Victoria Olgimskaya

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Victoria Olgimskaya (Виктория Ольгимская) was the matriarch of the Olgimsky family. She was the White Mistress, and stood in opposition to Nina Kaina.

Description
Her gleaming, dark-golden, copper hair was either collected in heavy braids, or stacked up like that of noblewomen in the early nineteenth century. Next to her husband, Big Vlad, she seemed tiny in appearance, but was actually quite tall and wonderfully proportioned. Nevertheless, if the main feature of Big Vlad is heaviness, for Victoria, it was softness, which was manifested in everything about her, from her movements and her way of speaking, to the way she did business. At the same time, she was a strong and willful woman, able to quietly insist on certain things or "arrange circumstances" so that situations were resolved with her desired result.

Background
Victoria had been married to Big Vlad for a long time before she came to live to the Steppe. She and Vlad the Younger, a little boy at the time, used to live faraway when Big Vlad made the decision to counterbalance Nina's influence upon the town with his wife's inclination to protect people.

As a Mistress
She was a good patron of the city, yet she did not engage in charity: there was no distribution of money, no organization of shelters, nor patronage of those who could not take care of themselves, and generally very little concrete good—the very fact of her existence stopped the development of strife and eased devastating events. This quality, the ability to make people happy just being herself, she gave to her daughter, young Victoria. Generally, all that is good in Capella was passed down from her mother. Victoria, when alive, was so beloved because she gave people hope for future happiness: not backed up by any concrete promises, no real action, but still, effective and joyful hope. After her death, she practically became a local saint, evident by the decorations and tributes left daily by the townspeople on her tombstone.

Those who try to show Victoria's splendour by dressing her as a white witch who defeats the wicked witch are fools. This was not what made her splendid. Those who represent her as a good mother soothing children from a nightmare are naive. Warmth and cold, the house and the road, woolen furs and glowing light, the darkness and the stars: they personified extreme limits and were thus very close to each other. Only together could they share the universal loneliness of a Mistress.

The splendour of Victoria was that she loved her rival much more than she was loved by her. Although stronger than Nina, Victoria, protector of the people, opened the way to Nina and allowed her merciless truth to prevail.

Victoria died shortly afterwards Nina passed away, and some believe she did it deliberately in order to restrain her unbridled opponent, for Nina had acquired a mystical power over the town after her death. When Victoria joined Nina, the townspeople breathed a sigh of relief, comforted by familiar hands wrapping them at night, and invisible wings sheltering them from a newly opened abyss. Victoria, who in life had taught to love man for what he was, and to ask nothing more from him, had become the guardian of the family's hearth—protector of the weak and the poor.