. She made it through the door to her home just in time to collapse, beginning her journey through Pandemonium and to the watchtower where she carved a name, the choice of which she still does not fully understand. Anna believed what she had experienced to be a mental breakdown caused by the stress of having framed an innocent man for murder.

Convinced that what she had done would soon be found out, and still reeling from the trauma of what she would later find out to be her awakening, Anna fled London, leaving behind her co-workers, family and friends without a word and ended up in Manchester. Once in Manchester, it didn’t take long for the presence of a newly awakened mage to be noticed.

Vandal and Montresor were the first mages that Anna met. They recognised what had happened to her, took her aside, reassured her that she wasn’t going insane and started to explain the mage world to her. After conversations about awakening, mage society and orders, they managed to convince her to confide in them the story of her awakening. She told them everything. In an instant their demeanor changed; they threatened Anna with the crimes that she had committed, demanding that she used her skills and what she knew as a former police officer to assist them in their own illegal ventures. Terrified, she agreed to help in exchange for their silence.

Fortunately for Anna their activities were quickly noticed by Hoodsman, a member of the Consilium by the Bay. Hoodsman enabled the intervention of Demdike, who managed to remove Anna from the situation and deal with Vandal and Montresor appropriately. Anna finally received a proper introduction to mage society from Demdike, took the shadow name Rayth and would eventually be inducted into the Guardians of the Veil.

Since joining the Consilium by the Bay, Rayth has become a member of The Rose, and despite an attitude that is somewhat hostile towards the notion of teamwork, has managed to assist in the resolving of various matters such as helping catch The Hallows Killer, and identifying de Molay as a member of the Cwn Annwn.

During the fallout from the merger, Rayth became involved through Pallas in the investigation of the Preston Proximi scandal, and it was in this period that she reached the decision to change her shadow name, becoming Phoenix.