Name: Ataea Variel (uh-TAY-uh VAH-rye-el)
Age: 19
Nationality: Tuatha’an
Height: 5’3”
Weight: 142 Ibls- would be lithe but is muscled
Hair color/length: A lovely burnished dark brown, very silky and well kept. Falls all the way down to her hips with chin length bangs framing her face, naturally very straight with minimal fly aways.
Eye color: A deep chocolate color with intense depth that could hold all the emotion in the world, instead replaced by bitterness and sheer determination.
Skin tone: Swarthy complexion that is somewhat unique and quite lovely, matching her dark hair and eyes.
Personality: Cold, hard, dispassionate, cynical. Very bitter and bares resentment towards the world. Beneath her icy shell lies a dark, burning hatred and extreme undirected rage that was swallowed long ago, then left to fester. Scorns those who attempt to bring light, happiness, or passion to her life though some hidden inner part of her hopes these things will somehow worm their way back into her heart.
Gaidar Path:
-Passably skilled with lightweight blades, though nowhere near excellence
-Very agile, swift, and acrobatic
-Known to use the provocative skills of her heritage to her advantage on simpler opponents
(History credit to Ildeus, who came up with the idea and then told it to me in the form of a beautiful and captiving story.)
Ataea’s parents were two very happy people, a couple that naturally fit together amidst the joyful chaos of their traveling Tuatha’an lives. The two could be described as a perfect match, the other halves that made up the whole. Naturally they decided upon children, a living embodiment of their affection, the ultimate decision that two in love can make. There were difficulties in the conception, however, and it took many tries and several years until their dream became reality. The term was carried out fully and then some, a very happy and healthy pregnancy considering the nature of their lives. Labor came and some difficulties made the birthing hard, threatening to claim both mother and child. Fortunately an experienced midwife was present in the camp and her skill alone saved the woman and the beautiful baby girl that she produced. It was decided that one child would be the limit for the couple because another conception would likely prove fatal.
Because of this decision the child was doted on and became the center of attention between her two parents. From a very early age she was able to get away with little things that should have been corrected, and her head was filled with wild hopes and dreams of her knight in shining armor. These were, of course, merely fanciful musings that all little girls possess at one time or another. They were things she would grow out of with time once she understood the true nature of the unforgiving world.
But the sheltered life her parents kept her in did not force her away from these dreams as early as should have been required. When she was 14 bordering 15 a handsome young man named Griffin stayed in the Tuatha’an camp for a night and wooed her with his silvery tongue. When he took his leave the next day she trailed along behind him under the foolish pretense that they were in love and that he was her prince charming. He was off to enlist in the Garrison at Tar Valon to become a soldier, to be her knight, and she followed him all the way to the fringes of the city. When Ataea approached the gates she was barred entry by a seasoned guard prejudiced against her lineage, made obvious by her brightly colored garments. She tried and tried but he refused to let her pass while saying, “No Tuatha’an shall cross over into the luxury of the white city, as it must be kept pristine of the filthy thieving tinkers.” She was driven from the bridge town and treated like rabble.
Ataea was disheartened and now without a family. She managed to snag different garments and find meager shelter in a barn of a small village. It just so happened that a gleeman by the name of Sam Cardingale was passing through on his way west and when his eyes lay upon the potential beauty of a young Ataea he just had to know more. After all, every gleeman needs a lovely young woman to assist him during his performances and in his opinion she was the loveliest he had ever seen.
At a stop in one city a band who called themselves Hunters of the Horn watched the gleeman’s show, taking an especially keen interest in his dark skinned apprentice. Lars, the leader of the band of Hunters, more brigand and bully than anything else, had his eyes on the burgeoning beauty. She was only fifteen which is indeed a significant age of the time, but not yet a woman of any high standard. Certainly she was neither seventeen nor eighteen and not yet the exotic temptress she could be. Lars, however, would not be swayed and ordered one of his men to take her in the dark of night and bring her to their camp.
One night Ataea was relaxing in the one story inn, her window open to the fresh air of the night as she polished one of Sam’s show daggers that he would flourish dangerously and do lovely illusions and stunts with. Sam himself was out and about the town, grabbing a few supplies while there wasn’t much bustle in the shops. The man from the Hunter’s band slipped into her window while she was singing with her lovely voice and tried to pluck her from her room silently, but his planned kidnapping went amiss when she struggled and thrashed so much that the dagger she had been cleaning went straight through his heart. It was an unintentional kill but a kill nonetheless. The Way of the Leaf, never really having been instilled within Ataea but still leaving its mark, was tarnished then and there.
Old Sam returned to find his apprentice a sobbing mess and one of his best daggers straight through a man, who was but a limp body in a pool of blood on his floor. He realized the danger almost immediately and whisked his lovely apprentice away into the night, fleeing the Hunters of the Horn. They find freedom from their pursuers, a right cruel lot of dark friends they were, in the form of a traveling menagerie, finding safety in the membership there. With Ataea’s native heritage she is a wild dancer to compliment the wiles of the acrobats, eventually becoming one herself. The menagerie became like a family to her, the gleeman like a father. But as is destined to happen to every person, two years later the gleeman passed into the afterlife due to his old age. Ataea was 17 when this occurred and she found solace in staying with the traveling circus, but it was not the same without Sam Cardingale.
It did not take long for her to find an interest in a new member of the menagerie. He was a young, fair, and wayward son of one of the northern houses of the borderlands, a noble and strong lad with an intense personality. His character could easily draw people in, and his eyes were the intense kind that can own a room without trying. People often deferred to his leadership without realizing they did so, and it is this lad, having forsaken the stuffy life of a lordling in favor of adventure, that took an interest in Ataea. He found her strange and enthralling with her swarthy skin, sultry dark eyes, the smoky ambiance of her presence, the wildness of her innate grace; it was something never seen by the likes of him.
So naturally the beginnings of a romance ensues and he pressed after her past, which Ataea found embarrassing for the foolhardy way she abandoned her life for what she thought was love. She was rather hesitant to open up again but the young man only found further drive to know her because of their similar leaving behind of family. He was committed and in time she began to allow herself to feel for him, allow her heart to open again, overcoming the pain of loosing her family for the sake of a nobody, and also the death of her mentor.
As this love bloomed two years passed and she is was now nineteen, the lordling twenty one. During this time he learned her history and in turn trained her in the sword, so she could incorporate it into her wild and acrobatic dance style. The menagerie came nearly full circle, passing through the town that so long ago tarnished Ataea’s Way of the Leaf. In that night after the performance, in the dark of the circus camped on the fringe of town, one of the Hunters in the crowd discovered her and sent word to Lars, the brutal leader of the Hunters of the Horn. Being part dark friends to boot, not to mention being well armed and trained as off time mercenaries since being a pure Hunter in these times traditionally does not pay all that well, they had no reservations in infiltrating the menagerie grounds. They covertly attempted to enter the girl’s wagon house but of course not all went as planned. By this time Ataea and the young man shared quarters as consorts, a partnership of equals, unlike marriage which tends to be a legal binding of ownership over a gender in these times. Consortship is the common binding of equals and lovers, neither possessing the other as property. That is why the infiltration failed.
The young man brought up sword to bar the entry, stopping the silent abduction cold. Chaos broke out between guard, performer, and Hunter alike. The Hunters began their sacking of the menagerie, confident they could overwhelm and take their prize then be gone before any authorities reacted. Amidst the confusion, as Lars pushed with his war axe to cleave those in his way, he hewed the house wagon in which Ataea and her consort lived. The young man squared off to protect her; the swordsman versus the axe wielder. However Lars was a giant of a man, given that such organizations favor rank by brute force, and was a hulking and cruel bruiser. What chance did the slender, straight sword have against the great war axe wielded by a man nearly as stout as he was tall?
The huge axe blew through the sword work of the young man, the swings too powerful and forceful to be blocked and parried, too wide and sweeping for an effective offensive. The young man was doomed from the start and so he died, hacked down by one monstrous chop of the great axe. Ataea’s love had his chance to play the hero as his honor demanded, and he died for it. He was no longer barring the way to protect her. However, she was far from helpless, for she was more agile, swift, and cunning in her fighting skills.
Also, Ataea could see that when the behemoth swung his heavy axe, at the end of the swing right before it is brought back, there is a pause because the weapon is so heavy. Such a style is favored by those of raw strength, enough to see them through, but hardly what one would call finesse or skill. The dancing acrobatic swordswoman, a person of tight ropes and trapezes, found little trial in dodging Lars’s clumsy axe swings. She ignored his ample bulk and in that one moment of openness after the swing she gutted him with her sword, right in the stomach.
When dawn came most, if not all the Hunters were dead, and the menagerie in ruins. At that moment, with her love gone, a man she might have saved if he wasn’t so bullheaded and insistent on protecting, Ataea didn’t feel like giving a damn about the circus or the authorities. The hunters were not there to vent her anger at and her love was not alive to scold, which made his death all the more painful. Every time she got angry over his death she wanted to yell at him, but she couldn’t, so she thought of his death again. It was a cycle of sadness and anger, each feeding into each other, and there was no where for her to place it. It is no wonder if she stopped caring about the world at that moment, nor could anyone blame her for being irrational and needing to find an outlet for her anger.
Ataea decided it was the one who had stayed at her camp all those years ago, the man who she had chased in mistaken feelings of love, that deserved all the blame. It was his fault somehow, she could not find a rational reason why, but he was to blame nonetheless. And so Ataea traveled to the bridge town and stormed up to the guard house at the bridge. Again she met opposition from the same elitist prick. This time, however, at seeing her fully blossomed beauty, he denied her entrance but got too friendly in offering to take her home and console her. “Why waste time in Tar Valon,” he said, “when I have a far better alternative?” She appeared to consider for a moment, playing coy and hiding her anger, and just as he was enticed Ataea head butted him in the face and broke his nose. She followed through with a right hook for his lewd suggestions, knocking him right over the edge of the railing and into the frigid water below. The younger guard present that eve was too dumbstruck to do anything but watch in open amazement. He watched her go over the bridge before his attention returned to the shouting senior guard in the water. He would pull the grizzled old guard back out, surely, but not anytime soon.
Ataea fumed and seethed, none hassling her as she looked like a thunderhead, a stormy disposition. She demanded that they allow her to see the man, Griffin, on whom she had placed the blame. When she gave the name, anger boiling over in anticipation, it was only to discover that he wasn’t there. In fact, he hadn’t been on active duty for a year. The man was dead. He had died of a weak heart from the stress of being a recruit.
With nowhere to vent her anger Ataea swallowed it, every last bitter acid drop of black venom that made up the dark and dangerous rage. She swallowed it and let it cool, to fester inside her. With the cold hard eyes of a cynic, as she was certainly no lover of the world, and with no better prospects she signed up right on the spot. A cold and cruel individual, like a rich dark rose in winter, frozen in statis without any warmth or light to bring her out of the depths. All that was left to her was the dispassionate way of the sword.