Draya Deadly - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Draya Deadly

Nickname

None

Race (Grade)

Demonkin (E)

Class

Sorceress

Height

5'10"

Birthday

Heatwave 17, 1276

Age

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Birthsign

The Phoenixborn Ifrit

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Bloodline Ability

🔮Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Draya Deadly, Sorceress

Draya Deadly is the kind of woman who walks into a room and makes the room aware of it. Her skin is a deep, burnished crimson, the color of coals near the point of going dark, and her horns curve upward in a sweeping arc, wrapped at the base and along the ridges with gold bands and rings she selected herself, for no reason she has ever needed to explain. Her hair is white going silver, long and loose, the kind of hair that has never been restrained for anyone else's comfort. Her eyes are a pale, unwavering amber that catches light in the way that fire catches light: it looks still from a distance and reveals itself as constantly moving when you get close enough to see.

Her right hand, when she raises it, carries flame the way other people carry an idle thought. It does not flicker the way fire is supposed to. It holds itself too still, too contained, like something that knows its situation and is choosing to wait. The rings on both hands are gold, three and four to a finger in places, heavy things that catch the light and declare without embarrassment that she has spent money on herself and intends to continue doing so. On her right forearm rests Gimber, her raven, who is deeply black and large enough to be taken seriously. He sits with the posture of something that has chosen its perch and will not be reconsidering.

She dresses in black: an off-shoulder cut that the cold cannot persuade her to change, layered with dark fur at the sleeves, cinched at the waist with a wide belt and a blood-red gem at the center. The slit in the skirt goes high enough to be intentional. There is nothing careless about how she presents herself, but neither is there anything calculated toward anyone else's approval. She looks like what she is: a woman who has arrived at her own sense of herself after a hard journey, decorated it the way she wanted to decorate it, and stopped asking for opinions on the subject.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Gives respect freely once it's offered to her first
Honest to the point of plainness; never softens the truth
Judges people by character, not by rank or title
Fiercely loyal to those she chooses to claim as hers
Dry, deadpan humor that lands if you're paying attention
Utterly tender with Gimber, exempt from every hard edge

Challenging Traits

Treats disrespect as a personal offense, minor or not
Her magic answers to emotion more than to her command
Rarely asks for help; old habit of having no one to ask
The gap in her memory is a wound she navigates, not heals

"Keep your hands to yourself. I'll only say it once, and the second time I won't use words."

"I don't know what I was before. But I know exactly what I am now. That's enough. It's more than most people manage."

"Gimber doesn't like you. I've learned to trust his opinion over most people's introductions."

Likes

Gimber (Non-Negotiable, Entirely)
Small Towns That Mind Their Own Business
Candles (She Finds Them Calming, Will Not Explain Why)
Warm Evenings, Especially Near Open Flame
People Who Say What They Mean on the First Try
Being Left Alone Without Anyone Making It Weird
A Good View From High Ground

Dislikes

Men Who Mistake Her Patience for Permission
Nobles as a Category (With Occasional Exceptions)
Being Asked Where She Is From
People Who Treat Demonkin Heritage as a Talking Point
Cold Weather (It Makes Her Irritable and She Knows It)
Anything That Threatens Gimber

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Background & History

The Field

The first memory she has is sensory: the smell of ash, grass against her cheek, her own hands in front of her face, and the absolute absence of any knowledge of who she was. The bodies around her were cold by the time she woke, which means whatever had happened, had happened hours before she opened her eyes. She lay still for a while, listening for anything that was still moving. Nothing moved. She stood up. She did not know her own name, her own age, where she had come from, or why she was the one who had survived whatever had turned the field into what it was. She made a list of things she knew: she was Demonkin, she was a woman, and the smoke on the horizon was from the direction she had not been lying in. She walked toward a city. She decided this counted as a plan and she would refine it as she went. She has never, in all the years since, been able to add a single fact to what she knew in that field.

The Name That Fit

She went by no name for the first several months, and eventually accepted a placeholder that a kindly innkeeper offered, something common and forgettable that she wore like ill-fitting clothes. She learned she could do things with fire; she learned this the way most people learn about inherited abilities, which is before they fully understand the implications. She kept her head down and worked. She was good with her hands and her magic, as she began to understand it, was precise when she was calm and expansive when she was not. She stayed calm. She found work. She lived quietly for a while, until the quiet stopped working. The first noble who confused her existence in his city for an invitation made his assumptions known in a way that did not leave much room for misinterpretation. The manor burned that night. She did not stay to see the morning. Two cities later, in a tavern, she heard a bard performing a children's verse about Draya Deadly, a murderous ghost who burned the homes of the wicked and left nothing behind but ash and the smell of sulfur. She listened through the whole song. Then she told the innkeeper her name.

The Reputation

She did not seek trouble after the name. The name found her trouble instead, the way names sometimes do once they begin to travel. She moved frequently, tried to keep her head down, and was intermittently unsuccessful when the wrong sort of person decided that her reputation was a challenge to be answered or an excuse to escalate. She is not proud of the number of noble estates that ended up as structural losses during this period. She is also not ashamed of it. The people who died in those buildings had made specific choices that involved her, and those choices had consequences. She has processed this with a particular clarity that is either moral courage or a gap in her emotional architecture, and she has never been entirely sure which, and she has decided it does not matter. What matters is that she is still here and they are not, and she would like to continue that pattern by living somewhere quiet where nobody needs to be made an example of.

Gimber

He appeared on her windowsill one morning in a city she was already planning to leave. He was large and deeply black and he looked at her with the expression of a creature that has assessed the situation and found it acceptable. She did not name him immediately. She put out some dried bread and went back to sleep and in the morning he was still there, and the name arrived fully formed when she looked at him directly: Gimber. She does not know where the name came from. It does not match anything she can trace. She has sat with this fact many times, turning it over, looking for a fragment of something that might explain it. There is nothing there. He is just Gimber, in the way that some things simply are what they are, and the name was correct from the moment it landed, and she has never once considered a different one. She packed him when she left that city and has not gone anywhere without him since. He rides her arm or her shoulder and does not bite people without what Draya considers adequate provocation.

Goodberry

She had heard about it at a crossroads inn, described by a passing merchant as a quiet farming town with a ruling family that actually seemed to care about the people in it, and a general atmosphere of minding-your-own-business that the merchant found boring and she found like water in a drought. She had also heard it was small enough that strangers were noticed, which was not ideal, and far enough from the cities she had made enemies in that the noticing was unlikely to escalate. She arrived with no announcement, rented a room, and spent the first week watching to see what kind of place it was. She determined it was the kind of place where people grew things and raised things and had meals together and did not, by and large, have the particular variety of ambition that had caused her so many problems elsewhere. She has not made any promises about staying. She has not made any promises about leaving either. She is here, she is trying the quiet, and she is prepared to be persuaded that it suits her.

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Goals & Aspirations

Peace

Not the absence of conflict, exactly, but the absence of the specific kind of conflict she has been living inside for years: the constant low-level assessment of who in a room might become a problem, the maintenance of enough distance from everyone that a fast exit remains possible, the particular exhaustion of being a woman with a name and a reputation in a world where neither of those things is free. She wants to wake up in the same place for long enough that the place begins to feel like something she chose rather than something she landed in. Goodberry is a first attempt at this. She is trying not to hold it too loosely in case it doesn't work, and trying not to hold it too tightly for the same reason.

The Field

She has never stopped turning it over. She does not talk about it because there is nothing to say that does not lead to questions she cannot answer, and she has learned that questions she cannot answer make people uncomfortable, and people who are uncomfortable become unpredictable. But somewhere beneath all of it is the thing she has never stopped wanting: to know. Not necessarily everything, not even the most of it. Just enough. Was she responsible for what happened? Did she survive it, or was she somehow apart from it? Is there a name attached to who she was before, and if there is, would she recognize it? She has no active plan for finding answers. She simply hasn't stopped hoping that one day an answer will find her, the way Gimber found her on that windowsill, already decided, already arrived.

Control

She has never been trained. Everything she knows about her fire she learned through proximity to crisis, which is the worst possible curriculum and also, in her case, the only one available. She can hold a flame steady in an open hand for hours. She can also, under the wrong circumstances, produce a result that is significantly larger than she intended. This is the thing she does not discuss and does not advertise. She is not afraid of her magic. She respects it the way you respect something powerful that you do not fully understand, which means carefully and with honest attention to its limits. She would like to find someone who can teach her more. She is not optimistic about this, and she is not holding her breath, but she has not given up on the idea either.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Goodberry

Role

Sorceress

ATTENTION!

Draya Deadly is E-Grade, but her fire magic is an anomaly at that tier. It operates on emotional resonance rather than trained channeling, which means it does not follow the expected output curve for her grade. Under calm conditions she is controlled and precise. Under emotional stress, particularly perceived threat or genuine anger, her output has historically exceeded what an E-Grade caster should be capable of producing. The cause of the event that left her with no memory and surrounded by dead bodies is unknown, and she herself is an unreliable source on the subject by necessity. She presents no threat to Goodberry's residents under foreseeable circumstances. However, the gap in her history is real and unresolved, and may be relevant to whatever produced her. She is not dangerous because she is cruel. She is dangerous because her power is genuine and her training is nonexistent, and she has no more idea what her ceiling is than anyone else does.