Maelis Ironvale - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Maelis Ironvale

Nickname

The Painted Blade

Race (Grade)

Human (E)

Class

Barbarian

Height

5'9"

Birthday

Stormhowl 20, 1279

Age

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Birthsign

The Glacial Wendigo

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Maelis Ironvale, camped outside Silmarithil

Appearance

Maelis is 5'9" of hard-earned muscle under sun-warmed olive skin, dark hair worn loose and long even in a fight because she has never once let anyone convince her to cut it for convenience. She favors battered leather harness-work over anything that would slow her down, scarred at the shoulder and forearm in ways that read as history rather than accident, and most people who meet her expecting a gladiator's rough edges are thrown by how carefully put together she is otherwise: clean brows, a steady hand with color at her lips and eyes, jewelry she chose rather than inherited. People say she doesn't look like a fighter. They generally only make that mistake once.

Unique Characteristics

Maelis will not leave a room, a tent, or a fight without checking her own reflection first, not out of vanity but out of something closer to a ritual: she spent years being told exactly how she was allowed to look, and every deliberate brushstroke of color she puts on herself now is hers alone to decide. She goes very quiet and very still in the moments right before real violence, a stillness people who don't know her find more unsettling than shouting would be, and her hands, when idle, tend to drift to whatever blade is nearest the way other people's drift to a fidgeting habit.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Fiercely, protectively loyal once she trusts you
Disciplined training routine, rain or shine
Genuinely tender with anyone smaller or weaker
Meticulous about her own appearance, always
Honest to a fault about what she's capable of

Challenging Traits

Assumes control is being taken until proven otherwise
Goes cold and silent before she goes violent
Struggles to accept help without suspecting a price
Trains until her hands bleed rather than sit still
Terrified of her own temper more than anyone else's

He liked to say I was his masterpiece. I corrected that opinion permanently.

I paint my face before a fight because it's still mine to decorate. He never understood that part.

I'm not looking for a cage with better lighting. I'm looking for a fight that ends when I say it ends.

Likes

A clean, decisive win with no ambiguity
Doing her own hair before anything else that day
Being underestimated right up until she isn't
Quiet mornings with nowhere she has to be
Anyone who asks before they touch her things

Dislikes

Being told to calm down
Men who mistake gentleness for permission
Unsolicited advice about her own safety
Debts she didn't ask to owe
Silence that feels like the one before he'd start

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Background & History

What Kristofferson Saw

Maelis made her name fighting in Kristofferson's unlicensed pit circuits, the kind of fights the City Watch mostly leaves alone as long as the betting stays quiet and the bodies stay breathing, tucked into the same Undercity corners better known for smuggling than sport. She was good, and she knew it, and for a few years that was the whole of her life: training, fighting, winning, and the particular high of being unmistakably the most dangerous person in any room she walked into.

Draeus

She met Draeus Kellenmoor at the edge of the pits, a spectator who never once wanted to fight her himself and instead spent two years teaching her, patiently and then not patiently at all, that being the most dangerous person in the room meant nothing at home. It started as opinions about her training. Then her friends. Then her face, her clothes, the color at her lips he decided he preferred she stop wearing. She endured it the way she'd endured every hit that ever taught her something in the ring, certain she could out-strategize it, right up until she understood she couldn't.

The Night It Ended

The last fight of Maelis's life in Kristofferson wasn't in a pit and had no crowd. She has told almost no one the details and does not intend to. What's true is that Draeus did not survive it, that she left his rooms within the hour, and that she was three streets from the city gate before the City Watch had even been called. She has heard nothing since about whether the case was ever formally closed, and she has decided not to find out.

Silmarithil

She chose Silmarithil because it was quiet, forested, and about as far from an arena as she could imagine building a life, which lasted almost exactly as long as it took her body to remember what it actually wants. The itch to fight has come back stronger every week she's been here, and she has been careful not to let it out on anyone in a city that took her in without asking questions. She has heard, with real relief, that nearby Goodberry keeps an arena of its own.

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Goals & Aspirations

A Legitimate Fight

Maelis intends to make her way to Goodberry's arena and fight there properly, openly, for an audience and a purse rather than a back-alley crowd, before the pressure building in her finds a worse outlet closer to home. She hasn't worked out yet how to explain a Kristofferson pit record to anyone who'd actually ask for one.

Not Becoming Him

More quietly, Maelis is watching herself for any sign that the control she craves in the ring is starting to bleed into how she treats the few people she's let close since Kristofferson. She killed one man for trying to own her. She has promised herself, with a specificity that scares her a little, that she will never become someone another person has to do the same thing to.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Gladiator

ATTENTION!

Maelis Ironvale is a trained, extremely dangerous fighter who does not currently look the part, and that gap has gotten more than one person in real trouble underestimating her. She is also, quietly, a fugitive: she killed her abusive ex-partner in Kristofferson in what was unambiguously self-defense, but fled before the City Watch could open a formal investigation, and has no idea whether anyone is still looking for her. She has told almost no one in Silmarithil the full truth. She is not currently dangerous to the city she's chosen, but the need to fight is building in her by the week, and she knows it.