Name: Tegan, Warden of the Magi

House Name: None.

Age: 29

Appearance: Tegan has a body consistent with the warrior culture of her people. She is tall, standing just short of six feet while wearing her sturdy boots. Being female, she lacks the bulk most commonly associated with a Guardian or other soldier types, but instead the muscles along her limbs and torso are long and each group well defined to compliment the fast, agile style in which she needs to fight to compensate facing foes commonly stronger than herself. Her face is oval with only the slightest protrusion of cheekbone visible beneath sun-darkened skin and her chin is small and rounded. A nose that looks to have been broken and then realigned on several occasions sits beneath intense eyes the color of rolling thunderclouds and hard with experience few others in the Circle can claim. Tegan’s high brows make it easy for her to vividly express her emotions, though they rarely stray from their crooked lift that accompanies her normal, lackadaisical smile. She enjoys letting the loose waves of her light, ashen brown hair fall around her shoulders while residing within the Tower but will almost always twist it into a thick braid while traveling, training, or on the hunt for feral mages. Her willowy hands are well calloused and her skin toughened into leather and scarred sporadically in reflection of her most dangerous, physically demanding lifestyle.

The Guardian claims a total of three whole outfits for herself: a loose pair of black breeches along with a red tunic, a set of worn, though well-oiled and cared for, leather armor made for training and traveling, and her full regalia plate armor in the style of the Wardens complete with helm and shield. Tegan will never be seen without her slim, meticulously maintained longsword belted to hang doggishly off her left hip, while a dagger stays sheathed on the right.

Homeland: Ferros

Race: Guardian

Spells: Ritual of Sealing

Bio: Tegan was the fifth and youngest child of her family and born in the Ferronian capital of Snowhearth, high within the mountains that covered most of kingdom. Her father, Drest, was a royal guard who had left the mentorship of the Ivory Tower before his fifth year of Guardian training and her mother, Isolde, was a seamstress who worked at a shop specializing in noble finery. The family lived in one of the upper districts of the city and earned enough of an income to provide a comfortable lifestyle for their brood, and a young Tegan never found herself in want.

Being the youngest of five had its own brand of hardships, however, her three older brothers and sister constantly warring despite their mother’s chastising. Tegan often got the brunt of any sibling rivalry, being the baby of the family, and had to quickly grow thick skin and fast wit. This helped her greatly when she grew a little older and was allowed out of the house on her own. Being a society who celebrated the warrior so much, it was very common for children in Snowhearth to carry little wooden swords tucked in their belts and duel with one another and Tegan was no exception. When not occupied by house chores or by sword lessons given by her father or eldest brother, Cadeyrn, the young girl was often running with a small pack of practice sword wielding children like herself, fighting for honor and to prove her skill. She routinely came home at night with a bloodied face and bruised body, sometimes crying and burying her face into her mother's skirts but more often than not with a proud grin plastered across her face.

When she reached the age of thirteen Tegan, like all her siblings except her sister before her, began her official training as a soldier of Ferros. She would follow in her father’s footsteps. She would learn to better wield a sword, to shoot a bow, to wage war. The strict discipline of her betters and the harsh training would shape her into a formidable fighter. Then she would volunteer to leave for the Ivory Tower and learn to control the magical power she knew she was capable of wielding but never had. After four years there she would return home a warrior mage and, unlike her father, if she had grown strong enough under the tower’s tutelage she would fight her way to the top of the Ferros hierarchy. The challenge of it rang heavily in her ears and the honor of it called to her.

Tegan would not have to wait long for either a challenge or her chance to earn honor. For it was not but a few months after she had completed her initial training as a soldier that the hordes of Malfear surged into their kingdom. The armies of Ferros pushed into the Stoneguard Mountains to attempt to hold the enemy there and Tegan was with them. She was young and fast and so for the first two years of the war was made a messenger. It was no easy work and she often found herself scrambling through a gauntlet of swinging weapons and arrows arching down from the sky as she raced from one side of a battlefield to the other with only a shortsword to defend herself. Luckily she was largely overlooked by most of the combatants and managed to come back from errands mostly unscathed.

By the time she was sixteen Tegan was serving as a sword-arm on the frontlines of the war. They had had so many casualties that the military had been stretched thin and even younger children than herself were being conscripted into the army to perform the jobs Tegan and her training mates once had. The older children were needed to fight. Now she was a part of battle after battle, only pure luck and her own tenacity allowing her to survive. Through jungles, on the sides of mountains, and in the midst of valleys she waged war with Malfear’s army. She forged through what seemed like unending seas of the undead and barbarians time and time again. So many of her brothers and sisters in arms she had lost that Tegan often wondered why she was left standing. People so much better than herself -stronger, faster, smarter- had perished, yet she remained. Remained to step over their corpses to push back the enemy, to hold them as they screamed out in their death throes, to bear their bodies to the huge funeral pyres, to carry on for them.

Well before the war was over did the young woman give up on the concept of fighting for her own honor; the childish notion that it had been. It was for the men and women who stood with her, shoulder to shoulder, in which she fought. Her ethos became one loyalty and camaraderie, to honor those who sacrificed everything for her and being willing to do the same for them. She grew better for them as she no longer sought glory for herself. And so, five years after she had marched from the kingdom’s capital, Tegan celebrated the victory of Ferros over Malfear’s horde, not as the foolhardy child soldier she had been, but as the adept warrior she had become.

When she returned home to Snowhearth for the first time in five years Tegan went immediately to her family’s house. There she found her mother and elder sister, Treva, and the three of them embraced, and cried, and rejoiced in their reunion. The three women waited several weeks for the men of the family to return from the wars, after all there were still some skirmishes and pocketed groups of resistance that could be keeping them from home. Every time the watch would sound horns to announce the arrival of another group of soldiers Tegan would climb up the ramparts to watch them march doggedly home. Then she would scamper back down and walk among them as they filed into the gates in an attempt to find one of her brothers or father. But only Cadeyrn ever returned. After a month where no horns sounded at all Tegan finally accept the death of her two brothers and father. She didn't know if she'd ever learn when or how they had perished.

Still wanting to follow the path her father had, it was then that Tegan decided to make her way to Valeal to seek out the Order of Magi. She was perhaps one of the first Ferrorians to come to the Circle for training since the five year war and it was no surprise that the young warrior chose the path of the Guardian. Already a veteran of combat and skilled with her sword, Tegan only became better as her instructors chiseled away at the rough fighting style she had used to survive full scale battles and refined it into one of precision and finesse. She was always at the top of her class, though she was generally not well liked among her male peers from rival nations despite their instructors’ insistence that all within the tower were equals. During the first few years of her training and while all the students acclimated themselves to a new way of thinking she had few friends, though those she did have she considered good ones. She would also often find solace in writing back and forth with her family back home, or even speaking with the Archmage of Ferros on occasion to get news of Snowhearth.

On the first day of the fifth year of her training, Tegan’s magic was taken and her life bound to the Circle. Though not her original intent upon entering the tower she did not regret the decision to stay. Though her brother had amassed himself a small holding and rank among the nobility, taking up the surname Stormgaze in the process, there was no life for her in Snowhearth any longer. She had come to see the magi and guardians her family, albeit a crazy one, and had grown accustomed and contented with her life.

Her last year of training was turbulent. The tempo of the training grew even more rapidly and the hunting feral magi was not a type of fight in which she was accustomed. But luckily she had Abraham who -despite his Gorgonite tendencies- had become her friend, confidant, and eventual partner in their convening time. Together they trudged through their tasks to gain full acceptance into their chosen occupations. Eventually they did too, after surviving a battle that left both physical and mental wounds. Since then the pair has served in any capacity needed of them and excelled. Their ability to work as a team is one that few others can rival. Her life was simple and good until everything within the five kingdoms started falling apart at once.

Tegan didn’t know what to think when the Ferrorians stopped sending young mages to the Circle for training. And when the Archmage brought her within his chambers and proposed that she withdraw with him back to Snowhearth she had a difficult time picking her jaw up off the floor. She didn’t accept his offer, of course, but his argument had been so close to swaying her that she was too ashamed to even tell Abraham what had happened. And on top of it all rumors were spreading that Malfear was still alive and plotting. The very idea of him pulling himself back out of the vile, repugnant ooze he had come from and resurfacing again brought the nightmares from the war she had long suppressed back to her full force.

As she grew up, her mother and grandmother promised Elisa she would develop a woman’s body: her breasts filling, her hips widening, the angles of her body softening. To her household’s dismay—she remained mostly androgynous. She endeavored to enhance whatever feminine qualities she had as to please her husband, her family, and herself. Her lashes are thick so she would carefully paint a delicate line of color (to match whatever outfit she’s wearing) above her brown eyes to make them larger. Although it is more stylish for a woman to wear her hair up, Elisa instructed her maids to fluff and arrange the brown, curling tresses around her thin face. As tall as most men, she wore only slippers and chose the loose clothing of the Eastern traders with their distracting bright colors. Her husband thought she was bragging about his trading connections and lavished her with more of their bizarre clothing (she treasured turban but dared not to wear it because of how masculine it made her look). Elisa knows her breasts are as large as they are because of her pregnancies, but the clothing provided a distraction from the lack of curves. The wide sleeve cuffs accentuated delicate wrists and fingers and the V of her dresses promoted her graceful collarbone and neck—the only other parts of her she believed to be pleasing. (Now, in a slave dress with cloth shoes and an iron band chafing her neck, she wished she worn that turban.)

Rarly Myers (grandfather, deceased) and Hostas Illwake (grandmother)

In-Laws: passed on to be with Meros, to her knowledge

Elisa’s father, Lord Hubert, owns the few plots of land that successfully produces roots and grains. However, this very land melts into the terrifying swamplands every Gorgonite child has nightscares over and the old women whisper their superstitious tales about. Wealthier than most lesser Lords, Sir Myers defended his lands well from the beasties crawling through those lands and paid rangers or highwaymen enough to keep their quarreling to a minimum along the boarders of his estate. Even through the War of the Blight and then the upheaval of house Blackwater, the Myers ‘ lands remained relatively functional.

During the latter years of transition of House Briar to political power, a marriage proposition came from a down-and-out friend of Lord Myers: Fennink Blackwater. Now this man’s blood is diluted and he believed himself to have no claim over the Gorgonite throne (his mother married into the Blackwaters you see), but he owned a fleet of ships with connections to Kain and the East and thus had the equal wealth to that of the Meyers. Lord Hubert figured the nobles and people and soldiers alike had enough of war and death, so arranging the marriage of his newborn daughter to the eldest son seemed secure and beneficial for both families.

In the years between Elisa grew up with the terrific swampfolk tales of her grandmother in one ear and the constant guidance of her mother in the other. She was not displeased with her life, not truly. She could listen to Nana’s stories as she embroidered (nothing like her mother, but skills like that come with time), as she ate, as she slept. The stories twirled on her tongue and in her mind. It would help pass the long hours her mother and maids would spend polishing her nails and hair and dress so she would look as feminine as possible when presented to visitors. She was, after all, the eldest daughter and for ten years, the one to inherit all of her father’s lands—and by her means her husband. But once her brother, Marcus, was born she felt no grudge to the squalling, red baby. The only regret she had was that two years later she would be married and Marcus would never know that it was his sister, not Nana, that whispered to him stories of the swampfolk as he drifted off to sleep.

Gillian, her first husband, visited Magaslat (her family’s main estate) as a child during the worst of the fall storms when only desperate men took their ships out to sea. She grew up knowing him and marriage was natural once she had her first bleeding around fourteen. Like any daughter going off, she had private tears, and the consummation was…difficult, but she learned the ways of a merchant’s wife from her mother-in-law and, despite being six years her elder, her husband was kind enough. Gillian’s younger sisters kept her entertained mostly, though. They exchanged stories of swampfolk and silkies and highwaymen and pirates.

She became pregnant the same spring whispers of traitor began to circulate through the Blackwater’s estate. She was sixteen. These whispers were worse nightscares than the swampfolk or the sirens combined. Soon Gillian complained of her restlessness and pacing. He began sleeping in a separate room for the first time in their marriage; however, Elisa knew it to be for other reasons. When the wet nurse fed her son—Her Son—for the first time, she knew it to be true, for swaddled and sleeping in the crib of Blackwater’s heir was Gillian’s bastard son. So, Fennick and Dustin grew up as milk brothers. Heidie, the wet nurse, chalked up Elisa’s acceptance of Dustin because she was ignorant of the bastard’s father. But really, it had everything to do with this: Dustin was only a little bit fairer than Fennick, but anyone could easily mistake the two. Dustin was Elisa’s insurance that Fennick would live into adulthood.

Despite cunning precautions, Heidie and Dustin both passed away during a sickness that swept through Gorgon when Elisa was eighteen. A year later, Gillian died during a trade deal gone South. Men said it was some Kainite pirates, but no one believed that. Weeks after becoming a widow, Lord Myers swept into the Blackwater household, declared them traitors and left with his daughter, his grandson, and her dowry. She heard later the whole entire estate was destroyed and everyone killed—all Gillian’s pretty little sisters with white flowers in their hair and silkies in their dreams.

Her father never made her privy to his plans, but once she admitted to be with child again, she expected her father to command her to be rid of the child so she could remarry faster. To her surprise, he smiled. It was within that smile, eyes dark and glinting like the seas before a storm, his plans were revealed to her. (If so few Blackwaters existed, and if they were attempting to reclaim the throne, any man who assisted in such a rise to power…) Elisa began tasting all of Fennick’s food and garnered the favor of a knight to protect her son, but it mattered not for her father implemented other plans of protection: ferreted out of the country through the very swamplands she sung about to Fennick and Marcus, her growing younger brother, before they fell asleep. It took only a bit of dreamwine and she awoke with her son on skiff with the green, damp light of the swamp around her. A sole ranger guided them for the better of a fortnight before he was bitten by a viper and died, turning brown like the sagging reeds along the banks of the bayou.

After a failed attempt to toe through the swamp on her own, Elisa carefully parceled out her supplies and prepared to live in the boughs of a black willow tree with her son. Foolish fantasies and too many stories made her think these things possible. After two weeks, they had no more food and she was sure the fetid water of the swamp would kill them before starvation. So she sang to Fennick as he slept with his ear pressed against her bulging stomach and brushed her dirty fingers through his oily, curling hair. The knife shook in her hands and her tears tasted like the sea, but she fell asleep in the wet twilight of the swamp before she could complete her desperate mission. It was then they were found, tricked, and sold as slaves along the Ferros border. She is grateful she hasn’t given birth yet because she knows as soon as she does, the babe will be gone. Fennick is too much of a burden to buy for the few buyers they’ve met don’t have women to raise a boy until he is of use. And she is still young and fertile. Maybe Euros and Meros do exist?

Name: Ashkante Nakesha

House Name: House Nakesha

House Sigil:

Family Members: In direct family none.

Stronghold:

Standing forces: Due House Nakesha's great success in the war and now his standing forces are quite large. 800 guardsman, 100 horsemen, 25 knights, 10 mages.

Age: 45

Appearance:

Homeland: Ferros

Race: Mage

Spells:
Airmancy
Pyromancy
Constructs

Bio: Ashkante was born 45 years ago to one of the great houses of Ferros. House Nakesha is an ancient house whose power has waxed and waned with the times, when Ashkante was born its power was waning. From his first breath he had immense and constant pressure exerted upon him to succeed, to make the house great again and to regain the lost honour of his house. Ashkante turned out to have an incredibly sharp mind one that quickly got him into trouble around the ageing castle. Most of the servants and soldiers had long since been dismissed and there was little to stop him wandering the entirety of the massive castle. He was curious and it was that which first got him into trouble. His father, Masahn Nakesha, raised him and trained him from birth to be the greatest warrior he could ever produce. Ashkante, whilst talented in the realm of swordplay had little interest in it and soon grew bored with it. He began exploring the ancient library more and more until he discovered a secret chamber hidden within filled with books of magic at the age of 10.

He became fascinated with it. He read every book he could get his hands on and soon began trying to practice it himself. His father caught him soon after the first attempt and it ended poorly for Ashkante. His father dragged him out into the courtyard and ordered him to use his magic to defend himself. Ashkante of course had no idea how to do so and frantically began trying everything he could to defend himself against his enraged father, all for naught. His father beat him within an inch of his life and stated that if he wished to learn magic he was no son of his and threw him out of the front door of the castle at the age of 11. It was beyond fortunate for Ashkante that a mage skilled in restos was travelling by and healed him before telling him about the of the tower of the magi. Ashkante was thrilled and begged the mage to take him. The mage eventually agreed and together they travelled to the tower.

On the way to the tower a plan had begun to formulate in Ashkante's head, a plan for revenge, for control and above all else power. He would show his father what true glory was, he would show his father what true power was and he would make sure he was never as weak as he was when his father beat him again. He threw himself into his training and grew in power quickly. He shunned the schools of magic which would not gain, what he saw, as true power. His two chosen schools were that of pyromancy and airomancy as he saw the greatest combat potential in the two of them. He had no desire to learn any of Mystos and so decided not to pledge his allegiance to the tower as it would also hinder his efforts in gaining revenge on his father. The five years that had passed had not dulled his desire for revenge in the slightest, if anything they only grew. The person who had ended up bring him was a veteran mage and Ashkante used that to his advantage ruthlessly. He convinced his instructors to let him stay an extra two years to partially learn the ways of the guardian. Although he was never a masterful swordsman he became quite skilled at it. Finally at the age of 18 left the tower to fulfil the final part of his revenge and orchestrate his ascent to his fathers position.

For five long years he practiced his arts raising them to the greatest heights he could before returning to the castle at last. The castle was even more run down than it had been when he left and now for the first time he could realize why. His father was incompetent and so caught up in reliving the glories of the past he could not focus on improving the future. Using his previous explorations of the castle to his advantage Ashkante snuck inside the castle and opened the doors letting a horde of bandits enter. They ran rampant through the castle slaughtering all in their way until finally reaching his father's room that was when Ashkante struck. He burst into the room in a storm of fire and magic killing all the bandits in the room before picking up his father's fallen sword and killing the bandit leader with it. His father was thrilled, his wife had died years ago and there had been no other heirs, he had feared that this would have been the end of the family. His father welcomed his heir back with open arms and trained him to succeed him as head of the family. Ashkante simply smiled.

Ashkante excelled in his fathers lessons and quickly surpassed his father in most respects. On the final day of his training Masahn took his son to the highest tower and told his son that he was proud of him, he loved him and had always regretted what he had done. He had never meant to leave his son out of the castle and he had sent men to search for him mere minutes after the mage had taken him to be healed. Ashkante heard all this and smiled at his father one last time. Before reaching out to hug his father and pushing him of the edge, the last words he said to his father was “I summoned the demon and all of this was for this one moment of joy.” His father's expression of shock, betrayal, anger and resignation would stay with him forever, and he wouldn't have it any other way.

Ashkante took over his fathers position and began to re-establish his house as one of the greats. Using the contacts he gained in the tower and over the years to slowly build up his power base. His lucky break came when at the age of 27 the war started. Stating he wished to regain his families lost honor and to end the threat of this evil forever he took his single battalion of men and joined the war. He quickly made a name for himself with his unique combination of air and fire magic to cause massive and wide scale destruction against the undead. His house was rising in power, but he wanted more power and more prestige and so he slipped the battle plans to a barbarian scout using a scout from another house as a scapegoat. The battle that followed was almost a complete diaster if it hadn't been for Ashkante's timely interference and he saved the lives of thousands of soldiers and more importantly many highly ranked nobles. The war came to an end but Ashkante's ambitions did not and so for the past sixteen years he has ruthlessly increased the power of his house until it was ranked as one of the most powerful houses in the country again.