Mareikura - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Mareikura (no surname)

Nickname

Marei

Race (Grade)

Human (D)

Class

Hunter/Rogue

Height

5'6"

Birthday

Stormhowl 3, 1285

Age

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Birthsign

The Stormghast

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Mareikura, Hunter of the Dreadwood

Appearance

Mareikura moves low and close to the ground even when she doesn't need to, a hunter's habit that never quite switched off. Ta moko spirals cover her shoulders, arms, and one thigh, earned marks of lineage and accomplishment in the old Vaitafe way, dark against sun-deepened skin, and she wears little beyond what a hunt actually requires: wrapped leather, a carved pendant on a cord at her throat, a curved bone-handled knife never far from her hand. Her dark hair is kept back and out of the way, and her eyes have the flat, measuring stillness of someone who spent a very long time somewhere with nothing to look at.

Unique Characteristics

She reads a room the way she'd read a treeline: exits first, threats second, everything else after. Even at rest, some part of her stays coiled, and she startles less at loud noises than at being touched without warning. She does not fill silences with talk. Most people meet her and walk away with maybe six words to remember her by. The people she trusts get considerably more.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Reads a jungle or a room without a wasted glance
Fiercely loyal once she decides to trust you
Dry, cutting wit once the silence finally breaks
Never panics, even when everything falls apart

Challenging Traits

Says almost nothing until she's decided you're safe
Struggles to trust her own memory of the lost years
Uncomfortable in cities, crowds, and closed rooms
Keeps quiet score of who's earned her trust

I don't talk much. Talking is loud. Loud gets you killed.

Trust me and I'll get you home. Annoy me and I'll still get you home. Just slower, and you'll hear about it the whole way.

Three years, they tell me. Feels like nothing. Feels like everything. I've stopped trying to decide which.

Likes

The Dreadwood's noise at night, oddly comforting
A blade that's actually sharp when she needs it
Rokoura's tattoo fale and its patient artists
Silence that doesn't need to be filled

Dislikes

Being asked to retell what she can't remember
Loud, careless movement through open jungle
Condolences about people she can't recall
Being pitied instead of trusted

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Background & History

Vaitafe, Before

Mareikura was raised in the village of Vaitafe on the coast west of Oraeus, taught to track, trap, and move through the Dreadwood Jungle before she was taught much else. Hunting wasn't a trade there so much as a rite; she earned the first of her ta moko young, and expected to earn many more. She has no memory of thinking her life would ever look any different than that.

The Hunt That Never Ended

In Goldenleaf of 1303, Mareikura was deep in the Dreadwood chasing a jaguar, well outside Vaitafe's walls, when the sky and the sea both seemed to recoil at once. She never saw what hit her. Something struck her from behind, vast and wrong and the color of a bruise, and the last true memory she has of her old life is the forest floor coming up to meet her. She did not know it then, but that same night, a hundred-foot horror born of Oraeus's corrupted eldritch power fell on Vaitafe and Ahorangi both, and her home stopped existing.

The Space Between

What came after has no real shape in her memory: a void, grey and lifeless, without hunger or cold or the passage of anything she could call time. She does not know where she was or what held her there, only that it did not feel like sleep and it did not feel like death, and that she has learned not to trust her own account of it too firmly. She has come to think of it less as a memory and more as an absence with her name on it.

Waking in Goodberry

The void ended without warning. Mareikura appeared in Goodberry with no explanation of her own, disoriented and combat-ready in the same breath, after a party of adventurers completed whatever task or trial had held the means of her release and chose, as their reward, to see her freed. Whether that release had anything to do with Oraeus's own recent liberation from King Verin Nightwhisper, the same corrupt regime that unleashed the horror that took her home, no one has yet confirmed. Goodberry's people were the ones who had to tell her that nearly three years had passed, and that Vaitafe no longer stood.

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Goals & Aspirations

Coming Home to Rokoura

Once she'd recovered enough to travel, Mareikura went where every surviving Vaitafe eventually goes: Rokoura, built in no small part by two of the last people who could still call themselves her people. She is glad, plainly and without much need to explain it further, to be somewhere that still speaks her language and marks the old holidays. It is not Vaitafe. It is the closest thing left.

The Names She Lost

Mareikura wants access to Te Whare Whakapapa, Rokoura's living archive of Vaitafe lineage, to find out plainly which names from her old life are recorded among the dead and which, however unlikely, might not be. She has not asked yet. She is not entirely sure she wants the answer confirmed instead of merely feared.

Back to the Trees

She wants to hunt again, properly, and has quietly offered her tracking and stealth to Rokoura as a scout rather than sit idle while she reorients herself. Being still is the hardest part of being back. Moving through green cover with a blade in hand is the only thing that has felt entirely like herself since she woke.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Rokoura

Role

Hunter

Relationships

Aroha Taringa

Elder, Fellow Survivor

Nari Te'Ahi

Keeper of Vaitafe Lineage

Matiu Ahorangi-kore

Fellow Survivor, Understands the Loss

ATTENTION!

Mareikura is far more dangerous than her silence suggests. A D-grade Hunter/Rogue, she can track, vanish, and close distance before most people register she's in the room with them. She is also missing nearly three years of her own life and does not fully trust her own memory of the gap. Do not press her for details she can't give you, and do not mistake her quiet for an absence of a plan.