Sythra Vael - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Sythra Vael

Nickname

Ghostscale

Race (Grade)

White Draconian (E)

Class

Ranger

Height

6'3"

Birthday

Mistfall 2, 1272

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

Sythra Vael, the palest thing in the jungle, and still you didn't see her

Appearance

Sythra is a tall, powerfully built white draconian, lean through the waist and heavy through the shoulders and arms in the way of someone who has spent twenty years drawing a heavy bow. Her scales are a pearl white with a faint opal sheen that catches the light like wet stone, and her eyes are a clear, startling blue. Two ridged horns sweep back from her skull above a crown of short pale spines, and further rows of spines run along her forearms and down the length of her tail. She dresses for the jungle rather than for company: a dark, weathered band of cloth across her chest and a long dark wrap knotted at the hip, both stained with mud and moss. A carved recurve bow and a quiver of long, striped-fletched arrows ride across her back, and she carries a knife she would very much prefer never to need.

Unique Characteristics

Sythra's white scales are entirely natural. She is not cursed, not magically altered, and not descended from any white dragon; she is simply white, in a family where no one else was. What looks like a long mane of pale hair is actually a crest of flexible keratinous filaments that grows along her skull and down her spine, far longer and paler than is usual even among draconians who have them. She braids it tightly whenever she hunts, because otherwise it catches on everything. She learned that lesson exactly once. She also has the unnerving habit of sitting beside a stranger for an hour and asking them about where they grew up, what animals live there, what their winters are like, and whether they have ever seen anything particularly strange. She collects information the way other people collect jewelry.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Endlessly curious about people, places, and animals
Patient enough to wait a full day for a single shot
Would rather understand a problem than kill it
Quiet but warm; listens like your answer matters
Bone-dry humor, delivered with a perfectly flat face

Challenging Traits

Keeps asking questions long after you want to leave
Visibly irritated by anyone who gets too close
Explores exactly the places she was warned about
Forgets that most people don't find ruins relaxing
Trusts maps and tracks far more than promises

A hydra? Once. [Asked how many heads.] Eventually? Nine. [A long, flat stare.] It began with six.

There's a difference between an old place and a place that was abandoned for a reason. Learn it early. Most people only get to learn it once.

If you're close enough for me to use this knife, one of us has made a mistake. I'm still deciding which.

Likes

Ruins, especially the ones nobody else will enter
Strangers with stories about faraway winters
A good bow, a quiet perch, and a long wait
Maps, surveys, and anyone else's field notes
Rain on stone in an old, empty courtyard

Dislikes

Anyone who says "it's just an old ruin"
Glorious extermination campaigns
Anything that gets close enough to touch her
Recruiters, envoys, and anyone who says "destiny"
Hunting with her crest unbraided, ever again

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Background & History

One White Egg

Sythra hatched in 1272 among a community of green draconians living deep in the southern jungles, in a clutch of emerald hatchlings that produced, for no reason anyone has ever explained, one strangely pale one with blue eyes. The elders called it a throwback to some older line and left it at that. It made her conspicuous from the moment she hatched, which is unfortunate in a culture that places considerable value on camouflage. Green draconians are raised to disappear into the forest. Sythra could not disappear into anything. So she had to become better at hiding than everyone else, and she did. By the time she was grown, the other hunters had started calling her Ghostscale: the whitest thing in the jungle, and nobody ever saw her coming.

The Drowned Court

Her people live among the flooded remnants of an ancient civilization that they call the Drowned Court. They did not build it. They simply moved in centuries after its builders were gone, and their homes occupy its temples, aqueducts, collapsed courtyards, and vine-covered towers, which have long since become part of the jungle around them. Children were explicitly warned not to explore some of the deeper structures. Naturally, Sythra explored all of them. Somewhere along the way she became fascinated by the difference between an old place and a place that was abandoned for a reason. There is, apparently, a very important distinction.

What Came Up From Below

When Sythra was nineteen, hunters began to disappear. Everyone assumed a new predator had moved into the jungle. Sythra found something worse. An earthquake had partially opened a sealed complex beneath the ruins, releasing creatures that had been trapped below for generations. Rather than simply kill whatever emerged, she spent months mapping the entire underground structure: its entrances, ventilation shafts, migration routes, nest chambers, and collapsed sections. Eventually she realized that the creatures were not attacking randomly. They were trying to leave. So instead of a glorious extermination campaign, Sythra convinced her people to collapse three passages and open a fourth, leading away from the settlement. The attacks stopped. That is Sythra in a single story: extremely dangerous, and much more interested in understanding the problem first.

Ruin-Stalker

She left the Drowned Court in her early twenties and has made her living ever since as a ruin-stalker, monster hunter, and deep-wilderness scout. Scholars hire her to find out what is inside an old place before they go in. Towns hire her when something has come out of one. She specializes in hunting creatures considerably larger than herself, and her entire approach revolves around anatomy and patience. She has fought exactly one hydra. She would prefer you ask her about the ruins instead.

The Frost King's Offer

A white draconian of her skill did not escape Tundra's attention. In the years before the Chromatic Council fell, his White Legion tried to recruit her several times, twice through envoys and once, memorably, in person, when the temperature in the room dropped and he informed her that she was statistically the most capable white draconian archer alive. Sythra asked him three questions about his Eternal Winter: what the animals would eat, where the rivers would go, and what happens to a ruin when nobody is left to wonder who built it. He did not seem to think the questions mattered. She decided that was her answer. She was never part of the White Legion. She simply was not interested.

The Geldergreen, and After

Sythra spent her most recent years in and around Gelderai, drawn by the ruins hidden in the deep Geldergreen and by a city that takes archery as seriously as she does. When the undead began pressing against the forest's borders, she worked as a scout for the wardens holding them, mapping routes and counting what came through. When Gelderai itself nearly fell in Goldenleaf of 1306, she came south with the refugees and settled in Silmarithil, for the time being. She finds the Elderwood agreeable, the Lanternwalkers entertaining, and the green draconians of the Crown Guard detachment oddly comforting. They are the first green scales she has lived among since she left home, and none of them have yet noticed her before she wanted them to.

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Goals & Aspirations

Old, or Abandoned for a Reason

Sythra has filled eleven notebooks with the signs she has learned to read in ruins: what an old place looks like, and what a place abandoned for a reason looks like, and how to tell the difference before it matters. She intends to turn them into a proper field guide someday, for the next child who explores exactly where she was told not to. She has not yet decided whether the guide should encourage them or not.

Back Into the Geldergreen

Sythra left several ruins in the deep Geldergreen half-mapped when Gelderai fell, and unfinished maps bother her more than almost anything else. Silmarithil is a place to wait, not a place to stay. When the forest is safe enough to go back into, or when someone is willing to pay her to go back before it is, she intends to finish what she started.

One Ordinary Winter

Sythra's people were built for the cold. She was raised in a jungle and has seen snow only on distant peaks. Tundra once offered her a winter that would never end, and she turned it down. What she would like instead is one ordinary winter, somewhere cold, entirely on her own terms. In the meantime she has asked nearly every northerner in Silmarithil what snow feels like, and she has written down all of their answers.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Ruin-Stalker

Notable Contacts

Tundra

Would-Be Recruiter (Declined)

ATTENTION!

Sythra Vael is an E-grade white draconian ranger and one of the most frightening archers most people will ever meet, not because she is fast, but because she is patient. She does not fill the air with arrows. She waits, and then she fires one: correct target, correct angle, done. She specializes in creatures far larger than herself, and she knows exactly where things break: eyes, wing joints, throats, hamstrings, and the soft scales beneath the jaw. If you somehow get close enough to fight her hand to hand, she is perfectly capable of it, and visibly irritated that you managed it. For all that, she would much rather understand a problem than kill it, and she will ask a great many questions before deciding which kind of problem you are. She is white scales in a green forest, and you will still not see her coming. She was never part of Tundra's White Legion, though he tried more than once to recruit her.