Dalyan (prime)
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Appearance
Dalyan LaTray is a Sylvankind Smuggler from Caligos.
She is taller than average, has a well-toned frame, and is in the prime of her life. She has piercing, silver-haloed deep indigo eyes and moonlight white skin. Her waist length, thick silver blonde hair is worn in a solitary loose fishtail braid tied with a shadowy black leather band. She has a delicate face and thin-tipped pointed ears. On her shoulder, sit an ebon violet-crested macaw with gleaming steel gears.
Her right collarbone is pierced with a black-tinted amethyst pygmy octopus and her left cheek is pierced with a teardrop ash grey pearl.
She has some delicately inked script across her knuckles that reads "Thug Life", and a rolling dice tattoo on her neck.
She is wearing an embroidered nightshade half-bodice laced with scarlet suede laces, a rune-carved rolaren-plated rucksack with a gold scarab emblem, a weathered leather bandolier, a pair of supple black suede gloves clasped with tiny onyx scarabs, a wide brushed vaalin band, a sturdy iron keyring, a branded leather case inset with well-oiled metal gears, some low-slung black leather pants, and a pair of leather high-heeled boots buttoned with black moonstones.
Backstory
Dalyan LaTray, known to most as Daly, grew up with mist in her lungs and salt on her skin. She won’t speak of her family, not because the pain is too deep, but because she simply doesn’t care to. Born on the haunted edges of Caligos Island before its demise, Daly left home rather young, guided by nothing more than instinct and the smuggling skills taught to her by her late father, who died in a back-alley skirmish. She vanished into a world of contraband routes, whispered deals, and the rusted edge of a hidden dagger.
She slipped into River’s Rest like a ghost ~ young, sharp-eyed, beautiful, and already too clever for her own good. At first, she played the long game: charming merchants and nobles who thought her a pretty distraction. She poured their wine, laughed at their jokes, let them think they’d bought her affection, right up until she stuck a knife through their heart and disappeared with their coin, jewels, and ledgers.
Her beauty was the bait. Her fists were the hammer. Her knives were the scalpel. A smuggler by trade and a thief by calling, Daly didn’t just survive, she flourished. She could crack a chest in the dark by feel alone and vanish down a tide-slick alley before the guard even finished sneezing.
But even River’s Rest has lines, and Daly crossed one. She'd taken to smuggling young ones lost in the marshes. The guards paid her handsomely as she handed them over with a reassuring, yet devious smile. When the law finally came sniffing, Daly knew her time was up.
Kristalin, a silver-spooned daughter of a shipping dynasty and one of the few whom Daly considered a friend, stepped in. With a few forged documents, Kristalin arranged passage for Daly on a swift sloop bound for Solhaven. The gift came with no strings, just a whispered goodbye and a promise to “see you soon”.
In Solhaven, Daly met Admiral Pixie. Now aboard The Madness, Daly serves as Chief Security Officer and Master Boatswain, cracking locks, keeping the crew in line, and betting hard at every port tavern. She smokes cigars when she wants to look dangerous, fights when someone doubts she is, and always, always, smiles before she steals. She never looks back. There’s nothing worth seeing in the rearview anyway.
Siblings - Part I
It was there aboard the Madness that Dalyan felt perhaps her past had come knocking.
The first time Glahnvis Hezekai called her his “sister from another mister,” Dalyan barked a laugh, sharp and dismissive. But her smile didn’t reach her eyes, and Glahnvis' own smirk faltered. It was just a joke… wasn’t it?
Both were from Caligos. Both had the same quick wit and sharp tongue when needed, the same twitch at the corner of their mouths when they were angry but trying not to show it. They fought with the same rhythm, moved with the same stealth. Dalyan started to notice. So did he.
Questions took root, quiet at first, then consuming.
Dalyan began poking around her old contacts, pulling on threads in the smuggler web that still stretched across the shattered world. In crumbling port towns and smoke-choked taverns, she asked if anything had survived the ruin of Caligos. Documents. Names. A scrap of paper washed up on some shore from the old library of records.
No one had much. But her gut wouldn’t let it go.
When she finally cornered Glahnvis one day on the Madness, leaning against a cannon with a bottle in hand, she asked him straight: “Do you remember your mother’s name?”
He looked across the water for a long while before answering. “Ava... I think. It’s fuzzy. After the wreck… I just remember the name Ava.”
Dalyan’s world tilted.
That was her mother’s name.
She never liked the woman. Never trusted her.
But what if? What if her mother had remarried, had a child?
Her own surname was LaTray, same as her father. Glahnvis’ name was Hezekai, no shared blood on paper. Still, the nagging similarities and that one name ~ Ava ~ hung in her thoughts like smoke.
One way or another, she’ll find out the truth. And if the answer is yes… well, she hasn’t decided what she’ll do with it yet.
Siblings - Part II
Weeks passed, and Daly found herself slipping into silence more often than not. It wasn’t about Glahnvis, not really. It was about the gnawing feeling beneath her skin that truth was close enough to touch, if she just clawed through the right layers of filth to get to it.
She kept her distance, not out of mistrust, but because her focus had narrowed. The world around her blurred at the edges. Conversations became distractions. Her questions, when she did speak, were sharp and direct, all business. The crew noticed, but said nothing. Glahnvis noticed too.
Every time The Madness pulled into a new port, she disappeared for hours, always claiming she was heading to the guild, even though it was all lies. She’d often return with blood on her knuckles, dirt on her boots and shadows under her eyes. She was digging through ash and ruin, hoping something, anything, had survived the destruction of Caligos.
What Glahnvis didn’t know, what she didn’t want anyone to know, was that she was still chasing ghosts. Her ghosts. His, maybe.
She didn’t want to believe it. Didn’t want to find proof. But if there was a chance they were connected, by blood or fate or some twisted thread, she had to know.
Even if the truth burned.
Siblings - Conclusion
Dalyan had always known where to ask the wrong questions.
It wasn’t easy. Most of Caligos' records had gone under when the island sank into the sea like a stone. What hadn’t burned or drowned had been looted and scattered. Birth certificates, marriage licenses, registries, pieces of people’s lives reduced to threadbare parchment traded like smuggled relics.
But where there’s desperation and coin, there’s always a black-market dealer ready to sniff opportunity.
She spent her coin fast. Then favors. Then threats. In the corners of hidden archives, backrooms behind taverns, and vaults of burned-out collectors, she chased the scraps. Most of it was junk, wrong names, wrong dates, water-damaged fragments. But finally, in a crooked little shop carved into the bones of an old lighthouse, she found him.
A document merchant, thin as a twig, with a grin like a paper cut.
“You’re looking for Caligos records? Risky business. Costly, too.”
Dalyan paid anyway.
Two days later, he handed her a sealed bundle, two aged birth certificates, brittle but whole. The ink had faded, the paper water-stained and mildly-burnt, but the names were still legible.
She read hers first.
Name: Dalyan LaTray Mother: Ava LaTray Father: Larkin LaTray Place of Birth: Caligos Island
Then she unfolded the second.
Name: Glahnvis Hezekai Mother: Ava Hezekai (formerly LaTray) Father: Dain Hezekai Place of Birth: Caligos Island
She looked at the birthdates, the years. It all made sense. She stared at the paper, her mind going still. The storm inside her had no name. No rage. No joy. Just a hollow kind of understanding that changed nothing, and everything.
They were half-siblings and she was 12 years his senior.
Born of the same mother. Two different fathers. Two wildly different lives.
Glahnvis, who barely remembered what he did yesterday, let alone bits from his tattered history. And Dalyan, who ran from the past and had now, unavoidably, collided with it.
She folded the papers carefully and methodically. Not trembling. Just thinking.
When she returned to the Madness late in the day, Glahnvis was working the irons, hammering down a mount with rhythmic ease. He didn’t look up until she stepped into the light.
“Found what you were looking for?” he asked.
She didn’t answer right away. Just pulled the papers from her rucksack and handed them to him.
He read them. Once. Twice. Then looked up with the calm of someone who already knew, deep down.
“So,” he said slowly. “Guess I wasn’t joking.”
“No,” Dalyan said. “You weren’t.”
The wind blew across the deck, snapping the ashen hemp sails. For a while, neither said anything. Then Glahnvis gave her the smallest of smiles.
“Well… sister,” he muttered, raising an eyebrow, “I suppose I get a pass now for every time I poisoned you after your botched garrote ambushes.”
She smirked, but there was something softer in her smile this time. "Whatever, little brother."
Before turning and retreating into the darkness, Daly threw a hiss over her shoulder like one of her prized daggers. Glahnvis, ever the brother now, grinned and returned it.
Whatever happened next, whatever storms still waited, at least they’d face them not just as crewmates… …but as blood.