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Zasha Thorivann
Zasha Thorivann
"They didn't know the forest." · Hunter and Wilderness Protector of Kestrel Hollow
Basic Information
Full Name
Zasha Thorivann
Nickname
The Forest Wall
Race (Grade)
Human (E)
Class
Ranger
Height
5'9"
Birthday
Sunspeak 2, 1274
Age
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Birthsign
Bloodline Ability
Unknown
This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.
Physical Description
Zasha Thorivann, who has already seen you, and has been watching for a while
Appearance
Zasha is a strikingly beautiful woman with the lean, powerful build of someone who has spent her entire life walking, climbing, and drawing a bow, and who has never once done any of it for show. A heavy mane of long, wavy black hair, warmed with brown where the sun has caught it, falls well past her shoulders, and her skin is a deep, sun-bronzed brown. Her eyes are a pale, clear green and very calm. She dresses for the woods and nowhere else: a tan suede halter fastened with brass rings, a ragged-hemmed suede wrap belted low at the hip, brass bands on her upper arms, and long leather wraps bound with cord from wrist to elbow. A gold choker sits at her throat above several fine cords of charms, and a quiver of long, white-fletched arrows rides at her back.
Unique Characteristics
A handful of faint scars cross Zasha's face, and every one of them is completely mundane: branches, claws, and one knife. Life outdoors leaves evidence. She does not particularly care about them and is always slightly confused when people assume each one must have a dramatic story behind it. The small one beneath her eye came from a goose. It was a mean goose. That is the whole story. The one thing she wears that does matter is the curved fang on her necklace, which came from the largest thorncat anyone in her village had ever seen, and which she did not kill.
Personality & Temperament
Positive Traits
- Calm and steady under any amount of pressure
- Perfectly comfortable with long, easy silences
- Would rather understand an animal than kill it
- Fiercely protective of anyone who can't protect themselves
- Understated humor that lands a few seconds late
Challenging Traits
- Shrugs off her own deeds as if they were chores
- Answers questions in as few words as possible
- Baffled when people want stories about her scars
- Stops being philosophical the moment innocents bleed
- Would rather sleep outdoors than in any bed
How far? [She looks toward a distant tree.] Depends. [Asked on what.] Whether it's important.
Goose. [Yes, a goose.] Mean goose.
There weren't dozens of archers. There was me. They just didn't know the forest.
Likes
- Twenty minutes of silence beside a good fire
- Reading a whole morning's story from fresh tracks
- Learning a forest she has never walked before
- Animals that ignore her, because she's doing it right
- A well-made arrow, fletched by her own hand
Dislikes
- People who fill every quiet moment with talk
- Hunting for sport, with nothing eaten or used
- Anyone who hurts the defenseless to make a point
- Being asked for the dramatic story behind a scar
- Geese. One goose in particular.
Background & History
A Village Without Walls
Zasha was born in 1274 in Kestrel Hollow, a tiny woodland settlement in the Ellespi Woods, where the trees thin out from Gelderai's ancient heart toward the coast. The village was too small to afford walls, professional soldiers, or much of anything else normally associated with defense. What it did have was forest, so its people learned to make the forest their wall. Her mother was a trapper and her father maintained the trails and hunted game. By ten, Zasha could identify most animals in the region from their spoor alone. By thirteen, she was putting arrows through rabbits at distances her father considered mildly irritating. By sixteen, everybody had stopped pretending she was merely talented.
Three Days in the Woods
When Zasha was nineteen, a band of raiders discovered Kestrel Hollow. The village had fewer than forty adults capable of fighting. The raiders numbered almost eighty. The village survived, not because it defeated eighty men in a heroic open battle, but because Zasha never let them reach it. She spent three days moving through the forest ahead of them. She destroyed their food supplies, cut saddle straps, spooked their horses, marked false trails, disabled their scouts, and shot their officers, disappearing each time before anyone could find her. By the third night the raiders were convinced there were dozens of archers in the woods. There was one. They left. Zasha has never considered this particularly impressive. Her entire explanation is: "They didn't know the forest."
The Thorncat
Some years later, livestock began disappearing from the pastures around Kestrel Hollow, and the tracks belonged to a thorncat far larger than any the village had ever seen. Zasha spent weeks tracking it. When she finally found it, she discovered that it had two cubs and had turned to livestock only because the game in its territory had grown scarce. So she did not kill it. She carried the cubs deeper into the wilderness, to better hunting grounds, and then deliberately drove the mother after them. Years later she found the old cat dead of simple old age, and she took one tooth. To Zasha it stands for the principle that has shaped her entire life: understanding something is more useful than immediately killing it. That philosophy lasts precisely until something decides to hurt innocent people. Then she becomes considerably less philosophical.
A Wall That Doesn't Work
In 1306 the undead crisis pressing against the Geldergreen reached the Ellespi Woods, and Windperch, a Vanara village barely a day's walk from Kestrel Hollow, was overrun in a single night. Zasha went out into the forest to learn what was coming, exactly as she had at nineteen, and came back with a very practical conclusion. Every trick that had broken the raiders works on people who get hungry, get tired, and get frightened. The dead do none of those things. You cannot make the forest a wall against something that is not afraid of it. So she did the only sensible thing left and got her village out, leading its families through the woods by paths the dead did not know, days ahead of whatever came for Kestrel Hollow afterward. She has not gone back to see what is left of it.
A Forest She Doesn't Know
Kestrel Hollow's families went south with the wave of refugees that followed Gelderai's near destruction, and most of them eventually came to rest along Rokoura's inland edge, near Waiora Grove. Zasha went with them, because they are her people and somebody has to keep hunting for them. The Kōmaru Wilds are nothing like the Ellespi Woods: hot, wet, loud, full of suncrest kiwi and fern-tailed piki that steal anything shiny, and she does not know them yet. She considers this the most interesting thing to have happened to her in years. Rokoura's oldest law, that the sea, land, and forest must be taken from with care, suits her perfectly.
Goals & Aspirations
Learning the Kōmaru Wilds
Zasha intends to know the Kōmaru Wilds the way she knew the Ellespi Woods: every trail, every stream, every den, and what every animal in them does when it is frightened. She walks a little further into them every day and comes back with a little less to say. When she knows them well enough, the forest around Rokoura will be a wall again, whether or not anyone ever asks her to make it one.
Keeping Kestrel Hollow Together
Kestrel Hollow no longer has a place, but Zasha is determined that it will still have its people. She keeps its families fed, checks on the elders without making a fuss about it, and makes sure the children are learning the woods even though they are different woods now. She would like them to still be a village, even without the village.
Going Back, Someday
When the Ellespi Woods are clear, Zasha means to be the first one back into them, alone, to see what is left of Kestrel Hollow before anyone else has to. She has not told the families this. She suspects most of them already know.
Current Status & Relationships
Residence
Role
Hunter
ATTENTION!
Zasha Thorivann is an E-grade human ranger and one of the finest archers in Rokoura, though she would never say so herself. At nineteen she turned back a raiding band of nearly eighty men entirely on her own, over three days, without once letting them see her; by the third night they were certain there were dozens of archers in the woods. In any forest, assume she knows it better than you do, and assume she has already seen you. How far she can shoot accurately depends, in her words, on whether it is important. She is calm and quiet, and she genuinely prefers to understand a dangerous animal, or a dangerous person, before deciding what to do about it. That patience ends the moment someone hurts people who cannot defend themselves.