Post by Teller on Aug 25, 2016 23:15:12 GMT -4
Name: Elskenaris, goes by Elske
Age: Seventy-nine, with the appearance of late-twenties to early-thirties
Race: Human
Homeland: The steppes in the northern island.
Physical Description: Elskenaris has the bearing of someone accustomed to contention, and even aware of this, for years has been unable to entirely drop the posture. Having been cursed with an unknown longevity, despite her age Elske looks only about twenty-eight, though older on her rougher days. Her hair is often only carelessly combed, as she hasn’t a drop of vanity. She typically wears a loose shirt with a leather vest and cotton trousers, and you will no longer catch her dead or otherwise in any form of a skirt. Elske has a variety of scars: a cut taken out of her left ear and extending faintly across the accompanying cheek; a cord from a whip around her right wrist; a scar from her right ear backward along her hairline; five parallel lines under her left forearm, a thick, vertical cut from between her hips to her bellybutton, and numerous other nicks and slashes across her body and hands. Most distinguishing about her, not that most people see it, is the leather and metal guard she wears under her shirt, protecting her right, lower ribcage, supported by buckles around her torso and over her shoulders. The guard protects the lung and organs beneath the four missing ribs on that side, which were removed in one of the endeavors she didn’t win.
Personality: Elske does not take direction well. She may listen to your request or suggestion, but her first instinct will be to do the direct opposite or simply to ignore you, as she is not accustomed to people asking of her things that they wish for her own benefit. She has spent decades being forged of betrayal and subterfuge, and therefore it is rare for her to genuinely trust anyone, and at this point she honestly understands meanness better than kindness, and reacts better to it, automatically being suspicious of generosity. She has, since the last organized ‘squabble’ she was involved in, been fighting herself to overcome her own meanness and learn to ‘be human’ again, though she has spent so many years hating nearly every sentient being she meets that the return to her natural-born personality is a struggle that, day by day, she frequently loses. If Elske decides to help someone it will be because no one suggested it to her, she noticed on her own that someone required it, she felt capable of providing it, and she felt the person deserved it. Slowly, she is overcoming the fury she has spent most of her life boiling in, though so far the furthest it has come is to a constant, simmering irritability. However she is trying. She doesn’t like being proven wrong, but as she herself will tell you she has very variable pride, which she for the most part ignores.
History: Elskenari was born intentionally. Elske to this day doesn’t know what the old queen or her people threatened her father Faren with, but evidently it was something more valuable than herself and her sister. Faren had been an army general in his time, and an accomplished fighter. For reasons that died with him, the queen convinced him—and indubitably other such accomplished men—to sire children until he bred females, then to raise his daughters to be as adept of fighters as he could accomplish. Faren only had two living daughters, and he did as he was ordered to do.
When her entire family fell sick, Elske wished not for the first time that her family lived closer to town. Those who could have helped had no idea their assistance was even needed. Elske was the only survivor, and as it happens, fled the region the day before the queen's soldiers came to at last retrieve herself and her sister. They themselves spread the rumor that Elske had killed her family, hoping her notoriety would make her easier to find.
Elske escaped the notice of the queen for the next four years, avoiding notice boards with her face on them and civilization in general. She was doing well until she unintentionally made the acquaintance of the man who became her husband. It terrified her to settle into living in a house again, always fearing someone would come after her to burn it down or try to hang her again—as had happened more than once before—but eventually she managed.
Until someone from the queen's employ recognized her by chance--years past the last time she had feared going to market--managed to capture her while nearly killing her husband, and take her to the queen's palace, where she came to understand the nature of both her birth and her childhood. The queen wanted women trained in fighting—a spare few—because nobody suspected women of knowing how, and therefore they made more formidable weapons against men, and the country she whose citizens she wanted deeper control over. She also came to understand that she’d been pregnant when she was captured. Elskenaris hid it for as long as possible, but soon the queen noticed, as she was bound to do. Her husband pled for her release and was repeatedly turned away. Elske could only be glad he wasn’t killed. Her husband could not find a way to free her, and she refused to allow him to know she was pregnant, terrified of what he would do when he found out, trying to find her way out alone so not to risk anyone else’s life. One of the queen's men--one who had complained about her age--said she might repay them now with her child.
But she wasn’t smart enough to find the way out of the merchants' cells, in which she had been kept since her arrival. She fought her labor, the healer and his assistants subdued her, and while she was unconscious they removed her child and stitched her back together empty. Elske’s rage was strong enough to keep her alive when the queen, realizing she had a stronger spirit than was tolerable for her, threw her into a fighting ring to break her of it. She was strong enough to survive the ring. But she wasn’t strong enough to find or save her son, and after a few years fighting for the queen's sport, and hearing that her son had died of illness, she disappeared. It had taken her as long to figure out how to escape the lower dungeons—the ones well belowground, where any uninformed visitors would never stumble across them—and she left more than a third of them in shambles when she did.
She went to the nearest city, one populated mostly by elves, trying to convince them to help her overthrow the queen. They either wouldn’t or couldn’t, and Elske departed from them with despair. She got nearly all the way out of the forest before a rockslide threw her down an incline into a ravine she couldn't climb. She survived, but with significant injuries. She decided the time was ripe to not bother attending to them, and settled in to wait peaceably to bleed out.
An elf found her there, and started to treat her injuries, waking her from her stupor. She tried to fight him off, not wanting his or any assistance, and as was natural he won that battle. He healed her wounds and she hated him for it. She wanted to die and he hated her for it. He gave her then the curse of an unwanted longevity, and sent her on her way. She didn’t know how long it would last, only that now it would be far harder for her to pass on when she wanted to. She didn't even look her age anymore--she had lost ten or more years with his curse.
After that Elskenaris traveled, purposeless. She found a secluded city of dwarves by dint of the fact that they took her to be a lost madwoman, and didn't want the bother of having some human die so close to their city, and spent several years with them because their lives differed so greatly from hers that they gave her no reminders of what she'd once had, or what once might have had. They taught her a broader skill in fighting, and apprenticed her to a blacksmith when they found she was interested in it, as she didn't have the strength or the mind for mining, even if she had the drive.
However in time she felt suspicious again, frustrated, anxious, and with virtually no warning left for the east. She skirted the desert and found others who shared her hatred of a particular woman. The people she fell in with had found a small gem apparently magically useful somehow—Elske didn’t want to hear about anything magically related. They wanted to give it to Azrael Panagiotis, knowing he would put it to greater use than could they. They just did not know how to safely transport it to him. Elske asked if the gem could safely be inserted under her skin; she would transport it. It took her six months to convince them; in desperation she invoked and won her right to request the scars she now wears under the hair on the right side of her head—a ceremony through which she earned their trust—and eventually they wedged the gemstone between her fourth and fifth ribs, where it could be only barely felt through the skin. Then Elske left again.
Half the trouble was all of the queen's spies. Not only did Elske not have access to the maps that would help her find the capital, she could not be seen going to them directly in case she was recognized. Several years later she ran into her husband again. She had thought he was dead, and they had grown apart. They went their separate ways. Then someone who knew from where she had come found her again, and took her captive, using magic to keep her calm and contained.
Someone from the desert people had betrayed them, but they knew only half the story. They knew Elske had the gem in the right side of her ribcage but not where. They didn’t feel the need to kill her, not being necessarily evil people themselves, so they removed her ribs one by one until they found the gem, then dropped her at a nearby healer. The healer was unconvinced that Elske would survive. She proved them wrong, had the leather and metal guard made to protect herself, and learned how to live again.
Needing somewhere to safely sleep while she was vulnerable, still relearing how to safely fight--and if she even could--with half of one side's ribs missing, Elske stole a maid's uniform from a clothesline and unbeknownst to the owners of the house, employed herself to a local lord and lady. Elske had intended only to remain--unpaid but with a mattress and food--until she felt healthy enough to fight again, but while in residence she picked up a number of other useful skills. She learned how to talk like the nobles do, and talk like the maids do, as well as how a noble house is typically run and organized, and the average value for the finer things in life. Wanting to know how various houses differed from each other, Elske vanished as soon as she'd appeared, stole another uniform, and repeated what was now an experiment with another house, comparing the two. She did this on and off through the years, finding it absurdly easy to slip in with the other maids--some of whom were always coming and going--as she felt the need or impulse to.
A while after that the queen became more than a risk to the country, but a true hazard, and Elske was able to rouse herself enough to at last make her way to the capital. Elske concealed herself as a man and fought in the ensuing battles, avoiding most other people because she had come to genuinely hate most of them and because she needed to maintain her deception, and went for the most part unnoticed. After the battles she is a bit at odds, having less to occupy herself with, as fighting--since leaving Marna--became one of the only things she ever fully understood. She is trying to learn how to associate peacefully with other sentient beings again, though she is doubtful she will ever again be able to trust elves. She never references the exact nature of why or how she lost her ribs, nor does she draw attention to or avoid the fact of their absence, though the how she’ll share if you ask correctly and she feels like it; explaining how she had lost the prized gemstone and all of its power is now irrelevant.
Notes: Elske goes virtually nowhere without her dog Fenir, a shaggy, heavy-boned, slightly-too-tall hound she doesn't know the true breed of. It's a smarter creature than she lets on, and knows far more than she will admit to. She prefers others to never fully know what she's capable of. Elske also learns spoken languages quickly--although she can only write (though not fluidly) in her native language, that common to most of the northern island, she is fluent in three, including Dwarvish and the language spoken by the desert people.
