Chrysaetos

Information

Player: Etmosril

Character Full Name: True name is Liliane Holcombe. She uses Chrysaetos, and has done so for long enough that it's become ingrained.

Character In-Game Name: Chrysaetos.

Nickname(s): Chrissy. Using this is not recommended.

Association(s): Ravenholdt and the Alliance.

Race: Human.

Class: Assassin

Skills and Abilities: Chrysaetos is an unusually combat-focused and violent person; closer to a berserker than a stealth-based rogue. However, she still prefers distinctively rogue-ish katars and light armor, and has a modest background in subtlety. Years of taking small doses of poisons have left her extremely resistant to the kinds utilized by Ravenholdt.

Age: 29

Sex: Female.

Hair: Long, dull black.

Eyes: Amber.

Weight: 147 lbs.

Height: 6'

Appearance

Usual Garments/Armor: Leather armor of middling weight. If she's wearing clothes, they have to be covering enough to hide her brand.

Other: Chrysaetos is quite tan-skinned, especially for someone originating from Alterac. But then, she spends a -lot- of time outdoors.

She has a mark of the Twilight's Hammer Cult branded high on her left shoulderblade. It doesn't look like it healed well at all.

Personality

Always angry. All the time. Chrysaetos is the epitome of unreasonable, destructive anger, manifesting mostly in violence. She prefers activity to words, and her vocabulary of physical expression is much fuller than her verbal one.

She's a very passionate person, who doesn't believe in any sort of mind games, cruelty, or carelessness between people - unless they're enemies, in which case she's happy to partake. She's also not the sort of person often found being kind. In the rare exceptions to this rule, she takes compassion to the extreme; going so far to help people that she'll do it to her own detriment.

She received very little education while growing up, and has only recently begun to fix that. Much of her time is spent reading, usually out of sight. Unfortunately, reading also tends to bring out the cynic in her - all of her ventures into the unknown have involved extremely unpleasant things, and she's quick to believe the rest of the world is like that too.

Has an inexplicably strong liking for sandwiches. Particularly ones which involve mustard.

She dislikes most races to some degree. Although the Horde is largely tarred with the same brush, she also includes some of the Alliance - she's suspicious of and slightly frightened by Draenei and Night Elves. Forsaken are avoided at all costs. If they evoke a sense of dread in most humans, they're a mortal fear to her.

History

Liliane Holcombe was born in the Kingdom of Alterac around the time of its crumble. Instead of fleeing to another human kingdom, her family remained on the periphery of civilization: hunting and trading for necessities. Otherwise, they went without. Liliane learned early on to be self-sufficient. A needy child was a liability in the wilderness. And the older she grew, the bolder and more experienced she got with the forests and mountains of Alterac. The problem was that she was a savage little thing, often biting off more than she could chew as fights were concerned.

A tangle with an assassin in the Hillsbrad Foothills left her scarred, but it also earned the assassin's respect. Upon learning that she had no real plans for her life, and few connections other than her family, he advised her to go north to Ravenholdt Manor, and seek training as an assassin. Never being one to turn down a challenge, she accepted.

She failed the customary Rite of Cunning with flying colors - not only by opening the chest in the tunnel preceding Ravenholdt, but by also throwing the chest at the enemy the trap summoned, and summarily disabling him. She was accepted by a training master of Ravenholdt (who must have had a sense of humor), but was forbade any kind of training in subtlety until she had gotten a grasp in the basic concept.

Needless to say, the 'basic concept' took a very long time for her to grasp. She spent the rest of her adolescence being drilled on it, along with the more customary skills of weaponry and poison. She also visited her family routinely, but out of what was probably cowardice, she never told them the real story on what she was doing.

The day arrived when the truth came out. They were definitely not pleased with her decision, and visits became strained - then almost ceased altogether. Liliane stayed in Ravenholdt, being trained, and accepting odd jobs wherever she could find them. She was often told to move to a town (or even a city!). Always, she declined. She was a wild girl at heart, after all.

Time passed. Liliane did eventually develop some skill at stealth, and was often sent off for work in the surrounding areas. Her greatest skill, though, remained combat. More often than not, she was stuck with training apprentice rogues in how to fight. She also adopted the pseudonym Chrysaetos for her work. Being an unsubtle person who stuck out painfully in her surroundings through both appearance and actions, a false name was probably the best recourse to keep people from finding her. And it was one of the few things she wouldn't botch horribly.

After doing a poor job on (but not technically ruining) a whole slew of assignments, it was decided that Chrysaetos shouldn't continue in Ravenholdt, But she had too much information about Ravenholdt to be just sent off into the world. The Manor also had a temporary lack in priests, and others capable of performing mind-wipes (recruitment being understandably difficult). So she was sent off to Northrend with stories of a fictitious Orc leader fleeing there. She was too gullible to refuse, and was never expected to return.

It was years before Horde or Alliance expeditions, leaving her with few options for traveling. She made good use of her wild upbringing. The travel west with her gryphon was like seeing a strange new world unfold beneath them. Alone, she came to realize, she would have been useless. But between her and the gryphon and barring any accidents, they could survive indefinitely.

She was captured during her travels while searching for food. She speaks little of this time period, but it may be extrapolated from what she does say that it wasn't just a slaving group. It was a subsection of the Twilight's Hammer cult in caverns not far from Ahn'kahet. She was branded accordingly on the shoulder.

The Nerubians, who had been too occupied repelling the Scourge to care about the cultists, attacked when the group ventured too far into the abandoned levels. Chrysaetos and a Quel'dorei captive - one Elruimar Frostwhisper - escaped through sheer luck; fighting their way through in the chaos, and making their way up to eastern Dragonblight.

Chrysaetos and Elruimar were best friends almost immediately. And considering that they had escaped with no equipment except a knife and no supplies to speak of, they had to work together. Elruimar, she found, had been a traveler of Northrend for a very long time, and knew how best to stay alive in the harsh weeks which followed. Chrysaetos, with all of her childhood spent living in the backwoods, was no stick in the mud either.

The problems only started when they returned to civilization. They parted ways at Valgarde; Chrysaetos to return and report her failure, and Elruimar (who hadn't yet learned of the Siege of Silvermoon) to see what had become of his homeland and the supposed Quel'dorei. Each kept promises to write frequently.

Chrysaetos, upon learning from one of the seniors at Ravenholdt that she had been slated to die, was furious. But not more furious then usual. It was then that she realized her own gullibility. Things like that were not uncommon amongst the cutthroat rogues, and she had known it as well as anyone. The one who had ordered the 'assassination' of the Orc had left since then. Determined to not repeat her mistakes, she did not take the anger out on the others. She just returned to work. This time, she actually put some effort into subtlety. All the while, she kept contact with Elruimar, who had become a Blood Elf, and wrote frequently about the state of Quel'thalas.

The incursion into Northrend and new restoration of Dalaran above Crystalsong forest gave her an idea. Dalaran was neutral. She made plans with Elruimar to meet again in the mage's city, and see Crystalsong.

Things didn't go as planned. Elruimar had fallen under some suspicion for being in Northrend for so long. Nothing more than a slip in hiding the Twilight's Hammer brand on his shoulder led to rumors that he was a cultist. He was followed and attacked in Dalaran. Except that time, his luck had run out.

Sightseers found what remained of his body on the border of the Twilight Rivulet days later. It had been dropped off Dalaran while under an illusion spell. Chrysaetos, who was close to panic, heard the news - a sensational killing like that was immediately picked up on by Dalaranians. It had to be Elruimar, she decided.

The resurrection went off without a hitch, Chrysaetos having spent much of the money earmarked for the trip on two extra priests. Their time in Dalaran was subdued; not the joyful reunion she'd hoped for. Elruimar was limited physically by his resurrection, and Chrysaetos was kept on edge by constant revenge daydreams. As the days wore on, a Sin'dorei illusionist noticed their lack of enmity, and took a fiendish delight in tormenting them about it. It was almost a relief when she went back to Ravenholdt.

She stayed there that time. As the war against the Lich King escalated, she grew bitter. The more she learned about the wide world, the more she hated it - especially the people. And the more experienced she grew at her task of assassination, the more jaded she became.

Considering her discontent, growing irritation, and relatively boring job of training new rogues, it seems inevitable that she'll leave Ravenholdt again before long; bringing trouble with her.