Elskenari - human - presently companion to Camarat
Feb 9, 2016 20:32:08 GMT -5
Post by Harbor on Feb 9, 2016 20:32:08 GMT -5
Full Name: Elskenari Farensdaughter
Other name: Elske
Race: Human
Side: Neutral
Birthplace: Marna, Alagaesia
Age: Seventy-nine, with the appearance of a late-twenties to early-thirties
Gender: Female
Birthday: 9 September
Eyes: Brown, unrelenting, often narrowed with mistrust.
Hair: Dull auburn, inclined to curl at the ends, but only long enough for her to be able to pull back and bundle at the back of her head.
Weight: ~ 160 pounds
Height: 5’ 10”
Magic User: Not a drop.
Preferred Weapon(s): A lightweight staff. She’s tired of killing, and would prefer now only to maim or seriously injure. However she’s also skilled in bare-knuckles fighting and the many and varied uses of a tomahawk. She is also an exceptional archer (shortbow).
Appearance: Elskenari 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 Galbatorix’s fall, 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, and for the most part completely ignores it.
--->Likes: A good, savage fight; underloved animals; righting wrongs; being proven wrong about people (since generally she believes all people are terrible); proving others wrong
--->Dislikes: Most people; the nobility; gowns/skirts/dresses; being told what to do or what she is or isn’t capable of; magic
--->Strengths: fighting; surviving; enduring; patience with what and who she believes deserves it; learning languages; drawing; training animals
--->Weakness: kind people; generosity; anything she cannot physically fight; succumbing to hatred; inability to trust others; magic
Family: Her parents and sister were killed when she was fifteen. She no longer knows where her husband is. Her son was taken from her at birth, and if he lives would be about thirty-nine now.
History: Elskenari was born intentionally. Elske to this day doesn’t know what Galbatorix or his people threatened her father Faren with, but evidently it was something more valuable than her. Faren had been an army general in his time, and an accomplished fighter. For reasons that died with him, the Empire 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 one living daughter, and he did as he was ordered to do.
Unfortunately the town of Maren was not firmly under Empire control at the time, and the villagers believed a woman taught to fight was no better than a changeling. They started simply by refusing interaction with Elskenari. As she grew up, and continued to learn what wasn’t meant for a woman’s knowledge, her entire family was forced into ostracism with her, much to her mother’s and sister’s despair. Her father wouldn’t tell them why he insisted on training them, and Elske was by now too frightened of her own people to refuse the lessons. Besides, she took to them like a bat to darkness. The lessons came naturally to her.
The antagonism in the town only grew, until when her entire family fell sick they did nothing to assist them where they would have fought hammer and tongs for any other family. Elske was the only survivor, and as it happens, fled the region the day before the Empire 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 Empire 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 Empire 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 Uru'Baen, where she came to understand the nature of both her birth and her childhood. Galbatorix wanted women trained in fighting—a spare few—because nobody suspected women of knowing how, and therefore they made more formidable weapons against men. She also came to understand that she’d been pregnant when she was captured. Elskenari hid it for as long as possible, but soon Galbatorix noticed, as he 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 Galbatorix'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. The moment she gave birth her son was taken from her. Elske’s rage was strong enough to keep her alive when Galbatorix, realizing she had a stronger spirit than was tolerable for him, 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 Galbatorix's sport, and hearing that her son had died of illness, she disappeared.
She went to the elves, trying to convince them to help her overthrow Galbatorix. 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 Elskenari traveled, purposeless. She found the dwarves in the Beor Mountains 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 Hadarac Dessert and found others who shared her hatred of a particular man and region. The Wandering Tribe she fell in with had found a small gem apparently brimming overfull with energy, but which they—none being magically inclined—could not use. They wanted to give it to the Varden, knowing they had spellcasters who could make good use of it. They just did not know how to safely transport it there. 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 the Trial of Long Knives, 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 Galbatorix’s spies. Not only did Elske not know where the main collection of the Varden were, she could not be seen going to them directly from the east. 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 tribe 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 Varden became more than an annoyance to Galbatorix, but a true hindrance, and Elske was able to discover their whereabouts. 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 war 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 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 Alagaesia, she is fluent in three, including Dwarvish and the language spoken by the Wandering Tribesmen.
Fenir