The Runaway Bard
Mia is a young girl who has lived a very sheltered life. Full of youthful naivety and optimism in the face of the horrors thrown at her, as she finds herself in the middle of the illevan-akati war, she pushes through without letting the world break her. She believes in the golden rule, to do unto others like you would want others to do unto you, and goes to great lengths to leave a place better than she found it.
Appearance
Wild, dark-brown auburn curls fall around a round face sprinkled with brown freckles over beautiful blue skin. Her big eyes are dark red and there are traces of horns on her forehead that seem to have been filed down. The ears are long and pointy, revealing her elven heritage.Personality
In her youth, Mia was happy and bubbly, loved fashion and beauty, and strived to make others feel like they were just as special as she knew they were. When Elmira Delid arrived back to Agartha Nova in time for the Guardian's Ascension, it was Mia and her mother who brought her a dress to match the occasion, feeling perhaps that no one else would take care of the Elder as the times became more intense. Besides, Mia was a great fan of Elmira and constantly shadowed her with girlish excitement, impressing the latter with her wit, heart, and intelligence. As the war ignited around her, the world hardened Mia to the point where she took to alcohol to remain somewhat sane. She was still performing for coin, telling the truth about the past wherever she could find a willing ear. She became gruff, ragged, and as unpleasant to be around as people were drawn to remain in her sphere. She retained a glimmer of her caring heart, showing sympathy for those in need.Background
Mia grew up an only child and was heavily doted upon by a loving mother and father. Her mother worked in the Citadel, as an Intelligence Curator and her father was a blacksmith to the upper classes. Their house was always filled with music and stories, so it was no wonder that Mia became a bard. Her tiefling nature was the result of a pact her father made in his youth and while they have never held it against her, the horns are something Mia has always been self-conscious about. She took to filing them down so her hair could hide the ends while she was at school. At some point in her life, she removed them altogether.
Once upon a time in a tavern on the outskirts of society
THE MAIN ROOM OF THE DRAFTY TAVERN was cramped, damp, and covered in a perpetual haze, as is usually the case for such an establishment. A tankard slammed into the table, frothy mead spilling into pools on the already greasy wood.
Grayed and stooped like a weathered tree on a stormy mountain, the woman was anything but good-looking, her once blue skin grey with age, her thin hair hanging in oily tatters from her scalp, barely held together with a scrap of twine. Now she cursed fervently, but the patrons barely looked up. She’d been there before.
The raggedy woman flailed, oblivious to the poor tankard still in her grip. Eyes blazing like a magician calling down lightning from a clear blue sky. Her lilting voice sounded like freshly fallen snow, yet it prowled through your chest like distant thunder. But never did she yell; her words filled the room from wall to wall as easily as the air itself. This woman knew the art of making a whisper roar.
“How dull, how unimaginative!” She spat, but there was a hungry joy in the corner of her mouth that betrayed glee before it set into a hard line. “There’re no dragons or witches or magic. Pah! No, the tale of the Four is so much more. Has it fallen into legend? Sure. Is it true? Who cares? It is a story that never dies, but ripples, transformes, twists, breaks… Whispered in silver shadows, in falling ashes and ruins of long-dead worlds, written in the blood of fallen men. You do well to remember this-"
The sudden roar of laughter had the patrons glaring daggers at a group of newcomers squeezed around a table in the back. The younglings ducked their heads behind their pints, muffling their sniggers. Which can be a difficult thing, indeed, if the drink is sound enough. With a humph, the Bard lifted her chin, the frown turning into a scowl.
“Would you care to fill in?” she asked them. “To tell us about Agartha? About the Guardians? Be my guest.”
The pause was undoubtedly dramatic. She was, after all, a performer through and through. The stage was her breath. By simple means, she could make an audience cry, laugh, or scream with rage. Sometimes all at once. A shift in a position here, a well-timed frown there, and they were in the palm of her hand. Receiving no reply, as she knew she would not, she let her expression darken, shifting her gaze into a faraway look; of the kind old folk get after a rough life on the road.
“All right then. It began, if one can call it a beginning, on a lonely plain in a land stuck betwixt night and light. Here a city lay, sprawled across the lands, burrowing deep below, conquering the very heavens themselves. Far fairer than a summer’s day, harsher than the Oort on apex turned. Home to the Builders and the Engineers of all that is. Like angels, they ripped the veils between the planes apart and left this world to us, pitiful mortals, as another city rose, far more impressive than our wildest dreams. So grand it was that...” the old Bard trailed off and stared in utter disgust at her empty tankard.
She didn’t resume speaking until they put another pint in front of her. While the audience waited with bated breaths, the pint was half gone before she blinked in the firelight.
“Where was I? Oh, yes. The City of the Living Fires. That’s what we called it, us Bards who came upon it in those days. Some came away with songs, most out of sorts. If memories were had at all. Such is the nature of the Fey call. Make of that what you will."
The Bard drew a hand across her brow, itching at a spot above her left eye where there were scars left of a horn, smiling at the strangled noises and grumbles. "But that is not the story. No. One day. One rather ordinary day, four people found themselves wandering the streets of Ágartha towards the Pillars of the Veil. The Sanctuary of Ayursha. As they reached this grove, all of a sudden Luna appeared in the sky for the first time since before the dawn of time. As that silver moon shone high above, Ayursha spoke to each of them and each was judged as the very essence of the veil quaked and rippled with anticipation.
For a moment the Bard was lost in thought, a glimmer of fear in the tightness of her grip on the tankard. “Upon her touch, each arm burned with a brand that linked them forevermore to the fabric of reality itself. They were the first of the Realmwalkers. The Guardians who protect us, our lives, our Avaleen from that which wants to wipe us out. From the forces of the Hells and beyond the Astral Plane. Alura of Time. Eio of Planes. Fahrain of Chaos. And Feya of Fate, for she alone could sew the Weave and make it obey her will. Remember their names."
“What’s that?” a serving girl of barely fourteen piped up. "The weave?"
“It is the threads that bind everything. It is the reason you are alive, the reason you breathe. It is time, the stars, and the void between. But that’s another story, my dear,” the Bard replied with a sardonic smile.
The patrons chuckled knowingly and the place settled into a comfortable attentiveness.
“I was just asking,” the girl whispered in defense of her boss’s hushes.
But the Bard had lost her thoughts. Her frame was tenser than before, though she hadn’t moved one inch. At once it seemed as if the bar was cold and airless, dimmer than before. When she spoke, there was nothing of her joviality left in the lines of her face.
“Rumor has it when the universe faces its darkest night and hope has fled to brighter days,” the old woman said in hushed tones, her voice even raspier than before, her ragged features grim and terrible. “The veil between the worlds will turn in on itself until the stars become figures moving through the voids and worlds. And where the Old Guard goes, death and destruction surely follow, for they are the darkness where nothing lives."
“What’s an Old Guard?” Someone called out in a husky voice. "I thought you were talking about the Realmwalkers!"
Their mate gawked. “Are you serious? Ask the Zionians,” he said with a shudder.
“Zion is nothing but ice and pebbles.” Another protested.
“Ever wondered why?” Their mate asked. Silence fell heavy as it sank in just where they all were.
The Bard remained silent till she held their uneasy attention once more, and when she spoke her voice was haunted. “The Eight… May their shadow never fall upon our day. Though prophecies about them go further back than memory itself, and few can say, I have met them once and got away.”
One could feel the air still inside the saloon. “You want to know their names? Know the spirits of old? Know then the heartless fool who walks in snow, the prince of lies, and the one who carries stars in their eyes. Know the named and she who bears the shadow’s bane. Last of all the twinned, twained. Hopeless. Hated. Love the same. Pray you never meet the mad one on the road, for your soul will nevermore be your own.”
There was nothing humorous about the Bard’s laugh. Once again, the woman fell into her own bubble, almost as if she’d forgotten she wasn’t alone in the packed room. The door opened. Whoever it was moved silently as to not to disturb the crowd inside, who were all staring at the raggedy Bard sitting on a stool gazing into her tankard as if it held the answers to the ‘verse itself.
“What happens then?” the serving girl asked with a trembling voice, but to her credit her hands remained as steady as ever as she threw a defiant look at her boss.
“I am a Bard, my dear, not a Seer. The prophecies fell into the realm of fancy stories and fairy tales long ago, much like this one. As for the City of the Living Fires, it is no secret. We know their stories. We are them. We live in the ruins of their megalomania and hubris. The akati and the illevian… Those mighty heroes. Those fucking villains.”
“If no one has seen the Old Guard,” the girl said, a flush creeping into her cheeks, “how can we be so sure they're real and not just realmwalkers and mages and wizards pretending to be more than they are?”
“Quiet, girl!” the man behind the bar snapped. “Apologies, m’am, she’s…”
But the Bard held up a hand to silence him and looked at the girl with an expression caught between confusion and amusement. “You don’t, my dear. You live, you drink, you make gorgeous love, go to bed, and do it all again. For who’s to say that untrue isn’t real? Or that the real is not true at all?”
At that there was a roar of laughter and scattered hear, hears when tankards met with dull clinks and hearty cheers. The Bard wiggled a finger at the proprietor. “And you - I am no m’am, thank you!”
A hooded woman leaning against the wall started, turning towards the Bard with unwavering eyes drawing everyone’s attention. Something seemed to pass between them, something that made the Bard pale and flushed. No one had noticed her arrival, and no one saw her leave. Her hair was jet black and her eyes... Her eyes were eerily translucent, filled with stars. The silence that fell was one the bar had seldom heard. Thundering like a vacuum in her presence. No one dared to breathe until she had drunk her mead and left.
It wasn’t true, of course, but many were the stories about that night, and none of them were the same. Misty-eyed, the Bard stared into the distance, until some patron put another tankard in her trembling hands, and she launched into some other tall, forgettable tale about a milkmaid and a shepherd’s boy.
Species
Children
Eyes
Dark red
Hair
Reddish brown, curly
Skin Tone/Pigmentation
Blue skin, brown freckles
Height
5'8''
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