Linweylan - Finished

Physical Description:
Not being the sort interested in fighting, Linweylan’s body is not as hardened as those of the warriors she suddenly feels surrounded by. Having never left the elves’ forest, and hardly leaving her own city before, her skin is soft and unused to hardship. Her eyes are green tinted with yellow, her favorite color, and watch her surroundings with a constant, quiet curiosity that never abates. Her hair—buttercup yellow—ripples down nearly to her ankles. It’s unwieldy, inconvenient and vain and she loves it all the more because her life does not require her to shorten it. Most of the time it hangs loosely or the front is bound back and out of her face. On occasion she’ll grow long, pale orange lily petals through it, but only for celebrations.

Linweylan almost always wears fine, simply cut dresses of all the warmest colors—red, orange, yellow, gold, violet—because she likes the ease of wearing them, not having to fuss with multiple layers as men do. She goes barefoot as much as possible, even when it’s too cold to reasonably do so, and it is one of the more foolish things she consistently does.

Personality:
Linweylan has never cared for violence, and never taught herself to fight. She believes that any altercation can be solved without physical violence if those at the heads of it care to explore their abilities. Of course, she is adequately versed in magic, which can easily be used for a violence all its own, one that so many men and women cannot defend themselves against. She is determined that she won’t be used in the mounting tension between peoples and even within nations, so she’s made a point not to learn how to use her talents for the harming of others. She knows she could, if threatened, find the uses of her talents with plant life to protect herself or others, but she dearly wishes not to have to.

Her second passion, and more blatant, is her love of the sky. Its many shades, the way it looks yellow when the sun shines through it just right in the morning, the way it turns the air indigo just before the night comes in summer, the clouds, the rain, the hail, the snow, and especially the storms. She can stand for hours watching it change, and often has. Those who know her are well accustomed to coming up on her standing in a seemingly random location with her head thrown back, her hair nearly trailing on the ground, watching the clouds billow and breathe and shrink. She likes to toy with raindrops as they fall, turning them and sending them fluttering around others for fun.

Linweylan strongly disapproves of conflict, but when she feels she is being slighted she will lift her chin and quietly impress upon the other the importance of respect where it is due. Just because she is quiet does not give others the right to take advantage of that trait, she says, and she will not forgive them for doing so in an effort to establish domination. Plays of power have never interested her, even if she knows the importance of arranging and maintaining a hierarchy within a nation and within each facet of that nation’s organization. Her parents wish her to take a stronger interest in politics, which, for the most part only serve to make her head and heart ache, and she is putting every effort forth to understand and follow each flow and eddy of how power moves so that she can avoid disappointing them; already they believe she is soft to the point of weakness, and vulnerability they will not tolerate in their child.

Linweylan only wishes that her parents realized that softness of heart or voice does not equate to weakness of spirit. Linweylan is open enough with the people she’s comfortable with, she just doesn’t see the need to speak unless she has something important to say, and surrounded by such forceful people who speak only to further themselves or hide others makes her wish even more to fade into the sun so they don’t notice her and feel that they need to smother her, too. And, despite her adoration of her close world and her warm home, she is increasingly curious about what lies outside of their vast forest, though she hasn’t the courage to venture out of it on her own.


Habits:
She keeps a wide dish of crabs in her room as pets, tying small things into her hair so she won’t forget them.

Skills:
Influencing plants, manipulation of small amounts of water, singing (both for magic and for pleasure), patience, knowing when to speak and knowing when to be silent, separating pertinent information from the superfluous, recognizing significant facts out of the insignificant.

History:
Linweylan didn’t open her eyes immediately upon waking in the larger world of air than the one her mother had provided for her. At first her parents worried, but when they finally opened and her sight proved just as sharp as any other elf’s, their worries dissipated.

As a child she showed little interest in the studies that most royal families made their focus, and her lessons on foreign wars past and present, as well as the future, along with studies of human and elven hierarchies progressed only when she could not convince her teachers to abandon them completely. Her father--a member of the Elder Council--worried that she would not fare well in the Game on account of her disinterest in the distributions and machinations of power, and her mother worried that she would wander her way into the sort of ambiguous territory that every elf felt a natural sourness toward, as they had no way to know where her loyalties would shift when the girl was disinclined to have loyalties to anyone in particular past her family at all.

At twenty-five she and the handful of other of-age elves from the forest traversed the desert for Ilirea to study magic. The Riders fascinated her, the way the few she had known previously either no longer seemed quite as whole as they had been before—having given some obscure and unseen part of themselves to their dragons—and how others appeared to be more. Not just in learning, which of course they received even past the tutoring she saw, but how their personalities had acquired a slightly different tilt. As though the elf had been a hawk to begin with, but now he had a lead on his leg tying him to another, and that other provided the perspective from which the new Rider saw all things. Linweylan wondered if they were glad of the changes or resented them, and wondered how she would have reacted if she had been chosen. Knowing her aversion to conflict, she expected poorly.

She wasn’t the one to notice her affinity with growing things. That had been one of the Riders, remarking one day upon how she’d noticed that when Linweylan sang, the flowers in the garden turned their heads to listen to her. At first the girl shook her head, still uncertain of the thrumming she could feel in her own skin when she sang certain ways. She called a mouse to her hand, elated that her language allowed her to do so, and sat for hours petting the tiny creature and thinking about what the Rider had said. Before she left at the end of her tutelage, Linweylan had learned how to sing an entirely furnished home out of the earth in a matter of days, bedding the floors with moss, hanging the ceiling with flowering vines, and lining the windows with cooking herbs.

Upon returning to Ellesmera Linweylan grew to an age when certain responsibilities became expected of her, such as the sort of responsibilities her father wanted to give her, and the sort of solid opinions her mother wanted her to have, her father finally threatened to begin directing others to come to her with their disputes and interrogations whenever he was out of the city. As he ran the day-to-day affairs of the capitol city, there would be many people coming to her expecting her to provide solutions, punishments and decrees that she did not feel comfortable handling. At present, her mother peaceably handled the verbal transactions with grace and tact. Linweylan was gladly left out of the intricacies she didn’t want to learn the full nature of.

Until her hundred and tenth year, when her father made true on his promise after discovering she had spent two full days and the nights between weaving a young willow and the vines within and below it into a green mass that perfectly expressed the twisting nature of the winds and the clouds in a thunderstorm. Then he promptly left for four weeks to Luthvira and every day at least a dozen men and women irritably sought Linweylan out to demand her ruling on how this man should be punished for stealing, the proper inflection of the taxes during a holiday, how to properly bestow a gift upon a family who had done them an insult, and all of the other miserable battles of politics and policy that she never wanted any part in.

Now, three years into the wretched affair, she handles her father’s workings and rulings nearly as well as he does, and hates every desolate minute of them. The only member of her family who let her take her interests wherever she found them was young Evandar. Linweylan had been born of the nobility already, but when Queen Dellanir absconded for Luthvira, her importance shifted sideways, the members of the royal family rustling about to fill the gap left by the dowager queen. Linweylan, child-king Evanar’s closest cousin, was also one of the king’s favorite family members, being the only one who never asked him to answer difficult questions.

Roleplaying Sample:
--See Tellenani Valaician--