Knight #86: Neraia Aikaterine Lysand - Description

Name:  Neraia (Aikaterine) Lysand
Alias:  Forgemistress, Maestra Lysand, The Widow Damiani
Rank:  Magistrix
Role:  Forgemistress, Metalsmith/Engineer, Artisan, Diplomatic Entity


Appearance:  

Neraia is a taller woman, standing at a tiptoeing 5’9” at a weight she refuses to reveal.  The most curious among the knights can hazard a guess, and a number between 125lbs and 140lbs prevents her from threatening a wallop with a forging hammer.  She is sinewy and well-built for a magistrix, due in large part to her choice of profession.  Her facial features are slender and well formed, high cheekbones shaping a naturally severe expression.  Her large eyes are a slightly preternatural light grey, fluorescing faintly in low light and framed by long lashes.  

Her hair is brown-black shot through with sparse strands of silvery-grey and easily waist-length, if not longer; she keeps it woven into pin-thin dreadlocks through the full length of the hair, giving the illusion of a wavy curl pattern.  While working, she piles her hair into a large, loose bun tied tightly with a scarf; it is rumored that her scarf contains a pocket dimension to hide the rest of her hair, though she deflects questioning on the matter.  In her off hours, she largely wears her hair back in a low, loose, and rather messy ponytail though she can preen for special occasions.  Despite working the forge, her nut-brown skin is remarkably supple (she refuses to give up her secrets), though dotted here and there with small, stubborn burn scars from her apprenticeship.  She has little in the way of unusual body modification—at least anything easily visible; she sports a row of three piercings in each earlobe, usually threaded with small thin hoops of silver, and a tiny silver nose stud in her left nostril.


Personality:

While friendly, Neraia is professional, almost to a fault, in most social situations, largely because it has proven to be the least inflammatory route.  As a result, she gets along with most people, but many see her as distant and a bit guarded due to her general avoidance of personal questions and quiet nature.  She can work alongside “colleagues,” fight alongside “comrades,” and have many “friendly acquaintances,” caring for all of them, but she has few people that she considers “friends,” people who have managed to navigate past her professional self to her interior life.  Usually, friendship takes persistence, patience, and her trust, as well as her piqued curiosity, but Neraia is unfailingly loyal, cherishing her true friendships dearly.

She prefers to spend her time between her duties and her craft, ignoring most non-mandatory social interactions.  However, when she walks willingly into a social or diplomatic situation, she can display a honey-tongued, charming personality, her erudite speech smattered with a blush-drawing touch of ribaldry.  As an introvert, the expenditure of her diplomatic prowess emotionally (and in many ways, physically) exhausts her.  

Neraia has a bit of a proud streak; garnering praise for her abilities or her artisanship pleases her greatly, even though she endeavors not to show it.  Still, it is hard to her to mask her pride, especially in her body language.  She carries herself with a raised head and an even, graceful gait.  Her personality most shifts on the rare occasion that she shares her musical gifts.  For the layperson, it is the most impassioned she will ever appear in anything close to a public setting.

Neraia endeavors to be largely collected, choosing the weather the storm and only allowing emotional fatigue once the stress dies down.  The closest thing to an obsession is her love of music; she does not travel without her baroque lute in tow.  Her greatest annoyances are wastefulness and purposeless sloth; the wasteful disrespect the elemental wheel and do not know true poverty, and purposeless sloth is wasteful of talent and potential.


Skills:

Neraia’s odd path of magistrix and smith falls nicely into her worldview; as a largely elemental caster, she views smithing and magic as an entwined route to the same end—a union of the elements that allows the maestra to cause change in the world.  Through her studies, she has gained mastery of both Western and Eastern elemental circles, combining them into six greater elements for her use: fire, water, air, earth/metal, wood, and Akasha.  

She has a skillset comprised of supportive adaptations of her elemental skill as well as raw offensive application of all six elements.  She can command elementals of each type with varying degrees of success, but the true nuance in her craft comes from an Akashic-based technique to sacrifice her own life essence to augment and strengthen her abilities.

Neraia occupies an odd place in battle.  As an elemental caster, much of her location in the fight depends on where she can maximize her effectiveness.  If the battle calls for an offensive caster, she stays at mid-range to protect herself from attack or at long range to cast area-of-effect magic.  As a support caster, she stays central to combat, using the surrounding forces to defend her from attack.  Additionally, her summoned elementals can take melee or ranged field positions depending upon their type and the strategic needs of the moment.

Off the battlefield, she does supportive casting to provide for basic needs; as an elemental caster, she can provide most provisions on her own, able to produce food, water, and shelter to improve morale and keep the regiment well fed and well-rested.  She also does her own preparatory casting and offerings to the elemental wheel to maintain her abilities.  With minimal equipment, she can also perform repairs on metal or wooden weaponry.  Her air mastery allows her to cushion weight on carts and pack animals, improving travel time and fatigue.  She also uses air mastery for cloud flight, not needing a transport animal for herself and her belongings.

She tries her best to make up for her lack of expertise in combat with her skill at the forge.  She is devoted heart and soul to arming and maintaining the ranks of the 101 Knights and the Second Contingent, working for mostly material costs.  While she can (and does) forge larger pieces such as plate/chain armor, shields, and large weapons (hammers, greatswords, bastard swords, lances/pikes, greataxes), her expertise lies with smaller weapons (daggers, short swords, curved swords, blades for halberd and naginata, hand axes), ammunition (arrow heads, crossbow bolts), staves, and jewelry.  As forgemistress and magistrix, she can imbue any of her forged creations with elemental enchantments.  Though she has limited biological experience, she has also designed magically augmented prosthetics for the replacement of lost organs.  She creates housewares (silverware, goblets, etc.) and fine crafts by commission to pay for the maintenance of her forge.  She can also construct rudimentary stoneware but does so primarily for self-use.

Neraia’s most secret passion is her lifelong love of music.  Having taken up the baroque lute in her childhood, she has spent the vast majority of her life playing music, using it as rare supplemental income or a private treat for those closest to her.  While owning a 13-course baroque lute, an oud, and a bell-strung sitar, she can adeptly play a wide range of plucked string instruments from several cultural backgrounds.


Equipment:

Neraia typically wears a modified version of the standard Magistrix’s robes, her favorite version in dark grey and black with white trim.  On either side, she has cut slits for mobility, also allowing access to a thigh-hilt for a casting dagger.  She also keeps a second dagger in case of emergencies, tucked in her left boot.  At each of the ‘points’ and in the center of the eye on her tabard, she has sewn tiny silver medallions imbued with pre-selected spells—a failsafe to prevent herself from ever being caught unaware.  She also wears leather gloves outside of combat.

Her primary weapon is Athanasia’s Eye, an ornately filigreed silver staff topped with a crescent supporting a large, spherical quartz crystal, used as a focus for her support-based spellcasting.  Secondarily, she uses an obsidian casting dagger, Hrodheid, as a focus for her offensive-based casting, dual wielding during combat.  The obsidian dagger also acts as her access to her akashic abilities; augmenting her elemental magic requires her to shed blood.

She also uses a set of enchanted jewelry to augment each of her elemental abilities: a left helix earring with a fire opal stud (fire), a right helix earring with a hoop of polished oak and ash secured by thorn (wood), a cast iron pendant shaped into a rune (earth/metal), a silver diadem with an inset celestite cabochon (air), a silver ring set with chrysocolla cabochon (water), and a polished ebony wood ring set with five stones (Akasha).