Dalyan (prime)

Portrait created by Dalyan's player using ChatGPT

Dalyan Race Sylvankind Hometown Solhaven Class Rogue Profession Smuggler Disposition Pragmatic Greatest Weakness Top Shelf Bourbon Dislikes The Law

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 abdomen is pierced with an ebon-clouded crimson phantom sapphire.

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 whit 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.