Valon Ternyk  Name: Valon “Val” Ternyk Race: Mixed Blood Age: 25 Birthday: Tenth of Winter Gender: Male Appearance: Val Ternyk has lived most of his life in caravans, traveling from city to city and region to region. Doing so has not allowed him to become chubby, for he is a long, lean man. Acting as guard repeatedly gave him a lean, muscular frame whilst also gifting him with a few scars. At six feet even, he is somewhat tall, weighing in at a respectable one hundred and seventy-three pounds. His limbs are long, fingers slim and dexterous, scarred from needle pricks. His palms, too, have become callused from work, most notably the right hand; it is his sword hand and sees frequent use. Though he is striped with a scar here and there, they were gained not in open battle but accidents in practice. The scars upon his body are light in color. The most noticeable almost took his eye out when he gained it. A guard he’d never sparred with before took him as better than he was. The sword cut through the curve of his right nostril and the apple of his cheek, deep enough to cause a worrisome wound, but not deadly. It left him with a pale line across his face. From his mother he inherited his fiery, bright red hair, or so he is told. His eyes are a dark blue color, though in certain lights, typically darker lighting, they appear to be almost purple. He wears his hair in tight, scalp hugging braids, only letting it free when off the job. While his skin might hold a healthy glow easier than most, he does not bear the gilded skin of his father. Personality: Overall, Valon is a very straightforward man. He generally tries to speak the truth, and when he lies, it is only out of necessity. He works hard to earn every miza that he can, intent on saving enough to begin his own rather odd sort of business. Val, once he takes a job, is extremely loyal to his employer, often serving as personal bodyguard for him or her with caravan guard coming a close second. His reasoning for such fierce loyalty is that he is being paid by that person, so that person must live to pay him. When off the job, he is a rather nice man, willing to help others. He won’t help to the point of overreaching himself, but he is willing to do just about anything for a few miza, be they gold, silver, or copper. He strives hard to prove himself in his chosen occupation, even if it is not the occupation he desires to eventually have. His single-minded dedication to combat during guard duty, however, has given him an unsavory sort of habit. He cannot fight in prolonged practice battles save for one on one or two on two at most lest he lose himself in the heat of a fight. More than once he has stabbed a guard, nonfatal though it was, during such a slip-up. He tends to get a bit defensive, as well, when his sewing doesn’t come out the way he likes. It puts him in an ill mood for anyone to mention it. Being functionally deaf in one ear has made him a bit paranoid, as well. He reacts badly to anyone “sneaking up” on him on that side, at times even throwing a punch before looking. As a result of trying to break the habit, he’s almost constantly glancing to the left to check that side. One thing Valon is proud of is his ability to read and write a bit and to do sums. He counts it as the advantages of being a merchant’s son. He’s a willing teacher, as well, to anyone that has time and a few mizas to part with. From time to time, Valon’s tendency to jump in and defend the little man has almost gotten him into trouble. Interfering into fights, after all, can impinge on the pride of prickly individuals. On one such occasion, it gave him a chair to the head for his trouble. For weeks after, he chewed a certain herb to dampen the pain of his debilitating headaches so that he could function. Despite healing up quite some time before, Valon still harbors an addiction to the herb. He passes off his trips to herbalists as attempts to ensure he won’t lose hearing in his right ear, as well, but it is a thin disguise for purchasing more. Valon likes to sew, and he likes to hone his skill with a blade. He likes to push himself in the skills he has acquired, to rise above himself constantly. He very much likes to learn, always eager to gain some new bit of knowledge or some small skill. He also enjoys fluffy animals for their softness. As a result of his drive for betterment, Valon dislikes feeling as if he were stagnating. He dislikes those who fight solely for combat’s sake, and he hates those who would prey on and use the weak simply because they perceive themselves as better. Valon also dislikes snakes with a rather intense passion. They are one of his fears, finding the way they slither to be disconcerting. Character History: Valon never found out how his mother, an Inarta, came to be not only out of Wind Reach, but also so very far from home that his Eypharian father could impregnate her. So far as Valon knows, his mother’s life began and ended with the caravan where his own began. As far back as he remembered, Valon Ternyk called Weslyn Ternyk father. The already aging but amiable merchant raised his adopted son well, thinking of him as such after his own son left home for his life of adventure. He never even seemed to mind that the boy he called his son had been born mostly deaf on one side. He just taught him to sign with his hands just in case. From time to time, Val would question the old man about a memory; a certain scent might catch his attention or he would remember bright hair like his own. Weslyn never held back a detail, not the fact that he had a brother adopted by another couple or even how his mother had passed, an arrow sunk to the fletching in her breast. He even confided in young Valon his relief that the woman had lived long enough to get both babes off the breast before perishing. This story in particular of how he lost his mother came to be one of two reasons that his first job was a caravan protector, guarding against bandits. Valon found himself to have a voracious appetite for learning at a young age, and he took to his father’s lessons with fervor. As any child, he played a lot; however, he also showed an equal energy for study. His father taught him letters, taught him to read, though neither could write very well. The most Valon ever learned in the way of writing was signing his name. As a merchant, his father knew sums, as well, and he did not skimp on this lesson for his son, either. As a loving father was wont to do, Weslyn wanted Valon to have every advantage that a son could have. It took some convincing for Valon to manage it, but he convinced his father to allow him to take up a sword. Weslyn knew his son well enough to realize he would find a way to wield a blade one way or another. To ensure his son’s safety, mostly from himself, Weslyn began his training in the use of an estoc, intending for the thrusting weapon to keep his son from too many self-inflicted cuts. Rather than hire a teacher, Valon tended to talk guards into giving him a spar here and there. Even with his father’s desire to spare him scars, Valon earned them through hard work. Each caravan tended to have one or two inexperienced guards that practiced with Valon rather than the stronger, more experienced men. Only once did he not feel pride at a scar, and that was the scar that he gained by almost losing an eye. The wound scared the boy witless for days, and it took even longer to heal. That particular incident gave him a drive to move a bit more swiftly in a fight. As Valon developed skill with a blade, he began to work more with the guards rather than just spar with them. In time, he even began to guard his father’s caravans as a teen. Only once did he see true action, and it was a pitiful display at best. The ambush had been poorly planned and even poorer in execution, with the bandits breaking and running after getting exactly one fur off a wagon. For such a meager prize, three men lost their lives and one his pride at being defeated by a gangly teen with a rusted sword. However, Valon’s pursuits were not all of the martial variety. With each new caravan traveling the dangerous world, he learned a bit of information here, a scrap there. From a seamstress, he learned to sew enough to patch his own clothes and to make the most rudimentary of garments from scraps of cloth. It was also from the sweet lady with pinpricked fingers that he learned to sketch garments. He proved better at drawing them than making them, however. From an apprentice armorer, he learned a bit about making armor, though he had no means to make any of his own. A leatherworker traveling with a caravan from city to city to change job venues taught young Valon a small bit, as well. From his father he learned two important skills, as well: riding and negotiation. He never developed the skills beyond what he had learned initially. He instead concentrated on his swordsmanship to improve his odds of surviving an ambush with better planning. Despite his generally supportive nature, Weslyn protested Valon’s desire to learn anything about magic. He had never truly paid any mind to mages, even making coin off wares sold by mages from time to time, but he knew that it could be dangerous. Valon, though, stood his ground with his desire to help his father. That, he said, was why he wanted to learn. When asked what sort of magic he wished to learn, he had told his father he wished to learn Webbing. From repeated trips to and through Cyphrus, he had learned enough about how it functioned to know it would be useful. As a caravan guard, it could only help his skill to be able to monitor a larger area, he explained. Through much discussion and pure stubbornness, Valon actually swayed the skeptical Weslyn to his side. As fortune would have it, their next trip led them through Cyphrus, and the shrewd old merchant found a mentor for his son. It cost him more than he expected to lose, but Weslyn’s love had always won out over his occasionally tightfisted ways. Coin, trade goods, and two fine horses changed hands and even then it bought young Valon only rudimentary training. His mentor proved to be more niggardly with his training than Weslyn with his money, but Valon learned enough from the man. He learned not to let himself overgive to the Webbing, he learned how to tap into existing Webs and read what little he could, and, most important for Valon, he learned to weave his own small Webs. While the Webbing called to him to stay, to learn more, Valon’s drive was not for the sake of magic itself. As such, he also learned to limit himself. He deemed himself ready to serve his father faithfully then, able to function as a sole night watchman if he set up a perimeter. In case of emergency, he always wove small Webs onto the guard captains. With his relative inexperience, his Webs faded more quickly than most, but it tended to last long enough to get through a night. For quite a number of years, he made Weslyn Ternyk proud to call him son by serving him with the same fervor that he had shown for learning. After all, the old man was his father. However, death came calling, as it did for every man. Rather than something that Valon could fight for his father, Weslyn Ternyk greeted the specter of death because of his age. Specifically, he contracted a flux that his aging old body simply could not fight off. Though his loyal son saw to him as the caravan moved on towards its destination, the man simply grew weaker and weaker. By the time the group had come within a few days of Syliras, Weslyn had become a shell of his former self. Where once he had been pudgy and bright, only a dull, bony shell remained. Only a day’s ride out from his birthplace, Weslyn passed on. Rather than depart then and there, Valon went on to finish his tenure as a guard after seeing to his father. The caravan’s circuit would, after all, bring him back to Syliras in another year. During his final year as a caravan guard, Valon began to think upon what he would enjoy doing with his life. Though he realized he would need to continue making mizas to survive and thrive, he knew that he did not want to be a career mercenary all his life. Thinking back on all he had learned, Valon decided what he wished to do. However unorthodox it might have been, he wanted to become a nobleman’s armorer. He came up with the term himself, though it always confused those he told about it. When he explained, they all laughed. What Valon intended to do was create fashionable clothing with chainmail sewn inside. After all, the powerful and paranoid need not wear ugly armor at all times, he reasoned. It needed not make sense for the others, however; it needed to make sense only to Valon. With his mind made up, he prepared for his stop at Syliras and the beginning of the rest of his life and the journey that entailed. Possessions: 1 Set of Clothing -Simple Leather Vest -Simple Pants -Simple Undergarments -Simple Coat -Simple Boots 1 Waterskin 1 Backpack containing: -Comb -Brush -Soap -Razor -Rations (1 week’s worth) -1 eating knife -Flint and Steel Heirloom: Oft-patched, once white silk coat from his father 100 Gold Mizas Housing: -1 large tent -1 large tarp -100 ft of rope -Lantern -2 torches -Bedroll and blanket -Fishing tackle and hooks -Mixed blood horse, a thick-bodied horse once used to pull wagons. Valon kept the horse because it was one of few things actually left to him in Weslyn’s will. The tack is old and worn, but useable, and his saddlebags are spacious.  Skills, Lores, Gnosis, Languages
Gnosis: None Fluent Language: Common Basic Language: Sign Language Poor Language: Shiber Lores: Guard Duty Garment Patterns Ledger
|
I hope that this is acceptable, though it is my first try. Please, let me know if there are any mistakes.
