Ilemyriss

Information

Player: Rimewynd

Character Full Name: Ilemyriss “Emory Shadowrunner” Starsong

Character In-Game Name: Ilemyriss

Nickname(s): Emory (the only name she's given since coming to the Eastern Kingdoms

Association(s): Kal'dorei (privately)

Race: Kal'dorei

Class: Rogue

Age: 520

Sex: Female

Hair: Cerulean-grey, currently shoulder-length with a few long, loose bangs.

Eyes: Slightly gold-tinted silver

Weight: 247 lbs.

Height: 6'3”

Other: Covered in a wide variety of cuts, nicks, and scars Ilemyriss makes no attempt to hide the records of her encounters, both historic and recent. Most prominent among them is a scar running down the right side of her face.

She typically carries a small array of minimalist survival gear about her person – bandages, splints, a few knifes, the odd potion or two, and flint and a few ready-made tinder balls. In addition to this she keeps a few spices and a lot of self-made jerky, as well as sheets of cheap paper, a pencil, and poorly-penned scraps of amateurish poetry.

Alignment: Lawful Good

Appearance

Ilemyriss usually wears some sort of light armor – most often “plates” of hardened leather fastened over soft – in dark colors: sometimes browns, but more often grays or black.

When not in armor, she wears pants and shirts, usually of blue or black and long-sleeved. Both with her armor and without she almost constantly wears a battered black leather hat and (unless the situation demands otherwise,) two blades crossed on her back.

Despite often taking exception legal codes, (although she'd much rather obey them than not,) Ilemyriss stridently supports codes of honor and ethics. In fact, her annoyance with legal parameters stems directly from her desire to live her life within a system of honor – she feels that forcing people to live by a rulebook instead of an ethical or moral code prevents them from taking the necessary actions to maintain a more just and universally applicable code of conduct. Far more important than any hard and fast rule is staying true to the heart and soul of an upstanding code of honor and morality.

Personality

Although reasonably friendly on first contact, Ilemyriss manages to combine both being rather contained and highly curious into a personally shy and somewhat nosy package; she'd much rather hear about you than have to talk about herself and mostly does so in private circumstances or under duress. By and large, she'd rather keep herself hidden from even those she calls friends – but feels compelled in such relationships to at least reveal small pieces. Generally, the way people found out more about her is by wheedling for information after they've known her for a time. Despite such reticence with personal information she's quite friendly with those she considers close, often dropping small odds and ends found on her travels into friend's laps because they happened to “remind her of them”.

Ilemyriss prides herself on being loyal, kind and accepting and open-minded of things. She personally feels that the former and the latter are required for the continued survival of her race as mortal beings, and kindness is something she holds up as a personal point of honor. A relatively easy way to make her upset is to get her to believe she's doing something to actively cause someone emotional pain – which she tends to hold up as the highest evil.

Despite her frequent and fervent insistence that she's not bound by her native culture, Ilemyriss still displays a lot of behavior that marks her as a kal'dorei. She tends to get skittish in the presence of large amounts of magic, often expressed dismay using phrases that clearly relate to the moon, and typically refers to group not comprised largely of kal'dorei as “you people”.

History

Raised in Starfall village, on the rare occasions she mentions her childhood Emory describes it as “Cold and white”. She was born with the name Ilemyriss Starsong, daughter of Tellamai Starsong during the thousand year stretch of peace between the war of the Shifting Sands and the Battle for Mount Hyjal.

She grew up without ever knowing who her father was. Her mother (for reasons unknown to Emory,) chose to keep that information from her. As she grew, she started to assume that it must have been a druid of some sort, given the slightly gold caste to her eyes that Tellamai's lacked.

Although mother and daughter did care for each other, they quickly found out that they were an ill suited match. Tellamai was quiet, retiring, and preferred being left alone to her plants and alchemy while Ilemyriss enjoyed noises, exploring, and the prospect of martial training. The dichotomy in their behavior was exaggerated even more by the fact that Ilemyriss tended to be a bit light-headed, and prone to day-dreaming. Ilemyriss never actually meant to disobey her mother – and in fact had a strong desire to make her proud – but she would often let her mind unfocused during tasks: ending up with results that were similar to, but not the same as, what she had been asked to do.

Despite the fact that Ilemyriss became more grounded as she aged, Tellamai found she had a harder time dealing to her daughter. Ilemyriss did start developing a lot of her mother's pensive behavior as she grew, but Tellamai often felt her daughter wondered about the wrong things, or things that simply made no sense. She was sure her daughter didn't mean it, but asking things such as why didn't the kal'dorei look after shu'halo lands as well wasn't the sort of question a person asked. As far as Tellamai was concerned, it was enough that it hadn't been that way and wouldn't be – alchemy offered more than enough questions to keep her content. For her part, Ilemyriss didn't understand why a person shouldn't try to question everything, to always find something better. Her mother was constantly questioning alchemy, to try and get better. Shouldn't people constantly question things, to make things better?

This fiction between them – Tellamai's annoyance at her daughter's constant probing about subjects she felt Ilemyriss had no business questioning against Ilemyriss' annoyance at what she considered a lack of ambition in her mother – lead to their relationship becoming quite clinical and rather upsetting to the young kal'dorei. As time went on, and she started to enter what most kal'dorei considered proper adulthood, she slowly became less and less talkative, in an effort to try and live up to her mother's hopes.

Learning to become a fighter was actually Ilemyriss' idea. It was an accepted and traditional role, and martial pursuits were an area she not only enjoyed but did well in, and perhaps her mother would be able to take pride in her successes in that arena. If she could but make her mother proud, now, Ilemyriss felt it might help make up for all the problems she was certain she'd caused growing up. Although her mother had harbored faint hopes that her daughter might have one day become a priestess or a craftsman of some sort, she did accept Ilemyriss' choice as an appropriate one.

Ilemyriss took well to weapons training, and threw herself into it – letting her constant curiosity become a thing of the past. Although somewhat surprised, Tellamai thought that her daughter might have finally found a proper place for herself.

The battle of Mt. Hyjal was Ilemyriss' first real battle, as well her last. It was among the carnage that she found a new source of inspiration, during the great fading retreats of the Horde and Alliance forces back towards the Well of Eternity. It was the first time she'd seen an orc, and long after the battle was over she found herself thinking back on the ferocity, the visceral power they displayed in combat. It stuck in her mind, even as she tried to mull over what had happened.

As the hours after victory stretched into days, and the shattered remains of three different forces tried to collect themselves, she decided on several things. The first and most important being the kal'dorei had completely and utterly failed. They had failed to protect anything, most of all themselves. Their knowledge of the broader world was stale, and as far as she knew, their knowledge of things like demons and the arcane was non-existent. It didn't matter if such things were dangerous, not anymore. In her mind, the kal'dorei had betrayed their duty to keep to their laws, leaving themselves vulnerable and weak to this assault. If they had only been better prepared, none of it would have ended the way it did.

Even if the others wouldn't see, she was determined to fix this within herself – or at least that was what she kept saying in mind as she made the trip south. Determination masked the shock she felt as she managed to find passage across the ocean. Inside, she felt numb, and purposeless. Life, as she had known it, was over for her – her immortality had vanished, and one day she was promised to die – and it was all because her entire people had proven themselves unworthy of it.

By the time she set foot on eastern soil, the thoughts had only intensified. She had gone from merely thinking that it was the fault of the kal'dorei that they were now mortal to considering it as a just punishment and come at last to fervently embracing it as the only way for them to keep surviving in the world, and the best thing that had ever happened to them as a race. Quietly she was worried that she might be losing her mind, if she hadn't already – but she silenced the thoughts. Instead, she imagined that those kal'dorei who would not – could not move on – and embrace their suddenly mortal nature were at fault, unworthy of becoming a part of her race's future.

The name Emory was something she picked up off of a sailor who told Ilemyriss that her name put him in mind of his son's; and later she invented the bloodline “Shadowrunner” to further mask her identity, if anyone asked. She didn't want to be found by anyone, not yet. She wanted time to think, to study, and to try and be mortal.

At night, sometimes, she wondered still if she could someday make Tellamai proud of her daughter's survival.