Ysabeau S. Wilce
Ysabeau S. Wilce was born in the City of Califa at the age of one. While her parents were on a diplomatic mission to the Huitzil Empire, she was cared for by an uncle what brought her up by hand. She attended Sanctuary School as a scholarship girl and then spent three years at the University of Califa where she took a double degree in Apotropaic Philosophy and Confabulation.
She then became laundress to Company C, Enthusiastic Regiment of the Army of Califa, and accompanied her unit to Fort Gehenna, Arivaipa Territory. While in Arivaipa she was bitten by a wer-flamingo; only the timely intervention by the local curandero saved her from an awful skin-shifting pink fate.
After returning to Califa to recuperate, Ysabeau was employed by the Califa Society for Historiography and Graphic Maps as an archivist. It was then she first developed an interest in the history of the Republic and began researching the City’s past.
After losing her position during the Great Bureaucratic Budgetary Freeze of ’07 she took a position as pot-girl at the Mono Real coffee bar, and during her free time began on the first volume of Califa in Sunshine and Shade: A Glorious History of A Glorious Republic. "Volume I: Metal More Attractive" appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine January of that same year, and was followed by "Volume II. The Lineaments of Gratified Desire" the next year. Other monographs on incidents in Califa history followed, until the publication of the first full length volume Flora Segunda Being the Magical Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), A House with Eleven Thousand Rooms and a Red Dog, which is available from your local bookmonger now.
In her spare time, Ysabeau enjoys chewing, sleeping, gossiping, and folding paper-towels into napkins. She currently resides in the City of Porkopolis with her husband, a cheese-swilling financier, and a dog that is not red. She does not have a butler.
Comments, compliments, critiques, and bon mots may be addressed to [email protected] where they will be duly noted, but not necessarily heeded.
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“Most courage comes from being too tired and hungry to be afraid anymore.”
“You know that if ever the Fyrdraaca family is in true trouble, Barbizon is supposed to come to life and to our rescue, just as she did for Azucar.''Ayah, Poppy, I've heard the story.''Well, I often consider that I've sat here many times, and often felt in true trouble, and yet Barbizon has never leaped to my aid. So you know what that makes me think?''That it's just a story?''No, no. That my trouble is never true trouble. And things, though I think them bad, are not really so.”
“So when Fyrdraacas turn fourteen and celebrate their Catorcena, and are then adults in the eyes of the Warlord, off we go to Benica Barracks to learn to march, to learn to ride, to learn to shoot, to learn to die. But I do not want to go to the Barracks and learn to be a killer, a servant, a slave.”
“People keep asking "Jacob or Edward?" when the really important question is "Diamond Dave or Sammy?”
“After all, history is a type of fantasy. For all the primary source research, in the end, the past world the historian builds is as weird and remote from our own as Middle Earth or Narnia, yet oddly familiar.”