Saelric Veyrish - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Saelric Veyrish

Nickname

Sael

Race (Grade)

Auric Drakeshade (E)

Class

Bard

Height

6'0"

Birthday

Harvestide 3, 1277

Age

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Birthsign

The Harvest Sphinx

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Saelric Veyrish, mid-delivery

Appearance

Saelric wears both halves of his blood on his face. His long hair is a silvery lavender, worn loose past his shoulders with a jeweled pin at the temple, and his skin is a warm bronze. Across his brow, along one cheekbone, and down the side of his neck runs a spread of fine gold scale, patterned like hammered metal: his father's gold dragon mark laid over his mother's vishkanya one. The same scales sheathe his forearms, which is why his sleeves are so often pushed back. His eyes are a dark, liquid amber that hold a person's gaze a beat longer than is comfortable, and his smile is quick, warm, and tuned to exactly the degree of sincerity each listener needs. He dresses like money that doesn't need to prove itself: a loose cream shirt worn open at the chest, a teal silk sash under a long teal-trimmed coat, gold chains, rings, and ornate bracers. A curved sword with a gilded hilt rides at his hip, and more often than not there is a sealed letter in his hand that he has not yet mentioned.

Unique Characteristics

From his father's side, Saelric inherited presence: an unforced, near-supernatural gravity that makes people want to be trusted by him, want his approval, and tell him things they had not planned to tell anyone. From his mother's side came the vishkanya gifts: senses sharp enough to catch a whispered name across a crowded hall, a supple, soundless way of moving, and blood and saliva that carry a venom he keeps entirely out of polite conversation. Rooms arrange themselves around him within a few minutes of his arrival, and he has built an entire career on people never quite noticing that it happened.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Reads a room in seconds, and rarely reads it wrong
Warm, generous, and endlessly attentive to clients
Remembers every name, birthday, and favorite wine
Unshakeable composure, even under real pressure
Always delivers, however obscure the request

Challenging Traits

His warmth is a tool, and he never puts it down
Lies smoothly, easily, and without a flicker of guilt
Impossible to pin down on where his loyalties lie
Answers direct questions with better questions
Gushing sentiment that grates on plain-spoken folk

My dear friend! Sit, please, you look exhausted. Wine? Of course wine. Now, tell me everything.

Dirt? I would never call it that. I prefer "context," and I have simply mountains of context on him.

Caught? Heavens, no. You would have to have done something first, wouldn't you?

Likes

Rooms full of people who dislike each other openly
Good wine, poured slowly, in good company
Being underestimated by someone with real power
A well-sealed letter with an interesting wax mark
Weddings, reunions, and any excuse for a teary toast

Dislikes

Being asked to pick a side and mean it
Clumsy, obvious attempts to bribe him
Anyone implying he's ever opened a letter
Blunt people who simply cannot be flattered
Debts he hasn't chosen to owe on his own terms

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Background & History

A Son of the Night Market

Saelric was born in 1277 in Uir, the desert city of the Great Bazaar. His mother was a vishkanya who sold perfume in the Night Market and secrets in the Veiled Bazaar. His father stayed a single season, paid for everything in gold coin, and turned out, as the scales that surfaced on his infant son's face made plain, to have been a gold dragon wearing a man's shape. Saelric has never met him. He has, however, spent a quiet and considerable sum over the years finding out where he went.

An Education in the Veiled Bazaar

His mother taught him the family trade the way other children learn their letters: which servants gossip, which guards drink, how a room shifts when someone important walks into it, and how to lift a wax seal with a warmed needle and set it back so cleanly that no one will ever know it moved. By twelve he was running messages through Uir's Upper City for merchant princes who found they liked the charming, scaled boy far more than they had meant to, and who said a great deal more in front of him than they should have.

A Currency Called Trust

At nineteen, Saelric carried a merchant's correspondence all the way to Gelderai and simply never went home. He started small, carrying letters for traders too cautious to use ordinary messengers, and worked his way, letter by letter, up through the Boughways and into Crownreach rooms most outsiders are never invited into once, let alone twice. Somewhere along the way he stopped being a courier and became a broker. Gelderai's upper families came to him when they wanted dirt on a rival, the truth behind an old and carefully buried scandal, or some obscure fact no library in the canopy could supply. He always delivered. No one ever quite worked out how.

The Man Who Was Never Caught

Saelric's entire reputation rested on one rule: he does not open the letters he carries, and he never sells one client's secrets to another. In a decade in Gelderai, no one ever proved he broke it. No one found a lifted seal, a leak that led back to him, or a client who could say he had crossed them. Several people did notice, over the years, that their rivals seemed to know things they had no business knowing, and that Saelric was always, somehow, the most sympathetic person in the room when they complained about it.

Out of Gelderai With the Right Bags Packed

When the undead incursion hit Gelderai, Saelric left with considerably more composure, and considerably more of his own wealth intact, than most of the people fleeing beside him. The network of contacts, debts, and secrets he had spent a decade assembling there is, for now, mostly severed, though he has given no sign of grieving it. He evacuated to Rokoura with the wave of refugees and arrived no worse for the experience than a man returning from an unusually eventful dinner party.

Three Weeks of Making Friends

Saelric bought a villa near the beach on his first day in Rokoura and spent every day after that making himself beloved. He learned the names of half the stallholders on the Tātahi Market Coast within a week, and the names of their children within two. He sends honey cakes to the sick, tips the musicians at the Swaying Palm Inn far too much, and wept openly at a fisherman's wedding he had been invited to only that morning. The traders who laughed at the gushing newcomer in his first days now bring him their disputes to settle and their rumors to weigh, and a growing number of locals find themselves telling him things they have not told anyone else, without being able to say quite when they started.

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Goals & Aspirations

Rebuilding the Network

Saelric intends to become as indispensable in Rokoura as he was in Gelderai, and faster this time, having learned exactly how quickly a web of trust can burn along with the city that held it. He is already learning which merchants owe which, which captains carry more than their manifests admit, and who in town needs a discreet friend and hasn't realized it yet. In a town this small, everyone already knows everyone's business, which makes it either the worst possible market for a man in his trade or the best, and he has not yet decided which.

A Clean Slate, Carefully Kept

Rokoura knows Saelric only as the charming refugee with the lovely villa, and he would like it to stay that way. The trouble is that he was not the only one who fled Gelderai for Rokoura, and a few of the others once paid him for things they would rather no one knew about, or once lost things they suspect he sold. So far every one of them has greeted him like an old friend. He is watching very closely to see which of them means it.

The Letter He Hasn't Delivered

Saelric has kept one particular letter on his person since well before Gelderai fell, unopened, undelivered, and unmentioned to anyone. He has had ample opportunity to deliver it, or destroy it, and has done neither. What it is, who it's from, and who it's for is a question he deflects more thoroughly than any other, which is itself, for a man this practiced at deflection, rather telling.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Rokoura

Role

Information Broker

ATTENTION!

Saelric's gold dragon presence makes people inclined to trust him and lower their guard faster than they normally would, and his gushing warmth is designed to finish the job; he knows both and uses them without apology. He reads a room in moments and likely already knows more about anyone he has spoken with for five minutes than they would be comfortable with. He is no duelist, and in a real fight his instinct is to talk, stall, or leave. He is also half vishkanya, his blood carries venom, and if he ever does draw that curved sword, assume its edge has been touched with it. Nothing said to him is ever entirely off the record.