Aramenta Stonewhistling

by **Aramenta** on March 15th, 2013, 12:45 pm

Name: Aramenta Stonewhistling
Birth Clan: Stonewhistling Pavilion of the Amethyst Clan
Birthday: Summer 45, 497 (16 years old)
Race: Human (Drykas)
Gender: Female
Home City: Endrykas

by **Aramenta** on March 15th, 2013, 12:45 pm

Aramenta has an unquestionable prettiness. She is a Drykas, so there is none of the pale translucent beauty of city elegance about her. She has, instead, a queer, elfin beauty. Her face is so round it looks like a child's, and her chin and nose have a certain naughty jaunt to them. But her eyes belie this - heavy, soft, so calm as to almost be dull.

Her skin is a deep sun-kissed color, and her hair, auburn from some long forgotten ancestor married into the Clans, is burnt almost to red by the sun. It is, in Drykas fashion, pulled into a thick series of spirals of wild braiding on the back of her hair, but curls so determinedly that a thin wispy halo surrounds the hair within 15 minutes of having it put up, no matter the care with which its done.

Her body is small, and delicate - less a horse-warriors body, and more a horse-jockey. She has the lithe strength of the horsefolk, the sort of floating grace of one who spends as much time on a horse's back as on the earth. But with her, the grace is more serene, less aggressive. She has almost... a dreaminess about her, one that is pretty, but also, is a bit dull, perhaps, a bit 'wrong in the head', as one might say. There is a slowness to her movements, the serenity of one who is perhaps not as aware of the possibility of danger as one should be.

But as pretty as she is, it is not the sight of Aramenta that her people know her by - it is the thick red keloid burn scars running along her left arm, or it is the sound of her voice - her voice never rises above an unvoiced whisper, and even at a loud whisper grows painfully hoarse, the remnants of injury from a fire long ago. Normally, she simply does not speak at all. Even the grassland-sign of her hands is subtle, and 'quiet' in its way.

by **Aramenta** on March 15th, 2013, 12:48 pm

Aramenta is seldom known as simply 'Ara' - most folks when they mention her say 'Ara-and-her-Liv' since the two are inseperable, and have been since they were girls. This isn't to say there's any equality between the two, of course. It is 'her' Liv, and noone would think otherwise. Liv herself, as fiercely loyal as she is to her mistress, seems a bit raw at her own servitude sometimes, though she'd be loth to say a thing. And who would ask? Its the law. She's no Drykas, just an outsider girl, a second generation slave, born to be a possession.

Ara herself, as dearly as she loves her Liv, sees her this way, and would be confused to think of her anyway - she loves Liv less as her own soul than as an extension of herself. There's no spite in this: it is simply the fact, and what she's grown to understand. And Ara, herself, sits in roles she may not be well-suited to in society: outsider, younger wife, daughter of a dead-woman. Queer and il-fitting.

Ara loves, perhaps more even than her family, her Liv, and her strider Canterfoot, the land itself. Her father taught her webbing because it takes the heart and head both of which, despite her queerness, are strong in Ara, so that she would have a place in society. But to Ara, the web she is now growing old enough to competently touch, is not a safeguard, or a network. Its more, almost, like an older sister, something that she turns to when she is lonely or frightened, or simply wants to play. This isn't to say she doesn't take it seriously - though young still, Ara would die for her 'sister' if somehow this made a difference - but it means that her relationship with it is wildly impractical at times.

by **Aramenta** on March 15th, 2013, 12:48 pm

Spring 5, 513 AV
Stream in Endrykas, A Group of Washerwomen
----------------------------------------------------

"Who's that?"

"Oh, Ara Stonewhistling, and her girl aside her."

"Her girl? Oh, you must mean Livvy."

"Is that her name?"

"Indeed 'tis. You caught me off guard, I s'pose. My sister, she's an Amethyst in Horncaller pav, you know, and them folk I think hardly think of her as 'her girl'. A person doesn't say, in Amethyst, 'Oh, I just saw Ara this morning, and her girl was with her.' A person just says 'Oh, I just saw Ara-and-her-Liv, as if that were her name."

"I don't take that light. Its not healthy, a good Drykas girl from a high family took up so close with a slavey-girl."

"Ara? A good Drykas girl? Oh, she's windmarked, sure, and I would not say she were bad, not rightly, but... well, you say that, I picture something other than Aramenta Grasswave - not Stonewhistling no more, you know. She's a queer one."

"Queery? She seemed a pretty enough thing, 'cept for her scar-arm. And you know how they say - a Drykas without scars needs to go riding more."

*laughter*

"Aye, that scar on her arm, though, did you get a right fine look at it? Or her windmark, either."

"Nae, why?"

"Well... if you see her again, you look at it. That ain't a mark o' some grapple wi' a Zith-bird or nothin'. 'sa burn. You ain't never heard about the Stonewhistlings?"

"No! Tell!"

"Well... you know I hate to gossip..."

"No, no, no, just between us, promise."

"Well... you keep it to yourself, and don't say I said it. But girlie was in a pavilion fire when she were only five."

*gasp*

"No! Oh, the dear!"

"Sure 'nuff. Amethysters, they don't talk about it much, you know how it is. It ain't the sort o' thing one likes t'remember too hard on. But aye, and a quick one, too. Old man Stonewhistling had two wives, then, sisters they was: Duna and Elaine Gullybird-Stonewhistling. Say he wanted to marry Elaine first, but Duna... well, you know I wouldn't say nothing indelicate of the man. Just saying, oldest of them Stonewhistling boys ain't nine months older than their anniversary, if you know what I mean."

"Oh, sure, I know what you mean!"

"Stonewhistlings weren't rich then, but old man, he wanted his girl, and he busted horse harder then I ever seen a man. A breeder he is, the old man, one of the folk 'at put the good name to Stonewhistling striders as good for scouts and speed-runners, you know. Took the big tough warhorse mounts and sold 'em off, and bought these little thin creatures, some said hardly Striders at all. But given a few seasons a growing, and there was many a runnery fellow hanging about the Stonewhistling herds, hoping one o' their runner-mares might just cozy up to him and give 'em a windmark."

"Ah! I have heard o 'them! Aye, I remember hearing on that, won the great race three years running, eh?"

"Aye, indeed. Old man Stonewhistling, he's a webber aside being a breeder, you know, I think that's as much to do with it. He knows just... where to have a horse, just how to weave 'em together, as it were. But, you're distracting me! Point is, a few seasons o' that, a man gets enou' money to be making him a second wife, comfortably, and he takes up his Duna, right? Was quite the tadge, as the Gullybirds Topazes are a good line, better once, I'd say, than the Stonewhistlings were. To take two girls from 'em! There was more than one girl who clucked her tongue, that I'll tell you. Two sisters in the same tent, sleeping with the same man, it ain't rightly wrong, as you say, it's just... recipe for bad business."

"He kept the older girl?"

"Stonewhistling ain't no cadder. He's a good man. Course he did. And she's all he got now, 'course, after the fire."

"No!"

"True as true. Fire started, and the only ones inside was Duna, and her slave, and their two girls: Ara-and-her-Liv, sure as sun. And the fire takes up, and the mothersget caught up quick, trying to set the horses free, and never make it out. But Ara, she does, and not just running, but on the back o' this great mistress of a Stryder-mare, with Livy slung o'er the back. How she got windmarked, the mare stayed with her after that."

"And that's where she got the burn scar? Saving a slave?"

"Maybe. She don't talk much on that. And more than a burn. She breathed so much o' the smoke she ain't never talked since."

"No!"

"Not one word. You sit just by her and sometimes, she'll kind of do this queer hissy-little-whisper. She does it sometimes with her Liv. But that's why they stick so close, I think. Liv's th'only one who knows what she's saying, and talks for her. Takes care of her. Ara, she needs taking care of. She's a queer one, like I said. You ask me, smoke burned her brains same time it burned her throat. She gets tired easy, and so her pa started teaching her web-work, right? Sometimes she just lays out in the grass, with her hands above her head, fussing her fingers in the sky, like a singer on a lute, her Liv just sittin' there in her dress all stone-faced-and-petch-you-if-you-touch-her."

"A bit bats, huh?"

"'swhat I think."

"Well. With the pox, I s'pose she might find a husband."

"Sure. Ain't nothin' wrong with her that way. Broad hips, pretty face, milk-breasts, and a good enoguh girl for mothering I think. And a webber. Jus' have to put up with the queer, and talkin' to your wife through her slave."

*laughter*

by **Aramenta** on March 15th, 2013, 12:53 pm

Skills

Lores

Languages

by **Aramenta** on March 15th, 2013, 1:01 pm

Liv

Canterfoot

Clompfoot

Small handaxe

Pack

Camp Gear

A braid of her mother's hair

by **Aramenta** on March 15th, 2013, 1:03 pm

+100 GM - Starting Cash
80gm - Liv (15 y/o female slave)
6gm - Small handaxe
10gm - Clompfoot, a large mule
1 gm - Drop spindle and distaff
5 sm - knitting and felting needles, wood
+273GM - Seasonal income (Spring 513)
-135GM - Living Expenses (Spring 513)
-45GM - Living Expenses (Livvy)
-20GM - Additional Food (Livvy)
+100GM - Sale of compass
-45GM - Living Expenses (Summer 513 - reduced to Poor)
-45GM - Living Expenses (Livvy)
-20GM -- Additional Food (Livvy)
-60GM - Wedding expenses (Summer 513)
------------------------------------------------------------------
5.5GM

by **Aramenta** on March 19th, 2013, 6:35 pm

Olivia is, if one goes back far enough, from a family in Zeltiva. But she knows this only as an abstract fact, having no real idea even what or where Zeltiva is: Liv was born to her enslaved mother in Endrykas, and has never left the Sea of Grass. She's spent most of her life fairly comfortable for a slave, acting as Ara's personal companion, but still dreams, perhaps, one day of being a full Drykas. She hates her short hair, and looks longingly at the great Strider mounts of the windmarked.

Liv's most formative moment was in the fire that killed her mother and nearly took her mistress. unbeknownst to the rest of the world - or even to Ara - Ara was overwhelmed by the fire heat and went into a faint. Liv, only a very small girl at the time, tried to drag her 'sister' - in her mind - from the fire, but was too small. It was then that she was approached by Canterfoot, a mare of the house who had struggled into the tent amid the confusion. The horse came to Liv, and would nuzzled Liv, rather than Ama, offering to bond with her, and carry her out of the fire. The girl, wanting to save her sister shook her head, and held Ama up. The horse, accepting this for Liv's sake, nipped gently at Ama, to wake her, and Ama and Liv struggled the Drykas girl onto the Stryder's back, and the two were bonded. Liv struggled onto the horse's rump, and Canterfoot pulled them from the burning tent in time to save them.

Riding (Mule): 10
Singing: 10
Hand Axe: 10

Aramenta Stonewhistling

Aramenta Stonewhistling

Aramenta (Physical Description)

Aramenta (Character Concept)

Aramenta (Character History)

Aramenta Grasswave: Skills

Equipment

Ledger

NPC - Olivia Merriwen

Who is online