Description
Under better circumstances, this human woman would be lovely. Her features
have a gentle, serene beauty to them. Her skin, however, has an unnatural
pallor that could never be attractive. Some powder or coloring agent must be
responsible. Other artificial dyes have shaded her eyes, lips, and cheeks a
touch too strongly to seem normal as well. It is as if a poor mortician
was conscripted to tend to a queen lying in state, and the whole effect is
more than a little garish. Her clothes look to have once been fine, though
they are tattered and seem too large and billowing for her slender form.
Each of her pieces of clothing is of a different color, but on the whole they
are dark and earthy tones and go together well. These in turn match her hair
and eyes well, raven-dark and deep brown respectively.
Role
Venoms
Added Sun Feb 25 13:41:51 2007 at level 29:
One night, Dyneli's wanderings took her through a charming spider-infested
forest. She passed an odd onyx monolith in the heart of the forest, a very
old looking thing carved with serpents and insects. She liked it immediately.
As far as her gothic sensibilities were concerned, anything black and creepy
had to be great. She decided to sleep for the night at the base of the
monolith, planning to get a better look at the unusual thing in the morning.
That night, she had striking, vivid dreams. She tracked down the conjurer
who had slain Hamuz and killed him slowly with a knife, taunting and enjoying
with his death as a cat plays with a mouse. She charged into the Sultan's
palace, keeping his guards safely at bay with the power of her voice, and
sang to the Sultan of her heartache until he collapsed, very dead, blood
gushing from his eyes and ears. She set the grand city of Hamsah Mu'tazz on
fire and it felt good. She set the damned Seaport on fire and it felt better
yet. She murdered the annoying children of the Dralkar Wood, and she
butchered the minotaurs dumping garbage in her beloved Coastal Wetlands.
She returned home and told her parents off, condemning their useless pursuit
of wealth. All of it felt so right.
Waking in the morning, she felt infused with a new sense of purpose. It was
clear what her heart longed to do next.
Tragic Sojourn
Added Sat Feb 24 16:18:32 2007 at level 26:
Dyneli wandered the breadth of Thera, consumed still by her heartbreak and
despair, but having now a violent outlet for it. She met kobolds, and beat
them to death with her hands. She encountered dwarves and elves, and sang to
them of the depths of her suffering until they perished from the sheer madness
and emotion of it. Everywhere she roamed, seeking answers and peace, leaving
only carrion in her wake. Only some human guardsmen were spared her wrath;
they evoked her memories of Hamuz too well, and even in her pain and despair
her heart cried out against maiming them.
Unwilling to return to her family for money, she worked a variety of odd
jobs to feed herself, caring little who employed her or their aims. In
time, she found even this to be unpalatable. Her soul was too wild to
ever be at peace serving the whims of anything mortal. Dead people with
things seemed to be around often, and she could care for her needs with
their belongings and coin. They wouldn't miss them.
Speech
Added Sat Feb 10 08:31:53 2007 at level 10:
Dyneli has a bard's ear for accents and speech patterns. In her life's early
travels she was exposed to a wide variety of them. In the time since the
shattering of her mind, she speaks with a variety of them, switching from
accent to accent without rhyme or reason, mixing idioms even in the same
sentence. The only common thread is that the message she conveys is usually
insane and depressing.
Breakdown and Rebirth in Madness
Added Thu Feb 1 23:29:24 2007 at level 6:
Finally, she resigned herself to wandering the wildlands of the world, hoping
somewhere, far away from people, she would at last find her peace. To her
horror, the world she found was not quite the one she remembered. The people
of Seantryn Modan had begun to dump trash into her beloved coastal swamp, and
the garbage had drawn malaria-spreading mosquitos by the thousands. She
wandered this once tranquil land, finding it now so despoiled as to be almost
a confusing maze to her. In remote Dralkar, she found that some people had
the audacity to have built houses and a town there! Unruly children were
constantly running about, despoiling the calm she had once found there.
But it was upon returning to Hamsah Mu'tazz that she encountered her greatest
horror. It seemed the Sultan had ordered a seaport built over her precious
beach. Here, where she had lived and loved and lost, was now a place for
merchants and sailors, people she had once identified with but now found
sotmach-turning. Worst of all, over the very cove where she had buried her
dear Hamuz was now some sort of ridiculous party pier where drunkards and
whores milled about. It was more than sanity could bear. Her heart broke.
Her mind shattered. Her very spirit burned like so much tinder.
But the phoenix that rose from those ashes was nothing short of amazing.
The smugglers of the Seaport still tell a story to frighten their children,
of a maddened and bedraggled woman who emerged from the shadows of the docks,
and how with a feral rage she pounced upon a clown that was entertaining
children on the dock. Of how she beat the clown to death with his own stilts,
and then those children unwise enough to stare in shock and horror rather than
run for their lives. Of how she stole the fallen clown's acoutrements and
dashed off clad in them as a hunter might wear the skin of its prey. But
most remarkable, they say, was the mournful wail that trailed after her, and
on this, all who tell the story can agree. On a night of the low tide, they
say you can still hear her yowling from the coves, proclaiming her loss to
the world.
Suicide Is Hard
Added Thu Feb 1 23:23:07 2007 at level 5:
In her passion and despair, Dyneli tried repeatedly to kill herself. She
lingered in her sea cove until the tide rolled in and eventually drowned her.
She threw herself from the jagged cliffs of Corte, then the top of the Tahril
mountains, then from the walls of Seantryn Modan itself. Each time, she awoke
after some indeterminate amount of time in one of the many temples of Modan,
unable to stay dead, unable to find a final end to her pain. With each
attempt, her suffering grew.
Angst-Filled Teenagers In Love
Added Thu Feb 1 23:17:17 2007 at level 5:
It was while enjoying a rainy day on these beaches that she met Hamuz, a young
man from Hamsah Mu'tazz recently conscripted into the Sultan's guard. No less
the angsty teenager than Dyneli herself, the two hit it off immediately. It
wasn't long before Dyneli would make excuses to be near Hamsah Mu'tazz as much
as possible, and she never failed to see Hamuz when there. They thought
themselves passionately in love and despite their very different backgrounds,
began to make plans to wed.
It was not to be. Dyneli arrived in town one day to learn that Hamuz had been
killed in action while raiding a house where an outlaw conjurer had been found
to be hiding. Further, a terrible demon in service to the mage had eaten most
of his body. His family had buried what was left of him in a small closed
coffin. Heartbroken and furious, Dyneli unearthed the remains by moonlight,
buying them again in darkness in the sea cove where they had first made love.
His family had not known his true heart as she did. What right had they to
his ash and bones?
Sullen Child
Added Thu Feb 1 23:14:06 2007 at level 5:
Born into a family of seafaring merchants, Dyneli Edehr never truly lacked
anything she might need or desire. Although a sullen, introverted child, she
still had her mother's serene beauty and her father's silver tongue from a very
young age. It was difficult for any of her family or servants not to love her.
No expense was spared in hiring the best tutors in a wide variety of studies
and crafts in hope something might stir Dyneli's passion or coax a smile from
her. In this, only her music and theatre instructors had any success, and if
Dyneli did smile for them, we can assume it was a false one born of the
dramatist's art rather than an indication of any genuine joy.
As she got older, she began to travel on her family's business. It was always
easy to persuade her father or one of her favorite uncles to take her along on
one of their merchant voyages. In any town or port in which they needed to
conduct her trades and lengthy business, she had time to herself to wander as
she would. Although she would never admit it to her family, she found to her
surprise that it was many of the wild places of Thera that made her feel most
comfortable and at calm. Some of her favorites included the coastal swamps
near her home in Seantryn Modan, the tranquil and empty Dralkar Wood, and the
beaches near Hamsah Mu'tazz.