Welcome to the official home of The Assassin Priestess.
The Assassin Priestess (this one should be on top, or even on the intro page): When I first met Isha, I thought her an enigma to be studied: a pale-aelv severed from the dark machinery of her people, carrying mysteries she clearly had no wish to share. In time, I realized she was something far simpler and sadder: a tortured soul, which is to say, not so different from the rest of our group in the White Wing. I should have recognized it sooner. Perhaps living so long beside my own grief has made me too practiced at overlooking it in others. Yet I did little for her. I did not know how to approach someone who had built her entire life around distance, and my search for Sartrel kept drawing me away whenever I might have tried. Isha held everyone at arm’s length with almost admirable discipline. Until, at last, she found one person she could not keep there. In the end, it seemed that love and grief together would succeed where all gentler things had failed, binding her at last to a life she might yet cherish… or suffer all the more for having something left to lose.
Why is it that all the so-called “races” of this world can produce viable offspring with one another despite clear morphological, magical, and cultural divergence? My dear friend Esriella, herself a half–high-aelv, now carries her first child from a human man, Levak; this is but one of many such unions I have observed. If we were truly separate species, such consistent fertility would be improbable at best. I am increasingly persuaded that our differences are not the result of natural divergence, but of some primordial artificial shaping (magical, divine, or otherwise) possibly imposed upon a single ancestral people.
Prior to the cataclysm later sources name “the Binding,” all extant pre-Binding records I have examined speak of only two deities, Light and Darkness, twin and opposed. Then, abruptly, the record ends; then nothing but silence for millennia. When written sources resume, the world’s peoples venerate fifty deities: the original two, plus forty-eight new names with distinct spheres and cults. Over the ensuing near hundred millennia, those fifty have dwindled to thirty-two, with whole divine lineages simply… absent. What, precisely, was the Binding, and what became of the civilization that thrived before it? By what mechanism were dozens of new deities introduced into the world’s consciousness? And conversely, how does a god vanish? Forgotten, destroyed, or something stranger still? It vexes me that I have no answer.
Priests speak of aether as though it were some rarefied “gift of the divine” diffused across the world, and I confess their hymns and sermons make it sound very dignified and miraculous. Yet, for all my teasing, I must give them their due: they wield that same force without first severing and binding a fragment of their own soul into a focus-crystal, as any true mage must. The uncomfortable truth, for them, at least, is that all magic is one. Aether is vharin, and vharin is aether; the distinction is terminological, not real. We mages keep this point quiet because, according to the less-sanitized chronicles, the last time priests realized it tens of thousands of years ago, they attempted to exterminate us.
Isha is a pale-aelv born in Assyrial, capital of the Vael’sarí Empire. Raised in an orphanage, she was adopted by the Kol family of the Morren clan and trained as an assassin and priestess of the Goddess of Darkness. Her skill and devotion eventually earned her the title of Nightfang, making her the youngest senior priestess in the clergy’s history.
Valin is the Crown Prince of Valmark and the son of King Levak K’far and Queen Esriella K’far. He also has an older half-brother through his father, Alexsyndir Faaris. Raised with a clear understanding of the duties awaiting him, Valin spent much of his childhood studying history, diplomacy, law, warfare, and governance under a succession of tutors. He also studied languages under the renowned scholar and swordmage Zyr’Magi Tes’Lothen, better known as Magi “the Blade.”
Esriella was born in the western high-aelvar village of Sylivar to an aelvar mother and a human father she never knew. When her aether manifested, she began training as a priestess of the Goddess of Light. At twenty, still a child by half-aelvar standards, she and her mother crossed the continent to settle near Valmark, where Esriella continued her religious studies even after reaching adulthood at forty.
Levak was born in the human village of Shad’li to Etharon and Isoli K’far, the exiled crown prince and princess of Valmark. He grew up alongside his older sister, Isobel, and younger twin brother, Kavel, and was engaged to a village woman named Angelica Faaris. His sister eventually ran away from home. When Shad’li was attacked shortly after his seventeenth birthday, Levak was rescued by the wandering swordmage Magi and believed that only he and Kavel had survived.
The High District occupies a gentle rise overlooking the Shad’li crossing. At its center stands Valentien’s Fortress, originally built to defend the river and now serving as the royal palace of Valmark. Its commanding position and proximity to the crown have made the district the preferred home of the city’s nobility.
The Western District is the oldest surviving part of Valmark, founded nearly four centuries ago where the Shad’li River could once be crossed during the driest months of the year. Although the city’s merchants later relocated to the newer Market District, the Western District remains an important entry point and a center of local tradition.
The Embersteps District stands upon a low rise near Valmark’s southern wall. Once known simply as the slums, much of the district was destroyed by a devastating fire several decades ago. It was rebuilt in brick and stone, though its narrow streets still twist unpredictably between crowded homes, workshops, and small neighborhood markets.
The Northern District is known for its workshops, warehouses, and small merchant houses. Although it sees fewer travelers than Valmark’s western and southern roads, much of the city’s timber, ore, stone, and other raw materials enter through its gates from the northern forests and mines of the Northern Mountains.
I had worked a forge for seven hundred and thirty-two years when a nightmare entered my workshop.
20th day of Redfall, in the Second Little-Moon’s Turn, year 1021 ÆC (Ætaine Calendar)