Zarin Al-Awani - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Zarin Al-Awani

Nickname

The Still Storm

Race (Grade)

Human (E)

Class

Assassin / Dancer

Height

5'6"

Birthday

Frostnight 20, 1272

Age

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Birthsign

The Twilight Phoenix

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Bloodline Ability

🔮Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Zarin Al-Awani, twin blades loose and ready

Appearance

Zarin is lithe in the specific way of someone who has spent a lifetime needing to be faster than whoever she's facing rather than stronger, all long lines and coiled economy of movement, with sun-warmed olive skin and a waterfall of black hair that moves like something separately alive whenever she does. Her eyes are a sharp hazel-brown, heavily lined in the old Uiran style, watchful in a way that rarely blinks first. She wears a wrapped cloth mask patterned with a faded twin-serpent sigil across the lower half of her face more often than not, a habit left over from a career that depended on nobody being able to describe her afterward. Beneath it, when she chooses to lower it, is a face that gives away considerably less than most people expect.

She dresses for speed and reach rather than protection: a fitted leather-and-bronze halter guard, wrapped cloth at her hips over close-bound leg wraps, bracers built to catch a blade rather than stop one outright. She carries a matched pair of curved blades, worn with the ease of someone who has never once had to think about where her hands were, and a faint red tattoo winds visibly along one forearm, a mark from a life she doesn't explain to strangers.

Unique Characteristics

Zarin's stillness is the first thing most people notice and the thing that unsettles them most. She can stand in a room for an hour without a single unnecessary motion, and then close the distance on someone in less time than it takes to finish a sentence, a whirling, unbroken flow of blade-work that reads more like the temple dances of her homeland than combat. When she's genuinely idle, which is rare, her fingers sometimes tap a small, precise rhythm against her thigh or a table's edge, an old dancer's counting habit that has outlived every other part of the identity she used to perform under.

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Personality & Temperament

Zarin does not feel very much anymore, and she stopped apologizing for that a long time ago. She gave up the luxury of remorse roughly a decade into a career that required her to be, by turns, a dancer, a bandit, an assassin, and whatever else paid, and she has found, on balance, that the absence is easier to carry than the alternative would have been. She is not cruel. Cruelty requires a kind of engagement she simply doesn't spend anymore. She is precise, unhurried, and almost entirely unreadable, and she has learned that most people fill that silence with whatever they're most afraid of, which usually does her work for her before she has to.

What's changed, in the last ten months, is that she has started noticing the absence instead of just living inside it. Silmarithil's green, its quiet, its lack of anyone who knows her name or her old ones, has given her something she didn't expect: enough stillness to actually hear herself think about what she wants next, rather than what the next contract requires. She has not enjoyed everything that thinking has turned up. She is, cautiously and without much confidence in her own follow-through, trying to become someone who doesn't go back to the only trade she's ever been excellent at.

Positive Traits

Utterly composed under almost any pressure
Reads a room's exits and threats instantly
Fiercely disciplined in body, mind, and blade
Capable of real loyalty, once it's actually earned
Quietly trying to become someone worth trusting

Challenging Traits

Genuinely feels very little, and rarely explains it
Views most people as marks, obstacles, or neither
Struggles to trust any offer that isn't payment
Ten months of dwindling coin are wearing her down
Keeps everyone at exactly a blade's length away

I stopped feeling bad about it about a decade ago. Somewhere around the fortieth job, I think. It gets easier once you stop counting which ones deserved it.

He killed a fifth of my city in under a minute. I've had time to think about it since, and the honest truth is most of who died needed to. I won't pretend otherwise to make you comfortable.

I have maybe a few months of gold left and about a thousand ways to solve that problem. I am trying very hard to only consider the boring ones.

Likes

Silmarithil's green, after a life spent in sand
Being paid fully, promptly, and without conversation
Rhythm: dance, blade-work, footsteps, anything counted
Quiet rooms with more than one way out
Not being recognized

Dislikes

Being asked what she used to do for coin
People who assume dancers are automatically harmless
The particular arithmetic of dwindling gold
Sudden, unexplained kindness from strangers
Talking about Uir, in either direction

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Background & History

Whatever Uir Needed Her to Be

Zarin grew up in the great desert city of Uir and learned early that survival there rarely rewarded specialization. She danced in bazaar courtyards and noble courts when that paid. She ran with bandits along the caravan roads when that paid better. She took contracts as an assassin when the money was largest and the job was cleanest, and she worked as a mercenary blade for anyone with coin and a fight that needed winning in between. She was, by her own account, good at all of it, and never especially attached to any one label for what she was. Coin was the only consistent employer she ever had.

A Decade Without Remorse

Somewhere around a decade ago, doing work she still won't detail for anyone, Zarin made a decision that she now describes as less a choice than a slow, practical erosion: she stopped letting herself feel bad about what the work required. It made her faster, calmer, and considerably better at the job. It also, by her own admission, cost her something she has only recently started to notice was missing. She does not perform grief about this. She states it the way she states most facts about herself, plainly, and moves on to the next sentence.

The Fifth That Fell

When King Xaneborr tore through Uir and left the Sultan and a full fifth of the city's people dead inside a single minute, Zarin did not mourn, and she does not pretend otherwise. She had spent enough years navigating the corruption at the top of that city to know exactly what kind of rot the crown and its favored courtiers represented, and she has never been able to work up genuine sympathy for the idea that they were owed a longer ending than they gave anyone else. She lost people she didn't especially care about that day, and kept people she did. She has made her peace with which side of that ledger she landed on.

One Safe Day in Goodberry

Zarin fled to Goodberry in the chaos that followed, reasoning, correctly as far as it went, that nobody in the world was likely to challenge a king who could do what Xaneborr had just done, which made his rivals' territory the safest place available to be. She only meant to stay a short while. She stayed long enough to watch the city fill with fellow Uiran refugees and then, gradually, empty of them again, as most of that displaced community drifted onward into Goodberry's smaller vassal territories in search of quieter, cheaper lives than the capital offered.

Choosing Green

Zarin followed that same drift, eventually, but not toward the largest or safest of Goodberry's vassal cities. She chose Silmarithil specifically, and for a reason she finds a little embarrassing when she says it aloud: she had never in her life lived anywhere with that much green in it. A whole city built into and around genuine forest, after a lifetime of sand, sun-bleached stone, and the specific brown of Uir's bazaar canvas, felt less like a strategic choice and more like something she simply wanted, which was itself an unfamiliar enough feeling to be worth following.

Ten Quiet Months

Zarin has spent the last ten months in Silmarithil doing, deliberately, almost nothing of what she's actually good at. She keeps a low profile, watches more than she speaks, and has quietly absorbed a working knowledge of the city's streets, guard patterns, and rhythms simply by being observant and having nowhere urgent to be. Her savings, a few hundred gold when she arrived, have been dwindling steadily the entire time, and the math of that has started to occupy more of her attention than she'd like. She has not yet decided what she's going to do about it. She is aware, with some discomfort, of exactly how easily she could answer that question the old way.

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Goals & Aspirations

What Comes Next

Zarin has not committed to an answer yet, and she is aware that the longer she waits, the fewer good options she'll have left when her gold finally runs out. Part of her would like to find something to do with her particular skills that doesn't cost her anything else on the way there. Part of her isn't convinced that option exists. She has not asked anyone in Silmarithil for help figuring it out, mostly because asking would mean explaining who she used to be, and she isn't ready for that conversation yet, if she ever will be.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Retired Blade-for-Hire

ATTENTION!

Do not mistake Zarin's quiet, unemployed present for diminished capability. She has spent roughly a decade as a professional killer who trained as a dancer first, which means her combat instincts are wrapped in a fluid, misleadingly graceful whirl of motion that most opponents read as performance right up until it isn't. She has personally survived a lifetime of banditry, contract killing, and mercenary work in one of the harshest cities on Xeres, and she has given up remorse as cleanly as most people give up a bad habit. She is currently retired, low on money, and genuinely undecided about what she does next. That last part is the one worth watching closely; nobody, including Zarin, knows yet which way she'll go if the coin gets desperate enough.