Alessandra Khortalis's page

Gray Maiden Initiate (Endurance, Scarred) +2 hp, can sleep in gray maiden plate without being fatigued, -1 diplomacy, -1 disguise, +2 intimidate, +2 save vs. pain effects
Noble Scion (War) +2 Knowledge (nobility), add Cha insted of Dex to Initiative rolls
Close Allies +1 save when adjacent to ally, +1d6 to ally's roll 1/adventure
Charming +1 to Bluff and Diplomacy vs. sexually attracted creatures
Reactionary +2 to Init

Fanatical. Deadly. Beautiful. You could ask any Korvosan to describe the steel-clad women known as the Gray Maidens – the merciless embodiment of Ileosa’s law in the streets – and these were the three words which almost anyone would come up with. But it was a poorly-kept secret that only the last requirement was indeed necessary: for deadliness and fanaticism could be bestowed through gruelling training and indoctrination, but beauty was a gift from the gods: one that, when found in others, the mad queen both coveted and resented.

Alessandra, the scion of a minor noble house which, in the past few centuries, had given its hometown more that its fair share of Marshals and Admirals, was indeed beautiful: and that, it turned out, was her curse. A young debutante who had just enrolled into the Endrin Military Academy when the old king died, she had long been the object of envy (as well as the unrequited desire which spawned it) of a former childhood acquaintance of her, now a Hellknight-turned-Gray Maiden. In the purges which followed Ileosa’s ascension, she had the Khortalis accused of disloyalty against the crown, and gave Alessandra a choice: become a Gray Maiden herself, or watch her family sink into disgrace. Knowing full well what Ileosa’s disfavour entailed, she pledged her services – and her life – to the newly risen tyrant of Korvosa.

Alessandra’s initiation and training had been as gruesome and arduous as any Gray Maiden’s; perhaps even more so. Particular delight was taken in making sure her scarring was as long and painful as humanly bearable: both a retribution and a cenotaph for a beauty that – they would make sure of that – would grace Golarion no more. The standards she was required to adhere to were always set only a little bit too high, her results always found unsatisfactory – if barely – for the sole purpose of triggering further punishment from her instructors.

Day after day, she used to cling to her humanity by finding new terms to define her life; the first being: Defiance. She would also go as far as protecting her fellow cadets by taking the blame for their shortcomings, as well as the chastisement that usually ensued – which they were only too eager to deal. Mercifully, the day of her first deployment was also the day Ileosa’s regime fell, which at least spared her from taking part in its worst atrocities. And still, she witnessed her Gray Maiden sisters being mowed down one by one by an angry mob as her platoon was overrun, her bunk mate dying in her arms with a bolt piercing her neck, gurgling her last words through the blood. She run with nowhere to go as the old order collapsed around her; in the end, that experience managed to do what all her training could not: it finally broke her.

She run, and run, and run, her armour – now a second skin of sorts – condemning her as an enemy of the people she used to call compatriots. Eventually, among the fire and the ruins she joined a charismatic young commander’s company, fleeing Korvosa to regroup and rebuild. Her name was Oriana, and when she spoke with fire in her eyes and rage in her words, Alessandra thought that perhaps she had found a new word to give meaning to her existence: Duty.

As everything in her life, it wouldn’t last. The expedition to find new allies soon proved a disaster: its tale recounted elsewhere, for just as the story of Korvosa’s liberation, it was but a chapter of somebody else’s saga. Suffice to say, as she saw even more of her Sisters – supposedly invincible maidens of battle – being purposelessly sacrificed, their lives thrown away against insurmountable odds, she finally found the right word to sum up her life’s meaning: it was Cheap. And finally, when a Tien woman came bringing a storm of blades upon them, her glaive effortlessly spinning like a whirlwind in the midst of battle, she took a few moments to ponder the irony of having pledged her life to not one, but two fake queens, before embracing oblivion.

It turned out her lots in death weren’t any more lasting than those she enjoyed in life. She woke up, unscathed, a few hours later, her vanquisher offering her and her sisters a strange, new mercy: to live on, not as faceless slaves to cruel tyrants or misguided crusaders, but as free individuals, master of their own fates. While Oriana and most of her former company took to nearby Magnimar, she instead chose to make her way back to Korvosa, joining the Scarlet Rose in a desperate attempt at starting a healing process which would take years to complete. She even embraced the worship of Shelyn (both her new Sisters' patron and, more poignantly, the goddess of the heroine she owed her life to), vowing to protect and preserve that Beauty which Ileosa had tried to eradicate from Golarion.

Five years have now passed – ten from the day she first donned her armour – and Alessandra still hasn’t found her call. Finding her only modicum of solace in the friendship of [insert close ally name here], the duo now patrols the Varisian coast, looking for a cause; might it be, at last, that it’d be in the sleepy town of Roderic’s Hollow that Fate finally catches up with her?

Age 26 (was 17-18 when CotCT took place, and 21 at the time of SS); Height 5' 10"; Weight 160 lbs

There used to be a lively girl, just blossoming into adulthood, whose emerald eyes and slender yet shapely curves would turn many a young suitor's head among Korvosa's high society. Of that girl very little remains, her Gray Maiden training having reshaped both her body and soul into a lean and efficient fighting machine to the point she's almost never seen outside of her armour: a new skin made of steel to conceal the fragile, broken thing within.

Meant to be a statement of Ileosa's vision of her personal amazon guard, every Gray Maidens' plate was supposed to cling to and underline every detail of the woman wearing it, and Alessandra's was no exception — underneath, powerful sinews and lean yet well-toned muscles are always pulling and pushing against its joints as they give it elegance and motion. Though it's been 5 years since she last saw combat, she is only very rarely seen outside of it, and that usually occurs during the daily 2-hour routine she's been practicing every day since her initiation: 1 hour spent polishing and maintaining her armour, and 1 hour performing gruelling physical exercises to keep her body in fighting shape.

Indeed, this in but one of the many telltale signs that even after embracing the tenets of the Scarlet Rose as well as Shelyn as her patron goddess, Alessandra's still a soldier at heart. Her outlook leans towards the practical and the efficient, and be it due to her kind nature or her conditioning (or more likely, due to a weird interaction between the two), she's hard-wired to put her company's good before her own. Only rarely is her old self allowed to resurface, usually by means of a well-timed quip or a sarcastic comment. Recently, she has taken up carrying a pencil and a ream of paper with her all the time, and she can sometimes be found sketching a face or a vista which has struck her imagination: her own personal way of trying to preserve the beauty of the world, for who better than her to know how fleeting it is?

Alessandra in full plate
Alessandra's face and scars

Sarwendah the Petal and Thorn, (Tian-Sing) Aasimar Monk / Paladin of Shelyn
A warrior-poetess and devoted follower of the Lady of Chrysanthemums (as Shelyn is known in distant Tian-Xia), Sarwendah had come to Avistan to explore this strange, new land and test her mettle in one of its many arenas (which, she understood, were the closest thing to a dojo to be found in the western continent) — her moniker had been given her by a Magnimarian fan because of her Shelynite faith and her deadliness in battle.

When spending some time fighting in Magnimar's Serpent Run, she became involved in the events of Shattered Star; in book 2, she and her party defeated a company of rogue Gray Maidens but ultimately decided to spare them – Alessandra being one of them.