Klines

Klines Silvermist
Status	Active
Race	Elothean
Gender	Male
Guild	undisclosed
Instance	Prime
Relatives	None

"Everything hinges on everything."
 

Description

You see Klines Silvermist of the House of the Silver Star, an Elothean.

Klines has sparkling crystal blue eyes and a classical nose. His golden brown hair is short and wavy, and is worn loose, tucked behind his ears. He has smooth skin and a slender build. He is a bit over average height for an Elothean. He appears to be an adult. He is clean shaven. He is in good shape.

He is wearing a black bowler hat, a polished gold monocle wrapped in platinum ivy accents, a brass pendant-orlog on a matching chain, a fitted military-style jacket of black cotton with niniam accents, a simple white shirt, a bison-leather badge that reads "Elves and Elotheans unite!", a heavy steel wristcuff comprised of interlocking gears, a small animite ring, a silversteel aristocrat's signet ring bearing the Silvermist family crest, some lightweight black cotton pants with rolled-up cuffs and a pair of low-heeled black boots adorned with several buckles.

Early Years

A passing glance may reveal what appears to be a pedestrian cliche of a story and based on his early life, that is precisely how Klines's life seemed destined to play out. During his youth, his parents seemed content with sequestering him from the world, and he nearly missed out on all the wonderful and terrible things Ilithi had to offer as a result. His family was not from nobility. His father, an Elothean, owned a meager plot of farmland half a day's ride from the Shard city limits. Klines's father, mother, and sister worked the plot which produced crops mostly on a subsistence basis. The land had been handed down for generations on Klines's father's side and was destined to, one day, belong to Klines.

Klines's mother, also an Elothean, was raised on a neighboring farmstead. Like most members of the small community, she was expected to marry into another local farmer's family. She married Klines's father 7 years before Klines was born. Klines's sister was born 3 years later.

Familial Distress

At first, Klines's father and mother were willing to overlook him being aloof to his responsibilities on the farm. As it became obvious that Klines was not experiencing a simple phase of Elothean adolescence, they became less tolerant. Klines did not seem to share the expectation that he would carry on the family tradition of an honest day’s work on the farm. Kines regularly demonstrated his preference to discuss matters of the bodies that seemed to move high above Elanthia. In addition, Klines developed what his mother referred to as "an unseemly habit" of asking questions about the nature of magic, the nature of the Immortals, and other questions that his parents found unable to provide satisfactory answers to. He yearned to learn more about the world around him, and in particular to understand why it was he felt drawn to the planets, moons, and stars, the names of which he was still ignorant.

Departure

Naturally, his questions and the yearning for the celestial bodies he still didn't understand, turned his mind towards joining the Moon Mages Guild. The subject, being broached with his parents for the first time, did not go well at all. In his thoughts, Klines planned a calm, logical, reasonable argument for why they should allow him to join the guild. "The ability to predict the weather would help when planting the field!" and "I heard the Moon Mages can see what may come to pass, that can help on a farm!" What came out instead was a far more impassioned declaration that he would join the Moon Mages Guild and there was nothing they could do to stop it. Without giving his parents a chance to respond, he walked out determined to prove that they were wrong to try to confine him to a life of farming. With a few silver dokoras in his pocket and the clothes he was wearing, Klines made the journey to Shard and requested an audience with Mortom Saist, in an attempt to officially join the Moon Mages Guild.

The Guild

The guild was not immediately what Klines expected it to be. Upon his arrival to Shard, he was refused entrance to the guildhall, not even getting a glimpse of Mortom. After several days of waiting in the garden outside the Great Tower, a lower Moon Mage noticed him and took pity. Taking an immediate liking to Klines, she spent several months teaching Klines the basics of the guild and its tenants. Klines came to learn that she was a member of the House of the Silver Star. Throughout this time of learning, Klines felt increasingly confident in his decision to attempt to join the guild. At the end of his studies with the Moon Mage, in an effort to provide Klines with more credibility, she assisted him in completing the process of becoming a member of the House of the Silver Star.

Finally, after ardent study, Klines passed the entrance exams to the Moon Mages Guild. By continuing his strictly regimented study and practice, over the next several years Klines completed the introductory classes and was recognized as full fledged member of the Guild. Wasting little time, he was determined to return home to show his parents what he had learned and to vindicate himself in their eyes.

Ruined Homecoming

Klines's return home was to be the completion of a journey and realization of a calling that had started when he was a small child. In his mind, he felt as though he could not get home rapidly enough to show his parents that he was able to make something of himself, by becoming Guilded. Years later, Klines would still wonder if the arrogance and pride he was bringing home with him blinded him to the lessons he had so recently been taught; blinded him to the strands of Fate. Or perhaps he simply was too ignorant to recognize his own inexperience. Regardless of the reason, the events that transpired upon his arrival home shattered any hope of vindication and arrogance he harbored.

Klines first noticed that something was wrong when he was still several miles from the farmstead. He had smelt the smoke for an hour before he spotted the plume, realizing it was coming from the direction of his childhood home. His first instinct was to assume a brush fire had begun to burn out of control. Recalling how dangerous the situation could be, he increased his pace of travel. He was entirely unprepared for what he encountered as the farmstead came within view. Instead of an out of control brush fire, a full on raid was in progress on the farm. While he was aware of certain groups attacking farms in the past, the stories he had heard always involved farms far away from his home. But the smoke wafting from a storage silo, the humanoid attackers throwing lit torches towards the home he grew up in, and the screams he heard from within the house weren't far away at all.

The rapidly devolving situation caused him to pause with indecisiveness for several long moments. Finally, a particularly hopeless scream spurred him into action. Klines steeled himself and decided that he was going to save his family. He planned to use his newly learned abilities to manipulate the shadows cast by the plume of smoke, so that he could attempt to sneak towards his home. During his exams at the Guild, using the spell had seemed a simple matter. But now, with much riding on his magic's success, Klines felt that he may not be able to cast the spell at all. After forcing himself to concentrate and focus, he managed to successfully mold the shadows around him.

Even more to his surprise, he managed to sneak to a side door of the house, locate his family (who were quite surprised to see him), and begin to sneak them out of the house and into the nearby woods. Klines deemed it safer to make individual trips, as a larger group would have been easy to spot. The final trip, at the moment where Klines had just began to feel sure he had successfully managed to safely get his family away from the farm, was when it all fell apart. The first sign that Klines had not been as stealthy as desired was the nightstick connecting with the back of his head. His vision blurred and as it faded out, he heard the scraping of metal as a weapon was unsheathed, the sound of metal connecting with flesh, his sister and mother screaming, and then nothing at all as blackness overtook him.

The events that happened over the next week are not entirely known, however, those that knew him previously would say that he was never the same. He also was rarely ever seen in Ilithi again.