Age: 45
Gender: Female
Appearance:
Lithe and elegant, Talyn moves with a serene and steady grace. She has a warm smile for those who show her kindness and a deadly calm stare for those who threaten her or those she seeks to protect. She was obviously young and beautiful, once, but that was long ago. Her auburn hair lacks the luster it once held and her smile is worn. The perceptive can see the caution in her brown eyes and the tension in her hands, as she is constantly ready to unleash a terrible onslaught of magic if need be, and this constant vigilance has furthered tired her over the years. Layers of thick robes, finely made but worn and mud spattered with age, conceal pale skin and a hood often obscures her face.
Allegiance: Unaligned, for the moment. Talyn sympathizes with her fellow mages and knows that their situation cannot last, but fears the destruction that the vengeful younger generation of her kind may cause if they war against the king. However, she has no love for the king or those who hunt mages in his name, having slain many of the latter. She will always rise to the defense of the innocent, mageborn or not.
Strengths: Naturally gifted in magic, with the training and discipline to further reinforce that arcane strength. She has studied many forms of magic of the years, though some come more easily than others. As an experienced priestess, she has formed her own spellwork over the years, a dark and dangerous shadow magic fueled by grief and rage, difficult to control but decisively deadly. A life on the road has given her a good sense of direction and she knows how to use the local plants and herbs to make various potions. Her politeness and warm smile can also be quite charming, allowing her to talk her way into friendships or out of trouble.
Weaknesses: Time, tragedy, and hard travel have taken it’s toll. Talyn is certainly no young knight and often needs to rely on her magic to sustain herself physically, and she has difficulty walking long distances without her staff.Constant conflict wearies her, but her wrath, when it is rarely unleashed, is a dreadful storm of magic that she often has difficulty relenting from once it has begun. She fears that she will one day lose control of her magical powers in a furious rage, proving the king right.
Personality: With a kind heart and a thirst for knowledge and how to use it best to help others, Talyn’s path to becoming a priestess was obvious. However, the sudden downfall of the mages hardened her. While she is friendly and polite to all who she meets, she rarely trusts fully, and has not taken to making close friends in a long time, after witnessing the deaths of far too many friends and teachers. She is still committed to aiding others, but more cautious in who she offers her magical aid to. She is calm and level headed, but will unleash a terrible wrath of magic to anyone who harms the people who aid her or the mage hunters that try to harm her and her kind. Discipline and responsibility in the use of magic are of the utmost importance to her, along with using magic to help and not harm whenever possible.
(Go all out. I want to know exactly what this person is like, how they tick, etc. Give me a good two paragraphs, at least.)
Likes: Teaching, learning, and otherwise encouraging the spread of knowledge, helping others, proving that the slander against mages is false.
Dislikes: Cruelty, brute force, killing, irresponsibility, ignorance. His Majesty the King and his mage hunters.
Bio: Born to mage parents, Talyn was raised in with an insatiable love for knowledge. Given her parentage, Talyn’s affinity for magic was evident from a young age and only increased the more she studied and practiced. Far too curious to limit herself to one aspect of magic, Talyn studied every tome and spellbook she could find. While she was still rather young at the time when magic became outlawed, Talyn was already an accomplished mage and studying to become a priestess. She continued this study even while the hierarchy and system of mages collapsed, traveling from teacher to teacher and trading spellbooks with other mages. However, traveling with other mages often only lead to their demise, and Talyn soon ventured out on her own with little more than her robes, provisions, and a few journals and spellbooks of dark magic. Her parents she has not heard from in many years, along with the close friends and teachers that she once knew. She wandered from village to village, exchanging potions and healing spells for food and shelter, constantly evading those who would harm her. Talyn has passed through the larger camps and caravans of mages, long enough to pass on lessons or spellbooks and exchange information with her peers. However, Talyn is wary of the younger generation that has been raised with a festering hate of the king and she fears their vengeance will turn them to a reckless and destructive use of their magic. She continues to wander, meditating on what may be done to save what is left of the mages without plummeting the land into a bloody war.
Other: While Talyn has been solitary in the past, she understands and dreads the likely chance of a war between the mages and the king’s forces. She has yet to decide how she will respond, knowing that reckless magic will devastate the land and kill countless people, all the while war is likely to bleed away what mages are left and only prove the king right of their danger.