Tallah Winterstone - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Tallah Winterstone

Nickname

Plainstone Tallah

Race (Grade)

Mountain Dwarf (E)

Class

Stonemason

Height

4'3"

Birthday

Sunspeak 28, 1257

Age

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Birthsign

The Sunscale Wyrm

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Bloodline Ability

🔮Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Tallah Winterstone, Plainstone Tallah

Appearance

Tallah wears her honey-brown hair in long, tight braids threaded with beads and small silver rings, framing a warm, open face that puts most people at ease right up until she opens her mouth. She favors dark, finely embroidered dresses for anything social, the sleeves worked with cattle stitched in cream thread, a nod to Olav's herd that she insists is just good craftsmanship and not sentiment, whatever anyone suggests. Beneath the jewelry and fine needlework, her hands tell a different story: broad, strong, and permanently calloused from stone dust and chisel work, hands that have shaped far more granite than lace.

Unique Characteristics

Tallah's opinion arrives before most people finish their question, and she has never once apologized for the timing, only occasionally for the content. She wears a small stone-carver's loupe on a cord around her neck alongside her jewelry, indistinguishable at a glance from ordinary adornment, and reaches for it constantly without seeming to notice she's doing it.

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Personality

Positive Traits

Honest to a fault, in the best and worst senses
Extraordinarily skilled across every kind of stonework
Practical and unshakeable in a genuine crisis
Fiercely devoted to her husband and their children
Never holds a grudge longer than it takes to say her piece

Challenging Traits

Speaks her mind before she's finished thinking it
Blunt with customers in ways that occasionally cost her work
Refuses to soften an honest opinion for comfort's sake
Stubborn about quality, even when a client wants cheaper
Has little patience for people who ask and then get upset

Folks hear "Tallah and Tallah" and expect two masons. It's just me. Everything I build ends up taller than whoever hired me expected, and the name was funnier than anything sensible I could have picked instead.

I've been told I should think before I speak. I have thought about it. I've decided the thinking mostly just delays the speaking.

Olav sells the story. I build the thing the story's about. Between the two of us we've never once had trouble getting a job finished, just occasionally trouble getting invited back.

Likes

A clean, honest cut of stone
Being asked exactly what she thinks
A wall that outlasts the person who complained about the price
Watching Olav hold court at one of his dinners
Rare letters from their children in Bannon

Dislikes

Being asked to lower her prices
Sloppy stonework passed off as good enough
People who ask her opinion and resent the answer
Reworking a job someone changed their mind on twice
Silence where something obviously needs saying

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Background & History

Bannon-Born, Same Street as Olav

Tallah grew up in Bannon on the same street as Olav Winterstone, and the two have known each other since they were small enough to be scolded together for the same mischief. Where Olav talked his way through childhood, Tallah tended to say exactly what she thought and let the consequences land where they would, and more than one shared misadventure ended with him smoothing over something she'd said too plainly to the wrong person. Somewhere in all of that, what started as friendship became something neither of them bothered to formally announce; it simply became obvious to everyone else first.

Apprenticed in Stone

Bannon's mining district gave Tallah her trade, and she apprenticed under one of the city's respected stoneworking families from a young age, showing a precision and patience with material that never quite translated to patience with people. By the time she'd finished her training she could cut, carve, and set stone to a standard few in the city could match, and she took a quiet, private pride in work that, unlike conversation, never needed to be walked back afterward.

A Life and Two Children in Bannon

Tallah and Olav married young by Bannon standards and raised two children there, both now grown and settled in the city themselves, comfortable enough in their own lives that neither felt any pull to follow their parents out to a frontier duchy. Tallah writes to them more often than she receives replies and has never once complained about it aloud, which those who know her recognize as its own kind of tell.

Founding Tallah and Tallah

When she and Olav settled in Valonrae, Tallah wasted no time setting up her own operation rather than simply working the farm alongside him. She named it Tallah and Tallah, a joke about how everything she builds ends up taller than expected, said with enough of a Bannon dwarven lilt that most newcomers hear "Taller and Taller" before they realize it's a pun on her own name. Walls, fences, gargoyles, posts, statues, whatever a customer needs and has coin for, she'll build it, and she'll tell them plainly beforehand exactly what she thinks of the design.

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Goals

A Real Wall for Valonrae

Tallah has been quietly lobbying Duke Varon for the commission to build Valonrae a proper defensive wall as the settlement grows past what fences and good intentions can protect. She considers the current arrangement, a scattering of farms trusting to luck and their neighbors' good sense, an embarrassment for a duchy with a stonemason of her caliber already living in it, and she is not shy about saying so.

Letters That Turn Into Visits

Tallah would like, eventually, for her children's letters from Bannon to turn into an actual visit, though she has never pressed the point in writing the way she presses nearly everything else. She keeps their old room in her and Olav's house furnished and ready regardless.

Learning When to Wait a Beat

A recent commission fell through after Tallah told a visiting merchant's wife, unprompted and in some detail, exactly why the gargoyles she wanted were a poor use of good granite. Tallah does not regret being right. She has, grudgingly, started trying to count to three before answering questions she suspects she'll regret answering honestly, with mixed and generally brief success.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Valonrae

Role

Master Stonemason

Family

Other

ATTENTION!

Tallah says exactly what she is thinking, whether or not anyone asked, and a price quote from her tends to arrive with her honest opinion of your design attached free of charge. Anyone hoping for polite evasion instead of a straight answer should ask someone else. Anyone commissioning custom stonework from Tallah and Tallah should be prepared to hear precisely why a gargoyle is "a poor use of good granite" before she agrees, somewhat reluctantly, to carve it anyway.