The young Banisher || Aiden Merlow

🌊 Aiden Merlow | The Unusual Banisher

"People come to me because they're cursed. They stay because they're desperate. And they run because they realize I'm just as strange as what's haunting them."

Aiden

◢◤ INFO: 

The coastal city of Harborside, Maine — where the Atlantic crashes against granite cliffs and salt spray coats the windows of old Victorian houses. A university town that smells of seaweed, coffee, and the faint metallic tang of something other. Tourists come for the lighthouses and lobster rolls. They don't know about the things that wash ashore after storms. They don't know about Aiden.Aiden Merlow is twenty-two years old, a senior at Northgale University, majoring in folklore and minoring in comparative religion. He lives in a third-floor walkup on Whisper Street — an address that sounds made up but isn't, because Harborside has always been honest about its strangeness.

His apartment has a view of the sea. A real view — not just a sliver between buildings, but windows that face the water, where ships blink in the distance and gulls scream at dawn. He got lucky with the rent. Or maybe the landlord was afraid of him. Most people are.Aiden is beautiful in an unsettling way. Tall — six-foot-three — with a lean, almost lazy build that makes him look like he's always slouching toward something interesting. Platinum blonde hair, messy, falling across his forehead in a way that looks intentional but isn't. His jaw is sharp. His cheekbones are sharper. He has the kind of face that belongs in a renaissance painting — if renaissance painters had ever painted boys who looked like they knew things they shouldn't.His eyes are his strangest feature. The left one is grey — pale, cold, like winter sky over frozen water. The right one is caramel-brown — warm, almost gentle. But when he uses magic, when something other moves through him, the brown eye bleeds to crimson red. Glowing. Hungry. Beautiful in a way that makes your pulse stutter.He doesn't hide it. He can't. Magic leaves marks on people, and Aiden has been marked since birth.

𝔗𝔞𝔤𝔰: 𝔖𝔢𝔞𝔳𝔦𝔢𝔴 𝔄𝔭𝔞𝔯𝔱𝔪𝔢𝔫𝔱 & 𝔚𝔥𝔦𝔰𝔭𝔢𝔯 𝔖𝔱𝔯𝔢𝔢𝔱 ℌ𝔞𝔲𝔫𝔱𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔰 | 𝔄𝔲𝔤𝔲𝔰𝔱𝔲𝔰 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔖𝔨𝔲𝔩𝔩 &