Kaerith

Information

Player: Sol

Character Name: Kaerithel Essara Sabersong

Character In-Game Name: Kaerith

Nicknames: Goes by Kaerith under most circumstances without additions, shortened to Kae (leading her to sign, simply, as 'K') or Ritha. Calling her by her full name or by Essara is usually enough to bring pause to her.

Associations: As an exile and discharged Sentinel, she lacks any formal association to the Alliance or Darnassus, although her heart remains with her people.

Race: Night Elf

Class: Runemaster

Age: 457

Sex: Female

Hair: White and worn short, tied up into two intricate braids that loop into one another and don't go past the shoulders.

Eyes: Starkly shining silver

Weight: 234lbs.

Height: 6'7"

Appearance

Narrowly proportioned but long-limbed and lithe, Kaerith is shorter than the standard but of about average weight, her body nimbly built and threaded through with lean, athletic muscle. Her face has a distinctly tomboyish set to it, a deal blockier than the elven norm, with a distinctively square jaw, cheekbones set widely apart, a strong brow, and a nose slightly crooked from serial breaks. Her eyes are bright and prone to darting while her posture is loose and lazy, and she carries with her a grin that comes easily and shows a few missing teeth.

With hair and eyes of silver-white and skin toned milky grey, it might be said of Kaerith that if few things are consistent about her, at least her colour scheme is. This, of course, is before you take into account her tattoos. The surface of her skin literally swims with runes, glyphs and sigils of a nature pertaining to Azeroth's rawest, most primal magic – the patterns of the ley lines themselves are inked irregularly into her skin in different colours, clearly added in patches at random rather than adhering to any overall design standard. She generally favours them in shades of red, but there are plenty enough exceptions.

In the way of clothes, she . . . doesn't wear much, as befits her calling. Short, tattered breeches down to the knees and a buckled harness about the chest are complimented by thin leather straps wound around her hands and feet. When travelling, she wears a tattered old cloak and a fur shawl draped about her shoulder, and while fighting she often secures a metal faceguard over her mouth and nose. When trying to go incognito she might opt for an obscuring robe with a hood, or on the rarest of occasions when she seeks to appear respectable she may even try a simple dress.

Personality

Sly, wry and spry, Kaerith is the sort of elf who speaks, thinks and acts much faster than is good for her. She relies all too heavily on reflex, impulse and gut instinct to carry her along through her travels, with the ramifications of her deeds only accounted for in occasional afterthoughts, if at all. The first impression you make on her is like enough to be a lasting one. For having grown up in a society of eternals, she's very much of the opinion that living for the day is the only kind of life worth living, and thus she can seem unusually brash, reckless and hotheaded for a kaldorei.

Beneath her exterior whimsy and nonchalance is a certain predatory kind of cunning that pervades almost her every thought and action. Almost by instinct, she'll seek to exploit and manipulate circumstances in a subtle way towards her favour, and likes to think she can make a sport out of talking circles around slower-witted people. Although she seems to enjoy combat and physical challenge, there's a pronounced diplomatic streak in her - she'll try and stop and negotiate before things get lethal if there's no other option, although she's surprisingly less prone to pause when battling the enemies of the kaldorei. She's almost always in relatively high spirits, but when they do take a knock, she's prone to deep dips of melancholia.

A lot of her apparent flippant disregard for life, the universe and everything stems from her status as an exile. She's no longer expected to conform to societal norms, so why the fel should she? In recent days, however, she has tried to temper this streak, to regulate her actions as she strives to make herself of value to her people once more. Although she comes across as readily outgoing, a life spent mostly in solitary travel has made her innately introspective, and while her short-term goals seem to change as the days go by, her eyes remain firmly set on some form of redemption and reconciliation with her kin in the long-term.

History

Some children are born rebellious in spite of a stable life, while others take to it later as fate forces it upon them. Kaerithel Essara definitely fell into the former category. Born from the union of an artisan herbalist who specialised in dyes and dabbled in tattooing, and a novitiate Priestess of the Moon, Kaerith was raised communally by the tightly-knit inhabitants of Starfall Village, with few children her age to cohort and engage with. Her mother, Thelessa, who bore distinctive tattoos bearing the faces of the old kaldorei pantheon across her torso, doted on the child considerably, but was somewhat ignorant towards her wants in her intensive focus on what she needed. Kae was known to be dutiful in her studies and punctual in her responsibilities, but with a penchant for idle mischief when she thought she could get away with it (read: she often didn't). Although first taught the scribery, theology and medicine of a priestess, it quickly came to her parents' attention that she was a far more active and practical child than was even the kaldorei norm. Many times over she would venture out into the snows to play solitary games of hunting and tracking, and so with some deliberation and some prodding by her father, she ultimately took up the path of a Sentinel sister, turning her training towards the moonglaive and bow.

That she was no good with either of them was somewhat discouraging, but she practiced nonetheless, even if her attention inevitably wandered back to the Winterspring landscape she seemed to so love. The landscape was only half of it. What truly engaged her - truly drove her to venture out, again and again, into the snowdrifts - were the Highborne ruins that hid amidst the barren whiteness. The crumbling marbled architecture and the strange markings that they bore intrigued her to no end, and even when confronted in her youth by a restless ghost, she was fascinated all the more. She shared little tales of her findings and hunts with her parents, but what they did hear of alarmed them, and by the time she came of age she had been warned off these excursions entirely, who feared the memory of the Highborne's excesses and arcane abuse might somehow taint their Kae. For years more she immersed herself in training until she was eventually inducted into the Sisterhood of Elune formally and from there, the Sentinels - but her mind would always wander back to the shattered ruins of the kaldorei's ancient empire and the curious sigils engraved into their stones.

Although she never excelled in skill at arms, Kaerithel gradually obtained a reputation amongst her sisters as a prodigal fighter in hand-to-hand sparring, and despite her short and slight size she somehow managed to consistently attain the upper hand in practice brawls. Her mother and she remained in constant contact by way of letter despite their disparate postings in the Sisterhood, and for a time, she was alarmed by her father's mysteriously ailing health. Many years later, she received word of his sudden death in the night. Patrolling Azshara forlornly in the following months with her sisters-in-arms, they happened upon a similar set of ruins to those she'd been so taken by as a child. Within, they were ambushed by a pack of marauding naga lurking in a flooded undercroft who accused the kaldorei of seeking the relic they had spent so many long years searching for. The skirmish was bloody and brutal and her sisters barely survived it, but in doing so, they managed to happen upon this relic - a marble tablet engraved with runes that burned with light as silver as the moon and stars and seemed to pulse with raw mystical power.

It reminded her so intensely of the places she'd frequented through her childhood, and she clung for some memory of that in her bereavement, some ghostly echo of the innocence and ease of those days when her father was healthy and her days were lively. Without thinking, and without telling her sisters, she stowed the tablet amongst her belongings after being tasked with disposing of it. She spent months studying it, examining the intricacies of the carvings, contemplating the ebb and flow of its power, before she was uncovered. A mediocre sentinel to begin with, with an extensive track record of multiple shortcomings in the line of duty, now accused of defying the direct orders of a superior officer in order to personally harbour a dangerous Highborne artefact? Discharge, it appeared, was the only option. In ceremonial fashion, she was stripped of her weapons and armour, and soon all of her belongings that she'd obtained in her duties - the tablet she coveted included, and some of the letters of correspondence between her and her mother, to boot. Kaerithel would later remark that the Sentinel chaplain-priestess carrying out the discharge ceremony should have known better, for while being disarmed in such a manner had deeply wounded her pride, being robbed of such precious belongings had set her into a rage. And even disarmed, Kae had a reputation for being extremely dangerous bare-handed.

Perceiving some slight in the priestess's demeanour as a taunt, she lashed out, attacking ruthlessly, and severely wounded the older woman in her sudden and jarring brutality. Such an offense struck at the core of kaldorei society - she had attacked an elder, no less, but also a superior officer and an anointed servant of Elune. With fears for the older woman's health abound and in light of Kaerith's recent failings, the decision was made to increase her punishment from a discharge from duty to a banishment from society. Exile, she was branded, and she was forced to hand over all her remaining possessions before being set to walk Azeroth alone. For all her prayers for aid, intervention or at least some respite, she found that the Goddess would grant none. Listless, she took a roundabout route through the mountains to avoid the Watchers in an attempt to return home, to return to Starfall Village before word of her exile reached her and enjoy her mother's company one last time - but she was too late. Consumed by grief for her dear mate, the same grief that had inadvertently catalysed Kae's discharge and exile, Thelessa reacted to her daughter only with scorn, disappointment and, after a heated argument and several ignored pleas, disownment. As destroyed emotionally as she had been socially, Kaerith set out into the snows once more and for the first time in her life, she was not chastised for wandering into the ruins.

Anger took hold of her once more. She remembered the herbal components of the allegedly mystical dye with which her father had inked her mother's distinctive priestly tattoos. More than that, she remembered the runic designs upon the incriminating tablet as clear as the stars in the sky, having studied them in such detail. As a final insult to the woman, the society, and the Goddess that had spurned her, she crudely replicated this dye and, using her lingering medical knowledge, cut and inked these allegedly tainted markings into her abdomen, striving to mockingly emulate the sacred symbols which so adorned her mother's.

. . . Primal power exploded within her, burned across her skin, permeated every fibre of her being. The same power she had felt to emanate from the tablet now ebbed and flowed through her skin and bones, and despite having marked herself with signs of supposed arcane magic, she had never felt so profound a harmony with the world around her. It was refreshing and invigorating in a way that consumed and compelled her. She would have to have more of this strange knowledge, this power, and if it could only be tapped through tattoos, then she supposed she would have to be having more of those, too.

And so out she set. In keeping with the terms of her exile, she wandered at the disused, discarded fringes of kaldorei society, plundering the ruins that marked previous pre-Sundering habitation for any semblance of the knowledge she sought. She encountered several more such tablets, some shattered, some complete, and found similar markings carved into walls and the very ground. She would happen across ancient ley maps and entire tomes of this lore, and on one occasion was fortunate enough to exchange words with a repentant Highborne scholar living as a hermit in Feralas. She made a friend of a solitary tauren who roamed similar wastes as she (and for similar causes), who compared the markings he bore across his hide to hers and told her that there was a name for their art, the power that they both harnessed: runemastery. Kaerith liked the sound of that. Mastery of these runes, she thought, would bring her closer to at long last becoming the master of her fate.

She studied and trained and sparred with this wizened tauren until a mortal lifespan meant his end, and throughout the whole while her repertoire of runes expanded, her understanding of their capabilities increasing in time. With his demise, though, she found herself longing dearly for some conversational company for her sanity's benefit, and when eventually she happened across a wilderness inn on the southernmost border of current kaldorei territory, where none knew her face or name, she hid her runes in the shroud of a robe and settled down there happily, eventually obtaining steady employment in the bar staff. And soon, in spite of all her baggage, she found something resembling love, or so she thought.

Wanderlust was beginning to claim her once more when the most terrible disaster struck. War came to the kaldorei once more when demons reentered the world and savage greenskins spilled out across the continent of Kalimdor in a seaborne wave from the east, felling trees, Sentinels and even demigods wherever they found them. There was a dark time in centuries past where Kaerith would have found it difficult to care for this, but her deeper understanding of herself and the world around her, as well as her experience of that small, isolated fragment of society she'd been working in came to show her that some things were worth fighting for. Some things were worth saving. Soon she was heading north to do battle with these orcs and their Horde, as well as these strange humans, but by the time she reached kaldorei glades they were fighting side by side against the horrible threats of the Undead Scourge and the Burning Legion on the slopes of Hyjal.

Tenuous alliances dissipated swiftly, however, but these events left a certain aftertaste in Kaerith's mouth. Becoming mortal, seeing your race's population decimated and your people's greatest leader becoming dangerously lost in the very Dream that had nurtured and strengthened him for so many years can do that to you, she decided. After an extended sojourn through the world(s) that had opened up before her after the Third War and a curious journey through the many cultures they contained, she returned to Ashenvale with renewed hopes and high spirits. Today, she remains an exile, and although she goes out of her way to mask this dark past, she continues to do as she's done for so many years - sticking out of sight when she can, seeking to enhance her runemastery - but more than anything she looks towards the bleak future facing her people and strives to make herself a worthy asset to the homeland once again.

Skills and abilities

Your standard set of Rogue abilities, dualspecced through Combat and Sublety, with First Aid and Inscription as professions (as appears to be standard fare for runemasters these days), all explained through her runic tattoos.

• Martial Mastery: Kaerith is a superbly skilled hand-to-hand combatant, and while she isn't much use at all with any kind of weapon, she's more than capable with none at all. She is incredibly fluid on her feet, highly practised in a fast form of free-handed fighting that borrows as much from dancing, gymnastics and acrobatics as it does from the martial arts.

• Runic Brawling: The plethora of eldritch tattoos covering Kaerith's skin enhance her physicality superbly. In her, the coordination, agility and reflexes her people take for granted are fine-tuned well past her natural norm. Her skin is resistant to puncture, abrasion and extremes of temperature while her flesh and bone can absorb blunt impact tremendously well. Runic power passively permeates her muscles and bolsters her strikes – her punches and kicks land with the force of hammer blows. All in all, her runes afford her heights of strength and survivability in combat that her lithe, nimble frame and lack of armour would otherwise preclude her from.

• Mark of the Hunting Nightsaber: Kaldorei are natural masters of camouflage, capable of becoming one with the very night, but Kaerith's runes allow her to take it one step further. She can maintain a shadowmeld while in motion, becomes almost invisible when she's perfectly still and can seemingly vanish into thin air for short intervals. ((Shadowmeld, Stealth, Vanish))

• Mark of the Bounding Nightsaber: Kaerith's runes allow her to greatly enhance her speed and agility for short bursts, bolstering her running speed and ability to dodge. ((Evasion, Sprint))

• Blinkstep Pattern: By flaring a certain pattern of runes over her neck and shoulders, Kaerith is capable of making short teleportation jumps towards and between targets. With several moment's uninterrupted focus, she can apply the same effect across a great distance to return to a place she's marked as home with a personalised rune, although this is incredibly exhausting. ((Shadowstep, Killing Spree, Scroll of Recall))

• Stunning Strikes: An electric blue rune inked into the underside of both her wrists allows Kaerith to stun, blind and incapacitate with a touch of the hand, often incorporating these into her punches to disadvantage a foe in the fight. ((Kidney Shot, Cheap Shot, Blind, Gouge, Sap))

• Debilitating Blows: Sequences of small silver sigils ring her ankles, empowering her kicks to briefly force mental or physical clumsiness on her foes. ((Crippling Poison, Mind-Numbing Poison))

• Liberating Strides: Verdant markings on Kaerith's elbows and knees allow her to free herself from magical malady and restraint. ((Cloak of Shadows))

• Runes of Restoration: A system of red runes across Kaerith's torso mean that, given a few moments of uninterrupted focus, she can trigger a short burst of immense regeneration to do away with minor injuries and go a fair bit towards mending major ones. This is immensely draining, however – if done in a state of post-battle exhaustion, it will likely render her unconscious. She cannot yet extend this ability beyond herself. ((Bandages))