Nayli (prime)

Nayli Valen Race Half-Elf Culture Evashir Class Warrior Profession Courier Affiliation(s) Drakes Vanguard Warrior Guild Order of Voln Runners Guild In-a-Word Steady Disposition Easygoing but opaque Demeanor Warm, practical, watchful Primary Trait Reliable Secondary Trait Disciplined Flaw Stubbornly independent Greatest Strength Endurance Greatest Weakness Closed-off Habits Early riser, cracks her joints Hobbies Cooking, gardening, reading, knucklebones Soft Spots Children, animals, outcasts, her father Likes People-watching, nature, good conversation, small rituals Dislikes Cruelty, gate-keeping Fears Losing her father, being found wanting Loyalties Landing, innocents, her loved ones Spouse Uninvolved romantically

Nayli Valen is a half-dark elven warrior based in Landing and an inter-city courier for the Runners Guild.

Appearance

You see Nayli Valen the Moot Hall Runner.
She appears to be a Half-Elf from Evashir.
She is of a modest stature and has an athletic build. She appears to be standing at the threshold between carefree youth and established maturity. She has dark feather-lashed pale grey eyes and smooth, koa-toned skin. She has mid back-length, wavy seashell pink hair held back in a ponytail with a simple band. She has a well-defined, heart-shaped face, a slender, delicately flared nose and sharp pointy ears.
She is in good shape.
She is wearing a simple gold stud inscribed with sigils, a rugged cloak layered in oilcloth and wool, an oiled light leather courier bag with polished faenor buckles slung over her shoulder, a leather harness slung over her other shoulder, some splint mail built from long riveted vultite strips with a padded natural linen gambeson underneath, a bloodstained leather survival kit, some belted ashen grey wool trousers, and a pair of thrak hide boots.

Roots

Nayli Valen was born in Iskravyn, a farming village in Celvaris, in the Toskathyr foothills of northern Evashir, sometime during mid-Olaesta 5091.

Family

Nayli’s mother was Katreth Valen, a dark elven warrior and youngest daughter of the Valens of Celvaris - a wealthy merchant house built on generations of lumber and iriswood trade in Celvaris province. Nobody there had a place for a renegade daughter who picked fights with tutors and suitors alike, and since she wasn’t the heiress, that bought her a little more room for rebellion than her older sister. Katreth left to spend roughly eighty years running escort jobs out of Vta’Samic for a minor order of spellswords known as Lyx’Teskath, creating a rift that was never loud enough to be a scandal but never quiet enough to fully heal. She adopted a jade Rakix’i - a bastardized version of the family’s white Rakix’i - as her personal crest.

Nayli’s father is Aldric Voss, a human empath from Wehnimer’s Landing who joined the crew of the merchant schooner Lucky Lucan following the tragic death of his first wife from illness. After a decade at sea, he followed Katreth home from a contract and never quite left. He built a small healing practice, picked up enough Evashiran to get by, learned which questions not to ask, and said nothing as he grew old while his lover did not.

The odd couple settled on a plot of Valen farmland in the remote hamlet of Iskravyn, where their first and only child would arrive mere months later. Whether the pair had ever actually married, and whether their daughter’s use of the family name was legitimate or just more of Katreth’s defiance, was not entirely clear.

Early Life

The village’s tolerance of Aldric extended to Nayli in varying degrees. She wasn’t hated, at least not openly. She wasn’t barred from school or festivals. She was just an oddity: a half-blood who behaved more like her father and looked more like her mother, growing up visibly faster than every other child around her. A square peg in a round hole,

Many Lyx orders don’t recruit halfbreeds or non-dark elves. There’s no written rule, and there didn’t need to be. She understood long before she was old enough to be considered that certain doors wouldn’t open for her, whatever her name was. So, she helped Aldric with his practice instead, learning to grow medicinal herbs, prepare tinctures, and mend simple wounds. Katreth was away on contract most of the year, but would come home loud and disruptive of every routine they’d built in her absence, and during those brief windows Nayli trained in fundamentals: swinging a wooden waster, simple drills, basic footwork, how to take a hit.

She didn’t have friends, exactly, but rather people who were reasonably comfortable around her and those who weren’t. She had to learn to read the difference fast, and to be easy and warm and need nothing from anyone, because it was the only version of herself that the village could hold. She was good at it. She still is.

Changing Tides

In spring of 5122, Katreth left for a contract on a merchant ship running out of Vta’Samic, through waters the krolvin had been raiding for years.

She didn’t come back. Wreckage showed up off the Kestrel Sea in the summer, but no survivors ever did. Lyx’Teskath and the Valens launched multiple inquiries, all of which returned nothing. All Nayli and her father could do was wait, until the waiting became foolish in the face of answers that would apparently never come.

That’s where the welcome wore out. The Valens took their land back the way they did most things - correctly, politely, lawfully. They allowed Aldric and Nayli the winter to settle affairs, but that courtesy was exhausted by the spring thaw. Nobody was cruel, but nobody was inviting them to stay, either.

Aldric still had a younger sister and a nephew in Wehnimer’s Landing. The choice was not a particularly difficult one. Evashir was full of ghosts and shadows, and there was nothing left to stay for.

A New Frontier

Landing proved to be a major culture shock for Nayli, a chaotic melting pot of faces and races - many of which she’d never encountered in person - and none of them with thirty years’ careful tolerance for what she is. She and her father slowly built a life there over the next three years, staying with her paternal aunt for several months while Aldric set up practice again. Nayli herself brought in what little coin she could, doing odd jobs and eventually landing steady work running messages and packages across the city as a low-level initiate of the Runners Guild.

Nobody vouched for her in those first months, because nothing she carried mattered. After a few months, what came next was Dragonsclaw and the near country: day runs to the coastal cliffs, the old mine road, the pastures and vales, and back to the city before dark. Nothing too treacherous for anyone keeping their wits and keeping to the roads.

Those years gave her three plain things, and they are still the whole of her professional worth. She is reliable - the deliveries arrive when she said it would, with seals intact and ledgers balanced. She is fast - not over a hundred yards but over a distance, across long days and in inclement weather. And she can fight - not spectacularly, but enough to keep hold of the bag and get the job done.

The Runners noticed those things long before she even understood that someone was watching for them. Her promotion came unexpectedly, and it was bigger than a longer route. Someone in the guild had trusted her enough to put their name against hers in writing, which is the whole currency of her trade. And more importantly, she’s started carrying the kinds of messages that don’t go on paper: told to her at the desk, repeated back, and held in her head for days to say to a stranger’s face.

It was a strange season to have landed there, with refugees from a barony that didn’t exist anymore pouring into land that didn’t have roads a year ago as the Empire staked controversial claims in the region. Complicating matters further were renewed human-elven tensions and a fragile peace that few seemed to put any real faith in. All of it attracted the worst sort of opportunists. All of it raw enough that checkpoints ask more questions than they used to. Nayli learned quickly to keep her head down, hold her tongue, and stay professional.

She and her father eventually rented a little house in the Meadowlands south of the city, raising chickens and a small garden. A baker in the market started saving her the good end of the loaf and giving her grief about her hours. She began meeting colleagues for drinks until they stopped being colleagues and started being friends. It had, without anyone announcing it, become home.

Present Day

The long haul from Landing to Solhaven and the gate of Vornavis is hers, and has been since mid-5125. She’s only recently been handed the northern route to Icemule and Pinefar, and it isn’t just "the southern road with worse weather" - it’s a different job altogether. Where the Vornavis road has established caravansaries and staffed waypoints, the trail to Icemule affords no such amenities, with treacherous ice underfoot and frost giants lurking in the few caves where one can shelter from the wind. She only crosses the Dragonspine when no other runners are available, and due to half-elven blood, is never assigned routes into the heart of the Empire.

Nayli travels in company when schedules allow it, which is most weeks; anyone sensible does. But caravans only leave when they’re loaded, and a packet has a date on it. When those don’t line up, she goes anyway. That is what her reputation has become: she’ll break company when the schedule demands it, when another runner might hang back and take the late delivery on the chin.

A workaholic by nature, Nayli often picks up bounties and contracts posted by the local Adventurer's Guild, and spent mornings practicing her mother’s drills from memory before the Warrior Guild surprised her with an invite in 5126. She turns up to the Drakes Vanguard's hunts and musters, doggedly determined to learn to fight as part of a unit. She isn’t sure where all of this is going, or why she insists on wielding her mother’s old bastard sword while she does it.

Off the road her days are ordinary and full. She and Aldric eat dinner together most evenings; he heals her without comment when she comes home cut up and then makes her tell him every detail, slower than she wants to. She cooks with real range in the results and one ongoing failure she won't abandon. She loses at knucklebones and keeps playing. She is having a long, unwinnable argument with a plant that won't grow in Landing's soil. Newer couriers have started asking her how she still has legs on the fourth day, and she likes that more than she lets on, because it's the first thing she's earned that has is fully, wholly hers.