Post by Eshara Aravell on Mar 2, 2019 22:43:44 GMT
Eshara Aravell
lady of Aravell, defender of Alirycas
Name: Eshara Aravell ti Shiwar
Age: 342
Gender: Female
Nationality: Saldaean
Place of Birth: Alirycas, Saldaea
Place of Residence: Alirycas, Saldaea
Affiliation: Saldaea, House Aravell, the Kin
Rank/Title: Lady of House Aravell
One Power Level: 6
Air: 6 | Earth: 3 | Fire: 8 | Spirit: 7 | Water: 6
# of Years as Novice/Soldier: 8
# of Years as Accepted/Dedicated: 6
# of Years as Aes Sedai/Asha'man: N/A
Talents: N/A
Weaves: Shielding, Fireball, Lightning
Weapon Skills:
Martial: 0 | Hand-Held: 6 | Stave: 5 | Thrown: 0 | Ranged: 5 | Mounted: 6
APPEARANCE
Height: 1.78m/5’11”
Weight: 57kg/126lbs
Build/Complexion: Lean/Ivory
Eye/Hair Color: Liquid Brown/Dark Brown
Distinguishing Features:
- Several streaks of grey in her hair as befitting her age
- Prominent Saldaean features such as the tilted Saldaean eyes and hooked nose.
- Several scars from the Last Battle
Fiercely beautiful as the stereotypical Saldaean woman, the years have given Eshara a quiet grace and stature to replace the fire of youth. With streaks of white hair to give the weight to her words and presence, Eshara often does not appear in public in any meaningful capacity, preferring instead to keep to the shadows in simple travelling clothes of shades in grey, green and brown, though obviously they are of high quality. Only when her family demands that she be trotted out for formal ceremonies does she don any striking clothes that draw attention, orange and red as befitting her reputation.
In order to prevent unwanted attention for the years before the Last Battle, when all channellers outside the White Tower did their best to hide from the attention of Aes Sedai, Eshara has long learned to become unassuming despite her stature. Her eyes though, are keen and sharp as any Aes Sedai – she did train in the White Tower for a time, after all. Hidden beneath a lean figure is also the muscle to wield a light sword with a single hand. Many things that Eshara knows, she has learned to keep hidden, lest they attract unwanted attention from the wrong places.
PERSONALITY
Once upon a time, more than three centuries ago, Eshara was born with fire in her eyes and spirit in her heart. The years have tempered her flames and tamed her wild spirit, centuries of travel and world-seeing have given her experience and caution. She now exercises caution where previously she would have ridden straight into battle, consequences be damned. Eshara has seen the Blight consume her people, and seen the Shadow fall to nothing and the brown bloom again to green. The final years before the Last Battle were as hard on her as on any other, from when she rode to battle against the hordes of Trollocs and against the False Dragon Mazrim Taim when he ravaged Saldaea. She nearly died a dozen times, a hundred times, during those days. But she survived and learned much from the experience.
Now the Shadow rises again, weak compared to the days where the power of Shayol Ghul was at its height. And to mirror it, the power of the Seanchan in the west rises too, fighting against the Shadow, but also to chain those who would serve the Light in a different way. Much as the years have worn on her, she still feels hate for both, for the suffering they have caused to the land, for their very arrogance that brings nothing but misery to the world, for disrupting the peace of the Dragon and the years that should have been granted to them after the Last Battle. She rages against the darkness with the light that burns within her, tempered but far more focused and directed, tamed but given true direction and purpose. She will die before she lets the Shadow triumph, or the Seanchan put a collar around her neck.
Eshara has lived too long to have her life so ruined.
HISTORY
Once upon a time, the esteemed defender of Alirycas was but a minor scion of House Aravell, a small noble house that maintained estates on the Blightborder. Born to defend her home with both sword and shield, the spark kindled within her not long after her fifteenth birthday, and she was sent to the White Tower to become Aes Sedai. Intensely passionate and dedicated, Eshara would have progressed much faster had she not been groomed from young to believe that defending the Blightborder was her sole duty in life, leading her to shun her lessons in diplomacy and politics. But the Tower had its way with her, and Eshara was tested for the Ring and the Shawl after eight years as a novice and six as an Accepted.
She was never raised as Aes Sedai. Completely losing her composure during the journey through the rings meant that she was put out, and Eshara quickly left the Tower and returned to the historical lands of her family.
There Eshara stayed for more than thirty years, away from the eyes of Aes Sedai who sought to meddle in politics rather than defend against the Shadow. With the aid of the One Power that she occasionally brought to bear in battle when times became desperate, Alirycas withstood the test of the Shadow’s raids. Thirty years, Eshara was bound to her duties as a defender against the Blightborder, bound to the family that she had created and raised. But she craved more, to see the world beyond her village, and sometime around her sixtieth birthday, she handed over the reins of leadership to her second daughter, Iliria, and vanished into the wilderness for the next ten years, looking scarcely older than the day she returned from the White Tower.
Pain had already entered her life. She had given her first son up to the White Tower for gentling, dragging him to the Aes Sedai of the Red, staying with him for the three years that he lived, forever craving the touch of the Power that was forever out of his reach. It was possibly from her, and the lineage she bore, rich in the Power, that the first theorists of the White Ajah began to research into the possibility that the channeling ability was passed down through children. Her first daughter as well, gifted with enough strength to become Aes Sedai, earning the Shawl where her mother could not. She was proud of her, but sad as well, for the White Tower would have first claim upon her daughter, not the family she had grown up with. Two children, claimed by the One Power over their familial bonds, and more still to come with the ravages of time.
For more than two hundred years, the cycle of her life repeated. For years on end, Eshara would travel the world, sometimes as a merchant, then maybe a Wise Woman, and even as a mercenary of the sword. And then when she had had her fill of the years, she would return to Alirycas, the matron of House Aravell. Other times, duty called when one of her male descendants would pop up with the taint of Saidin upon them, and she would come in the dead of night at her family’s beckoning and steal him away quietly, bringing him to the White Tower to be gentled. For her descendants’ connection to the One Power came through her, and it was therefore her responsibility to protect her line from the curse that it sometimes would bring. Among her female descendants, a handful would become Aes Sedai, but most would otherwise be put out, too weak to ever gain the shawl. Some would stay in Alirycas, others would move elsewhere, unable to be reminded of their failure.
The Last Battle came and went, the Dragon Reborn breaking the nations with his passing and throwing the world into chaos. Trollocs poured over the Blightborder, and despite the efforts of her House, her people, and the One Power, Alirycas would fall to the Shadow. Eshara fought, first in Shienar with her people, then in Merrilor as a whole with the remaining forces of the Light. And when the day was won, House Aravell, once considered minor in Saldaea, had earned great recognition from their peers, and was raised as one of the major noble houses.
And Eshara herself earned the attention of the White Tower again, for she had held nothing back during the Last Battle itself. Though recognized as a former Accepted, Eshara refused to retake the test for the Shawl, and instead opted to join the Kin as a compromise. Freed from the duties of the Blightborder, she saw little reason why her people could not manage by themselves. Indeed, she had passed down her title many generations gone, but yet her shadow still loomed behind the High Seat of Aravell. To free her children of that legacy, she once again vanished into the night to allow them to forge their own destiny, with or without her.
One would have expected that the years after the Last Battle would be quiet, a time of peace for a land so ravaged by war. But Eshara’s hopes for a long, boring stretch of history were dashed by the Great Seanchan War. As the western front of the Seanchan armies struck through Arad Doman despite the best efforts of the Great Captain Ituralde, now the King, the western border of Saldaea found themselves threatened. Eshara herself rode back to the defense of her people, and, uninhibited by the three Oaths of Aes Sedai, found herself fighting on the warfront together with her descendants as they had during the Last Battle. Only, instead of an ocean of half-human monsters, it was a sea of men and women who saw her and all like her as beasts to be collared and held as less than beasts.
She had not fought to live in the Last Battle to be collared and treated as sub-human.
And so Eshara fought, and so did House Aravell fight. For five years, Eshara served on the frontlines of war, witnessing the devastation caused not by the Shadow, but by man, and it sickened her. When Chachin fell to the Seanchan, halted only by the ultimate sacrifice of el’Nynaeve and al’Lan Mandragoran, it was the first time that Eshara had known hate against something other than the shadow for a long while. Even after the Seanchan were pushed back off into the Aryth Ocean and their troops decimated, Eshara was no longer at ease. The world, once promised peace by the events of the Dragon Pact, seemed to be spiraling back into the chaos of war. Only this time, it was not between nations, but continents. And ultimately, between Light and Shadow.
For thought the Shadow slept, it was not gone. Not even fifty years after the Last Battle, reports of Blighted things began to appear in the far north, in territories where the Borderlands had reclaimed as part of their own to the frozen wastes of the north. And Eshara found the source of her unease, directing her anger northwards towards the Shadow. The Dark One had his grasp on the hearts of all men – no wonder the world was thrown into chaos. Alirycas, once destroyed by the Last Battle, had long since been rebuilt in the cold norths near the far reaches of the Borderlands, where channeling and the One Power had allowed their people to survive the harsh winters and the short growing seasons. But now, her homeland was once again threatened by the Shadow as it slowly grew and spread from the ancient lands of Shayol Ghul.
So now she watches, and waits, for the threat of the Shadow to blossom in full, and she and hers will be ready to meet it.
