My completed character sheet... hopefully.
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.
