Aeyliea Tie'lan
Appearance
Aeyliea knows she is beautiful despite her scars, and uses that as a weapon much like her actual weapons whenever she can. She is lean, muscles honed by training that never seems to end, with skin bronzed by long hours spent in the sun, stalking the plains.
She has long white hair that hangs to her rump. It is an oddity in and of itself, as the rest of her tribe tends towards black hair. She wears it in a loose braid, festooned with a variety of charms carved from bone if not outright small bones of animals, rough cut stones, and feathers. It is pulled back from her face, which is narrow and defined by high cheekbones and sharp eyes the color of storms on the horizon of the plains, so grey-blue. Like all others of her people, the scales on her body match that of her eyes, and her scales appear onthe back and sides of her neck and the tops of her arms. Her left arm bears a disfiguring scar, the flesh of her forearm sunken and twisted, the muscle atrophied from the healed blight of corruption.
She bears an intricate and, perhaps more important, small tattoo in the middle of her back, between her shoulder blades. The archaic image might be of a bird or a dragon, but it is difficult to say. The style predates modern No'rei culture by several centuries, a product of the name she bears and the history attendant to it.
She wears leathers or cloth in a manner to best suit her figure, which as mentioned before she is entirely aware of the effect it has on others. She carries a few other fetish charms about her person.
Aeyliea is a fearsome fighter with the spear and shield, carrying a light buckler on her back and a few spears with short hafts, designed for close fighting or throwing. She also carries a short recurved bow for fighting at range. Following her maiming, she is unable to use the weapon but still keeps it.
Skills and Abilities
Strengths
Spear Fighter: Aeyliea is an expert at using shield and buckler in close quarters combat. The weapons allow her to put her superior agility to best use, and she is a frightening force to face one on one, or in a melee. She is particularly deadly with the short spears she prefers in combination with a buckler.
Spiritual Magic: She is proficient the magic of the shamans, using the ancestral spirits for their powers in battle. Most of the shamanistic spells at Aeyliea's disposal are not direct attack spells, and have more to do with communion with the spiritual realm than they do with battle, but she nevertheless can find a use for it if necessary.
Quickness: Aeyliea is both highly flexible and very quick. She has excellent reflexes, trained to a brutal degree alongside her acrobatic abilities. She is often difficult to hit, and has an uncanny knack for anticipating and reacting to attacks quicker than an opponent can adjust to deal with. It helps her make up for the lack of physical strength when compared to male warriors and other species, both of which she must deal with regularly.
Weaknesses
Isolated: In her own element, Aeyliea is competent and capable of handling herself quite well. Within civilization, though, she is a touch naive as to the ways of people that live in the cities. She is not stupid, but she often cannot pick up on subtle cues from civilized people.
Mistrustful: Aeyliea is mistrustful of people in the cities, or really anyone who is not of her clan of the No'Rei. Everything that is said and done by an outsider is treated with extreme suspicion. All outsiders are seen as little better than the hated Vel Anirian vultures, and treated with open hostility at the outset.
Arrogance: She is very prone to arrogance, thinking herself much better than others, including her enemies. Although she can usually get herself out of situations created by her overweening pride, it typically comes at a cost that is not always easily borne.
Spear Fighter: Aeyliea is an expert at using shield and buckler in close quarters combat. The weapons allow her to put her superior agility to best use, and she is a frightening force to face one on one, or in a melee. She is particularly deadly with the short spears she prefers in combination with a buckler.
Spiritual Magic: She is proficient the magic of the shamans, using the ancestral spirits for their powers in battle. Most of the shamanistic spells at Aeyliea's disposal are not direct attack spells, and have more to do with communion with the spiritual realm than they do with battle, but she nevertheless can find a use for it if necessary.
Quickness: Aeyliea is both highly flexible and very quick. She has excellent reflexes, trained to a brutal degree alongside her acrobatic abilities. She is often difficult to hit, and has an uncanny knack for anticipating and reacting to attacks quicker than an opponent can adjust to deal with. It helps her make up for the lack of physical strength when compared to male warriors and other species, both of which she must deal with regularly.
Weaknesses
Isolated: In her own element, Aeyliea is competent and capable of handling herself quite well. Within civilization, though, she is a touch naive as to the ways of people that live in the cities. She is not stupid, but she often cannot pick up on subtle cues from civilized people.
Mistrustful: Aeyliea is mistrustful of people in the cities, or really anyone who is not of her clan of the No'Rei. Everything that is said and done by an outsider is treated with extreme suspicion. All outsiders are seen as little better than the hated Vel Anirian vultures, and treated with open hostility at the outset.
Arrogance: She is very prone to arrogance, thinking herself much better than others, including her enemies. Although she can usually get herself out of situations created by her overweening pride, it typically comes at a cost that is not always easily borne.
Personality
Aeyliea has a fiery temper that often gets her into trouble. The No'rei do not trust outsiders, and Aeyliea is no exception. In fact, she may be a touch worse than the run of the mill among her people; her status in the tribe often puts her on the front lines in the incessant war with the outside world, and she loathes people who come from the cities with a burning passion and has little compunction acting on that aggression without much in the way of forward thinking.
Aeyliea is a fierce warrior, almost to the point where it feels forced. The No'rei do not make special distinction between men and women as it pertains to the class of warrior, but she was not chosen to be a warrior. Her physical traits marked her out as one chosen by the Spirits of the Wild, and she was to be trained in the way of the shaman, to serve as a mediary between the Dream and the waking world. She resisted, mostly, and has become a thing that is not truly a warrior and not truly a shaman, either. As a result, she feels she has to constantly assert her right to fight alongside the other warriors.
In person, she is has a dominant personality, not usually ready to sit back and take orders from others. She has little in the way of tact, especially as the people from the cities would see it, and will quite often speak plainly regardless of who it might offend. She can also be very passionate, expressing it in anger with a foe, or in affection for someone considered near and dear to her.
Aeyliea is a fierce warrior, almost to the point where it feels forced. The No'rei do not make special distinction between men and women as it pertains to the class of warrior, but she was not chosen to be a warrior. Her physical traits marked her out as one chosen by the Spirits of the Wild, and she was to be trained in the way of the shaman, to serve as a mediary between the Dream and the waking world. She resisted, mostly, and has become a thing that is not truly a warrior and not truly a shaman, either. As a result, she feels she has to constantly assert her right to fight alongside the other warriors.
In person, she is has a dominant personality, not usually ready to sit back and take orders from others. She has little in the way of tact, especially as the people from the cities would see it, and will quite often speak plainly regardless of who it might offend. She can also be very passionate, expressing it in anger with a foe, or in affection for someone considered near and dear to her.
Biography & Lore
Aeyliea was born of the Kel'tin clan of the Norei (no-reye) people of the Savannahs somewhere around the year 339, although it is not by any means a certainty. The nomadic tribe does not keep any record of time beyond the seasons, and ascribes no number to them.
Her birth was remarkable due in part to the color of her hair, an oddity among the tribes. Hair that is not black is considered lucky by the clans, and quite often any individual born with hair of a different color is destined to become the clan shaman, or one of the clan shamans. They are meant to act as mediaries between the Dream world and the waking one, between the land of the dead and the spirits and the land of the living. The ranks of the shamans often include the albinos and those with other unusual physical characteristics, provided they are not considered deformed.
At an early age, she knew she did not want to be a shaman. She had a fiery spirit and an equally fiery temper, and preferred fighting to study, sparring to communion with the ancestral spirits. Her path was not entirely her own to decide upon, unfortunately, but neither could the elders of the tribe truly tame the spirit of one chosen by the Wilds. They instead taught her both things, reasoning that there was no way to keep such a precocious child from casting aside their teaching if they did not at least meet her halfway.
So it was that she was brought up by the warriors and the shamans both, taught the things needed by either faction. She was exceptionally skilled as a fighter, and passably capable of the work that a shaman was expected to perform. In a way, having a warrior shaman was beneficial to the tribe, for she could perform her entreaties to the ancestors and the spirits of the land while defending the savannah from the ever encroaching hordes of greedy city dwellers.
Her birth was remarkable due in part to the color of her hair, an oddity among the tribes. Hair that is not black is considered lucky by the clans, and quite often any individual born with hair of a different color is destined to become the clan shaman, or one of the clan shamans. They are meant to act as mediaries between the Dream world and the waking one, between the land of the dead and the spirits and the land of the living. The ranks of the shamans often include the albinos and those with other unusual physical characteristics, provided they are not considered deformed.
At an early age, she knew she did not want to be a shaman. She had a fiery spirit and an equally fiery temper, and preferred fighting to study, sparring to communion with the ancestral spirits. Her path was not entirely her own to decide upon, unfortunately, but neither could the elders of the tribe truly tame the spirit of one chosen by the Wilds. They instead taught her both things, reasoning that there was no way to keep such a precocious child from casting aside their teaching if they did not at least meet her halfway.
So it was that she was brought up by the warriors and the shamans both, taught the things needed by either faction. She was exceptionally skilled as a fighter, and passably capable of the work that a shaman was expected to perform. In a way, having a warrior shaman was beneficial to the tribe, for she could perform her entreaties to the ancestors and the spirits of the land while defending the savannah from the ever encroaching hordes of greedy city dwellers.
