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Cailurion
Name: Cailurion
Age: 21
Race: Ithecal, Paltharnum
Date of Birth: Ashan 29th, 797
Marks: n/a
Factions Joined: n/a
Languages Spoken: Fluent Common, broken Common Sign
Partners:
Age: 21
Race: Ithecal, Paltharnum
Date of Birth: Ashan 29th, 797
Marks: n/a
Factions Joined: n/a
Languages Spoken: Fluent Common, broken Common Sign
Partners:
Appearance
Next to her own kin, Cailurion would be described as "boyish." She is stocky and somewhat flat-chested compared to most Paltharnum women, but her gender is still clear to those who know the signs. Her voice is low and deliberate, usually irritated, while her arms and legs are built thick from several years of military service. She is, at first glance, a no-nonsense woman with a penchant for observation.
At least, this is how she appears to her kinsmen.
At first, the constant misgendering was annoying, then it was exhausting, and now it is amusing. Her voice is somewhat low and raspy, which is still a telltale sign to those familiar with her people but otherwise unhelpful to those who are not.
Outside mention of gender, Cailurion stands tall at 8’3”, with the broad shoulders, thick muscles and short snout typical of the Paltharnum. Her hide is a greenish brown––though she will declare it is more like bronze, thank you––with very faint dark stripes across her neck, back and shoulders.
Personality
A ruler without a kingdom, a warden without a ward, born lost and somehow wrong.
And still too stubborn to accept it.
Cailurion is a soldier, that much she can declare without hesitation. But a soldier without a cause is barely anything at all, and her lack of purpose stings with every breath. She perseveres in spite of not knowing what she is searching for; the only thing she knows for certain is that it lies away from her people, which only narrows it down to the entire rest of the world. At least it's somewhere to start.
Honor, pride and iron will define every action, but she has also been cursed with practicality. When a goal is chosen, tradition is secondary; Cailurion will learn, adapt and grow if it brings her closer to completing her mission. This, ultimately, is the root of her frustration: like all Ithecal, she knows that something is wrong with the way things are and that change must be enforced – yet all the solutions presented to her have left her unsatisfied.
And so, Cailurion wanders. Though she could not say where her destination is, she knows at least that she is traveling in the right direction.
History
It was always known that Cailurion would be a soldier. Both her parents were career military and Cailurion never showed and strong inclination to anything else. Her father was a cavalryman, her mother trained infantry, and she grew up breathing in the art of war as easily as she breathed air. They lived a few miles out from Yithiral, in a quiet river valley with fields to explore and fish to catch. Cailurion grew strong there, and like her parents before her she grew hungry for something no one could quite name.
“Ambition,” outsiders would call it. “Birthright,” her family corrected.
You are hungry for the world, and you are entitled to it. The first part was fact, the second part was persuasion.
Cailurion was born with a sharp streak of skepticism, and her parents encouraged it. Though loyal to Ethelynda, they questioned her goals fiercely; if a leader could not stand up to scrutiny, they said, then that was no true leader in the first place. They became less happy with her skepticism when she turned ten and began to turn it on them as well, but they were too proud to put a stop to it.
All of her family were notoriously prideful, much to Cailurion’s exasperation. Though she too held an iron sense of honor and morality, she was also deeply practical and could be easily irritated when someone chose their pride over what was right. The family’s feud with their Wyvarnth neighbors was long-standing, having escalated slowly but surely over the past three generations. It reached a breaking point in Cailurion’s sixteenth arc.It ended over a goat, of all things, one that had wandered into the space Cailurion and her cousin spent their mornings practicing spearcraft. He cousin promptly caught the goat and slaughtered it for dinner. Cailurion thought that perhaps they should ask the neighboring clan if it belonged to them––the red ribbon tied to its horn was a sign of their neighbors' ownership––but the problem was dead and cooking before she'd had her say.
When the neighboring clan came by that same day, the affair went as if by script.
The goat, it turned out, did not actually belong to them––it belonged to a Rharne trader who was staying as a guest of the Wyvarnth clan. That did nothing to sway the mind of Cailurion’s family; the goat had wandered into their land, even though it had possess a ribbon of ownership, and the cousin had committed no wrong. The elder members of the family refused to give up one of their own goats as recompense, and when Cailurion spoke out in favor of simply agreeing in order to settle the matter, she was reprimanded immediately. To agree would be to admit guilt, they said, and they had done nothing wrong.
Eventually the matter was brought to the Ivorian justice system, and then her family was ordered to give up a goat. In anger, they chose the oldest, weakest, most useless billy goat they had to give. The next day, their neighbors arrived with weapons in hand to take the entire herd. It was Cailurion's poor luck to be minding the herd that day.
Her enemies knew that she was young and also a voice of temperance, so they attacked one at a time to avoid humiliating her. She managed one victory, then two, and then the rest of her family came charging over the hill––with the Ivorian justices hot on their heels. The dueling came to a halt, and as the justices placed themselves between the feuding clans to regain some semblance of order, Cailurion's patience came to an end.
She threw down her weapon and her shepherd's crook, she turned around and she walked away.
Her sister and two distant cousins followed her, equally exasperated. Alongside them came two Wyvarnth from the neighboring clan.
The five Ithecal walked together for some while, stopping next to a river as the sun began to set and building camp. Cailurion's cousin and one of their neighbors took to the water to fish, while the rest built a fire and lay down beds of pine boughs to rest on. Her sister cooked, Cailurion and the other neighbor cleaned, and a quiet serenity settled over them all. There would be things to decide tomorrow, but for now there was peace.
They continued on to Yithiral the next morning, and upon arrival they learned that both of their families had chosen to leave the island entirely rather than admit any wrongdoing. Cailurion's cousin decided to go back and rejoin the clan, and the remaining four wished him well as they each tried to find their feet in the city. The two Wyvarnth bid farewell and went their own way, while Cailurion's sister quickly found work as a weaponsmith.
As for Cailurion herself, only one path lay ahead: the way to the barracks, and to her future.
Cailurion was alone, but she was not afraid. Years of family training earned quick entry to the Yithiral military. She moved through training quickly, her iron practicality allowing her to bend her pride when the goal was worthy and claim success where other, less yielding recruits would not. This adaptability earned the attention of several squad leaders, and in particular the attention of another young Paltharnum named Lazerius.
Lazerius was only a few arcs older than Cailurion, but had grown up around active military and already had enough field experience to become lieutenant of his squad. He also chose his goals over his pride, and was quicker to laugh than most Ithecal Cailurion had known while also remaining unwavering in his ideals. He took on the last cycles of Cailurion’s training as her personal mentor, and they fell into a physical relationship almost immediately. Though there were dozens of protocols against it, neither one found enough value in those rules to follow. They still stayed quiet about it.
Lazerius recommended Cailurion to his squad captain, and after her twentieth birthday she was on the battlefield. It was here she saw the mettle of non-Ithecal firsthand; their captain was a Lotharro devotee of Ethelynda, alongside two humans and a Biqaj. Contrary to her family’s complaints about the uselessness of non-Ithecal, Cailurion found steadfast, reliable companions in every one of her unit members; when the time came for action, they moved, fought and died as one.
At first they were auxiliary warriors, sent with goodwill to bolster allies against the Immortal Empire's expansion. They rarely stayed in one place for long, traveling from post to post on the Western mainland of Idalos and fighting alongside armies of all stripes. Some of their foriegn comrades were good men, others less so, and Cailurion came to better understand her own honor when faced with the dishonor of others. Above all, she witnessed the world outside the one she had known, and came to compare her own home to its neighbors. The notorious pride of the Ithecal came to feel less a virtue and more a weakness.
And then she was captured.
They had been assisting a distant outpost that claimed kinship to Rharne, alongside Rharne soldiers and a small collection of mercenaries. Their enemy was the Immortal Empire once again. They had withstood two long, bloody battles against all odds, when three quick surprise attacks scattered them across the countryside in the dead of night. Separated from her own unit, Cailurion and the few mercenaries she banded with were no match for the enemy; she fell at sunrise after failing to find her unit, and it was blood loss, exhaustion and a blow to the head that finally took her down.
She awoke in a medic's tent, her brother and mother looking down at her as they cleaned and mended their Imperial armor. Though dismayed and humiliated by her defeat, Cailurion realized quickly that she was in no danger despite the enemy banners strewn across the camp. She was still a prisoner, that much was clear, but with her family acting as guards she knew no undue harm would come to her.
After getting over the surprise and shame of her situation, her mother told the tale of what had happened since the family’s exile. They had roved for two years before being offered a place in the Immortal Empire. There had been dissent, resistance, and in the end the family split in half as some joined service under the Empress and others disappeared into the wilds. There was great honor to be found under Raskalarn, her mother said, because Raskalarn also believed that innate fact that all Ithecal knew to be true: that the world was somehow wrong, and it needed fixing. Ethelynda, while good and honorable, was not wise to the true nature of things and was both delaying the inevitable and wasting the Ithecal people on pointless alliances.
Most surprising of all, her mother admitted with a bowed head that she might have been unjust in their treatment of their old neighbors, and that perhaps cooperation could have been better.
Cailurion slept that night not knowing what to believe. When she woke, she agreed to travel to Korlasir once the battle was won––and her mother spoke without doubt when she assured victory.
That night, Cailurion experienced ambush once again.
In the last precious few days, the mercenaries, Ivorians and Rharne forces had gathered for one decisive strike against the exhausted Imperial Army. Horses were set loose, tents set ablaze, sleeping soldiers woken by shouts and the sounds of steel, and on instinct Cailurion took up her spear and rushed into the fray––though for which side became meaningless.
Her armor was still Ivorian, but she fought alongside her Imperial mother and brother; in the confusion she spilled blood from both sides in forced self-defense. Cailurion lost track of her mother for just a few moments, then turned back to find her on her knees with an Ivorian soldier's sword in her chest.
Cailurion had no thought but vengeance, no fuel but grief, and her spear was longer than his sword––his body hit the ground mere moments after her mother's, and then his battered helmet fell away to reveal a battered Lazerius as the life faded from his eyes.
There were no winners in that battle. Both sides were broken, both commanders dead and nothing left for either to gain. Both sides scraped together what few survivors they had left and retreated. Cailurion walked the middle ground that morning, feet refusing to go after one army or the other. They both felt wrong––pointless––although she could not say why.
Lazerius’ warhorse found her as the sun rose, tack and armor still covered in ash and missing a shoe but otherwise unharmed. His remaining possessions were still in the bag, organized as carefully as ever, and Cailurion couldn’t bring herself to send the horse one way or the other.
So she chose neither. The horse allowed her to mount, and she took them both away from the battlefield––away from Ivorian and the Immortal Empire, with no destination in mind besides not them. She was tired of traditions and worthy causes. She was finished with proud traditions that crippled progress. Her ambition craved action, and above all, truth.
And all Cailurion knew for certain was that her truth lay somewhere beyond the horizon.
Housing
Has wandered to Ne'haer, possessing a tent and horse.
Knowledge & Skills
| Skill | Points Acquired | Total Points Spent | Proficiency |
| Polearms: Spear | 25/100 | (25/251) | Novice |
| Endurance | 25/100 | (25/100) | Novice |
| Shield Combat | 15/100 | NA: FT | Novice |
| Mount | 10/100 | (10/251) | Novice |
Skill Point Ledger
| Thread or Skill Name | Points Awarded | Points Spent | Running Total |
| Endurance [RB} | 25[RB] | 25 | 00 |
| Starting Package | 50 | 00 | 50 |
| Polearms: Spear | .. | 25 | 25 |
| Shield Combat | .. | 15 | 10 |
| Mount | .. | 10 | 0 |
Marks Section
Items
- Chainmail armor, greaves and gauntlets (mid-grade)
- Combat spear (good)
- Heater shield (good, medium)
- Dagger (good)
- bedroll
- two-person tent
- Tinderbox
- Whetstone
- Soap
- Razor
- Tin plate, spoon and fork
- 2 water skins
- Standard shirt, pants, stockings, underwear
- Small backpack
- Bundle of 15 cloth bandage strips w/holding clips
- Needle and thread
- 3-use vial of antiseptic alcohol
- Single-use vial of strong local anesthetic
- 1 tourniquet kit
- saddle and blanket
- bit and bridle
- medium saddlebags
- full leather barding
Ledger
| Item | Debit | Credit |
| Starting Package | ... | 60gn |
| bedroll | 5gn | 55gn |
| 2-person tent | 30gn | 25gn |
| ... | ... | ... |
| ... | ... | ... |
| ... | ... | ... |
Total Currency: 0 ON, 25 GN, 0 SN, 0 CN
Renown Ledger
| Item/ Thread | Renown | Total |
| Starting Race | +/- 10 | Total |
| Starting Race in City | +/- 10 | Total |
| Starting Profession (if applicable) | +/- 10 | Total |
| ... | ... | ... |
| ... | ... | ... |
| ... | ... | ... |
Thread List
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