Hovering in the 5’6” to 5’7” range, Trantascilia is relatively tall for a girl but there are certainly taller women out in the world. Her hair is a dark blue, a fitting commonality for those with the blood of the Dalvcress running through their veins. Her lean, athletic body is good for her dexterous combat style, though she isn’t one to take hits very well. The advantage of being fast and athletic as opposed to hardy and strong, one could suppose. Her irises are yellow.

Her attire as a huntress is light, but not absent; a battle dress is common alongside her common vestige of metal hairbands on each side above her ears. The royal colors of black and gold are never absent from anything she wears.

Prentalema is the oldest city in the world. It’s walls have survived centuries and nothing has ever broken them or the people inside. The Kimnothelis Dynasty has staked their claim in the cerulean city for the last decade, succeeding the elder Dalvcress Dynasty when the last surviving Dalvcress heirs, the twins Ihmo and Elrick Dalvcress were killed by the void during the Great War.

Essel Kimnothelis, the Patriarch of the Kimnothelis families was one of the first lords to step up with a claim to the Cerulean Throne, with blood through his great-grandmother connecting himself with the Dalvcress bloodline a short war of succession would occur. It is regarded as a mostly bloodless succession crisis, with every member of the conflict save a few serving in the royal conciliate.

Trantascilia was born during just a few minutes before the forsaken eclipse that preceded the void apocalypse, the granddaughter of Essel through his second eldest son, Kalenis. Some might suggest her birth was a foreboding omen in retrospect, but such claims would be laughed off as humorous banter by pretty much anyone. Still, Trantascilia’s armor was formed early and worn well.

The childhood in question was not one with much comfort. Her family were wealthy, but not gluttonous or greedy, and in an apocalypse many noble comforts had to be broken down so everyone had enough to comfortably live while the pyromancers fortified their hearths, the obelisk-like signal towers that would come to ward off the void. It would be the blue-haired girl’s perception that her family were the most righteous and noble in all of the land in the face of the void; if anyone could press the void back into oblivion it would be Prentisians bearing the Kimnothelis banners. Midnosians were oppressive theocratic warlords. Ldranti were cruel, overbearing conquerors. Scilari were weak albeit intelligent allies. Such things were facts, there was no room for heresay or challenges to her worldview.

As she grew older the void continued to gain power, toppling the weaker, smaller nations. She had joined the Knights Prilmarius to serve as every able-bodied man and woman had sworn to do. One could say she experienced pain and loss. The years between her succession to adulthood and then the call for volunteers to participate in occult experiments to destroy the void were many. Every single person she has loved and cherished died either fighting the void or having their souls collapse in on the ember placed within from the experiment. When she was offered to the sorcerers of Kethiline one might presume she expected to fall in the same fashion as the others, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. She believed in herself. She had survived the void without a pyromancer’s ember, so why would she doubt that it was her right to live and thrive? Perhaps it was through her lack of self-doubt that she transcended her human shell, perhaps it was dumb luck.

It didn’t matter, there was work to be done.

TBD

A woman of perhaps 5'5" with an extremely average build, Quinnlash can melt into a crowd of people with relative ease as long as she pulls a hood over her head. Not only imbued with a pyromancer's ember but a pyromancer herself, her single eye gleams with a brilliant yellow light. Her hair is very long, kept in a tight braid that trails down her back. Though most if it is the dark gray it always was, bits and pieces of the fringes around her face have begun to bleed the same vivid hue as her eye.

While her body certainly isn't unfit by any stretch, it's not to the same standards that many other Hunters have trained to. Her tendency to keep her distance means that much of her evasive skills in combat rely on creating space between her and enemies as fast as she can. She's nimble enough, of course, needs to be in order to avoid being struck by any return fire, but not very strong. The most obvious place to see this is in her musculature. It is very apparent that she's not a frontline fighter by any means. What she lacks in strength, though, she makes up for in consistency. Though her muscles aren't overly strong, they are filled with a seemingly unnatural endurance and surefootedness even for a hunter. Bought and paid for with each backwards step taken while lining up a shot, that manifests in confident and easy movement, even in the most perilous situation.

She wears long, baggy, thick clothes with many layers, worn and tattered by now, as she travels. She no longer feels the cold now, heated as she is with an ember from deep inside. But deep within her, in a part that she despises, there is a fear that one day, she will lose what makes her human. That perhaps she already has. That her soul, already so fragile, will shatter like a pane of glass, and she'll lose something very, very important.

Quinnlash was a scholar once. A books-in-a-library-in-Midnos, dyed-in-the-wool scholar. She'd been raised to be one her entire life. Ever since she could read, her parents—both reputable scholars themselves—had inundated her, drowned her, with diagrams, carvings, and so many books. Some as heavy as she was and varying widely in topic, the only way for her to keep her head above water was to swim. And swim she did, meekly accepting her parents' demands and doing her work, kept totally isolated in her room within the small but lavish house in the capital of Midnos. She grew very knowledgeable for her age as she simply read. Not that she could understand most of what was in the books. But what else was she to do? With nothing else around her, all the time she could ever want, and the only two people in her world constantly telling her to study at such a young age, what could she do but eat, sleep, and read? She didn't want to go outside. Her parents told her that it was dark. It was dark, and scary, and filled with things that wanted to hurt you. Best to just stay inside studying, right? She could go outside when she was older.

But when she was seven, she was allowed to leave the house. Just once, with her father close beside her. She clung tightly to him, looking fearfully at the dark world, as he took her to see a strange woman. The two of them spoke seriously in low voices for some time. What little she could hear, she didn't understand. Words like "magical affinity," "innate talent," "potential for phenomenal things." She had no idea what was going on, and flinched away, clutching to her father's clothing, when the woman reached her glowing hand out to her. She averted her pale violet eyes from her and closed them tightly, terrified. But no touch came, only a faint warmth that soon faded entirely. She opened her eyes in time to see the woman nod gravely at her father and then turn to walk towards her. And no matter how Quinnlash struggled, no matter how she screamed or cried—the pyromancer took her. The last things she ever heard from her family were two words from her father, as she tearfully begged him to take her back home with mama, please, whatever she did she was sorry, she'd be a good girl from now on, she'd never ask to go outside again:

"Goodbye, Quinn."

From then on, she studied different topics, in different ways. How to conjure flame. How to use it to defend yourself. How to exercise fine control over it. How to channel it for sustained periods. The work was grueling—mentally and physically exhausting. Months bled into years and years bled together, as she studied and trained as a pyromancer, first from a small group of skilled pyromancers and then—as her prodigal once-in-a-generation skill became apparent—by Ezlineia Aldos, the Pyromancer-Queen of Midnos, whom she became very close to. She even started calling her Mom.

Still, the habits ingrained into her by her parents held. Whenever she had time to spare, little enough of it thought there was, she would plod her way into Ezlineia’s library and find the book that Ezlineia told her to sink her brain into to distract her from the crippling fear she felt of the outside world. In reference tomes and manuals of pyromancy, the world was categorized. Understandable. Dissected. But whenever she stepped outside, it all bled together into a mess of darkness and confusion that she fled from time and again. She'd heard the stories of the Void. She'd heard tales about what lurked out there in the darkness. And she was, as ever, afraid. So she buried herself with scholarship and training, distracting herself from the terrifying world around her. She was a perfect piece of moldable clay: quiet, meek, obedient, desperate to be loved, and hopelessly eager to please.

Time ticked by, revealing Quinnlash, now a very powerful—if very inexperienced—pyromancer of 24 years, still lurking in Ezlineia’s libraries, reading about the world that she was ever and always too scared to explore, even past her doorway. There was a hidden, growing part of her that wanted, that desperately yearned, to see what was out there. But it was crushed beneath something far more meaningful that had bubbled up beneath her of late. Studies had been done in Midnos on how to fight the Void. How to resist their corruptive influence. She should know, she’'d read them all. But nothing she'd ever found in her mentor’s library knew what they were. And with that realization, the deep-rooted anger reared its head. She had been shut up her entire life, first of her parents' will, then Ezlineia’s, then her own. And now, 24 years into her life, what did she have to show for it? An exhausting fear. A horrible feeling of being trapped. And not a fragment of new knowledge to contribute to anything. She knew how to wield fire, but what did that matter if she didn’t even know what she was fighting?

Angry. Angry. Angry. Angry at the entire world. But she didn't let it out. She couldn't let it out. She closed in again. And she let it fester. It simmered beneath her for a year and a half, during which time she grew increasingly desperate to find out more about the Void. To find out something, anything, about the Void. A way to justify to herself the decades spent in isolation.

But she never did.

And nearing the tail end of her twenty-fifth year, the caldera of rage had swollen within her, growing more and more misplaced tremors of anger. Anger at her parents, who locked her in one room for years, and instilled deep within her the fear of the unknown that still dogged her feet. Anger at that damned pyromancer Elan for taking her away from her family when she was scarcely old enough to understand what was happening. Anger at Ezlineia, for her obsessed devotion to training her to become the next Queen. But most of all? Most of all, she was so furious it made her sick to her stomach at herself. If all the Midnosian studies on the Void were useless, what was she? Hiding in the library walls, never daring to take more than a few steps outside? Her whole life...what did any of it mean?

No more. No more calculating decisions for weeks before taking a single action. No more staring silently at the ceiling, unable to sleep, eyes fearfully darting about the room for hours. No more suppressing her emotions, crushing them down until they boiled her alive. No more books. No more. No more useless scholarship. No more being groomed to take the throne by Ezlineia. After all, a queenship was just another, shinier cage. Never again. No more. She needed to leave this place. To escape. To throw herself into something else, something so singular and savage that she could only ever think of it. Her brain screamed for it.

The caldera burst. The volcano erupted.

With barely a conscious thought, she found herself strapped to a table as a willing volunteer, with Mom standing above her.

"Are you really sure you want to do this, Quinnlash?"
"Fucking yes! Hurry up already!

The Queen sighed almost mournfully. And then came the pain. Her pyromancy warred with the ember growing within her, violently rejecting this foreign flame. Her skin peeled off and regrew. Her blood seethed and boiled. Her muscles were shredded, rebuilt, and shredded again. She vaguely remembers her bones snapping like brittle burnt twigs under their own weight. And her eyes incandesced, searing themselves white hot and bubbling within her skull. One of them ran out of her face, dripping like magma to the floor and collecting in a smoking, ruined pool. Only the other made it through the transformation from scholar to something far more dangerous, and it was forever dyed with a baleful yellow light.

In the years since, she's changed so much from the her that hid from the world that she doesn't even recognize what she was anymore. She's a different person now. The life of a Huntress was one that she'd only come upon through reckless abandon and overpowering emotion—sheer blinding anger—and so that is who she became. She barely even remembers the old Quinnlash. The Quinnlash that she left behind. And for that she is thankful, as she embraces a new Quinnlash. The Quinnlash who fights the darkness. Who embraces the constant pain. Who does all she can to not feel fear. Because if she does, then the rest of her—the one she's tried so hard to forget—may come creeping back.

Never again. Fight for the sake of fighting. Never again. Move on. Never again. Don't ever look back.

TBD

Rain is an even 5’0”, but has only ever had it described to her as “short,” and “no, you’re probably not getting any taller.” She possesses the build of someone who spent most of her childhood kicking other kids in the teeth for scraps of meat, and the complexion to suggest there wasn’t a lot of sun where she was doing it. Aside from being a pallid, wiry imp, her hair is about waist-length and settled about as neatly as an avalanche. Many of her teeth, filed before her procedure, are much sharper than they ought to be. But hey, at least she’s hygienic.

Rain prefers comfortable clothes, but that’s not really her call. As a representative of Scila (pause for the sound of Scila collectively grinding its teeth,) she can’t just run around wearing her old pit-rags smudged with dirt and grime and the blood of little rats that were pretty quick yeah but not quick enough. What she wears now isn’t a uniform per se, she still has to fight in it, but it lends her an air of formal conventionality that on literally anyone else might look nice, but she somehow manages to ruin that too.

Oh, Scila. Land of industry. Land of ingenuity. A land of people unbroken by slavery, and emboldened by their independence. Truly, if any nation could face the void and, in response, be dissatisfied with survival without power, it would be you.

You bastard.

Then again, as someone who lived through thralldom and liberation, as well as the Great War and the world-ending Eclipse that followed it, Locke knew a thing or two about the value of power. He knew how it worked, he knew its many forms and the ways it could sway and influence others. He knew how easily power corrupted, but he also understood its necessity—without it no man, or king, or kingdom could stand. But most importantly, he knew what a power-play looked like.

When the Kethiline Order created Hunters to fight against the void, and subsequently chose to keep its methods largely secret, Locke saw it for what it was. A damn good power-play. He didn’t know what angle those dusty old zealots were playing at, but he could respect it. He could also disrespect the hell out of it, and violently tear their secrets from their shriveled, grasping hands. Not real violence though. Knowledge violence.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

This isn’t Locke’s story, but he’s gone out of his way to make himself damn near inseparable from it so here we are. Locke didn’t just pop up from the ground one day and decide to open his own little Ember Farm, his rise began even before Scila broke free from Ldrant. As a young and immensely talented pyromancer, he helped solidify Scila’s national defenses, and later founded an institution—named after himself, of course—inspired by a Ldranti custom called “Ember Hunting.” His goal was to increase the number and quality of pyromancers at Scila’s command by studying the offspring of the magically-affluent. The research would take generations to complete, and necessitated the creation of a small academy to ensure that whatever pyromancers were produced were also properly trained. Efficiency was key, after all.

Unfortunately, Locke didn’t have decades. War erupted between Midnos and Aulrithia, and to the surprise of literally no one anywhere at any point, Ldrant set its sights on reconquering Scila in the chaos, as well as Prentis. The Ldranti were nothing if not ambitious. Things at the Institute are fast-tracked, lessons accelerated, and research stalled for what was optimistically referred to as, “as long as it takes to win this fucking war.”

Now, it’s probably bad taste for someone to be relieved about the apocalypse, but, really, that’s about as gourmet as things are going to get from here on.

With the founding of the Algaeon Hearthfire at the Institute, Locke found himself suddenly inundated with both funding and the opportunity to spend that funding on morally gray and ethically repugnant research. Kethiline created the Hunters, kept their secretes, blah blah we’ve already tread that ground. Here’s where the violence started.

Getting his hands on any information about the Hunter procedure was incredibly difficult, but Locke wasn’t simply resourceful, he was also, frankly, a genius. He didn’t need the whole picture, he only needed pieces of it, then he could damn well paint the rest of it himself. And with Hunters slowly beginning to crop up in other nations, it was clear that paint was going to run dry before too long. Sure, the world was ending, and perhaps on the surface that meant petty things like “wars” and “border conflicts” were pragmatically shelved, only a fool believed they couldn’t be just as quickly plucked up again. To Locke, the apocalypse was a backdrop, a stopgap between conflicts no different than any other time of peace, accept for the part where there wasn’t any. Kethiline had invented living weapons of mass destruction, and on the other side of this dreaded eclipse, whoever had the most would hold true power.

And “most” was indeed the keyword for Locke. As far as he could tell, the success rate for Kethiline’s procedure was dramatically low, to the point that it was practically a death sentence for those who underwent it. That wouldn’t do. Inefficient. It also appeared that the process required mages from multiple elements, which was also inefficient. By and large, Hunters used fire to fight the Void, it was pyromancy at the forefront of things and though Scila didn’t have a surplus of aeromancers and geomancers Locke had ensured that it had at least a minor surplus of pyromancers. And a whole slew of their children, some of which could be useful. Others…

When all you have is a match, everything looks like kindling. Nothing is as efficient as fire.

There, we’re done with Locke now, we can move on to Rain.

Though, technically speaking, before she was “Rain” she was “L.I.-23, Group Four, Number 13,” or, sometimes, “The one that keeps making the other kids swallow her baby teeth after they fall out.” But, for clarity’s sake, Rain will do.

Thereabouts a decade into the Eclipse, Rain was born at the Locke Institute to exactly zero parents who would ever know her name or see her face, alongside a whole gaggle of similarly spawned lambs-to-the-inevitable-slaughter. Growing up, the rules were simple: kids who showed magical aptitude got to leave the “pit” and train to become super cool fire-throwing badasses. Kids that didn’t got to stay in the pit and hate each other. If you didn’t show some worth by the time you weren’t a kid anymore, you got the boot. Allegedly.

By the time Rain’s match was struck, she was ten. She had to leave all her teeth-trophies and rat bones behind, but that was okay, because she also got to meet Papa Locke.

I lied, we’re not done with him at all.

When he brought her up out of the dark, and gave her the first hug she’d ever received—that wasn’t a precursor to being thrown onto the dirt—Rain knew instantly that she loved her papa with all of her heart, and would do anything for him.

The next eight years she spent training under the Institute’s best pyromancers and weaponsmasters. Some days she would make progress, and papa would tousle her hair and praise her and she would feel like a shooting star against the black sky. Then there were tough weeks, or months, where she struggled or plateaued and papa wouldn’t even look at her. It made her whole self shake, made her sick, made her never want to leave her cot. Eventually the bad lessons outnumbered the good ones. Eventually she stopped progressing altogether. The last years were lonely, and very, very hard.

When she was eighteen, papa came to her after another failed lesson. He wasn’t upset, but he didn’t tousle her hair and didn’t have anything particularly nice to tell her. All he had was a proposition. “Undergo this procedure,” he said, and she didn’t even hear the “or,” or even what it was. The moment he asked, she decided to do it, she didn’t need to know. They strapped her to a table and the next thing she did know was pain, pure and blinding and all-consuming. But in the back of her mind, she had her papa, and she knew that if she could just bear through it, he’d be so proud of her. He’d love her as much as she loved him—maybe even more.

No one seemed particularly happy when it was done, especially not Rain. The pain hadn’t stopped with the procedure, it had stuck with her. It was stuck in her. Always. Day and night, burning, burning, burning it was like her blood was molten and even when it wasn’t awful it was still bad. Drinking water didn’t do much, chewing ice was a little better. Whenever it stormed, she would stand out in the rain and that took the edge off enough that she was almost comfortable. Almost.

Papa hadn’t told her about this. About the pain. He hadn’t even come to see her when it was done. He just went back to the pit, and the other kids just striking their matches, and she was taken off the institute’s hands along with all the others who had gone through the same pain and woken up on the other side. There were lots of them, all just like her. The pyromancers called them Hunters, and sent them off to fight the Void, because apparently that’s what Hunters did.

They asked her name. She told them, and they said, “that’s not a name, that’s a bunch of letters and numbers,” which didn’t make much sense to her because that’s what all names were. They told her to pick, and she almost picked “Locke,” but then decided that, no, she didn’t like that name at all. In fact, she hated it.

So they told her to pick something she did like.

Rain and every other Hunter to come from the Locke Institute was created using the sufficiently-narcissistic “Locke Method.” Eschewing involvement of the other elements, the Locke Method focuses entirely upon pyromancy to meld soul and eternal ember together. The procedure is much quicker and carries an exponentially higher success rate than the Kethiline method, however, what it boasts in quantity it suffers in quality.

These Hunters, sometimes referred to as “Melters,” are notoriously short-lived and are often the first to die on whatever battlefield they’re sent to. Their embers are unstable, and coupled with their generally lackluster training, it’s no wonder pyromancers, and even other Hunters, tend to view them as fodder.

Still, their numbers and their propensity to die in place of other, more valuable Hunters has seen them begin to find a place in Scila's defenses in the handful of months they've been around.

A tall, gaunt woman with a somewhat ragged and unsettling aspect to her, Fianna somehow manages to be both younger and older than she looks. Though she's now in her late 30s, her body stopped aging half a decade ago when she first became a Hunter, leaving her mostly unmarred by the ravages of time. The ravages of duty, on the other hand, are a different story. Her sleepless crimson eyes are often bloodshot and rimmed in red, with heavy eyelids that never seem to fully open like those of a tired old woman twice her true age, while her resting expression could perhaps best be described as a thousand-yard stare. Her hair is wild, matted, and uneven like the mane of some great beast, as though she simply stopped caring to cut or straighten it and simply lets it trail behind her as it may. And most unsettling of all, her pale skin is almost imperceptibly marked by countless faint crisscrossing white lines too numerous to be battle scars, as though every inch of her has been ripped apart over and over again, then pasted back together almost but not quite right each time.

It's not particularly difficult to guess at what she is, as unlike other Hunters, she exerts essentially no effort to hide her nature. She is most often seen dressed light, in flimsy dresses and tabards that only provide enough cover to preserve her modesty, despite the chill of the perpetual night in which she prowls. The fire within is more than enough to keep her warm, and anything more would be a waste anyway -- as the destructive way in which her powers as a Hunter and her weapon of choice tend to warp her body would shred any more comprehensive garment. The only exception to this general rule is that she tends to favor long, flowing sleeves which cover her hands completely... meaning that most people never get to see the hideous scars covering the limbs hidden beneath.

Fianna remembers the sunset.

It was a long time ago, now -- so long that her childhood seems like a distant dream, one which grows less real to her with each awakening. And yet, the hand that was outstretched to her that day is burned into her memories. Though she can no longer even recall the names or faces of her birth parents, that man and the lessons he taught her -- that old house overgrown with crimson vines -- the sunset they watched together on that day will never fade.

She remembers the smell of soot and ash, the chill of the rain running down her back as she dug amongst the dead and the dying for any small scraps that might earn her next meal. There was no joy, even when she found an unbroken sword or some precious brooch to bring back to her masters -- merely the objective knowledge that she would live another day. Hers wasn't the loyalty of a dog, proud to be of use, willing to die for the praise of its owner -- it was the hunger of the wolf that drove her. Live. Take what you can. Eat. Preserve your wavering heartbeat. Don't become like the bodies that surround you. Sleep. Awaken, and hunt again. Those lessons serve her well now.

Yet she also remembers a kinder teacher -- one who pulled her from that life, wrapped her in warm clothes, and gave her a place to call home. He taught her to write her name, praised her when she got it right. For the first time, she raised her head out of the mud and the dirt and looked at the sky, and realized that somewhere under it could lay freedom -- a future -- something more to live for. She wanted to give that gift to others, too. There were other children like her -- others who had, like her, been saved. But they came and went, guided by his hands back to the land he fought for. Yet she never left. Even when the sun went out, even when the war ended -- she stayed by his side.

She cared for the sick and the weary, took up the sword that she might protect them together with him. Her dear Master Fray, her second father, always on the move, always rallying the oppressed to break their chains, scale the walls, and cross over to the land of opportunity that awaited them on the other side. Scila, her new homeland, its cause her own, its people her cherished protectorate -- even if Scila itself officially denied their actions.

The war had ended suddenly with the advent of the void. A hundred lords arose to proclaim themselves the rulers of the lands no one else had been able to claim, and the people starved and suffered under their rule. Scila couldn't fight them, no matter how many had already died to free those who were now enslaved. Not without starting another war. But Master Fray was not Scila. He and those who followed him could continue to fight for those who had already perished in the name of freedom, and those to whom the gift of freedom could yet be bestowed. They struggled. They won. They liberated. And then...

A band of refugees, so close to the border, so close to freedom. They had to hold the line -- just long enough to get them out. But Midnos would not so easily give up its people -- its property. There was a battle, and they...

She remembers the pain of the lash -- her teacher's warmth stripped away. She remembers watching her comrades fall one by one around her, consumed by the fire within. She remembers the blazing agony that coursed through her being, and the questions with which she was left alone to remain.

Why? What was it all for? What purpose do I have left to fulfill?

Live. Take what you can. Eat. Preserve your wavering heartbeat. Don't become like the bodies that surround you. Sleep. Awaken, and hunt again.

The wolf bared its fangs again, and the old lessons, once forgotten, were remembered. Fianna lived. She ate. She stepped over countless bodies. She awakened, and she hunted once more. That was all that remained to her, a tool to which even death was denied, bearing two voices within her -- a beast that lived only for destruction, and a child who yet dreamed of what lay beyond the sky...

Fianna was orphaned during the Great War, and was eventually picked off a battlefield to become first the student, then the adoptive daughter of a former Scilari general. This general, known as Master Fray, left his nation behind after the war's end to continue fighting as a revolutionary on the Midnosian border, leading a band of guerrilla fighters known as the Red Branch. They occupied themselves in liberating contested regions and allowing their people to flee to Scila to escape oppression in their homeland. She remembers well the lessons he taught her in those days, residing in secrecy along with the other orphans he had taken under his protection. A small cottage in the woods, overgrown with the crimson flowers that became the revolution's symbol functioned as their shelter, hideaway, and school for all of them.

He taught them to read and write, and read them books and stories of heroes of old. He taught them that they were valuable and precious, and that everyone deserved the right to strive for their own happiness. When the war drew closer, he did his best to smuggle them to safety in the homeland that awaited them, teaching them the secret code his men used to differentiate friend from foe. Every one of the flowers in that wood dipped in crimson had a meaning -- and the flower he gave to them as a sign of protection was no different. The Amaryllis -- a symbol of love, and of endurance, containing all of his wishes that they survive at any cost.

But even when his other students fled, Fianna stayed, and learned new lessons. She learned how to hold a sword, and how to fight. She proudly became her father's right hand, serving the Red Branch first as an aide, then eventually as a fellow warrior fighting by his side, despite his wishes to keep her away from the battlefield.

When the revolution was eventually quashed by Midnosian peacekeeping forces, however, she and her comrades were submitted to the pyromancers as sacrificial candidates for the Hunter project, in lieu of a public execution. Master Fray and all those who were captured with him did not survive the transformation -- all those, that is, save for one, who not only lived to become a Hunter, but somehow kept her burning will to survive intact for the five long years that followed, becoming one of the oldest Hunters still on active duty fighting the void, unbroken and uncorrupted.

She is, however, by no means well-regarded. As a tool of Midnos, the missions she has been forced to undertake have been perilous -- suicidal, even. She's died many times, but each and every time her fire has brought her back to life. Her mere appearance is now regarded among other Hunters as a sign of an ill omen, since wherever Fianna the Bloody goes, disaster tends to follow...

Nearly 6' in stature, Lexann's taller than most men and women, and her limbs are hard with natural strength enhanced by her transformation into a hunter. Somehow, she often seems even taller--a cool confidence pulls her shoulders and chin up even when she's lounging. Long, peachy hair is a sharp contrast to the Ldrantian warrior's build. Often it's styled into two separate tails, but the occasional braids or buns aren't unheard of for Lexann. Bangs fall to her bright, sea green eyes--like a cat's, they're wide and interested in the world. Watchful, but easily distracted. And while her face is young, free of blemish from stress or age, her clothing hides various scars earned in combat (and clumsiness).

Her clothing of choice, while comfortable first and foremost, is often colorful. Eye-catching, she doesn't mind standing out in a crowd and welcomes attention--even on a battlefield. Fortune favors the bold.

Lexann was born among many siblings and half-siblings, her father a once renowned warrior in Ldrant and first of the name Stormbrew. After fighting for the glory of Ldrant, the next best thing a man could do is provide more foot soldiers. Stormbrew offspring are infamous, even in Ldrant--swords and spears in their hands as soon as they can grasp, dominating friendly competitions, and merciless in the unfriendly sorts. Perhaps it is thanks to the void that Stormbrew cultivated such an army, as surviving mortal enemies certainly don't call for such rigorous child rearing.

Needless to say, Lexann's strength was tested daily for as long as she could remember. Teachers were impatient, cruel, and had high expectations that few could meet. Her father was distant, cold--he had more children than he could keep track of. What was the point of getting attached? And when one might think that she could look to an older brother or sister for support, she could not. Older siblings were the biggest bullies, and those the same age as her were unfriendly rivals. The blood between seemed to mean little. "Family" was a word hardly uttered among these kids who shared a name.

While it was isolating, Lexann learned quickly that she could do and take as she liked so long as she was stronger than the other guy. She liked her sister's doll, so she fought for it. Her brother earned a war horse, so she took it for her own--he was too short to ride it anyhow. While she didn't always come out on top, she welcomed new opportunities. And in her strength and victories, her pride and confidence grew. Her growth spurt came in her teens and older siblings weren't always bigger or faster or stronger. The younger siblings became prey far too easy for to push around, so she didn't bother. In fact, pity occasional swelled in her physically large heart and she stepped in if the odds were too unfair for the younguns. So, despite her strength, she's known for her softness among the Stormbrews--enough to earn a disapproving frown from her father.

The time came for Lexann to take up the sword outside of competitions and war games. While she wasn't the best educated, she knew enough to take pride in her country and its exploits in the pre-void era. She wanted a taste of that glory, to stand out against her dozens of siblings and thousands of countrymen. Surviving against the void on the front lines was certainly one way to earn renown-- but suicide for a mere mortal, no matter how strong she was. Well, people have fought against the void since before she was born so surely there was something she could do.

A smarter person may have turned to books or scholars for answers, but Lexann wasn't type the type to think ahead. She simply acted: she journeyed to the great walls, where pyromancers worked around the clock protecting civilization against the void by fueling hearthfires. Pyromancers had become a rarity in her neck of the woods, their duty calling them out of city centers; so she was delighted to meet and converse with them. And her first disappointment was learning pyromancy was not something she could simply learn. However, she wasn't one to dwell so she sought out work against the void anyway. Hunters were yet to exist.

For over a year, she was a scout against the void and the occasional mortal threat. She spent much of her time outside walls and hearthfires, returning to their safety to report sightings to pyromancers who would handle the real work. Although it was exciting at first, enlightening and horrifying, to see the void firsthand and survive, Lexann could still only standby when it reared its ugly head at humanity. What she did was good work, but it wasn't satisfying-- it wasn't enough.

Enter the hunters. Although they were being manufactured, existing in the world, word of their existence had not yet graced Lexann's ears. And just like humans were learning and evolving to survive, so was the void. While Lexann's small party of scouts had always spotted signs of the void first, that night the void found them. For the first time in her life, true fear took hold of Lexann-- There was nothing she could do but run, run away from the void and toward the flames of safety. While duty was important--warning the pyromancers of the threat--it was only self preservation that pushed her on as others died around her. She was surely next--

Somehow, she was still standing. And between the void and Lexann were narrow shoulders and average frame--smaller than herself, but somehow leagues stronger. The figure pushed back the void and instead of running, lunged after it with murderous intent...

That night, Lexann was saved by hunters--humanity's real chance against the void. It inspired her. Ignoring warnings and throwing caution to the wind, she joined their ranks.

TBD