Post by Teller on Oct 8, 2015 21:53:19 GMT -4
Name: Rowanis Anligh
Gender: Female
Age: Twenty-four when she died, some eighty years ago
Race: Human
Magic: None while alive, but now a limited ability to influence air and her own solidity.
Physical Description: Rowanis stands to about five-six in her bare feet, a few inches taller when she’s wearing heels. She has a fair complexion and soft skin from life as a member of the nobility, and dark-brown hair that rippled nearly to her waist when it was down. However when she died she had it up, and secured with pins flattened and painted to look like white flower petals. Her gown was pink, and shaped to look as though she had draped herself in a tipped-over rose. Although almost nobody is ever capable of seeing her besides young children and animals, those who do see her can see the white, crocheted shawl she was wearing, and see the small embroidery hoop she had been working with at the time of her death, which she often carries with her. She wears small, white heels patterned with lace, and an expression almost always bordering on either curiosity or amusement.
Personality: Rowanis was the perfect lady when she was still living, and aspects of that poise remain today, in particular when she’s trying to show somebody up or convince them to better themselves, but beyond that she’s become a bit of an old lady: nobody ever sees her misbehave, so when she’s bored she’ll shift every object on someone’s mantle a centimeter to the right, hang a husband’s trousers on the coat rack and fold his coats up in the drawer, or cut the cook’s potatoes in the shapes of hearts and stars. She is also just as content to spend a number of days or weeks sitting in one cushy armchair and working on her stitching, which improves while she’s paying attention to it, but unravels back to its original state the moment she looks away.
However do attempt not to annoy her. When Rowanis spots disrespect she does her best to take it upon herself to show said disrespectful person the error of their ways. Rarely does she genuinely intimidate others with her abilities and her seeming invulnerability, but she has no trouble unnerving others for teaching purposes. When a stableboy harassed a maid within Rowanis’s observation, when he wasn’t looking she took all of his pitchforks, hoof hooks and other tools and rammed them into the ceiling of the barn where he never did manage to retrieve them. She will gladly keep your shoes wet, unravel your hems, or tug your sleeves when she feels you need straightening out.
Unfortunately, due to the fact she’s dead, adapting to changes can occasionally present problems. Remembering what day, month or year it is is a struggle, though time of day she has down to the minute. Getting into a new routine takes practice, as her memory tries to ‘reset’ itself in between periods of time when she isn’t consciously interacting with the living, solid world. But with eighty years of practice she has much improved.
History: Rowanis was born a triplet, the smallest of which died within the week, and the effort of carrying and birthing the three of them nearly killed their mother, who never had another child after the first ones. Rowanis and her sister spent their entire lives competing with each other, with the sugared sneer of genuine love hidden by the ensuing need to establish a hierarchy between themselves. Rowanis matured into her face and body first, but her sister excelled in musical instruments in a way that Rowanis could never match. Her sister was the first to receive offers of marriage, but Rowanis was the first one betrothed. Rowanis’s marriage was scheduled first, but when Rowanis died her sister was the only one to marry. Her sister was the one to find her slumped in the armchair by the fire, a thin ribbon of blood nearly dried on her upper lip, her sewing still gently in hand. They had been about to leave for the winter solstice ball, but Rowanis’s aneurysm halted the entire family’s social life for the next six months.
Rowanis found herself as powerless as a cloud for the next several years. With extreme concentration she could move herself, follow her family around and quietly beg them to hear her, but it wasn’t until close to a decade later that she was able to influence the world of the living again, since it was no longer a world that belonged to her. On occasion she saw other ghosts, but as a habit, those who remain after their deaths are too concerned with the living to bother socializing much with the other dead.
Rowanis doesn’t know entirely why she’s stuck around so long. Most of her family is dead, though she visits her husband’s and her sister’s children and grandchildren as often as she can, but except for never having the life that she’d wanted she didn’t know what she could have left undone. She was no different than many others who died younger than they had expected to, and they hadn’t stayed drifting through the world they no longer belonged in. But she doesn’t know why she’s stayed, and she doesn’t know how to leave.
Rowanis didn’t know what to do with herself for quite a while, but she found that she could be useful eventually, and began visiting inns she remembered visiting in her lifetime, and several others she had never patronized. Within a decade the inns she visited had reputations as being haunted, though not with the same negative connotation as many other places claimed to be haunted. Rowanis was known to keep the fire going, dust and sweep, clean up spills and broken glass, peel potatoes, chop onions, entertain small children, mind supper, and keep fragile things from falling when she could. Within a few more decades, in most of the places she had introduced herself in the only way she could—by manipulating such items as sand, flour or ink to write her words for the living to see—and in most places she had become as accepted and commonplace as another employee, and the employees and regulars of said establishments often thanked her, laughing, by name whenever something unexpected or unexplained happened.
However even Rowanis, whose favorite thing in the world had always been to serve a purpose, could not remain satisfied with death as an innkeeper forever. So she began to venture out, to travel as she hadn’t done before, and to eavesdrop unrepentantly on anyone she thought could help her in her being helpful. However she rarely met anyone to whose service she wished to, even invisibly, pledge her assistance, so for many years—still minding her inns—she moved on, and continued traveling.
One afternoon she found herself on the bubbling edge of a mountain and settled in to observe the volcanoes for as long as she felt like. She still wasn’t entirely accustomed to being incorporeal, as the ideas she’d formed about how the world worked while alive were even harder to dislodge while dead, and it took her hours to work up the courage to walk through the lava, even knowing it could no longer hurt her. Another she sat on the prow of a northern ship for several days as she shook her head over their escapades and their raucously ribald days. Yet another day she visited Atma to sit in on their councils. She likes exploring, and she also loves the inn she protects in Amanzi.
