Morwenna Vesperis - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Morwenna Vesperis

Nickname

The Highest Bidder

Race (Grade)

Human (D)

Class

Warlock

Height

5'7"

Birthday

Harvestide 20, 1159

Age

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Birthsign

The Mist Chimera

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Bloodline Ability

🔮Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Morwenna Vesperis, watching a battlefield decide whether it can afford her

Appearance

At well over a hundred years old and firmly D-grade, Morwenna looks not a day past her early twenties, and she has stopped finding that ironic. Her hair is long, dark, and wild, fading from black to a deep violet at its tips the way smoke fades into shadow, and her eyes hold that same violet, a color that seems to catch firelight even in rooms with none. Her features are striking rather than soft, sharp cheekbones, a mouth that settles more naturally into a smirk than a smile, and a gaze that most people find very difficult to hold for long. She dresses like the war she's usually walking toward matters more than the room she's currently standing in: dark leather and gold-trimmed plate cut for movement over modesty, black feathered pauldrons, amethyst drops at her ears that match the color her magic burns.

Unique Characteristics

When Morwenna calls on her power, it answers as violet flame, curling around her hands and forearms without ever quite touching her skin, cold to the eye and anything but cold to whoever it's aimed at. She rarely bothers to hide it as a show of restraint; if a room is tense enough to need a reminder of what she is, she'd rather it just know. She does not age the way most people expect a hundred and forty-some years to show, and she has long since stopped explaining that to anyone who asks. Those who spend real time around her start to notice she watches doorways more than conversations, and has an old habit, from a very old life, of always knowing exactly where the nearest exit is.

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Personality & Temperament

Morwenna is exactly as much trouble as she looks like, and she has never once tried to soften that impression for anyone's comfort. She is blunt, transactional, openly motivated by coin, and entirely unbothered by whatever anyone thinks that says about her character. Kings have called her mercenary to her face expecting to wound her with the word. She has thanked them for the accurate assessment and quoted them a higher rate. Underneath the performance of it, and it is partly performance, is someone who has been doing this long enough to have very little patience left for people who waste her time, insult her intelligence, or mistake her price for the whole of what she is.

What most of her employers never see, and most of her rare friends eventually do, is that Morwenna has been looking for something for a very long time, longer than most of the wars she's fought have lasted combined, and she has no intention of discussing what it is with anyone who hasn't earned that particular conversation. It shows, if you know to look for it, in the way she goes quiet in cities she's never visited before, listening for something under the ordinary noise of the place. Silmarithil, apparently, had something worth listening to.

Positive Traits

Ferociously competent in absolutely everything she does
Never breaks a contract once the coin has changed hands
Reads a battlefield the way most people read a room
Entirely fearless in front of kings, and worse than kings
Surprisingly generous to the few who earn her respect

Challenging Traits

Blunt to the point of open cruelty
Openly, unapologetically motivated by money
Contemptuous of anyone she considers beneath her
Impossible to read when she doesn't want to be read
Restless in a way she refuses to explain to anyone

You want to know my price? You already know my price. Everyone always has enough, they just don't want to admit it until the battle's half lost.

I could leave this world behind tomorrow and become something this sky was never built to hold. I'm still here. Draw your own conclusions.

Yes, I saw your summons. I'll get around to it. I'm not in a hurry.

Likes

Large sums of coin paid promptly and in full
A battle everyone else has already given up on
Being underestimated right up until she isn't
Kings who beg prettier than they negotiate
Silence, when she's finally allowed to have it

Dislikes

Being asked why she hasn't moved on already
Cowards who hire her instead of fighting themselves
Patrons who try to renegotiate after the fact
Being cast as anyone's morally-grey love interest
Questions about where she actually comes from

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Background & History

No One Asks Where She's From

Morwenna does not discuss where she was born, who taught her, or what the first several decades of her very long life looked like, and she has become extremely practiced at redirecting anyone who tries to find out. What's known is what can be observed: she is old enough that entire kingdoms have risen and fallen in her adult lifetime, and skilled enough that none of that time appears to have been spent standing still. She arrives in a place fully formed, does the work she's there to do, and leaves before anyone gets close enough to ask the questions she doesn't answer.

The Turning Tide

Morwenna's reputation was not built on subtlety. It was built on kings and warlords across the width of Xeres learning, one costly engagement at a time, that a battle everyone assumed was already decided could still turn completely the moment she stepped onto the field. She has been paid enormous sums by desperate rulers and even more enormous sums by rulers who were merely being careful, and she has, by her own count, tipped the outcome of more wars than she bothers to remember individually anymore. She takes contracts on her own terms, at her own price, and has never once completed one halfway.

Every Door Xeres Has Left to Open

There is a ceiling to what this world can teach a person, a point past which further mastery of magic and self simply isn't available here anymore, no matter how much coin or blood or time is spent chasing it. Morwenna reached hers decades ago. Everyone in her position eventually makes the same choice: they leave Xeres behind entirely and ascend to Nexora, a vast and far more dangerous world where all of that hard-won progress resets to nothing, but where the ceiling itself simply doesn't exist anymore. It is, by every account, the obvious next step for someone with nothing left to prove here. Morwenna has not taken it. She has been asked why more times than she can count, by people ranging from genuinely curious to openly suspicious, and she has given every one of them a different answer, none of which were true.

What She's Actually Looking For

The honest answer, which she has given to no one, is that she is looking for something specific, something she has been looking for across most of the countries and courts she has ever taken coin in, and she is not leaving this world until she finds it or is finally certain it can't be found. She does not talk about what it is. She does not talk about how long she's been looking, though it is clearly a very long time. She takes contracts, wins wars, collects payment, and quietly keeps searching in whatever direction each new job happens to take her, patient in the specific way of someone who has already accepted that this might simply take the rest of a very long life.

The Move to Silmarithil

Morwenna arrived in Silmarithil recently, and unlike most of her stops, this one wasn't for a contract. Something about the city, or more precisely something she has come to understand about Haven, the wider region around it, drew her here with more purpose than a job ever has. She has not explained what she knows or how she came to know it, and she has made it very clear, in the way she makes most things clear, that she isn't interested in discussing it further with anyone who hasn't earned the right to ask. She is, for the moment, simply present, watching the city the way she watches every room she enters: for the thing underneath the thing everyone else sees.

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Goals & Aspirations

Whatever It Is

Morwenna's actual goal, the thing she has organized the better part of a century around, is not something she has ever stated plainly to another living person. She continues to take contracts, continues to be extremely well paid for them, and continues to treat every new city she visits as a possible answer to a question she has never once asked out loud. Silmarithil is the current answer she's testing. She'll know if it's the right one before she tells anyone else.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Mercenary Warlock

ATTENTION!

Kings do not pay the sums Morwenna charges out of generosity. She has personally decided the outcome of battles that were, by every reasonable estimate, already lost, and she has done it enough times that serious military planners now factor "is Morwenna involved" into their strategy before a single unit moves. Her mercenary manner and open fixation on payment lead plenty of people to assume she's all bark, all price tag, no real bite behind the reputation. Every one of them has been wrong. She is exceptionally old, exceptionally capable, and has had more time than almost anyone alive to get very good at violence. She is also, currently, watching Silmarithil and the wider region of Haven far more closely than her mercenary cover story explains, and anyone who notices that and asks her about it directly should not expect a satisfying answer, or necessarily a polite one.