Character Compendium

[Kuri Shardweaver]

In keeping with the spirit of organization and ease of use, here is where I'll be merging the Characters of EC to create a cohesive index. Hopefully. Keep in mind, this topic is ONLY going to contain Approved characters, so I'll be editing out the actual approval posts by me to keep the post count to a minimum.

Cast so far: Sayuri,Nasir,Kiki,Krh'rhl,Isil,Bix

Edited September 18, 2011 by Kuri Shardweaver

[Comatose]

Sayuri Tenaho

Leyari Mathematician

Player Information

Name: Comatose

Contact Information: PM me to talk about it.

Character Information

Name: Sayuri Tenaho

Race: Xaneth: Leyari

Age: 24

Gender: Female

Place of Origin: The Leya (Cherry Valley)

Class: Master of Mathematics (Currently an Accountant)

Relationship Status: Single

Channeling Capacity:

As a Leyari, Sayuri has a fairly high channeling potential. She is very skilled in telekinesis, and is able to move multiple light objects at once at varying speeds, but has never used this ability for combat. Her other talent is the generation of light, which she can create in a variety of colours and intensities. Other skills that are not as developed include the heating and cooling of objects and the preservation of perishable items, such as food and plants. After leaving Cherry Valley for the last time, Sayuri learned to create offensive blasts of pure energy to use in combat in order to prove to herself she had put the traditions of her people behind her. While she learned the technique, it is the least developed of her channeling skills, and she has yet to use it against another living being. Sayuri’s focus is the Cherry Blossom hair clip she uses to tie back her hair.

Appearance:

Like most Leyari women, Sayuri is petite, standing approximately five feet tall, and weighing less than most other women her size. Her skin is a very delicate and a very pale brown. Her black hair is thin and sleek, and hangs down to her lower back. In order to distance herself from her culture, she never wears it up. Instead, she leaves it hanging, only ornamented by the cherry blossom hair clip that keeps it away from her face. Her facial features are delicate and sharp at the same time. What sets Sayuri apart from other women of her culture is her eyes. While they are tilted and the same shape as the rest of her people, her eyes are pale blue in color, and are considered to be an ill omen. Forsaking the silk robes of her people, Sayuri often wears plain dresses with a shawl or cloak for warmth. She never wears make-up or face paint. Sayuri moves with grace, precision, and economy.

Special Skills:

Mathematics, rapid reading and memorization abilities, dancing and calligraphy.

Strengths:

Sayuri’s greatest strengths are her intellect, determination, and discipline. Using these three things, if Sayuri sets her mind to figuring out or learning something, she will accomplish her goal, no matter what hardships she has to face to get there. While her sometimes extreme practicality seems harsh at times, Sayuri refuses to let any foolish cultural norms or traditions stand in the way of efficiency and progress. Though she has not practiced for some time, Sayuri is a naturally skilled Leyari dancer. Other special skills include (obviously) Mathematics, rapid reading and memorization abilities, and calligraphy. While she no longer practices the Leyari traditional style, all her writing is still ornate and beautiful.

Weaknesses:

As a Leyari, Sayuri has absolutely no combat ability. While she has rejected the culture of her people, their beliefs were drilled into her since birth, and she still would have great difficulty physically harming another person, even to save her own life or the life of others. While she was very physically fit in her youth, her years as a scholar have made her physically weak, especially after she quit dancing recreationally.

Sayuri’s greatest weakness is her difficulty with interpersonal connections. While her own people find her offensively boisterous, to the rest of the world, she is still very reserved. This reservation makes her seem much colder than she is, making it difficult for her to form friendships with others. Her practicality and intense focus on her education isolates her, as when busy with a project any friendships she has managed to create are the first things to be neglected. Because of her previous experiences and upbringing, Sayuri also has difficulty trusting others and opening up to people, preferring to seek her goals on her own.

Personality:

While she likes to think of herself as rebellious, Sayuri is a very disciplined, practical, and emotionally reserved individual. She is a quiet and cautious woman who knows how to get a job done, and done right. She is no stranger to hardship, and enjoys overcoming it. In her view, anything that does not serve a purpose is pointless, and if it gets in her way, it must be discarded, no matter how important some people think it is. As an academic, Sayuri is also very curious and inquisitive, and is always finding new things she wishes to investigate, prove, or disprove. She is always pushing herself to reach her full potential, and loathes being blocked or stifled by anything other than her own talent. When it comes to something she desires, Sayuri can be incredibly stubborn.

Sayuri believes strongly in making her own way, and resents seeking help from others. She is slow to trust, and even slower to let her guard down and open up to someone. While she has rejected her culture, she still unconsciously holds several Leyari values inside of her, including a respect for life, dislike of violence, discipline and appreciation of nature. Sayuri is very open minded when it comes to other cultures and traditions, but she often becomes skeptical when she sees any short comings. Sayuri’s four greatest fears are complete and utter failure, being prevented from growing intellectually, being silenced, and that, like her father before her, she is going insane.

History:

I come from a place where men braid their hair and dress only in silk while women walk silently through the streets with painted faces. In the privacy of our home, my mother explained to me that a woman must always be silent in public, for a woman’s words are more valuable than a man’s, and must be used sparingly. Only in the privacy of our homes, when the face paint is removed can we speak freely. It wasn’t until I left my homeland that I realized a free speaking Leyari woman speaks far less than even the most reserved of foreigners.

As you have probably guessed by now, I come from The Leya, or Cherry Valley as the foreigners call it. It is strange that even though I have come to see myself as an outsider, I still use the name of my people when referring to my homeland. The valley is not large by the standards of countries and nations, but it is large enough contain three nodes, two weaker ones at either end, and a quite powerful one at the valley’s center. A strong ley line traces the valley’s floor, joining the three. The energy from these nodes has made The Leya a place of great fertility, and the forests of cherry trees that grow there give the valley its name. In the spring, the entire valley is blanketed with beautiful pink blossoms, and the paths are littered with fallen petals. In the summer, our famous Leyari cherries grow ripe, and in fall the leaves turn vibrant shades of red and yellow. It is always warm in the Leya, and we never experience a true winter, aside, of course, from the Season of the Serpent, when nothing grows, and our beautiful cherry trees shrivel up.

My people are pacifistic. They care little for the world outside The Leya, other than the merchants who come to buy our cherries, the vibrant dyes we make from both the fruit and the flowers, and the fine silks woven into garments from the cocoons of the worms and moths who fertilize our trees. The men, with their cheap words, handle the business aspect, while the women silently take care of the ‘important work’: tending the trees, harvesting the cherries, grinding both fruit and blossom into dyes, tending our livestock, and weaving fine silks. The livestock are kept, of course, only for their milk or wool. My people only eat what they can grow in their gardens, or harvest from our trees. The spilling of blood is forbidden within The Leya.

With such a rich land, containing three entire nodes, you may be wondering how my people have survived as pacifists when an army of any size could easily wipe us out and take the valuable resources we guard. The answer is the Peace Line. It is a wall of white stone, strange and smooth, that surrounds the valley. There are no gates, but it is barely a foot tall, so it is hardly an impediment to travellers. An artifact from another age, no one understands the Peace Line, who made it, for what purpose, or how it works, but we do know what it does. No man, woman or child can cross it while bearing arms or intending harm. While violence is possible within The Leya, my people have imposed strict penalties for any individual who breaks their peace, and no true Leyari would dream of committing violence against another living being.

Despite having a wealth of Ley energy at our disposal, the Leyari think of themselves as the people of the Ley Lines, and view the life giving energy within them as sacred. While all of my people have a relatively high channeling potential, it is never developed, as channeling the Ley Lines is strictly forbidden. The ignoring of this valuable resource is only one my people’s follies. Others include their rejection of higher learning (they believe knowledge that is not ‘necessary’ within The Leya always leads to corruption), and refusal of scientific advances are others.

The politics of The Leya are nothing of note, and probable seem laughable to the complex societies of other countries. The Leyari are ruled by a council of women and men, one of each gender from each of the nine clans. Decisions are made rarely, if ever, and most Leyari are content to let life go by as it always has, choosing conservatism and tradition over radical ingenuity time and time again. Each clan is headed by a matriarch and a patriarch. When a couple is married, they both forsake the clans of their birth, and join one of the seven others. Because of this, while the clans remain distinct, all Leyari are interrelated in some way or another. This relationship, isolation from other cultures, and our cultural dress (especially the face paint) lead many to believe all Leyari look the same. The men are all short and round, with handsome faces and dark braided hair, and the women are all tiny with dark mysterious eyes. This is not true. Foreigners just do not know where to look. Someone from a more cosmopolitan city might use the color of a person’s hair, skin, or eyes, or their height or girth to recognize them. My people use the ratio between the size of the nose and eyes, the thinness or thickness of the lips, the way someone moves or stands, or the way their face changes expressions.

I, of course, was always easy to pick out. The Leyari woman is short and thin, with sleek black hair, and tilted eyes that are dark and mysterious. She wears her hair piled on her head in complex arrangements, dresses in silks (or wool while working, but only if the woman is a clumsy worker) of white, pink, or crimson and paints her face white. The only color is a black liner with red accents to emphasize the eyes, and red paint on the lips with a single red line running from the bottom lip to the tip of the chin. My mother made sure I fit the mould as soon as I was able to keep food off of my clothes, and play without ruining my hair or face paint, but she never quite succeeded. My eyes were a problem you see. They are a pale, watery blue. While such a colour is hardly unheard of with my people, light coloured eyes were rare enough to be considered an ill omen, and they made me a prime target for teasing among the other children. Looking back, however, I’m grateful that the colour of my eyes made me different. They were the first thing that set me apart from the rest of the Leyari, and as I grew, I found I was far more different than just the colour of my eyes.

I grew up within the Tenaho clan, and lived in Myrashi, the largest of The Leya’s three cities, built over top of our largest node. In any other nation, it would be called a town, if a large and very beautiful one, but to a rural people like mine, it was our capitol. It was a sprawling place, the houses spread out to accommodate the forest, andnbuilt with what stone or marble could be imported from outside. Wanting to save as much space for the trees as possible, our buildings are built as tall as possible, creating stone towers that stretch out above the trees, and offer amazing views of the Leya. While some of these towers are made of plain un-ornamented stone, just as many are made of marble and decorated with gold and silver. My people’s simplistic lifestyle leads some to forget how wealthy we are. Our cherries, dyes, and silks are in high demand, and our cities are where our wealth is displayed.

Within Leyari society, the balance of power between men and women is very difficult to grasp to outsiders. Some see the women are silent in public, and think the men control them. Others see the women’s control of ‘industry’ and wealth within The Leya, and think they hold the real power. In truth, their power is balanced. A woman’s power is the power of the body. She is in charge of her family’s wealth and livelihood, and is taught to excel in all her crafts at a young age. It is the women of the council who set the prices for our exports, and distribute wealth among the clans. The men, however, hold the power of the voice. They hold sway over relations with the outside world, make laws, and uphold cultural traditions within The Leya. They also administer justice. And so, they are balanced. In times of conflict, however, it is the women who take charge. So you see, a woman’s silence in public is not an arbitrary restriction placed on them. It is a statement of power. By keeping silent, the Leyari women provide their men with a constant reminder that men cannot exist without a body, but a woman can exist without a voice.

As it turned out, I had no father to tell me stories, or teach me to dream. All I had was a mother to teach me discipline and grace. My father, they told me, was a brilliant man, but not a good Leyari. No one said anything overtly, but I pieced this much together on my own. Around the time he married my mother, he began neglecting his duties. He’d vanish for hours at a time, and no one would no where he went or what he was doing. Steadily it got worse and worse. They didn’t find out what he was doing until after I was born. Stashed carefully away in a cleverly made lock box, something that should have been made by a woman, were notes. Thousands and thousands of pieces of paper, filled with numbers and strange diagrams. No one could decipher what they meant. My mother even had a male member of the clan to take the notes to a university when he and his wife went travelling, but no one there could make any sense of them either.

The discovery of my father’s secret did not stop him. If anything, it spurred him on. He began forgetting to eat and sleep if he wasn’t reminded, and his only daughter was completely forgotten. I remember approaching him one day and asking him for a story. He looked me straight in the eye for a moment, with a completely unreadable expression, and then his eyes went blank. He didn’t even recognize me! He didn’t say anything, just turned back to his piece of paper and continued scribbling. My family tried everything, we took his paper and his pens, and locked him away, or locked him outside, but he always ended up scratching something into the ground, or his walls. Once he used his own fingernails, and continued to scratch numbers into the floor of his room even after his hands started bleeding. He died when I was six, still not old enough to really understand what happened. He just died one day, like he had given up on living. His funeral was a small affair, with only me and my mother, and my father’s immediate family present for his burial beneath a cherry tree. We buried him, his father and brother honored him with a single death song, and my mother, grandmother, and aunt perfromed a single death dance. And then we left him there. His behaviour had shamed all three families, you see, and they were all ready to move on.

The Leyari have no formal schooling system. Children are instructed by their parents, and the elder members of their gender from within the clan. Children are taught cultural traditions, and the basics of all the crafts and arts available to them, before they choose their specialty or specialties. Boys are taught bargaining, diplomacy, politics, law theory, debate, and the arts of story telling, music, poetry, and oration. All women will eventually harvest and tend the cherry trees, but we are also taught gardening, the harvesting and spinning of silk, dyeing, dye making, animal husbandry, accounting, food preparation, and the arts of painting, calligraphy, and dance. So, it was within my family’s tower and the surrounding forest that I spent most of my childhood. I was eight when I began realizing the limits of our education system. The Leyari are experts in their field, but they have a very narrow view of the rest of the rest of the world, mainly things that do not involve cherries or silk. They have all kinds of answers for why things are the way they are: it is the will of the Ley-Heart, or the decree of our ancestors, or a boon from an ancient spirit, but they never examine the how. As an inquisitive child, my questions were met with stern disapproval from my teachers, and my overactive tongue earned me hours of extra chores. One day, when I was fourteen, I broke my woman’s silence to ask about the my father’s notes, and had to walk the length of The Leya, picking a cherry from every tree in my path. Not only had I asked a question that was considered taboo in a rude manner, but I was also a woman by then you see, and should have known better. My mother shook her head, and told me I reminded her of my father.

The combination of my father’s early ad mysterious death, the lack of answers to my questions, and the inability to ask them created an enormous frustration within me, which I redirected against my people, particularly my mother. We fought often, though an outsider would likely take our fights for pleasant conversation. We might disagree, but we were both Leyari women. As I grew into my teens, I began to rebel more and more, refusing to tie my hair or paint my face, earning myself several days of confinement within my family’s tower. When I turned sixteen, my mother had enough, and so, she began making arrangements to marry me off to the son of another clan. While some marriages come from romantic courtships, most are arranged. Only the most charming of women can woo a man without speaking to him, after all. And all marriages must be approved by the governing council.

All I heard when my mother told me I was to marry were the whispers surrounding my father’s death, and how he had began his decline soon after marrying my mother. Taking this attempt to get rid of me as the last straw, I packed my bags, and crossed the Peace Line with a group of merchants. My specialty would have likely been dance, or perhaps accounting, for I have always found the movements of Leyari dancing comforting. While I enjoyed working with numbers and keeping accounts, it came too easily too me, and I found no challenge there. I left before I could choose a specialty though. It was probably for the best. A life dedicated dance would not have satisfied me or my mother. She was a skilled dancer herself, but in her opinion, the womanly arts were meant to be hobbies, and a true woman used her specialty to benefit The Leya. As one of the best robe makers in The Leya, she lived by this belief.

I began to travel the kingdoms of Alteiryn. The Leya is on the eastern edge of the continent and isolated by both the Leyari culture and the Peace Line. The entire journey was eye opening to me, and my inquisitive mind uncovered new facts every day, but my true intellectual awakening didn’t begin until I reached one of Alteiryn’s famed Universities. For the first time in my life, I came home. Using funds raised by selling all my silks, leaving me only wool to wear, I paid for my first term at the university there. The first day alone was amazing. Not benefiting from the education of others, I quickly became overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information. Within the first week, I began despairing, and thought of going home, but the image of my mother’s calm and collected painted face stopped that thought in its tracks. Though it was hard, I felt alive for the first time, like a woman who had lived her life in starvation, and had just swallowed her first Leyari cherry.

I threw myself into my studies, neglecting food, sleep, and friendship, and finished my first year in the top half of my class. While I performed decently (well considering the circumstances), the only class I truly flourished in was mathematics. Where the other classes involved endless lists of facts that I would have needed years to memorize in order to truly excel at, once I began to understand the rules that governed numbers, equations became putty in my hands. Though my experience with mathematics was limited to what I needed to participate in my people’s economy (and because of this, I failed my first few assessments), with hard work, dedication, and what I can only call natural talent, by the end of the year I had the eighth highest scores in my class. The masters, eager to encourage talented young minds, paid the tuition for the top ten students of every discipline, and so, my academic career took off.

By the end of my second year, I was the top of my class, and I graduated as one of the most talented new mathematicians in the mapped world. While math was both my talent and my passion, I had other areas of interest as well. My background and curiosity led my to pursue as much as I could handle with my studies in biology and ecology, but I never achieved mastery in either discipline. I also enjoyed learning of the other known cultures in the world. My official minor, however, was in channeling the power of the Ley Lines. It took me a full semester before my curiosity over-powered the beliefs that had been built into me since birth, but as soon as I began learning about how these lines shaped and made our world, I could not stop. It was then that I discovered my people had a natural talent for shaping the power. Backed by my new found understanding and knowledge, the Ley Lines were the final piece, and suddenly, the world made sense. I saw things that my people had taken for granted, or attributed to some higher power, and how they fit into the greater scheme of things, and the symmetry with which it was all connected. There was still much to be learned of course. The intellectual revolution of Alteiryn was just beginning, and there was much left to discover.

I was in my early twenties when I decided to return home. Naive as I was, I thought it would be impossible for my family to ignore facts when I presented it to them. My head was filled with ideas of how I could improve life in The Leya, and increase the importance of education, perhaps even develop an exchange program. It shouldn’t be very surprising that the reality did not live up to my expectations.

I prepared all day before I finally got up the courage to cross the Peace Line. It had been years since I had wound my hair in complex knots, or applied paint to my face, but I still remembered how it was done. I had to send one of the merchants I was travelling with in the day before, to buy the things I needed to make myself presentable. When I was ready, it was almost noon, and it took several more hours to reach my family’s tower by foot. By the end I was huffing and puffing. The lifestyle of a Leyari woman had made me fit and healthy, but me years of study indoors had stolen most of the muscle I had built in my youth. Still, it felt good to be back in the Leya. Amidst the stone of the rest of Alteiryn, I had made my own home, but I had forgotten the sheer beauty of The Leya. Coming over the Peace Line and seeing the valley again, it took my breath away.

When my mother saw me, her eyes went dark, and I became afraid. After nodding curtly to each other, we moved inside to speak. I suffered in silence until we had washed off our face paint and finally faced each other. As a Leyari woman, I know the importance of words, and I will remember these until the day I die.

“You’re hair is still so beautiful,” she said, her face still a mask even though it was bare. “You should take good care of it.” From anyone else, that might sound like a compliment, but from a Leyari, it was an open insult. I resisted the temptation to to reach up and check my hair. I thought I had it perfect! It wasn’t until I looked at my mother’s hair that I realized my mistake. Her complex knot was immaculate. The kind of perfection only achieved after tying it over and over for every day of her adult life. To an outsider, the difference between us might not have been noticeable, but between Leyari women, it was as clear as the difference between harvest and the Dark Season.

“I have not had much time to tie it,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “I have been very busy.”

“I’m sure you have,” said my mother, her voice betraying no emotion. Pausing, she reached out and poured us both a cup of cherry tea. We sipped our tea in silence, but a Leyari woman knows how to make even her silences count. My mother looked down, not meeting my eyes. As a gesture, in Leyari culture, lowering one’s eyes can be taken either as a sign of respect, or an insult. I was not sure which my mother intended.

“Your leaving saddened me,” she said softly. “You would have made a beautiful bride.” Again her words were ambiguous. Was she sad because she missed me, or because my leaving shamed her? Her tone and face gave no clues. As I have said before Leyari women take emotional reservation to the extreme. I was out of practice. Out in the world, I had grown used to reading a man’s face with ease. Back in The Leya, I was completely lost.

“It saddened me as well,” I said, then, hoping to break through to her, I added, “I have missed you. And The Leya.”

“Outsiders call our home the Cherry Valley,” she replied. She spoke it as if it were an observation, even though it was a reprimand. She said the word ‘our’ like I was included in it, but if I had been, she would not have said the rest.

Something inside me snapped. Hadn’t this been why I had left The Leya in the first place? To escape from the mind numbingly infuriating culture and traditions?

“Did you miss me at all? Or was it just a nuisance? Just a wrinkle in your robe, like always?” I realized I had spilled my tea, and barely managed to avoid getting it on my robe. In silence, my mother gracefully stood, left the room, cleaned the spill, and returned to her seat. Then she sipped her tea for a time. Her silence made me want to scream, but I held my tongue. A Leyari can use her silence as an insult when speaking to another woman in doors, and my mother was doing just that.

Finally, she spoke. “Your leaving was hard on me. I missed you very much. I am disappointed.”

I struggled to keep my face serene. “I’ve learned so many things. Things the Leyari don’t even understand! I think I can improve our life here, make a difference!”

My mother calmly set down her tea, but the way she did it made me feel as if she had stood up and started shouting, even though her voice was soft. “We of The Leya understand more than most outsiders think we do. Why should we seek to be different?” Her lips twitched slightly at the last word, as if it had left a bad taste in her mouth. Even though I was out of practice, I still recognized this as the sternest reprimand I had been given since I was a child, when more overt signs of displeasure were necessary.

Stupidly, I tried to reason with her. “I know how The Leya works now though; why our forests produce higher quantities and better quality cherries. The nodes and Ley Lines fill this valley with life, and power the Peace Line...”

“All life comes from the Ley-Heart. This knowledge is not new.” Her interruption stunned me, no matter how politely it was phrased. A Leyari woman never needed to interrupt another. I suddenly realized how much I had been speaking. I had switched from Sayuri the Leyari to Sayuri the academic without noticing.

“Mother,” I said, bowing my head with respect. “I know the way I have followed is not the way of the Leyari. But I think it is the way the Ley-Heart has set out for me,” inwardly I cringed at the explanation. Leyari beliefs about destiny seemed awfully shaky out in the real world. The Eternal Conflux was just an exceedingly powerful node. It had god like power, but it was not a god in and of itself, like my people seemed to think.

“The Ley-Heart sets all paths.” said my mother, and it was clear she meant I had not followed mine.

“And did it set father’s?” I asked, my insides turning from fire to ice in an instant. Since his death, my mother and I had never spoken of him. I’d asked questions, but answers were never given. All I knew of him, I had learned from whispers or pieced together from the memory of a six year old.

“Your father was sick.”

“He was oppressed,” I said coolly. It was strange. I felt like I was screaming at the top of my lungs, saying all the things I’d always meant to say to my mother, but my words came out as cold and soft as hers. Yes, a Leyari woman’s words were valuable, if she knew how to use them.

“The Peace Line gives us freedom.”

“It creates a prison. Father was trapped. I broke free.”

“Your father was sick” she repeated. Her voice was barely a whisper, but her dark eyes seemed to be afire.

“And were you his sickness?” My mother’s eyes widened, and I knew I had hit the mark. Never would I have dared to say such a thing, had I not seen the world outside The Leya. I continued on, before she could respond, shocking myself with how cool and collected I remained. “He was like me. Different. He wanted more than what The Leya could give him. But he couldn’t get it because he was trapped. Trapped by the Peace Line, trapped by the Leyari, and trapped by his arranged marriage to you. The Leya is beautiful and the Leyari are good, but we don’t have everything. There is so much else out there, that you can’t even imagine until you’ve come out from behind your painted face and seen it for yourself. Maybe that’s what he was scribbling all that time. It didn’t make sense because he himself didn’t understand what he wanted; it was beyond his understanding because he never got the chance try to piece it together. All he had left to write was jibberish.” I remembered suddenly that my father’s books were filled with numbers. What if he had been a mathematician, like me? The basic arithmetic taught to Leyari children was mostly reserved for girls. What would it have been like, to desire something so badly, not knowing why, or even understanding what you desired? I silently thanked the Ley-Heart before I realized what I was doing, for giving me the strength to leave.

My mother’s words caught me off guard yet again. “Our marriage was not arranged.”

The cold anger that had sustained me faded. My mother had fallen in love? The epitome of tradition and conservatism had been one of the few to choose her own husband? Suddenly, my mother was not the easy target she had been. How had it felt, to see the man she loved fall apart? What had it been like to know people were silently judging her, attributing her tragedy to her not letting her parents choose a husband for her?

“I am sorry,” I said.

“The tea is cold” said my mother, obviously trying to end the conversation so she could compose herself.

“Leave it,” I said, before she could reach for the pot. Not thinking about what I was doing, I reached up my sleeve, and pulled my focus from a hidden pocket. It was beautiful: a crystal cherry blossom, affixed to a hair clip. My first Channeling master found it for me when he realized the talent I possessed. He explained that an old channeling master had been a woman of great beauty, and the cherry blossom focus had been a gift from an admiring student, who had compared her beauty to the Cherry Valley in spring. He thought it only fitting that the first channeler from the Cherry Valley should have it.

Mathematics was always my primary passion, and the theory of Channeling has always interested me more than the practice of it, but between practice and my natural talent, I know enough to do a few very practical things. I can heat or cool things, which comes in handy when you are a busy student, and I’m very good at creating a floating light to read by. Besides the light, the only talent I’ve really cultivated is telekinesis, both for study and the sheer practicality of it.

Using the clip as a focus, I drew on the power of the node. The central node of The Leya was bigger than the one at the university, so I was careful not to take too much. Transferring my focus and the ley energy to the tea pot, I willed for it to start heating itself. Almost instantly, steam began rising from the spout. I’d done such things a thousand times since learning how, and I barely thought anything of it.

For the first time in my life, I saw my mother’s beautiful face contort in shock. “What have you done?”

I realized my mistake at once, but tried to play it off. “I wish to keep speaking with you. The tea has been heated.”

My mother stood and began backing away, shaking her head. “What have you done?”

I stood and moved towards her. “It’s harmless mother. The Ley Lines are not what you think they are. Their power is made to be harnessed...”

“Leave this place. Channelers are not welcome in The Leya.”

One look at my mother’s face, and I knew my cause was lost, and so, I turned to leave my homeland forever. As I moved to go down the stairs, however, I stopped suddenly, and turned back to face the woman who had raised me. “I want father’s notes.”

“Please leave.”

“Not without my father’s notes,” I said, feeling like a child as I crossed my arms petulantly.

My mother fought for control and then mastered herself. I could see the revulsion my use of the node had caused. “They are filed with our family’s papers. Take them and leave.”

I nodded slowly, turned, and left. Saying good bye would have only made things worse. I easily found the notes, at least, those that had been saved. My mother had filed them under ‘Miscellaneous Notations’. I ended up needing the help of the merchants to transport them all back to the cart. How had he written so much? And why had my mother kept them all? I began to read through them as soon as we crossed the Peace Line. The first few pages were filled with poetry. Before his decline, my father had been a brilliant poet. At the beginning, most of them were exquisite, and yet standard examples of Leyari poetry: praises to the Leya, ornate descriptions of nature, and shockingly, even some love poetry, no doubt meant for my mother. While poetry was never an interest of mine, my father’s poems made me want to weep.

As I read on however, I began to sense a strangeness to my father’s poems. The began to grow darker. The shift was subtle, and would never be noticeable unless all the poems were read in succession. But steadily, all the praises for the Leya began to have an ironic twist, or a description of nature lacked a key element. Sometimes, there seemed to be extra lines added, that had nothing to do with the subject of the poem, or had an entirely different meter. One read:

I look unto the cherry tree,

Blossoms, Fruit, and Ivory Bark.

Rendered with such dignity,

The Ley-Heart’s darkest hour.

The poems became more and more scrambled and ambiguous, and soon, it was difficult to discern any sort of topic, meter, or meaning. By this time, however, and meaning that could be taken out of the gibberish, was dark. It was at this point that the numbers began appearing. It was as if my father, one of my people’s greatest poets, was being consumed by an idea or concept he could not understand or express. The numbers, it seemed, were meant to symbolize something that could not be expressed in words. I began to grow excited. My mother would not have sent my father’s poems to that mathematician all those years ago, she only would have sent the sheets of numbers. Perhaps the poetry was the key!

I put my father’s notes away for a time when I reached the University. I had work to do: equations to find, proofs to create, and young minds to tutor. Though I am an excellent student, I do not think I am a very good teacher. My students often find me harsh and unyielding in my desire for perfection. I know this, and yet somehow, I cannot settle for less, nor can I change my nature.

Wanting to cut myself off from the Leyari culture, I burned the few silk robes that remained, quit dancing recreationally, and began learning to channel offensively. I hoped that, when these changes were done, no one would ever be able to call me a Leyari again. You might thing I did this out of hate for my people. I didn’t. It was out of love that I stripped myself of everything Leyari. While I disagreed with their ideology, I loved my people dearly, and any reminders of them while I was cut off were too painful for me to bear.

When I reached the university however, I realized something it had taken being cut off from my people to make clear. I was respected and praised by my colleagues and teachers, but I was friends with none of them. In my pursuit of knowledge, I had ignored all else, partially to compensate for my lack of education, and also because the reservedness drilled into me by my culture made it difficult to get close to people. I was surrounded by people everyday, and yet, I was entirely alone.

Until I met Alexandre.

I had been aware of him during my time as a student, for he was another of the brightest mathematicians in our age group. I had set aside my fathers notes for a time, and was doing research in complex analysis. Everyone worth their education had been trying to get it right for some time now, and it had quickly become a race to see who would figure it out first.

As we started realizing the periodicity of complex-valued logarithms, and as we worked hard to find the truth that seemed so close in our grasp, the sense of competition in the air at our college intensified, and nearly all the mathematicians of note began working on it, hoping to use it to build their career. Alexandre came to me with an offer. He acknowledged that between us, I was the more talented mathematician, but pointed out that my lack of formal education might be holding me back. As the son of two famous mathematicians, Alexandre had been schooled to follow in his parents footsteps since the day he was born. While he was not as bright as either of his parents, he had more knowledge of the history of mathematics than almost anyone. Desperate to earn his parents’ approval, he came to me in the hopes that together we could find the formula first.

Eager for the emotional connection I had unintentionally been starving myself of, I agreed, and so Alexandre and I set to work. We pushed ourselves hard, sometimes working through the night when a break through was made. As I worked with him, I quickly realized what I had been missing in the Leya. There, I had trouble relating to others, as if we were speaking different language. As a fellow mathematician, and a fairly talented one, Alexandre seemed to be able to read my mind, and I his. There were days when it seemed we didn’t even use words, speaking in objective numbers and beautiful formulae instead.

I did not realize I had given him my heart until he broke it.

Finally, one night, we had a break through. After hours and hours of trying proof after proof, we had one that worked. We were tired and exhausted, both of us had stayed up for the last twenty four hours and I had classes to teach in the morning, but we had it! Alexandre, or Alex as I had begun calling him, was taking a few minutes rest to refresh his mind. ewe were close, I decided to stay up for a few more hours. Then, suddenly, I had it. The elegant proof came to me like silk from a worm. When I woke him to tell him it worked, Alex jumped out of his seat, picked me up in his thin but graceful scholar’s arms, and spun me around. At the time, it was one of the happiest moments of my life.

I told him I could barely stand from excitement. He told me I was likely over-exhausted, and offered to take my class in the morning. After some protest that he was just as tired as I was, I agreed, and fell happily into my bed. To this day, it was the best sleep I have ever had.

I woke up the next evening, to the sound of celebration.

After washing and dressing, I made my way into the halls of the college, and asked one of my colleagues what all the noise was about. She looked at me like I was insane and asked, “Didn’t you here? Alexandre Dupreau had done it! He found the formula!”

“You mean Alexandre and I found it,” I corrected, trying not to sound too smug. “I did the last proof before going to sleep.”

My colleague game me a flat look. “Nice try Sayuri. I know you’re on the of the most talented mathematicians of our generation, but that doesn’t mean you can steal Alexandre’s moment. If you discovered the equation why was Alexandre the one to present it to the Masters today? Why were all the proofs in Alexandre’s writing, and why wasn’t your name on anything.” She went quiet for a moment before continuing. “Though, out of anyone to suggest such a thing, I suppose you would be the one I’d be most likely to believe. I thought you would find it for sure. I guess Alexandre just found it first.”

“But...” I protested.

“But nothing Sayuri. You’re more mature than that. Besides, your story doesn’t hold up. What mathematician worth their salt would share their research with a competitor?”

I was speechless. The reality of what had happened was finally sinking in. Alexandre had been with me throughout the research process, helping me every step of the way, and memorizing every step as he did so. He had rewritten all the notes I had worked on in his own handwriting, and presented them as his own. He had stolen our moment for himself. He had used me.

Unable to face my shame, I fled from my stunned colleague. Not really knowing where I was going, I soon found myself at the door to Alexandre’s apartments.

“You betrayed me,” I said as I burst in.

He had been sleeping, likely exhausted from the hours he had spent rewriting the notes and presenting them to the Masters. I was seriously doubted he had found time to teach my class.

“Sayuri, what are you doing here?” he asked. Sleep filled both his voice and his eyes.

“What am I doing here?” I asked. I had expected to be angry. I wanted to shout and scream and rave at him. Instead, I felt my heart turn to ice, and my voice grow frosty, as it had during my last encounter with my mother. Yes I thought to myself. This was better. This way, I would not let him know how much he had hurt me. “You stole my work. Did you not think I would confront you?”

Alexandre looked down at his feet. “I know. It was horrible. I’m sorry Sayuri, I really am. It’s just... you don’t know what it’s been like for me, growing up under the shadow of not one, but TWO famous mathematicians. Let’s face it Sayuri. I’ve had a lot of training, probably more than anyone, but that’s all I have. I’m smart sure, but my parents... they’re brilliant. Like you. This was my one chance to prove myself.”

“You used me.” I said, refusing to be moved by his story.

“Yes. I did.”

That was it. He’d never wanted my company. He’d wanted my brain. He’d used me, and now it was time for him to discard me, like a cherry once it’s juice has been squeezed out. That’s all I was to anyone now: a mind to be exploited and used. Sayuri the person might as well have been left in the Leya. Not knowing what else to say, I left, and never spoke to Alexandre again.

As I went through my day to day activities, I felt a rising sense of shame within me. When my colleagues and students looked at me, it felt like they all knew somehow. And so, after a week of avoiding all unnecessary human contact, I packed my fathers notes, and left the University forever. I got a job doing sums and accounts for a merchant caravan, and began traveling the continent once again. The work was simple and un-fulfilling, but it was work, and it helped me get away. I interacted with the merchants as little as possible, and spent my solitary hours pouring over my fathers notes, trying to find some pattern or meaning hidden within. That is, I did until today...

[borborygmus]

Nasir

Xanethi mercenary

Player Information

Name: Jess

Contact Information: If you know me, you already know how to contact me. If you don't know me, PM me.

Character Information

Name: Nasir

Race: Xaneth

Age: 21

Gender: Eunuch

Place of Origin: Masrah

Class: Mercenary

Relationship Status: Single

Channeling Capacity: (

-Type: Both internal and external (fire-related effects only)

-Focus Used: Own blood

-Degree of Skill: Low

Appearance: Nasir is unusually tall and slender, rather elongated in form, with a surprising grace to his movements. He is quick, with good reflexes, and a steely strength hidden within his lithe body. It is not hard to see that something is different about him, which is reinforced by his light voice, sounding young and oddly gentle – not childish or feminine, but not that of a man, either.

His hair is black and soft, reaching to his shoulders; there is no hair on his face nor on his body. Nasir is dark olive-skinned, and his eyes are dark, and rather kind, although there is a quiet sadness to them as well. His face is angled and refined, with high cheekbones and a straight nose. It is smooth and unlined, but there is something indefinably strange about the shape, and it is hard to say what age he is. He is dressed in a mixture of the Masran style and what is common in Alteiryn, in a grey undertunic, underneath a flowing dark green surcoat that reaches to his knees, and loose grey trousers that tuck into soft leather boots, lacing up to his knee.

Nasir carries a slender curved scimitar, well-forged if plain steel. On his belt, there is a khanjali, a long double-edged dagger, and there are two more knives, small enough and balanced to throw, hidden in his boots.

Special Skills: Nasir has been raised as a warrior from his early childhood. He has mastered the art of the sword, and even with only a knife or his bare hands alone, he is still a deadly fighter.

As a servant of the Malik, his education was twofold: his primary purpose was as a bodyguard, but he was also expected to adorn the court. Nasir can write a hand that is fine enough for any scribe, and has a good education in history, geography, poetry, music, law, politics, and court etiquette. He had most interest, however, in folktales, listening to whatever stories that visitors to the court would tell, and has memorized something of a wide repertoire.

Strengths: Highly educated, articulate, and intelligent. Skilled swordsman and hand-to-hand fighter. Some mild ley-channeling ability.

Weaknesses: Social stigma of being both a bastard (for those who know what it means for a Masran to have a single name) and a eunuch (for those who guess), crippling fear of the dark, deep water, and difficulty dealing with cold temperatures. Also, wanted in connection with the assassination of the Masran Malik.

Personality:Nasir is an observant and curious person, with keen eyes and a sharp mind behind them. He has a passion for stories and legends, reading books whenever he can get them – he reveres the written word with something approaching awe – and listening to the tales carried by strangers from faraway places. Nasir would rather earn a living as a storyteller than as a warrior, but the second is far easier. Most others do not care about words the way he does, and they need his blade, not his pen.

He tries to live by the code of honour that Saif taught him, as far he can. Even though he sells his sword, he works for the lesser wages of a caravan guard rather than taking the more profitable choice of warfare, though with his experience and literacy, he could easily become an officer. Nasir respects others, particularly women, and treats strangers with courtesy. He will help someone who is in trouble if it is in his power. Without truly acknowledging it, even to himself, Nasir is searching for some greater cause to follow.

Nasir is a stranger, an outlander and a traveler who rarely stays in one place for very long. The kind of men who usually work with him are not the sort with whom he can form a close friendship; at the best of times, mercenaries are not good men. He is not reserved, and the other guards in the caravan he is currently accompanying are friendly acquaintances. But he has taken none of them into his confidence, and the strangeness that they can sense around him leads them to allow a little distance.

Yet he is not solitary by choice. He is often intensely lonely, and although he has no sensations of sexual desire, he still dreams of having a family. When Nasir learns to care for another, his loyalty is a gift that is hard to match. Even though he has difficulty connecting sometimes, he spends as much of his time as possible with others. He frequents taverns, not to drink but for companionship, learning new stories and sharing those of his own.

He is terrified of darkness, cold, and water (any water he can't stand up in, at any rate). He sleeps with a lantern on every night, and his money is expended mainly for candles and lamp-oil. Sometimes, in order not to be alone at night, he will hire a prostitute to stay the night with him. He cannot touch her, of course, but her presence helps him to feel less fear, and for such women it is a chance at a respite from a very ugly life. For once, a man is actually paying them to sleep with him.

History: I grew up in Masrah, far away from this country, in a beautiful place, a white-walled palace filled with silk and perfume. It was an indoor garden designed for the comfort and pleasure of the Malik, the ruler of the land. They said he was wise, and learned, and powerful, the greatest man ever to lead the realm and perhaps even holding the blood of the divine. I was one of the few allowed into the inner chambers, when I accompanied Saif to show the great Malik my progress in learning to become his most devoted servant.

The Malik was fleshy and corpulent, and even under the heavy fragrances that he wore I could smell the odour of old sweat. His language was neither wise nor learned, but laden with curses and harsh language. But I believed, as I had been taught, that he was chosen by God, and I tried not to let these thoughts intrude. He seldom spoke to me, and I did not dare to speak to him; I tried to keep out of his way and hide behind Saif as much as I could. Only later, when I had enough wisdom to see the truth for myself, did I understand that the Malik was nothing more than any other man, and then I lost my fear of him.

I am starting this story badly. I have not yet told you about Saif son of Daula. He was the master of the Malik’s personal bodyguard, and he was everything that I had imagined the Malik should be, when I first pictured him, before I met him and saw the truth. Saif was a great hero, who had earned the respect and friendship of the Malik through years of service as, first, a common soldier, and then as the Malik’s protector. He was strong of arm, dark, and seemed impossibly tall to me. He was clever, and kind, and he treated me as if I were his son. I was given to him to train when I was barely four years old. He was not an easy master, I had to work hard to please him, but he was never cruel.

He taught me everything through games, trying to make it enjoyable for me. The art of the sword became a dance. Lessons in politics and court etiquette came over the chessboard. History was told to me as a dramatic tale, the great people of the past coming alive through Saif’s words. He had a unique gift for making them seem to breathe and walk among us right there in that room. Now that I am older, sometimes I wonder where he might have learned to tell such stories.

I was six when the Malik’s physician came for me. I was given a cup of strong alcohol to drink, and taken to a room that was heavy with the smoke of opium; lulled and drowsy, I sat down to rest, and the next thing I knew I was bound to the table and the physician stood over me with a knife. Though my wits were dulled, the pain I felt was beyond excruciating; it broke through the fog of the drugs and spirits as if I had been set on fire. Blessedly, I lost consciousness soon afterwards, and only later awoke to find myself different.

All I had between my legs was a small row of neat sutures and indescribable agony – nothing else.

For weeks after the operation, I could not hold in my urine. I was deeply ashamed of myself, and it burned my unhealed wounds like fire, but I could not control it. I slowly healed to the point where I could walk again, and then, eventually, control my bladder. As I returned to normal society, however, I found that the other boys inexplicably shunned me, even those who had been my friends. I sought them out, but the kindest of them turned their faces away, and those who were not so kind would point and laugh and say a strange word that until then I had not known: Eunuch. Half-man.

I did not understand why until Saif sat down with me and explained that I had been changed forever, and I would never again be like them. I remember he wept as he told me I was not to be a man, but that strange word – eunuch. He told me that I would never be able to love a woman, or to father a child, but that if I was brave, and honest, one day I would be a great warrior, and that he would always be proud of me.

To fill the void left by these former friends, I threw myself into my studies with Saif. I also peopled my surroundings with imaginary friends and family. I pictured a mother, with warm, dark eyes and a comforting voice like velvet. A brother, a little older than I was, who would come to my defense against the people who pointed and laughed. A sister, who would play with me, and tell me stories, and whom I in turn protected from her enemies. I dreamed that they spoke to me out of the fire that I had always loved. My father, of course, was always Saif son of Daula. In my dreamings, he was not only my teacher, but also my true-blooded father, and I was a great prince of the realm.

It was not until I was a little older that I learned who I really was, no prince, but a bastard. My mother had been the Malik’s favourite concubine; she was a woman renowned for her beauty, her wit, and her art. Shula was her name, and she was a fiery spirit, taken as a captive from the desert nomads and said to have the ancient blood of the Naara in her veins. It was also said that she spun tales that could captivate even the dullest mind. And the Malik had loved her with all the heart that he had to give for it.

Then she had betrayed that heart, for she had given birth to a child that was not his, a child with dark skin. I, Nasir, son of no-one, was that child. The Malik had ordered that Shula should be strangled for it, for he could not bear to spill her blood, and yet his rage was too great to permit her to live. Before she was put to death, however, she begged him for the love that he had once born her to spare my life. He promised her this one gift, and that he would take me into his service and give me a decent life; then he took his revenge. My castration was done to prevent me from continuing Shula’s line. The Malik kept his promise to Shula in that he kept me at the court, but he wanted her blood to end forever with me, and so he ensured this.

I grew older. I was taller than the other children my age, and stronger. There were others whom Saif trained to become warriors, but I outstripped them all in the training ring. I had greater speed and range, and I had a focus and drive that they did not. I wanted, above all other things, to be worthy of Saif’s respect. He gave it freely, but I wanted to earn it, and I was ready to suffer any amount of pain for that goal. I was often sore after hours of practice with the sword, the dagger, and striking with my hands and feet. I read voraciously, and wrote with the concentration of an artist, perfecting my calligraphy as I copied the words of the poets into my journal late into the night. I watched everything around me, hoping to impress him with an observation or intuition about the dynamics of court.

I had very little to distract me. While the noble boys my age were all mooning after one girl or another in the court, I could concentrate on my studies and training. They showed off, struggling amongst themselves for pride of place, and even tried to assert their own independence, rebelling against Saif’s authority. I never did. I was quiet, and observant, and I learned when others allowed lessons to go by them unnoticed. This continued until I was nearing eighteen – the age when I would have been considered a man, if things had been different. I was to join the Malik’s personal bodyguard when I came of age, the work for which I had been brought up since birth.

Saif came to me the night before my name-day, and he woke me in the darkness with a hand to my face, so that I would not call out and wake anyone. He whispered in my ear, and these were his words. I remember them as clearly as if he speaks them into my ear at this moment. "Tomorrow you will be grown, Nasir, and my work will be complete. You are my last student, and the greatest one I have ever had. I am proud of you. You have a great destiny ahead of you; your name shall be written in fire on the pages of history. Remember it, and remember everything that I have taught you."

“No matter what blood you come from, you will always be my son.”

In the morning when I awoke, I thought it had been a dream. I often dreamed that Saif would call me his son, and this seemed to be no different.

That day there was a ceremony to honour the warriors of the court – for the other boys my age were also named on that day, and we would all be raised to adulthood together. Some of us would be sent to war, to fight for the Malik in faraway lands. Some of us, those who were not as skilled at combat, would remain in the country to become civil servants – for we had all been taught politics, law, and history in addition to the blade. And a very few of us would dedicate our lives to protect the Malik.

Saif had kept the Malik safe for many years. There were scores of enemies who hated the Malik, and who sent assassins to take his life, but none had gotten past Saif and his men. The Malik chose that day to honour Saif above all other men in the court, and brought him to stand beside his throne. He took Saif by the hand, in front of every nobleman and woman, and embraced him as a brother, naming him his Wazir and praising him as the most faithful of men.

And Saif drove a dagger straight into the Malik’s heart.

As the Malik screamed and fell, his other bodyguards closed in and the court panicked. I fought to get to his side, but Saif let his blade fall and opened his arms to their swords as if he would embrace them. He died calmly, without lifting a hand to defend himself. I even saw him smile. I could not reach him in time, for the crowd barred my way as they stampeded to escape in every direction. I watched him die, and I could do nothing. My heart still aches at the failure.

Why did Saif betray the Malik? Why did he let himself die afterwards? I do not know the answers to these questions, and perhaps I never will. I wonder, sometimes, if my dark skin was his…if he had once loved the lonely woman that had been stolen away from her desert home. I look at myself in the mirror and try to see Saif in the face that looks back out at me. But there were many dark-skinned men at the court, and I will never know for sure if he was only my teacher, or if he was something more.

I left the palace and fled into the city, blinded by my tears but knowing full well that I had no other choice but to run. All knew that Saif had loved me well. His treachery tainted me by association, and within hours I would be hunted like an animal. I did not even have the time to collect my belongings before I took passage on the first merchant ship out of the port. I looked back many times, and as the city began to pass out of my sight I allowed myself to weep. I had lost my dreams. I had lost the nearest thing to family that I had ever had. I had lost everything, and I did not know what the future could possibly hold to make up for it.

I spent all my money for the voyage, and I was finally put ashore in a strange port, among men with harsh accents and suspicious eyes. I sought work for days, but I found very little, only menial labour on the docks that barely brought me enough to eat. I slept curled up behind a barrel, surrounded by the chill of the night sea-breeze and the stench of rotting fish. I could have sold my weapons, but they were all I had to remind me of Saif and my home.

Finally a land merchant who had recently lost the service of one of his guards spotted me in the streets. His name was Abdul, and he asked me if I knew how to use the sword I carried, and I told him yes. Abdul had a shrewd eye, and he could see that I carried myself differently from the average dockyard lout; he offered me a job, if I could prove myself halfway capable in a fight against the man he had appointed as officer of his guard accompaniment.

I had been trained by Saif son of Daula, the finest swordsman in the land, and the mercenary was barely fit to handle a bread-knife, let alone a scimitar. I had the man disarmed and pinned in a matter of moments. That was the beginning of my life as a mercenary; I went from place to place, protecting those who offered me the best rewards – and I chose the merchants who would take me farthest away from the country of my birth. I had no wish to be dragged in chains before the Malik’s son and successor, and I wanted to see for myself the lands from which had sprung the legends that I grew up on as a child.

[KChan]

Player Information

Name: KChan

Contact Information: In my profile. Alternately, you could shine my logo into the sky.

Character Information

Name: Kierra Vhaskar

Race: Xanethi

Age: 20

Gender: Female

Place of Origin: Azure Basin, Vhaskari Highlands

Class: Adventurer/Wandering Ley Researcher

Relationship Status: Single

Channeling Capacity:

-Type: Blended, but mostly external

-Focus Used: Kierra actually has a number of foci: she primarily uses her pair of swords, which were specially crafted to function as such; she also has a crest bearing her family's sigil which contains a small array of crystals, and a simple crystal pendant to be used in an emergency should she find herself without the others.

-Degree of Skill: Having studied channeling her entire life, Kierra's skill with the ley arts is considerable, particularly in the areas of improvisation and fine control. She is also constantly pushing her own limits, always seeking to improve her ability.

Appearance: Kierra is tall, standing at no less than 5'11”, and she looks even taller due to the high-heeled shoes and boots she often wears. She has a slender, long-limbed build and a moderate hourglass figure, while her physique is well-toned due to years of climbing, training, combat, and hard travel. She does not carry herself like the noblewoman she technically is, but rather with the grace and assertive confidence of a skilled swordswoman, though if one looks closely, one can see traces of a dancer in her movements as well. She inherited all the defining features of her family: very fair skin, delicate facial features, high cheekbones, and slightly tilted eyes. Her coloring, too, is typical of a Vhaskar: her hair is a very dark blue, which shines all the brighter in the correct lighting, though she has cut it short (about shoulder-length) and currently disguises the color with her channeling, making it appear to be a much darker blue-black. Her eyes, large and expressive, are a clear, crystalline icy blue.

For clothing, she typically chooses shades of blue, often with gold-colored trim when appropriate, along with black, white, and various neutral shades. Her adventuring fare is simple: shirt, fitted trousers, vest or coat depending on the season, gloves, boots, etc., and a long, billowing blue cloak. Even her swords have been given the typical Vhaskari “blue” treatment; the forging process which also allows them to function as foci has left them with the subtlest of blue tints. When dressing as a noble – though this is done rarely, and only under extreme duress – her clothes are of blue and gold silks, with jewelry and hair adornments made of sapphires set in gold.

Special Skills: In addition to her skill with channeling, Kierra is also a practiced swordswoman, and her noble upbringing has given her a number of skills: she is familiar with the customs, dances, and courtly manners of many countries in Alteiryn – though she struggles to remember them at times – and can write with a fine hand, recite poetry, sing, and play music. She was also an adventurer at heart from an early age, and her many years of climbing all over have given her a very keen sense of balance and a good head for heights. In addition, she is extremely well-read, and has a passion for studying the ley arts. Recently, she has begun studying Masran under the guidance of her friend and bodyguard, Nasir.

Strengths: Kierra's stubborn attitude and what is almost an inability to give up once she's started something means she will push through to the very end, no matter what hardships present themselves. Though she can be discouraged at times, with the right motivation, she will pick herself up every time and push through. She is very intelligent, and is constantly trying to make sense of the world around her by looking for patterns and analyzing what she sees. She is an innovator at heart, and is good at improvisation. This extends to her channeling, as well, which she approaches almost instinctively rather than strictly adhering to set procedures and methodologies.

Her skill at climbing and balance means that heights present no difficulty for her: cliffs, ledges, sheer drops, and narrow perches are much the same as flat ground to her, if a little more exciting. In battle, her lithe frame and natural agility means she has a natural talent for fighting with speed and precision, and this combined with her channeling ability makes her a deadly opponent.

Weaknesses: Kierra's stubbornness, while in some ways a strength, is also a handicap in certain situations. Her biggest weakness, though, is perhaps her inability to cope with feeling trapped or contained in any way. She begins to shut down emotionally, and will withdraw deeper and deeper into her own mind until she can either have time to cool off or someone she trusts can pull her out of it. Her strict upbringing also left her with severe self-doubt which, though she hides it as best she can, can cripple her when it surfaces.

In combat, though strong offensively, Kierra is too lithe and slender to move effectively in heavy equipment, and thus was never trained in the use of either armor or shields. Her feminine build, while lending itself to her natural speed, also means she cannot absorb hits and keep on going: she has to be fast, because if she isn't, she's done for.

Personality: Vibrant, outgoing, adventuresome, and stubborn, Kierra Vhaskar is the last person you would picture as the daughter of a ruling family. She is more at home in the common room of an inn than a ballroom, and any mention of her lineage, except by those she trusts the most (and sometimes even then), will immediately put her on edge. She is, above all else, a free spirit: she seeks to follow her own path in life and find her own happiness, regardless of others' wishes or expectations. In fact, she is so much of a free spirit that she simply cannot handle any sort of confinement. This is not, however, a physical claustrophobia: you can shut her in the tiniest space imaginable and give her the key that will let her out, and she will be fine; however, put her in the largest, grandest palace in the world but forbid her to set foot outside its walls, and all that splendor and grandeur will become nothing more than an oppressive, suffocating prison. This goes with any other type of restriction as well, including societal expectations and anything – or anyone – that tries to force her to think or behave a certain way. Kierra was meant be free, and any attempt to box her in will have disastrous results: for her, for the person/people/situation that put her there, or both.

For Kierra, there is no true “neutral” emotional state: she lives freely, loves deeply, is unquestioningly loyal to her closest friends, drinks in the excitement of even the most dangerous situations, finds beauty and adventure in almost anything, and when she is worried, frightened, or sorrowful, the negative emotion consumes almost everything else. It is like everything she feels or experiences is amplified – sharper, more potent, closer to her heart than what others might feel, despite the mental and emotional defenses she has built for herself.

Despite the emotional intensity she lives in, or perhaps because of it, Kierra finds it difficult to get truly close to other people. She can make friendly acquaintances easily, but because she fears being trapped or betrayed, while there are rare exceptions, it normally takes a great deal of time to earn her truest, deepest trust. And because she moves around so much, she doesn't typically get the chance to form those bonds with the people she meets. Instead, she will distance herself emotionally and, when threatened, will often try to defend herself with brusque words and harsh behavior, hoping to drive the other person away rather than risk being hurt. Alternately, she may choose to simply withdraw entirely and escape that way. This self-isolation in turn leads to loneliness, but because it is difficult for her to let go and trust, the cycle continues. Those who do slip in past her defenses, though, and earn that trust and affection, will never find a more loyal friend. She is sincerely caring and affectionate towards those she feels safe enough to bond with, and will go to extreme lengths to protect them, help them, or even just to make them smile.

Beneath the vibrant, passionate exterior, however, lies an inner darkness riddled with insecurity and crippling self-doubt. She has convinced herself that she is utterly incapable of being anything like what others want from her, and has a deep-seated fear of facing and acknowledging her past and her true identity as the daughter of a ruler and an important individual in her own right. She is unsure of who or even what she is, and, consequentially, of her place in the world. Her journey is as much a search for herself as it is a search for adventure, if not more so.

History: “You already figured out my name and parentage: Kierra Vhaskar, eldest daughter of High Lord Tierran Vhaskar himself. There are those who would label me a princess, I suppose, as the daughter of a ruler, but that has never been the way of the Highlands. And I am glad for it. I already hate being called Lady; to be titled Princess would be absolutely suffocating.

“I told you already that children in the Vhaskari Highlands begin their educations at a young age, but mine started even earlier than the others. I cannot remember the first time I channeled, or what I did with it, though I am told I was far too eager and ended up driving myself to exhaustion, and fainted right there in the middle of the lesson. I doubt you're surprised I would do such a thing.” She grinned at her companion, who looked amused, but kept silent.

“Channeling isn't the only thing I was taught, though it was by far my favorite. Reading, writing, and research methodology are common fare for anyone growing up in or around the Azure Basin, and as my father's daughter, I was pushed harder than any of the others. I was also expected to learn history, politics, etiquette, and how to conduct myself in a formal court, both at home and in any kingdom in Alteiryn. That was the most suffocating of all my studies. Except the dancing, of course. I always loved dancing. And, of course,” she added with a smirk, “I learned my favorite Masran phrase. I got that out of a book, not from a teacher, in case you couldn't tell.” She still thanked her lucky stars she hadn't wished some visiting Masran dignitary a 'Happy Belated Cheesecake' instead of 'Good Morning.' It was embarrassing enough that she had said it to anyone at all.

Nasir laughed, though she could tell he was trying to hold it back. “Yes,” he said, “I could tell.”

“Oh?” Kierra asked, still grinning, and quirked an eyebrow at him. “And you didn't make any embarrassing mistakes at all when you were first learning Altey?”

“Of course not,” came the reply. “I spoke it fluently from the first.” He grinned, and she made a face at him.

“We'll see about that. Perhaps one day I'll catch you.”

“I will have to watch out,” he said with a smile.

“Yes, you will,” she agreed with a grin. “Anyways. What free time I had was typically spent outside. We would spend hours clambering all over, climbing all over the rocky walls of the basin and the mountains and getting ourselves into places no sane flatlander would ever go. Occasionally we did get stuck, and some poor unfortunate Sentinels had to come get us down, but for the most part, we chose our routes carefully. When you grow up in the Highlands, you learn quickly and effectively what is or isn't safe to climb, where not to put your weight, and how to pick your way over, up, and across pretty much anything. Every now and then we got to travel down lower, to where the trees begin to grow, and we climbed those too. The mountains were our entire world, and we made enough adventures for ourselves to fill it to the brim.

“When I wasn't climbing and adventuring, I was reading. Not the academic things my tutors made me read – when left to my own devices, I picked stories. Adventures, tales of heroes and fantastic things and even romance. I must have read every story in every book I could get my hands on. Multiple times. I just couldn't get enough. And the more I read, the more fantastic our adventures on the mountain became, and the more I wanted to read more stories. It was the happiest time of my life in the Highlands.”

“Who was 'we'?” he asked suddenly.

“The other children my age,” she explained. “Their parents were mostly important officials, researchers, or officers, I think. We took some of our lessons together, and we all knew how stupid it is to wander off into the mountains alone, so we banded together. Of course,” she added with a grin, “the more daring our adventures became, the fewer girls there were in the group.” He didn't seem surprised that she hadn't dropped out, and she grinned all the more at that. “Apparently things like falling off rock walls and breaking limbs scared them off. But it was just part of adventuring in the mountains. Out of the ones who stayed, nothing kept any of us down for long.”

“Breaking limbs, hm?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. I think I told you about it before. I fell off one of the terrace walls and broke my leg.”

“Indeed.”

“I would have been fine up there if I'd seen the ice. Guess what lesson I learned that day?”

“I imagine to avoid black ice.”

“That, yes. And if you climb another wall right after you've just had your broken leg healed, the Healers will turn the strangest shade of purple you've ever seen.”

He made a delightful snrk noise, and she grinned all the more. Nasir was normally so calm and collected that reactions like that meant all the more when they came from him.

“As I said, life was an adventure. But, of course, it didn't last forever. As we got older, our lessons and responsibilities called all the more strongly. It wasn't long before the only times we were supposed to be climbing the mountains were to take samples and measurements, and instead of playing, I spent my days practicing my dance steps and addressing my etiquette teacher as if he were the Crown Prince of Tolvera. As you can imagine, I hated it.”

“I can,” he agreed. “After having had that freedom, it must have been like prison.”

“It was. Those adventures were our escape from that world. Or at least, what of it we were already trapped in. I can't imagine how it would have been without them. So to lose them entirely...” She shuddered. “And so I fought back. I snuck out of lessons, or – when I had free time – out of the Basin entirely. I read whenever I could, sometimes even found one or two of my old friends to go on an adventure with me, but that got more and more difficult to do. Eventually the Sentinels had standing orders to bring me back if they caught me wandering outside the Basin without a proper escort.

“I did, at least, still have my stories. And if I couldn't have adventures out in the mountains, I would have something else. I convinced my family to let me learn the sword. That, and channeling, and my stories, became my only escapes from the shades of gray that were the rest of my life. I still don't know how I convinced them – the sword is considered unfeminine; I didn't ever dream they'd let me learn – but I did, and I became obsessed. With the sword in my hands, the feel of the Leyht coursing through me, I felt like I was in the stories. I felt alive, for the first time since those adventures ended. And so I devoted more and more of my time to learning those things, and sacrificed my other studies to do it. It didn't go unnoticed, of course. I would fall asleep when I was supposed to be sitting through a mock dinner party or reading about the history of the Five Kingdoms. I barely even had the energy to dance anymore.

“Everyone noticed, of course. My parents, my teachers, all of the other perfect young students and their perfect court manners... I was strange enough for wanting to climb mountains in a ballgown. But now this? My parents had had enough.” Her companion frowned slightly, and she sighed. “You've already seen some of what resulted, I think. Or at least the effect it had on me.” He nodded, and she continued.

“My lessons had been strict before, but I had previously enjoyed some measure of freedom. My adventures in the mountains, and later the sword, and the liberty to spend my free time as I wished. Well, mostly. That all changed. I was turning into a disgrace. I was to represent my family and my people, they said, and I would not be allowed to let them down. I don't know if they meant to spur me on, to use my stubbornness to make me push myself through it, but it just made everything worse.”

Before she could say anything else, he shifted, moving from where he had been sitting across from her to sit next to her instead, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “Akhayyatun,” he said to her. Masran for 'little sister.' She drew a shuddering breath and gave him a grateful hug. “Thank you, Akhi,” she told him in Masran. Akhi. 'My brother.'

“You are welcome,” he told her, also in Masran, still with his arm warmly around her shoulders. After a moment or two of silence, she took a deep, steadying breath and continued in Altey.

“They took my swords, and my time was strictly regulated. Every step, every move I made, was strictly regulated. I felt more like a living doll than a person, and even my beloved mountains towered menacingly over me, as if they would come crashing down and bury me at any moment. And so it continued for the next few years. The pressure, the prisons, the constant entrapment. I couldn't breathe. For years, I couldn't breathe.

“Eventually, my coming-of-age approached. There was a huge celebration planned: a dinner party and then a ball, with plenty of important people invited. There would be the best of everything, and dancing all night. And as I thought about it, I realized with sudden, perfect clarity that I could not do this for another day. No matter what, I could not remain in this gilded prison. I confronted my parents. I begged them to call the party off. I should have known they wouldn't understand. I should have known they would be furious.” She took another deep breath, and was another moment before she continued.

“I left that night.” He gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze, and with his support, she continued.

“I took everything I could. Clothes, jewelry – mostly to sell, since I couldn't wander around dressed in silk gowns and jewels – and my swords, which I found and took. There were other things as well. Research equipment from the facility. Money. I took everything I thought I could possibly need, that I could carry, at least, cut my hair short, and I left. I have not seen the Azure Basin since.

“I knew that there would be a massive search mounted for me. No inn, no highway, no hiding place would be left unsearched. So I did what any self-respecting runaway Vhaskari princess would do in my situation: I disguised myself as a man and joined the Sentinels. It was easy enough to do. I bound my chest, wrapped my waist to disguise my figure, and altered my appearance and voice with channeling. Women are allowed in the Sentinels, but only as Healers, Engineers, or – rarely – Warcasters. Beside that, I would be found too easily in the women's ranks. And I did not want any of those jobs. Instead, I joined the Leystrikers. I was barely sixteen. Any younger, and I could not have joined.

“They do not have these, I think, in any other military force. At least, not that I have seen. If you want fire, call a Warcaster. But if you want fire and steel, call a Leystriker. You have seen some of what they do, in what you have seen of how I blend channeling and my swords. All recruits are tested, of course; one cannot have a Warcaster with barely enough willpower to light a candle. We must show what we already know, prove that we have the potential, and are then given our choice of the divisions we are most suited to. Of course, I did not show everything I knew – that would give me away – but I showed enough.

“During my training, I realized just how good it was that I had taken refuge in the ranks of the Sentinels rather than struck out on my own right away. I had been sheltered my whole life, despite my childhood adventures and my voracious reading. I had escaped my gilded prison, but I had never learned how to function outside it. Even simple things were difficult to get used to at first, but other vital skills – navigation in the wild, how to start a fire without channeling or find food in the wilderness – things I would come to need... I didn't know any of it. But I learned. Combat isn't the only thing they teach the Sentinels; much of Vhaskari territory is wild, as I'm sure you know, and thus its defenders must be able to survive no matter where they find themselves.

“For the most part, my disguise was flawless. I have always possessed a delicate touch with channeling, so my illusions went unnoticed. The only trouble I had was with the baths. Vhaskari baths are communal,” she explained, flushing slightly. “Men and women are separated, but that is it. As you can imagine for a woman disguising herself as a man, this presented a very embarrassing problem.

He nodded. “I can see why, yes. Not an easy illusion to project. And not a comfortable situation for a young woman.”

She made a strangled noise, and could feel herself turning bright red. “I didn't---!” She paused, cleared her throat, and continued. “I haven't exactly studied naked men, you know,” she said at last, still red. “And I have never had a desire to go into the men's baths. Besides, illusion would have been almost impossible in that case. I channeled myself clean in privacy when I could find it, or snuck off to the women's baths late at night, altering the illusions around myself when no one could see.

“This, of course, led to a significant amount of teasing and jokes, but I applied myself to the training and eventually earned their respect for my abilities, whatever my strange habits were. I even came to make friends, though of course, the fact that my entire identity was a lie wasn't exactly comforting.

“Now. Perhaps you know of the foothills, which on a map are part of the Vhaskari Highlands, but which are only high to flatlander eyes. Nestled within these foothills, there is an outpost maintained by some of our scholars. It is primarily a place for research, but it is also a destination for adventurers who wish to test themselves against the frenzied renders there and hopefully bring back evidence of ruins in the wilds beyond.”

He blinked, obviously confused by the sudden change of subject. “I know the foothills on the maps,” he offered.

“It is there,” she explained, “that we were sent after we finished our training. If I had thought before it was good that I had joined the Sentinels, it was nothing compared to how I felt as we made our way deeper and deeper into the wilderness. Without what I learned in training, I would have been dead in a week trying to travel through that. Particularly alone, as I would have been. As it was, we made it safely, and began our duties protecting the outpost.

“There is little to be said about my time there. We patrolled the few streets, kept peace among the adventurers who came through, and occasionally ventured out to hunt. Sometimes we escorted transports or couriers to and from the pass through the mountains. When left to our own, we often sparred with each other, or sometimes even ventured out to seek the ruins ourselves. It was not the most exciting of lives, but I enjoyed it.

“I was eighteen when I was discovered.” She sighed, and took another moment before continuing.

“I had snuck off to the baths, like I often did, but this time my friends noticed. Thinking I was getting into some sort of mischief, or perhaps drunk, they followed me; they were concerned because I had never shown any signs of doing such things. They finally caught up to me in the otherwise empty bath, but not knowing they were following, I had already removed my bindings and the illusions around me. I had enough warning to cover myself, but there was no hiding my figure. The secret was out.

“I had changed in appearance between sixteen and eighteen, of course, but there was no mistaking my hair and eye color. And a woman of my age, with my appearance, could only be one person, at least to a Vhaskari. They recognized me immediately.

“What else could I have done? Ordered – even asked – them to keep silent, and just left? Run away? These were my friends, and though I had lied to them for two years, I could not burden them with that. I asked them to turn me in, knowing very well what it meant, and together, the three of us went to our Captain.

“He, of course, was shocked. But I was even more shocked at what happened next: instead of taking me into custody and returning me to my parents – which he was under orders to do – he ordered my friends to keep silent, and wrote up my – or rather, my male identity's – discharge from the Sentinels. I bade farewell to them all, and left a little while before dawn, so as not to attract undue attention. To this day, I do not understand why he did that.

“I decided to make for the nearest city and from there decide what to do next, but in order to get there, I would need to spend some days in the wilderness before reaching so much as a small town. I expected to spend much of my time alone. So, of course, you might understand how surprised I was to wake up the very next morning to the sight of Harran cooking breakfast, as though it were the most normal thing in the world.” Even now, remembering the site of the stocky, grandfatherly Healer bending over a cooking fire as though he had always followed her around completely boggled her.

“That was not the first time you met him?”

“Well, technically, no. The outpost is small, so anyone there with any semblance of permanence - Sentinels, researchers, Healers - all tend to come to know at least each other's names. That was, however, the first time I had met him personally, if that makes sense.”

“...I see.”

“Hm? What is it?” she asked, curious at what that response was supposed to mean.

“Nothing,” he told her. “Go on.”

“... All right,” she said hesitantly, still not fully convinced. “Anyways, Harran was not of the Sentinels, but rather worked as a civilian Healer there at the outpost. Though a small place, it is always in need of Healers for any number of reasons. The Captain had informed him of my identity, and asked him to keep me safe. A duty,” she added with a wry grin, “he has taken very seriously.”

“To the point of hiring a bothersome bodyguard,” Nasir added, grinning as well.

“Oh yes, very bothersome,” she said with a grin, giving him a teasing poke. “I'm glad he did, though.”

“Rather convenient, despite everything?” He was still grinning.

“Who else would share stories with me, and teach me the things you have?” she asked honestly. “Or sit on the roof with me at night instead of forcing me inside? Who else can I trust to watch my back the way you do? Who else can I call Akhi?”

He said nothing, but squeezed her shoulders again in response. And to her, that one gesture said more than any amount of words could have.

“And that,” she said at last, “brings you up to date. Of course, there are the travels Harran and I had together before he hired you, but those are stories all their own, and I am growing tired. And I do not believe you need to be told what happened afterward.” She grinned, however, as she thought of that afterward: from that first night, when she tried to give Nasir the slip over the rooftops of the city they had been in at the time and they ended up catching a thief together, the first time he told her his stories, all the times they had practiced channeling together. They had even attended a formal banquet as the Lady Kierra Vhaskar and her mysterious Masran companion Tamir, though it still chilled her to remember the things she had learned that night. And more besides; she felt like she could fill a book with all those stories. Nasir had become her closest and dearest friend, despite the fact that it was technically his job to protect her. She didn't know what she would do without him, and she had no desire to find out. He had already told her his story, so now it had been her turn. And, despite how terrifying she found it to talk about some of those things, she found herself feeling glad she had told him. And so it was with a tired, relieved smile that she looked up at her Masran brother.

“That, Akhi,” she said to him, “is my story.”

[Emeralis00]

Krh'rhl

(Dh'krr-ghrnnch/'Cartographer')

Player Information

Name: Emeralis00

Contact Information:PM,or [email protected]

Character Information

Name:Krh'rhl

Race: Dh'krr-ghrnnch

Age: 109

Gender: Male Personality

Place of Origin: Seamaw Range, The ResoundingPaths

Class: Cartographer

Relationship Status: Single

Channeling Capacity: high

-Type: External (internal for Earthshell)

-Focus Used: An emerald the size of a baseballon the Earthshell

-Degree of Skill: Unique for most of his species, Krh’rhl is highly skilled in detail work using Leyht and can manipulate sand and earth on a small scale as easily as a Xaneth breathes. The sand and earth can be controlled like any other limb and as dexterously, especially for crafting maps and manipulating lock picks. Fitting his nature, combat using Leyht is primarily defensive: an ever-present cloud of and used to scrape fragile eyes or cloud sight, tripping foes by moving the earth under their feet, or simply merging either them or him with the surrounding earth and rock. If pressed, and only as a last resort, Krh’rhl can chuck a stone far at high speed, ripping throughflesh, wood and leather. Krh’rhl has no particular talent with his Earthshell, only maintaining it as needed.

Appearance: The Earthshell is about 6 feet tall and vaguely humanoid shaped, with a great emerald situated on the ‘face’ of the ‘head’, lines of iron ore and radiate from the emerald into swirling patterns reminiscent of Ley Lines. Smoky Quartz extends in 2 inch flexible strands from his head like hair. The remaining stone is a very dark grey with black flecks, embedded with coins and gems. One of the most striking features of his shell is a pair of smaller secondary arms situated just below the main pair of manipulating arms, at each end of the arm, instead of a hand, is a small stone-carving blade made of an unknown substance.

Special Skills: building 3D maps made of stone and earth, detecting Ley line usage around himself, lock-picking.

Strengths: can easily tell if being lied to, has an abnormally large capacity for Leyht.

Weaknesses: appears to not see very well,greedy, perfectionist, and prideful to the point of arrogance.

Personality: Krh'rhl is, like many of his race,quiet and hermetic, but is very prideful and perfectionist with his work. Krh’rhl is very greedy when it comes to rare gems or shiny objects. When interacting with others, he is very peaceful and would prefer to simply leave when confronted by violence. Even when provoked to a rage, Krh’rhl prefers to incapacitate rather than kill.

History: The Harmonies are the soul of the Dh'krr-ghrnnch; a subtle song created, only audible to us, from a node’s energies as they echo, deep within the caverns of our home. It is this song that calls us rom the deeper places, from the spinning fire and metal of the planet’s womb. The world is the mother, the Harmonies are the father. The Harmonies teach us the secrets of earth and stone and how to be as the stones are; immovable, solid, strong, unchanging yet changing. Above all, the Harmonies teach us to listen. It is to my eternal sorrow that I saw them die …but I get ahead of myself.

It was nine and one hundred years past that I was called up from the deeper places. For my first five decades, I lived with the other children, following the guidance of the Harmonies as we discovered our unique talents. Upon my fiftieth year of my awakening, the song changed, the adults welcomed me as one of them, for I had just reached adulthood. Having already established, five years ago, my skills as a cartographer, I began mapping the complex, expansive and often mind-numbing twists and turns and atriums of our seemingly non-Euclidean tunnels that made our home while guiding the Great Elders, the oldest living members of our race, to the sacred

echo chambers.

For many decades have I done only this, for the Dh’krr-ghrnnch believe that the purpose of one’s life rests in what is left behind. Perhaps it was due to my proximity to them that drew me to the echo chambers or perhaps it was the Harmonies themselves, subtly manipulating me. However the reason, I found myself within those halls. The echo chambers, magnifying andharmonizing the frequencies emanating from the node of the deep places,sent out the loving song to every part of the tunnels. It was only here, within the embrace of my parent, that I noticed a grave wrongness. The node was gone! The Harmonies bounced around the walls in a dissonant game of madness. I only found words to describe the terrible truth I discovered that day when I traveled the surface world. It was like a tree, hearty andhealthy on the outside, but dead and rotten within. I don’t know how long I was paralyzed in shock and fear, but it I do remember being surrounded by the Great Elders. I do remember every word they spoke to me that day. Their voices, like a cascade of whispers echoed, slipped and joined with each other in the dead Harmonies.

“You have been selected, only you and a handful of others have been chosen to see this terrible truth.” “The echo chambers…they have been broken” “They can no longer hear the node of the deep places” “The up-worlders speak of a node. It is called the Eternal Conflux” “Find it. Save the echo chambers” “We will maintain the Harmonies… but our memories of the song are growing ever fainter” “The children are no longer called from the deeper places... Our race is dying…” “Go…to the surface…” “You are the last agent…” “Find…Conflux…”

I remember no more after that.

The sudden shock of losing the Harmonies hit me as I flowed out of the Tunnels. It was not a simple fading of sound, for the Harmonies, dead as they were, remained strong throughout theTunnels. Upon leaving, they simply stopped. It took me several cycles of the bright light above me before I could recover. Imagine sleeping safely in your mother’s arms only to be violently and viscously ripped away, what you just imagined pales to how it felt, losing a presence I had known from awakening and before. Years went by as I sought after my only hope. In my travels I felt a terrible wrongness, so like being within the echo chambers, seeping throughout the world. I traveled alone wary of all others,

until today…

Here is a very bad image I made of him.

(Any artist is welcome to do better)

[The Oblivious Monk]

Isiloka dé Za

Myrullat/Masrah Marksman

Player Information

Name: Jay

Contact Information: [email protected], AIM: CorinFirestorm

Character Information

Name: Isiloka dé Za, Isil for short

Race: Myrullat/Masrah half-breed.

Age: 28

Gender: Male

Place of Origin: Pémi’Lla Fuq, Stenmalkk

Class: Journeyman Marksman

Relationship Status: Unattached

Channeling Capacity:

-Type: Internal

-Focus Used: Isiloka primarily uses channeling for three things: the first is silencing his footfalls; the second is improving his accuracy; and the third is for increasing his ability to run across the mudflats of the Stenmalkk Swamp. He also has some ability to use it to increase his dexterity or speed, though these benefits are mild at best. His physical Focus is a leather band kept around his right wrist, the hand with which he draws his bow, that is inset with markings identifying him as a Hunter to his people.

-Degree of Skill: Moderate. His lack of stamina reserves his Channeling to one-shot-kill or do-or-die scenarios and limits his ability to employ them for long periods of time or rapid succession.

Appearance: Slight of frame and stature, Isiloka dé Za is still easily located in a crowd of his people. While still graceful and quick like the majority of his people, his darkened tan skin is in stark contrast to the normal coloration of his people and makes his green0colored markings more noticeable. His gray hair hangs to his chin and is usually pulled back into a top knot to facilitate archery. His eyes are a lightly brown with a slightly more almond shape than the rest of his people.

His features are youthful and graceful, belying a bit of his naïveté, innocence, and youth. His clothing, or lack thereof, is designed to give him the greatest range of movement, preferring a leather bolero vest paired with tailored pants of linen or leather. A cross stitched leather built holds a stiletto, fletching and carving knives, and has a place to mount a short quiver. Like most Myrullat, he doesn’t wear shoes.

His expanded equipment for when he is away from home includes a medium weight, full length cloak in dark green, linen shirts and extra clothing, a short quiver, a large quiver, a rucksack, assorted bows, arrows, feathers, strips of leather, and a pair of leather sandals known in the Stenmalkk as arro’zuko: leather feet.

Special Skills: Trained from his coming of age in Pémi’lla Fuq to be a hunter, Isiloka has the necessary abilities to remain on an hunt for extended periods of time and make critical, sniper worthy shots. He is skilled in the arts of tracking and archery as well as climbing and scaling, natural practice for living among the suspended housing of his home city. He has received extensive tutoring in carpentry, allowing him to craft his own bows as well as fletching to create his own arrows. He also learned the skills of knot-tying from time spent at the docks of his home.

Strengths: Expert Archer, naturally agile and quick, adept at climbing, swimming, and tracking. Expert bowyer and Fletcher. Conversationally adept in several languages, passable in many more. Hunter training has also made him an adept survivalist.

Weaknesses: Pride, low stamina threshold prevents extended bouts of physical activity or Channeling, lack of strength limits attack options, easily identifiable in a crowd, aversion to arid or cold environments, socially despondent and reclusive, lack of trust.

Personality: Isiloka is an incredibly introverted person, preferring to move alone than with a group and, while not completely contrary to his society’s communal nature, has made him a bit of an outcast. But it serves him well in his pursuits on the hunt. It does make him less trusting in social situations and more likely to run than to stay and discuss or fight. He also believes that support is usually not available and is therefore extremely cautious when entering into combat or an aggressive situation, preferring to avoid drawn out conflict as much as possible.

It is possible to bring him out of his shell through intrigue. Confusing Isiloka is one of the easiest ways to gain his attention. The other is appealing to his skill or sense of accomplishment. In the past he has followed a group if he is interested in what they might have said in a tavern or passing on the street, watching from afar to see if they would be amiable to his inclusion in a group. This had lead to more than one accusation of thievery and spying, which he takes as a great insult.

He takes great pride in his craft, both hunting and the creating of hunting implements, and tends to be slightly haughty, nearly insulting, when dealing with what he deems as common bows and arrows. He is more accepting of people with less-than-perfect archery skills, though still displays points of hubris.

Isiloka’s nature is to establish himself in a camp, be it a city or an actual camp, and then move forward and explore from that central point. This style of exploration forces him to become a regional expert of sorts, knowing the terrain, paths in and out, and the commonly viewed people exceptionally well. However, he misses the metaphysical and philosophical details of a situation, rarely understanding the motivations of higher-level life forms. This becomes problematic when he is tracking one of these sentient beings.

Isiloka also has a tendency to simplify all situations down to base, almost animal like motivations and simplistic desires. This tends to make him seem socially obtuse and rude. He tends to vocalize his unhappiness rather sharply, at first through petulant pouting and the silent treatment, and later by criticizing and complaining once he is more familiar with the person or persons he is around.

Once he is comfortable with a group however, he does open up, becoming much lighter hearted and energetic, becoming even jovial at times. He tends to abstain from physical contact, even in friendly situations. His apprehension at being excluded or removed from the group however does keep him a bit at arm’s length and always double guessing his actions and responses. Once earned, Isiloka is exceptionally loyal to a group however, and will stand and fight if the group is in danger or needs his assistance, even against his better instincts.

History: “It’s an interesting tale, to be sure…I’m not sure you’d want to hear it all,” the young Myrullat murmured, reaching over for his tankard. His companion at the tavern table seemed intrigued. Most of them were, Xaneth that is. Intrigued in this sun-kissed swamp runner and how he came to whatever backwater alehouse he found himself in. Isiloka dé Za smiled and took a long draught of ale. “Alright…it starts in port…”

The Sword of Hearts was a merchant schooner of great repute and was a local favorite in the port of Pémi’Lla Fuq whenever she made berth. The moment those large red sails were seen on the horizon, the best berth was prepared and postings for discounts for her crew at every respectable bar and house of ill repute. The town knew what to expect: the finest weapons, the most exquisite silks, the rarest spices, and the nicest men from Masrah.

That was how Edercarri Zallés knew the night was going to be different. The last time the Sword had docked, she had been but a slight on the docks, scurrying around and doing her best to fletch sailors out of their hard earned coin for trinkets and bits of fruit. She hadn’t understood the flash messages or women waving with their brightest scarves. Her mother had sniffed at the notion, preferring to stand guard at the door to her favorite lover’s tavern. Momma Serra, a Xaneth woman with an eye for talent and a taste for ale had just shaken her head and smiled.

She’d know one day. And Edercarri knew that day had come.

When her Mother had passed, Serra had taken to wandering, leaving the bar in her hands and name. Her name and offers were among those left upon the market board where the boat would dock. She had tidied the establishment and was polishing glasses as the first men came in. She smiled up at the towering figures, pouring ale and fetching wine as her cook fed whatever bits he had shoot that day in the swamps.

Crocodile stew and ale was a perfectly acceptable combination as she was concerned.

It was as the crew were rowdy and well into their later rouds, Edercarri looked up and locked eyes with a dashing man with handsome almond eyes and a striking smile. And a very large hat. And a fancy sword. And it was all she could do to keep from swooning. She was no virginal maiden. No, she understood mating and had indulged herself before. But she had no lover, no partner. Yet this man, this excellent example of Masran physiology, exuded calm and control and excitement.

And Edercarri responded.

He ordered rounds of drinks for anyone in the tavern, even those not of his crew. And he ordered the finest spirits for him and his companion, both of whom perched at the bar. He sparkled and simpered and stayed long after the crew had left and well into the night.

The next day, the Sword of Hearts sailed from Pémi’Lla Fuq with all hands and Edercarri’s bar opened late as the lady of the establishment was quite late in moving from her bed.

Nine months later, Isiloka dé Za came into the world.

“So yeh, I don’t know m’dad,” the young Myrullat said, slicing a hunk from something steaming and tasty smelling the other member at the bar had ordered. “Just that he was dashing and handsome and all that rot.” Isiloka grinned and took a bite, letting his companion ask something else. “Eh, that’s a loaded question. There isn’t much that was different ya know…my people like to…breed outside the box,” he murmured with a smirk.

The young Isiloka had experienced little hardship for having a father of a different race. The fact that he did not know his father was of little consequence as well, despite it being out of the ordinary. What set him apart though was his skin. He was instantly noticeable with his dark skin and quick eyes. And like all good children, he dealt with the teasing by getting into fights and scrapping about. And eventually, he learned to ignore the others and sit by himself.

That was when he learned to tie knots. He spent hours at the docks, perfecting his skills with rope and string, learning from the different kingdoms and races that sailed into the docks. He learned languages and shipman’s signals as well just as he returned the favor. It was a learned experience, greater than the sparring or channeling classes in his mind. He still did conditioning though, often not by choice.

When older Myrullat saw him, they would chase, sending him scampering with others his age through the city and swamps just as the pursuers had once been chased. It was a tradition designed to teach evasion, strength, or agility. The smart hid in crevices and recesses, old and forgotten or new and undiscovered. The strong stood and fought or climbed to the higher rungs, learning to use the elevation changes to their advantage. But the agile. The agile ran as long as they could, dodging through crowds and across roofs.

And Isiloka was agile.

He earned a reputation among the children for being around a corner, across a gap, and down a ladder faster than some much older than he. The older children disliked this quality. The elders praised it. And at age 15, as he came of age, the boy was handed over to Ehizta rí Hos-to, the master hunter and marksman.

From there, his days at the docks were limited. He trained in archery and tracking, learning the best way to not only find his prey, but strike it from afar. He learned beast lore, beginning to understand the different creatures that roamed around and through the city. Ehizta was not simply content with shooting a bow either. Isiloka learned to craft his own weapons and bolts, perfecting the arts that would allow him to be self sufficient in the wild should the need arise.

Ehizta taught him how to stab with a knife, aiming for vital organs and blood ways. He also taught him to Channel like a hunter: to walk across the bog with greater acuity, to channel the Leyht to practically see where to shoot to strike his target, to boost speed and agility. He learned how to hide, to strike, to move, and to flee.

And at the age of 22, Isiloka was sent on his first solo excursion.

He was sent after a thief who had taken an ancient book from the Myrullat shrine. It was a text of great importance, but not irreplaceable: the perfect way to show his worth to the community. He set out over bog, tracking the Xaneth by her stumbling steps and broken plants. Her control in the suffocating swamp was that of a novice. And the apprentice hunter tracked her to a camp at the edge of the causeway. If she made the road, he’d never catch her.

As night fell and shadows lengthened, he steeled himself and drew his bow of handcrafted Rosethorn wood and, with arrow notched, Channeled, and let loose his bolt, signature blue of blue plumes visible from his targets neck just a moment later. He stole into her camp, took the book and the stiletto dagger that he still carried today before returning to Pémi’Lla Fuq.

“So I was a Journeyman then…still am,” Isiloka told his companion, playing with his dagger and grinning amusedly. “I just wander now. Taking a job or whatnot when necessary.” He speared an apple, dessert from his companion as payment for his tale and insight into his culture. He blinked, chewing softly as his companion asked another question. He grinned wolfishly, the apple disappearing behind slightly elongated fangs.

“What am I doing here? In Tolvera?” the Myurllat asked incredulously, leaning forward. “Are ya daft man? The Incident of course. Everyone’s heard about the Tolvera Incident.” He laughed and leaned back, picking up another slice of fruit. “Anyone worth their salt is here now.”

[Kuri Shardweaver]

Bix

Seelvah Sage

Player Information

Name:Kuri

Contact Information:PM, AIM, Email.

Character Information

Name:Bix

Race:Seelvah

Age:39

Gender:Male

Place of Origin:Isle of Insight, Wildwood Archipelago

Class:Sage/Scholar

Relationship Status:"Seekin' dat speshul laydeh who make me heart chime"

Channeling Capacity:Moderate

-Type:Internal for enhanced mental clarity, External for heightened balance and constructive purposes.

-Focus Used:A bracelet of beads and bone charms.

-Degree of Skill:Passable

Appearance:Like all Seelvah, Bix is a tall and broad shouldered male with shaggy cocoa-brown fur and black skin, bands of silvery white beginning to creep down his biceps from the mantle across his shoulders. He has kind, bright green eyes and smiles almost perpetually. Preferring to keep his head of hair roughly shoulder-length, it is usually beaded and braided to help keep it from being directly in his face, and he tends to finger the beads while humming when lost in one musing or another. In keeping with the simplistic mindset of his people, his clothing usually consists of a vest of varying blues and simple loose tan trousers.

Special Skills:Possesses a particularly keen mind for analysis and puzzle-solving, as well as very strong communication and people skills.

Strengths: Hand-to-hand combat (when it can't be avoided), problem-solving, interpersonal relations.

Weaknesses: Like most Seelvah, he tends to be optimistic, and more so than his kin a bit of an altruist, overlooking potentially dangerous behavior in others in favor of seeing their positive points.

Personality:As easygoing and jovial as Seelvah come, Bix relishes meeting new acquaintances, whom he treats like dear old friends right from the start. An avid traveler, he is always seeking the next big riddle to unravel, new friends to help with their problems, and perhaps learn something about himself in the process.

History: "I be comin' into de world jess lyk any o' me bruddahs n' seestahs, but I'll be sparin' ya dem hairy deetayuhls. Lit'ruhly." The Seelvah male chuckled deeply, pivoting on a palm as he pushed his glasses gingerly back into place.

"I be Seelvah, yah, ya nawt be meestakin' dere. Callin' de Isle o' Insight me home, back dere in de Archipelago...dat nawt quite beein' right, now. Born dere, sure, grew up dere, absolutely bruddah! But de warhld, she my home. Always be fassinatin' wit her meestries an' wunders, yah? Always been lovin' dem, yaknow? Ever since I wuzza runt, always tryin' ta figger out dis an' dat...Get dem froots widdout d'sturbin' de hive, best way ta be gettin' from me tree to shore afore me bruddahs...is all a puzzle, ya? And da Bix, he love him a puzzle, haha!

When I wuz gettin' into me adolesent yeers, an' me bruddahs an' seestahs 'cross de treetops start walkin' dey own paths, seekin' dey own ways, I get to thinkin'...'how dey do dat?' Wut mayk one Seelvah go one way, anudder dis way? For dat madder, wut make dem Oohns go da ways dey go? Wut de rocky bruddahs be fearin'? An' so Bix be findin' HIS path. People bein' da biggest, most compleecayted puzzle dere be, and I be thinkin' I travel de world, meet all de people, learnin' dey stories n' culcha, an' see if ol' Bix can't be findin' a way to help all me bruddahs and seestahs of all kinds be livin' a leetle more harmonyouslee."

The street urchin, dangling upended from the talkative Seelvah's foot, remained wide-eyed in an even more stupefied sense of awe, jaw slacked. "Now, leetle bruddah, maybe you be tellin' Bix why you so desprit for dese pulsah's dat you try pickin' dem right outta me pocket? I be doubtin' dat be yer village's way o' shakin' hands an' sayin' welcome, yah?" Bix smiled disarmingly, setting the lad upright again on a barrel before flipping to his feet. "Bix be done tellin' his story, now ya be tellin' Bix ya own, yah?"