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ELSRYN - the self-portraitist
Location Southern Weyr
Position Jr. Journeyman, Candidate
Craft Harper
Birthplace High Hill Hold, a minor hold near Fort
Played By none
Player Kassitty (art credit)

Description

A paradox in the flesh, Elsryn is not wher-faced. But neither she is beautiful, and therein lies the contradiction. There is nothing actually wrong with her - you would be hard-pressed to find fault in her full lips, in those keen healer-green eyes. Elsryn is an artist's delight, a creature of contrasts; dagger-sharp brows and a mouth softly sketched, parchment-pale skin yet unstained by the Southern sun and chin length locks as black as between. All sleek lines and angles, she has the hard physicality of a violin bow; taut, light of frame, and nimble-fingered. And yet despite her quiet assets, the casual eye simply slides over her. A grey smudge in the minds of most, she is not, and has never been, a girl who is noticed. And in her twenty years, Elsryn has gotten used to being overlooked.


Wearing

A woman of utilitarian ways, Elsryn seems to be enjoying the permissive freedom of weyr life: today, unheeled and unskirted, she sports worn black leather boots laced up to below her knee. Her journeyman knots are proudly in place. Elsryn is yet unaccustomed to the weather of Southern, and a faded jacket in harper blue - deemed unnecessary in the heat - can be found tied about her waist. The secondhand wherhide is perhaps the most expensive item that she owns - although she is not visibly impoverished, there is something undeniably shabby about her.


Common Knowledge

  • Artist. She lives art, breathes it with every fiber of that tormented artist's soul of hers. Art is her bread and butter, and a combination of a steady hand, a perceptive eye, and a dash of Harper training have conspired to make her very good at it. She does portraits and small-time commissions to pay her way in the world, although it's something of an expensive pastime. Paints aren't cheap, after all. Most of the time she just works with ink and charcoal, as in her self-portrait. She wouldn't waste the good stuff on herself.
  • Gay. Exclusively so. And most people know. Her upbringing between hold and hall has caused her to be fairly repressed about it, but she'll still set off a blip in anyone's gaydar. She always seems to fall for the straights, poor girl.
  • Nerd. Quick-eyed and quick-minded, but socially off-balance. Oddly knowledgeable about the weirdest, most irrelevant topics. It may be a harper thing, or it may be just an Elsryn thing.

Uncommon Knowledge


Personality

Blue in color and blue by nature, Elsryn lacks the performer's charisma that characterizes most harpers. Instead, hers is the melancholy of the artist and the poet - a gentle twilight cat-grace, born of a peerless breadth of mind and depth of spirit. There is a certain nobility about her. She does not desire riches nor rank, no, she would rather live with her eyes turned skywards. Morning, noon, and night, Elsryn watches for the colors in the world; the violet of a wine glass's shadow, the green-gold of the clouds before a storm.

More than anything, she wants to feel, within her little artist's soul, to love and lose and grieve and laugh with all the breathlessness of a knife between her teeth, and to her numbness is worse than any pain of heartbreak. Somehow, Elsryn is always drunk, addicted to life, and no matter how much she struggles the right words will never come to describe it – how her heart races, how each breath becomes the sweetest agony and she knows that she is real. And so on some days Elsryn drinks the rain and tells herself that even though everyone is going to die, she will not be ashamed to be alive. She will not let herself die of misery every day, over and over again. She will be immortal for maybe fifty years, maybe more, maybe less, and then she will die all at once, and that is how it is meant to be.

Dreamweaver, keeper of memories, she wanders from one day to the next with the patience of an ageless soul. She is small; her life, fleeting, her story, unwritten.


Relationships

To be determined!


History

Someway, somehow, Elsryn was destined never to fit in. Born and raised in the minor hold of High Hill, a day's ride from Fort proper, she was the youngest of five daughters. With plenty of older - and more charming - sisters to be married off, it chanced that Elsryn was never called to fulfill the ultimate destiny of most holder girls. Instead, tapped by a local journeyman, she found her way to the Harper Hall of Fort.

She made a good apprentice, studious if not overtalented. Drawing was her one great skill, but past that she didn't have much else to set her apart. She was decent on the violin and can still pluck a few tunes on the gitar, but listening to a dragon's death-keen might be preferable to her singing. Once she made junior journeyman, she was relegated to everyday record-keeping, doing illustrations and the like - but the work suited her, and she was happy.

But harpers are harpers, and harpers talk. It began as a whisper but became a storm - one misplaced kiss and all of a sudden everyone knew that Elsryn of High Hill liked girls. Things got ugly for a while, and within the month her senior arranged to have her reassigned to Southern, reasoning that if anyone would take her in, it would be the Weyrfolk. After all, everyone knows that Weyrfolk are degenerates - so Elsryn should fit right in. And there was word of a clutch on the Sands…


Height Build Hair Eyes Age
5'7" Waifish Black Green 20

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