(no subject)

[dinadhal]

PLAYER

Name: dove
Age: over 21
Contact: pm this journal
Other Characters: laura kint
Interests: Turns out I just really love this stupid OC I made up, help. Looking forward to a lot of chatter and exploration with her.

CHARACTER

Name: Aenor Dinadhal
Canon/OC: OC
Journal: dinadhal
Race: Elf
Nationality: Ander, Dalish
Occupation: Mail carrier
Division: Scouting
Mage or Not: Not
Age: 44

History

• Clan Ethghilas travels along the Lattenfluss and Aenor grows up happy enough, training to hunt for her clan. At sixteen, while they're camped somewhere near north of Kassel, she meets a handsome farmboy named Raffen (farming what, dirt? don't worry about it) and has a swoony little secret fling.

• When she realizes she's pregnant, she lets everyone think she slept with another Dalish elf, which works right up until baby Raban comes out with round ears. Whoops. A few days after his birth, members of the clan leave him on a random doorstep in Kassel proper, and Aenor's parents forbid her from speaking of her son. The clan regards this incident as something over and done with, to be forgotten.

• Aenor, for the rest of her seventeenth year and part of her eighteenth, tries to move on the way her clan expects and takes on the vallaslin of Falon'din. During her eighteenth year, she realizes that she can't forget her past and leaves in the night, changing her name (sometimes spelled Dinadhal, sometimes Din'adhal, she's barely literate and doesn't particularly care) and heading south to Hossberg.

• Turns out living in an alienage is confining, ugly, and segregated, and humans don't love it when you try to live in the nice parts of the city. It's a miserable, confined-feeling time for her that threatens to turn into a life of always staying in the same place.

• She finds work carrying packages, messages, and favours, first between Hossberg and Nordbotten, and then across the deserts between Nordbotten and Laysh. She lives on the border of civilization and never stays anywhere long enough to be rejected. The person who brings the mail is providing a popular service without wearing out her welcome, and she's never around long enough that someone tries to get her to go to Chantry services. She has friends among the people she works with, but the relationships are fairly shallow--dinner companions, the occasional one-night stand. She also does mail-carrying work with/for the Grey Wardens, though she doesn't have any desire to join.

• Many years later, her son finds her! He answers to Caric, not Raban, but otherwise, he's clearly the perfect child. Joy and regret and much love, the first meaningful longterm connection she's made outside work in years--and when he says that they take all comers in Riftwatch, it's not hard to convince her to leave the Anderfels.

Personality

In casual settings, Aenor's a warm personality, the sort of woman who develops laugh-lines long before any other wrinkles. She teases, she asks about your life, she smiles, she calls you nicknames. Friendly, inviting, happy to stop for a drink together.

But it might become clear, eventually, that while she's very interested in hearing about you, she says as little about herself as she can get away with. Aenor's life, as she tells it, features only the present and the future. Press about her clan, and she'll tell you that the past is a dead tree, a din'adhal, and should be burnt. Ask just how her gangly, elf-blooded son came about, and she'll turn it into an opportunity to praise his bravery and clever speech. She's spent twenty-odd years existing briefly in others' lives and then leaving; she knows how to maneuver through conversations with the grace of a dancer.

The truth is that Aenor is a warm person, but she's also someone who's made joviality both shield and weapon. A little Dalish woman who makes everyone feel at home before leaving is a little Dalish woman who'll encounter less trouble, especially in the staunchly Andrastian land of her birth. Knowing how to refuse to take "no" for an answer is easier when you can counter with a smile. And being comfortable with roomfuls of Grey Wardens--again, in a land where easily half the populace is or knows a member of their order--is key to surviving off their business.

Under that pleasant exterior, there's a woman whose feelings are far more complicated. She's a woman whose child was taken from her, whose intense curiosity for the world beyond her people was supposed to be stamped out. She's spent the equivalent of years of her life without anyone to talk to but a dracolisk, traveling through the wastelands of a dry and dangerous country, making room for only casual friends and lovers at the edges of her life. And she's experienced rejection based on her identity, both as a Dalish elf and the mother of an elf-blooded son, from every corner, including from people she thought could never hurt her in such a way: her parents, her friends, her clan.

The rage she's felt in her lifetime, the fear, the shame, the grief--those, she reserves for herself. They're things that can't be taken away from her, things she owns, things she draws a curtain around. The people around her are welcome to the parts of her she's leaned on in order to thrive in an unwelcoming desert. But they have no claim on her pain.

That leaves a stubborn, smiling woman with a wind-chapped face, one who's looking forward to talking about you and pressing for the answers that illuminate the dusty corners of your life. Not hers.

Opinions & Affiliations

Grey Wardens: Don't join. Do drink with.

Elves, Dalish: Shallow connections only. Avoid the "which clan is Dinadhal" conversation.

Elves, city: Poor souls, stuck in one place. Good for casual friendships, but don't be drawn too far into the alienage.

Elf-blooded people: Befriend, treat with maternal fondness without entirely realizing you're doing it.

Humans: Drink with, sleep with, befriend, but show caution when red flags arise. Don't let them see you hurt, if you can help it.

Tevinter: AVOID. Tevinters outside the country to be judged individually.

The Chantry: Do everything possible to avoid without looking like you're avoiding it.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths
-Speaks Trade and Ander
-Used to rough travel conditions and doing as much as possible with few supplies
-Skilled rider
-Familiarity with Grey Wardens
-Capable of getting along with people from a variety of walks of life

Weaknesses
-Values her son more than any of y'all, will pick him over Riftwatch every time
-Too plainspoken at times, teasing
-Willing to press too far to learn the things she wants to know
-Doesn't do so great with Dalish elves and Dalish culture
-Kicks as much dirt over her past and negative feelings as possible

Inventory

-Clothing fit for a desert climate
-Bow and arrows
-Dagger
-Satchel, parchment, a stubby piece of charcoal wrapped up in cloth
-Various small keepsakes of purely sentimental value
-The money left over from selling a well-behaved dracolisk with saddle and cart
-An elf-blooded son, tallish

Motivation

Her son suggested Riftwatch, and Aenor would deny him nothing--not least because Riftwatch seemed unlikely to turn them away.

SAMPLES

one, two