5'1" | 110lbs | Icy Blue / Bright Blue | Black / Deep Blue"Oh, the stories I could tell about you."Short and spindly, there’s undoubtedly Halfling in Lilann’s blood, just not enough to matter. Tainted is what you see, from the blue skin and curved horns, to the bright eyes and tail. Her parents could have been Gnomes and she’d still be cursed—only shorter.
So she’s gone out of her way to ensure the first thing people notice about her is something else. She wears a hat many times too big for her head, and often dons a thin, painted mask when performing. Her coat is long and its layers are manifold. The blue hair, which falls in abundance down her back and about her shoulders like a drape, also grabs attention as a sign of aetherborn abnormality.
Name: Lilann Storyborn (Formerly Livean Shol)
Age: 18
Gender: Female
Classification (Aetherborn Only): Genesian, Alteration
Abnormality: Lilann’s abnormality presents as a sort of localized bioluminescence. When exposed directly to light, she seems to absorb and diffuse it to her hair and her eyes. Her hair, normally a soft black, takes on a bold, deep blue hue, and her dim, icy eyes become azure lamps. Thankfully, wearing her hat cuts back on the absorption significantly.
Personality:Despite being a storyteller, Lilann is just as adept a listener as she is a speaker—it’s other people’s stories she’s telling, after all. She is insatiably curious and fiendishly persistent, but not impolite. She maneuvers through most conversations with fair amounts of charm and wit, and enjoys studying the people she meets, scrutinizing them as if they might be the subject of her next tale. If she weren’t a Tainted she would be called “charismatic,” and might have eventually found herself neck deep in the intrigue of the noble courts, whispering into the ears of the rich and powerful.
Beneath the generally friendly demeanor is a bitter, cunning cynicism. For all the work she’s done forging people into heroes, she still expects them to fail, not just in their duties but in their actions as well. She expects them to fail as people, because the truth is that Lilann does not believe in heroes, only in fleeting heroism. In a way her stories are games, and they’re rigged, because no matter the length, no matter the path, no matter the triumphs, nothing survives a disappointing ending.
She makes sure of it.
Bio:The question is always: “Where to begin?”
Finnagund is much too early, but to pick up in Dranir would be missing the point. Better instead that we start in that liminal space where warm plains become cold stone, and blue skies become gray. Where given names shed themselves to become names chosen. Where endings become beginnings.
Yes, we’ll leave young miss Livean out of this, for all sakes. Her story was brief, and would make for poor conversation.
Lilann’s began at the age of eleven, in a cart bound for Dragon Rock. She was a pitiful thing, without coin or direction, shivering in clothes unfit for Dranirian weather. The other passengers were little better—transients leaving Finnagund, ironically, in search of greener pastures. The fact that these pastures lay in the inhospitable mountains of a land wracked by civil war should tell you plenty about their circumstances. Among them was a man named Oranwulf, who had been hired on as the sole protector. His armor was dented, his sword poorly cared for, and the first words out of his mouth were lies about the scars on his face, which were numerous but unflattering, though they could hardly make him uglier than he already was. Not a famed, seasoned knight by any means, but then, you get what you pay for.
Those of you that frequent taverns in southern Dranir might recognize that name—we were getting to that, but perhaps it’s best if we skip the part you already know, and jump to the truth. The truth is that, when the pair of giants attacked, Oranwulf hid in the cart, and became trapped beneath it when it was flipped over, along with our own Tainted girl. Twelve passengers were reduced to five before one of the giants fell, entirely by accident, over the side of the cliff chasing after the survivors. While the remaining giant picked through the carnage, Lilann had what we could call a, “growing moment.” Still a young and inexperienced aetherborn, she only managed to infuse the wreckage with a sliver of her own aether. Blessedly, that was enough. The cart didn’t fly off into the air, or explode, or turn into dust, but it did lighten enough for Oranwulf to create a gap—which he would have dropped right back onto her had she not scrambled out ahead of him. Under cover of the fog, they ran for Dragon Rock.
And that was that. No, Oranwulf the Brave did not push one of the giants off the cliff and face the other alone, nor did he catch its blade with a single hand, and cleave its head from its shoulders. He was not a man of “peerless valor and mettle,” and the Fated Empress did not “weave a stitch in her pattern to accommodate his honorable path.” The first thing he did at Dragon Rock was threaten to break Lilann’s neck if she ever told anyone what had happened. The second thing he did was beat the snot out of her to ensure she knew he was serious. Then he went and got terribly drunk.
“But that’s not his name—” Shh. We’re getting there.
The reality is that Oranwulf’s story didn’t truly begin until almost a week later. Lilann had found work in a tavern sweeping floors and running drinks, and one day she saw a familiar face. It was one of the other passengers who had fled early into the attack. When they pressed her for answers, Lilann, fearing retribution from Oranwulf, lied.
No, the story of Oranwulf the Brave did not spring to life from the words of an eleven-year-old. Lilann Storyborn is good, but she didn’t start out that good. She told the survivor that Oranwulf had not hidden, but rather, he had tried to protect her. One of the giants had fallen, and while the other was distracted, Oranwulf struck it down. It was vague enough to be believable, at least to the drunken ears listening, and she figured that would be the end of it. Not so. Days later she heard that same story spill from the mouth of a complete stranger to a tableful of his friends, only the details were different. Oranwulf had not simply saved a little Tainted whelp, but all of the survivors as well. He hadn’t snuck up on the giant, he had challenged it boldly, and parried its blows as though they had been swung with the strength of a halfling. A nearby patron, overhearing this, chided the man for fudging the details, and corrected that Oranwulf had not parried, but blocked the strikes outright, matching the giant muscle for muscle—he had heard this from his friend, who had allegedly been on that fated cart, and whose words were thus beyond reproach.
This fascinated Lilann, who even then could see that a hero’s legend was budding right before her eyes, from a seed sewn by her own hands. Over the next weeks Oranwulf’s story continued to morph, and all the while she listened, learning which embellishments were more readily believed and which were waved off and discarded, seeing how far the truth could be stretched before it passed into bold-faced fable, and then, which fables sunk and which fables were met with toasts and hearty laughter.
The next time Lilann wove Oranwulf’s story, it was from the golden threads plucked from a hundred different iterations. The giants struck on the back of an icy morning fog, slaughtering the driver and all four of the mercenary protectors. While the passengers scattered, Oranwulf took up a fallen blade, sliced a giant’s ankle and sent it hurtling over the cliff. The last charged him, roaring with bloody fury, but Oranwulf stood strong. He was a man of unshakable faith, so confident in the will of the Fated Empress that he held up only his hand for protection. As the cleaver came down, it was stopped upon his palm by the fateful strings of Lady Azaiza herself, and with a single swing, Oranwulf severed the giant’s head. In the aftermath, he pulled an Elven girl of five from the wreckage, who to this day lives happily with her mother in Relfin.
It landed. Beautifully. Lilann’s story was received so well that she found patrons calling her over when their friends would mess it up. “Where’s the little imp?” they’d say. “Bring her over, she tells it best."
She only ever saw Oranwulf again on his way out of Dragon Rock three years later. He was a knight then; his armor was splendid and there was a ruby in the pommel of his very expensive sword. He was on his way to Cloud Hold, answering a prestigious summons for his heroism. Of course, he never made it. He died in an altercation with a single Gnomish bandit, falling from his own horse, accidentally castrating himself with his fancy sword, and bleeding to death on the side of the road clutching his own severed cock. This is why you and most people instead remember him as Oranwulf the Gelded.
See? We got there.
Much like his legacy, this too was a lie. But by then Lilann had learned a valuable lesson about storytelling: the only thing people enjoyed hearing more than a hero’s rise to glory, was their fall from it. She had bruises to repay, and nothing bruised as easily or as lastingly as reputation.
This isn’t about Oranwulf, but telling his story was necessary because Lilann created it, beginning and end. That, you see, is her story. She didn’t stop with him; even after Oranwulf’s tale fell out of fashion she kept her ear to the dirty ground of every tavern, listening for the signs of burgeoning heroes. She stayed in Dragon Rock until she was fourteen, and by then she had crafted no less than two dozen other stories, ranging from the triumphs of unassuming adventurers, to the frightening attacks of bandits and giants. Once or twice she tried her hand at retelling the legends of old, but found her interest waned when faced with the annals of history. She didn’t want to recite legends, she wanted to make them—and sometimes, break them.
When she left Dragon Rock, she donned a hat to hide her horns, a mask to hide her face, and long, flowing coats for her tail and skin. People were more receptive to her stories when she made it easy for them to ignore that she was a Tainted. She found great success in the taverns and streets of various cave-towns, and a plethora of stories on the journeys between them. She spun yarns for merchants and mercenaries, and once or twice even for bandits. Travelers who saw her in their carts knew they would not want for entertainment.
At sixteen she came to Norn Thul, having decided against trying business in Cloud Hold—even she knew better than to push her luck in such a spiritual place. It did not take long to establish herself, even in taverns where no one knew the name Lilann Storyborn. Her bardic skills aside, she had done careful practice with her aetherborn abilities, and began implementing them into her work. Her talents were still minimal, she could float one or two small props, or make her lyre play a few tender, ambient chords while she spoke, but theatrics went a long way with crowds who were used to getting their stories from poems and drunks. Nothing could ever truly compensate for her heritage, but she kept patrons drinking and eating, and that was usually enough to prevent her getting the boot if her tail happened to slip from beneath her coat.
Two more years she spent with Norn Thul as her nest, venturing out with slummy trade caravans and vendors desperate enough to take coin from a Tainted. Once or twice she dipped down into Relfin, to Buscon, where the fairer attitudes and close-knit community of Tainted nearly tempted her into staying, but not quite. Whenever she returned to Norn Thul, it was always with new stories to build.
Valan, the Gnomian Wolf. Sedrica Half-Hymn. The Man Who Was Kindling. Drang, Who Climbed Dragon’s Demise. The Secret Concubine of Rhogar Sadaar. The Seven-Headed Beast Behind Galken’s Door. The Fey Pirate King. Some of these names you know, others you don’t yet, but will. All were woven by the words of Lilann Storyborn, true in degrees often varying from “hardly at all” to “not even a little bit.” That doesn’t stop them from being heard, or, importantly, spread. Some become distorted, or claimed by other bards. Some have made their heroes into Oranwulf the Brave, others into Oranwulf the Gelded. More than once has she been threatened to stop, more than once she has been bribed to continue. Neither mattered much to her. After all, whatever one’s reputation, all it takes is the right story to set things moving the other way.
With the next Great War looming on the horizon, Lilann’s interests have naturally been drawn to the Bounty Houses established by the enigmatic diplomats of Veraz Althma. Oh, the stories to be born from the sorts collecting there, the triumph and tragedy awaiting them, the legends in making. But if she was going to uproot herself again it would not be for some glorified bounty board. Word of Lord Mystralath’s own venture reached even to Norn Thul, and she knew instantly that she would go there.
There was hesitation, of course. The gods had cursed her with a long and lucid memory, and though she had been Lilann Storyborn for many years, Livean Shol still paled at the idea of stepping foot in her homeland again. She would have rather stayed in Dranir, and lived out the rest of her days quietly.
But Livean’s story was over, and Lilann would not let that end hers, too.
Likes:- Interesting people
- Uninteresting people (a challenge!)
- Good tippers
- Mysteries
- Long travels
Dislikes:- When the sun is too bright
- Captive audiences (no challenge!)
- Any fish
- Out-of-tune instruments
- Nobility
Habits: When deep in thought, Lilann has a tendency to unknowingly burn through the light stored up by her abnormality, making her hair and eyes an occasional giveaway that something is on her mind.
Inventory: - Lilann’s attire (big hat, painted mask, longcoat)
- Lyre (cheap, but well cared-after)
- Satchel (contains a variety of small, handmade props, wooden bricks, and a whittling knife)
- Journal (filled with pages written in incomprehensible shorthand)
- Longsword (simple, but seems a bit too wieldy for someone her size)
- Money: 2 Silver, 4 Copper
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