Talk:Annael
GM Reexa's post
Empath NPC spotlight: Annael Ebeshalek · on 5/21/2008 3:24:17 PM
In her own words:
Chalk it up to a youthful mistake. That's what I try to tell myself when the regret looms. Regrets are an inevitable part of life, and while I sometimes wonder what might have been, I have to remember that the path I chose to follow is the one that brought me here.
I've had to learn to trust again, and yet still do so with some reservations. I watch the people around me who seem to live so flawlessly and I wonder sometimes at the secret knowledge that they have that enables them to do so. Whatever lesson they learned or book they read to get to that moment, I must have missed it. I still feel so much like the awkward girl I once was.
I know that Mirinn has faith in me...even still she has faith, and always has. She sees something there. She must, or she never would have stepped aside from her position and let me take the position of guildleader. Until Nebela Mentrade, I was the youngest to ever do so, and there were so many times when I wished she'd never done so. But she had faith.
Sometimes, I have hope that someday I might look in a mirror and see what she sees. But not today.
The Empath guild leader is a mid-height Human woman with long hair the color of a raven's wing. Her eyes are a disturbing violet that, despite their humor, hold many years of personal anguish within them. The lines in her face only stand out when she smiles, which is fairly often. What you can see of her body is criss-crossed with scars, and her face is woven with a light lattice-work of them. Her clothing is all silk of a tasteful pearl gray color, cut in the latest rage of the Crossing. Her feet are shod with black leather boots, and she has pouches on her body that are stuffed with dried herbs, aloe, and other such tools of her craft. One little piece of mandrake root, you notice, has been shoved into her sash in much the same way a warrior would thrust his sword quickly into his belt after a hard battle.
Years of fighting unseen battles weigh heavy around this woman, and several times you see the light smile on her face drop, replaced by one of sad seriousness. Her eyes go distant at those times and she looks toward a window, scanning the streets of the Crossing as if she was searching for someone or something she had lost.
Annael, long ago, shared a love with a young man named Ivinnes. When a girl came to her, claiming to be Ivinnes' lover and pregnant with his child, Annael believed the girl and turned her back on her love. Ivinnes left the city and Annael behind, and only after did Annael learn that the woman had lied. By then, it was too late. Annael learned that Ivinnes' ship had sunk; with it went her dreams. Though she knows now that Ivinnes survived the storm, and subsequently married and had children, she is emotionally scarred by the years of shame and pain caused by having driven her love away. It is unclear if she still loves him or if she only feels the pain of what might have been, and the shame of what she assumed. The two have not reunited. Despite Mirinn's encouragement that she should see him and resolve the past, Annael feels that too much time has passed and that there are some things best left in the shadows.
Because of Annael's experience as a young woman, she is often very reserved, a trait that many of her students see as coldness or aloofness. Kind and caring to a fault but not always sure how to show it, she loves her guildhall and is so proud of the members and their efforts to heal the sick and the injured. Always, though, always is the memory of how she believed tears over love, of turning her back on someone who trusted her. Perhaps she now mistrusts her own instincts, and fears that if she allows herself to become too close to anyone, she would be capable of doing the same thing again.
So she hangs back. She smiles when a part of her wants to laugh, congratulates promotions warmly when she really wants to hug them. She is resigned to living on the outskirts of life, believing it is a just punishment for the pain that she caused her dearest love.