Hirane

Information

Player: Etmosril

Character Full Name: Hirane Startalon

Character In-Game Name: Hirane

Nickname(s): N/A

Association(s): Night Elves, Alliance, and (somewhat tenuously) the Cenarion Expedition

Race: Night Elf

Class: Warden

Skills and Abilities: Heavy Weaponry Specialization. Extra Strength. Mental Implacability. Slicing Torrent (Warden spell). Blink (another Warden spell). She doesn't have all of her Warden abilities, and it will likely take months of roleplaying to get them.

Age: 7,365

Sex: Female

Hair: Moderate length and midnight-blue, with one thick hank of it looped at the back of her head with a silver clasp.

Eyes: Kal'dorei silver

Weight: 275 lbs

Height: 6'11

Appearance

Mostly heavy armor. Dislikes Sentinel armor for its scanty design. Otherwise, she wears anything sturdy, covering, and decent-looking; preferring clothes dyed in blue, purple, or green.

Other: Hirane has a surprisingly powerful build for a female Kaldorei. She is particularly well-muscled in the shoulders and arms for the usage of heavy weapons. Her rib cage seems a bit larger than usual (probably for larger heart and lungs.) Her skin is a pale lavender, and her face is a bit on the angular side, with a long and curved nose, sharp jawline, pointy chin, and unusually slanted eyes.

Personality

Alignment: Lawful Good

Hirane has a quiet demeanor and great respect for authority, both of which originate from her Sentinel days. She is at once blunt and polite in speech; lacking the drive to say anything untruthful, and having an innate interest in leaving people with a good impression. She will not question anyone she considers to be superior unless there's a very good reason for it.

Even amongst Sentinels, she's unusually diligent. She follows any given orders immediately (even if the person who ordered her is not technically a superior), and will only devote time to herself when they're completed. In return - and this is usually hidden from sight - she does expects a certain amount of leisure time, which is usually spent on her beloved hobby of writing. She's also picked up a recent interest of drawing, though her desire to reproduce every scene or person perfectly keeps her frustrated and willing to throw her pad of paper should she encounter the slightest difficulty. Stargazing - her first love beyond combat - used to take up much of her time. Recent events have made it almost too painful for her to do.

Her biggest vice off-duty is gluttony. She's an extremely greedy person about food, and goes considerably in excess of what she needs to eat every day. This is worst around times of stress and high physical demand, and will grow snappish at anyone who dares to point this out.

She's only fluent in Darnassian. The recent exposure to Common and Draenei have rubbed off on her slightly, and she has a few words of vocabulary to each. Learning those are slow going for her and usually done out of books, since she refuses to try them with a native speaker for fear she would sound stupid.

Combat-wise, she is most experienced with glaives and heavy weaponry. She also enjoys archery, and practices almost exclusively on Orcs and Satyrs. More than once, she has gone through a day radiantly happy because of one particularly good 'pot-shot' to an enemy's head.

Her memory is very acute for a Kaldorei. Instead of remembering an abstracted summary of events, she tends to remember many random details as well as the overarching 'plot' of any given event. What she remembers is entirely random, though it goes without saying that she remembers more of what she's interested in. This has been used to great advantage in remembering what battle tactics work.

Exceptionally racist. Of the other Alliance races, she prefers Draenei for their similar Lawful-Good morals, their great age, and their origins. Humans and other short-lived, 'foolish' races are tolerated, but only because she thinks there is a remote possibility that they can purge their own weaknesses. Orcs, Quel'dorei, and Sin'dorei are not tolerated. Ever.

History

Hirane was born in a smallish settlement on Mount Hyjal, and lived in relative peace for several hundred years with her Sentinel mother, Naerwen Raintracker. Her father, Imkallor Sapclaw (a Druid of the Talon) returned to the Emerald Dream somewhat later than the other druids to ensure his new family would be able to live well while he was gone. Naerwen was a dutiful worker, and continued her assigned patrols shortly after Hirane was born, leaving her with other Kal'dorei of the settlement for several hours at a time.

Even with that degree of absence from her parents, Hirane kept a deep and abiding love for them both. As soon as she was old enough to walk, remain out of trouble (a tall order for an insatiably curious child), and carry a small weapon, she was literally following in Naerwen's footsteps. She accompanied her mother on her rounds, pretending she was also a Sentinel for the Kal'dorei - in short, idolizing everything her mother did. It came as no surprise when Hirane began to display a strong aptitude for the large, unwieldy glaives her mother favored for fighting.

It was around this time that more Sentinel forces were being called down from Hyjal and Moonglade to account for an increased demand for them in Ashenvale. Naerwen was amongst those who were called, and so Hirane saw for the first time the world outside Hyjal. Naerwen did not train her in the warrior's ways personally, passing her off to a retired Sentinel-turned-trainer in a belief that she would be stricter, and therefore better for the girl.

Adanessa turned out to be one of the stricter trainers of Ashenvale. She was of a mindset that emphasized strength of body and skill with heavy weaponry over any sort of wilderness survival skills or guerrilla fighting tactics. Hirane already had an edge there: she took after her mother physically, with strong, rather broad shoulders and back, powerful arms and a large ribcage that allowed extra space for lungs and heart.

She followed Adanessa's tutoring obsessively for at least a century, though she never bothered countering the years. By the time she was named a Sentinel, she had changed completely. She was a worthy warrior by their standards, and the extreme stoicism she'd learned in the process would serve her for years to come.

She worked for thousands of years alongside her friends and mother to protect Ashenvale. This was a more relaxed time in her life, when she truly began to develop interests and loves outside her vocation. She loved astronomy in particular - she took after her father that way, looking more towards the skies than the ground. Even though she was not vocally talented, she began to write songs and poems of an irregular format for her own reading enjoyment. They did begin to attain a sort of eerie charm over the years, even if they couldn't be considered art.

The arrival of the Orcs was the end of her peace. She and the other Sentinels fought those invaders with covert operations at first, but when the attacks on the Orcs and demons grew more brutal and self-sacrificing. Hirane was seeing many of the Sentinels she knew and respected die around her. But her time with Adanessa had done its work - she continued to follow orders unquestioningly. If she had questions, sorrow, or anger about it, she kept it to herself and kept working. In the confusion and chaos when Malfurion woke, many of the Sentinels who were still operating in smaller groups were killed during the demon's retreat - and Naerwen was amongst them.

Imkallor Saptalon was woken not long after Malfurion went in search of the other druids. He took to his scouting duties immediately in a strange parallel to his daughter, who never allowed the grief to stop her from following orders to the letter. They both fought in Hyjal alongside Humans and Orcs - the first allegiance of the Night Elves with either race - and met again after the forest had calmed. Hirane had the unfortunate duty of explaining to him what had happened over the thousands of years he had been in sleep. She grew accustomed to her father over time, after he chose to stay in Astranaar instead of returning to the Emerald Dream. There were thousands of years of 'catching up' to do.

This catching up only lasted long enough for Hirane to learn a little about her father. He was one of the druids recruited as further support for the Cenarion Expedition, presumably for his scouting abilities.

She abandoned her Sentinel work shortly after this, commenting to the ones who knew her that if the Kal'dorei were to die like other races, then she wanted to see the other parts of the world before dying. The truth was, she had been fascinated by the appearance of other sentient races - none of which she had ever known existed - during the Battle of Mount Hyjal. So she set off over Kalimdor soon after, in her own private attempt to see what else the world had hidden from the lands of the Kaldorei.

During her travels through the native lands of various creatures, she saw how they behaved in their natural setting, and began to dislike them. The turning point came in Stormwind, when she discovered her first warlock. She left human lands after that and traveled on through the Dark Portal alone.

When she arrived in the Cenarion Refuge where her father was supposedly stationed, she learned from the other druids that he had been missing for weeks. He had been on a scouting mission through the Blade's Edge mountains, and was expected to return with a report from Ruuan Weald. Instead, he had vanished.

Several weeks of Hirane's were spent trying to retrace the location. She could not fly as her father did, nor was she particularly agile or subtle during travel. She was forced to learn some of those skills to avoid detection by enemy forces. She found in Ruuan Weald that Imkallor had gone northeast to Netherstorm in response to a demon attack on Area 52. And yet she found no trace when she followed him there.

Finally despairing, she never returned to the Cenarion Refuge. She remained in Netherstorm to keep the demons at bay, hoping that one day she would be lucky enough to discover the whereabouts of her father. After finding nothing for months and nearly being killed by the demons outside the eco-domes, she declared Imkallor dead and left Outland to return to her old home.

Perhaps a month had passed routinely in Ashenvale before she was given a letter from someone she had never met before. Her name was Celyaion Frozendusk, a Warden of the Kaldorei, and the letter was an offer to begin a Warden's training. Hirane accepted eagerly. She had seen Wardens in the past - or, perhaps her younger self had only imagined seeing them -, and had respected them even before training. The very idea that such an offer would be made was an honor.

Her trial began one week later. She says nothing about what it consisted of, even to friends, but the fact that she passed it is obvious. She now balances her duties as a Sentinel with the training of a Warden, traveling between her Ashenvale home and wherever she's instructed to go every week. Time will tell whether she succeeds.