Alea'soruinithuilwe

Alea'soruinithuilwe

"The Softest Whisper of the Wind on Shadowed Nights".

 

 

Alea is a tall, slender aeldari of indeterminate gender, possessed of a lithe strength and a graceful, fierce gaze. She looks upon the world through wide, expressive eyes of rich amber so deep it's almost gold, and they seem to burn within with dark depths of passion. Hers are eyes that draw the mind deeper, and her narrow mouth curls downward in the silent judgement promised by their fury. She walks, talks, dances, drinks, sleeps with a terrible precision, a depth of absolute purpose, no movement wasted. Her hair is cropped short around a warrior's topknot, often hidden behind the sloping mask of her void armour with its implacable visage of war. She wears a loose red cloak of some scaly material over the fluid wraithbone of her armour, her form concealed, and she treads lightly upon the ground. There is a great black bird perched sullenly on her shoulder, its eyes shrouded in a hood of dark wraithbone that grows from its skin and runs trails in delicate traceries down its body. She is extremely well-armed, with an eldar blade and pistol at her belt alongside three jewelled grenades, a wraithbone kite shield on her backpack, a fluted shuriken catapult on a sling, and she leans easily on what for all the world looks like a wraithbone lance.

 

Alea was born on a craftworld, like many of her kin, and she has walked many paths. She has seen her world go to war, and she has walked the paths of the Webway at the behest of fates beyond the ken of lesser minds. She has walked as far as Commoragh and carries the gift of a World Spirit, a fragile wraithbone charm, close to her heart. Any Eldar would know her wishes from this mark - her soul will return to the exodites, the World Spirit calling her home. The ways of the craftworlds seem to her like constraint, custom made concrete by endless repetition, a crushing weight of tradition. She fears their labours of war and the deathly sleep of the wraithguard, walking their slow way to battle for all eternity. She walks her own path now, and the craftworld calls her outcast.

 

Alea was born but a few hundred years ago, a mere eyeblink to the eldest of her race, and she has never walked an artisan’s path. Her mother was a scorpion who walked the path so long she lost her way back, and Alea loves the hunting life of the exodites; her father walked their path, and died there among them, and on pilgrimage to their world she came to understand her father's choice. What she doesn't understand is staying in one place, on one world - she craves the reaches of the webway or distant stars, the seeds of adventure. She is a wandering seer now, like the void dreamers of the corsairs - she walks a careful path between damnation and the razor’s edge, out here among the wild men. She has had mentors - those who have stood guarantor for her soul. She has walked among the dark kin under the auspices of the Shadowseers of the harlequins, and learnt the ways of her people wherever they may be, but she finds no peace there, each of them clinging in their own ways to the world before the fall. She seeks something new to drown out the hunger in the warp, not a way to preserve what was.

 

In many ways, Alea is still a young eldar - but she has walked far. From the Dark City, she has brought a companion, a wraithbone-wrapped razorwing, one of the fell ravens of that terrible place - a gift from a kabbalite trainer who thought the beast's timid temperament an insult to her. From the exodites, she carries a charm that is her will, and her love of the hunt - as well as a passing familiarity with mounted combat. She is still somewhat naive around humans - a flaw she is working on, since the crawling ape children are the new masters of the galaxy. She finds herself walking their way for now - learning what she can of humanity, wherever she can find humans who aren't inclined to shoot her on sight. She retains a cautious disdain for the teeming, reeking masses of the race, but there are those among them who approach true personhood in her eyes, and those she can even find some affection for.

Alea wears rune-inscribed armour the colour of sun-bleached bone beneath a sweeping cloak made from the blood-red hide of some alien beast. Thrown clear of her shoulders, the cloak is pinned to two shining spars rising from her shoulders. Her tall, fluting helm is crested with a shock of bone white hair in which stars shimmer, and on one shoulder sits a raven the size of an eagle, its head wrapped in a bone cage grown from its very skeleton. She carries like she means to use it a spear that crackles softly with suppressed energy, its point tracing ahead as she walks, and over her back is slung a sleek, deadly cannon that looks grown from smooth white stone. Her form fair glows with power, bright with an unlight that gifts the eye her form but casts no shadows and illuminates nothing but her. In the air around her, ghosts of Alea flicker and dance, whirling and turning and fading, striking and falling and bursting apart in bright sprays of shards. Through the images dances a wraithbone fish, sleek and swift, and behind her crouches a shadowy shark, a hulking form that snaps and snarls at the scent of food.