Elhedril Cólthel‏'s page

About Elhedril Cólthel‏

Most can hear the music, but few can hear its spirit.

An orphan of Galt who was adopted by a former noble family, Elhedril was raised to despise the chaos that had robbed her adoptive parents of their proper name and station, forcing them to hide as middle-class apothecaries. Yet for Elhedril herself, apprenticed to a great musician and never having personally known the aristocratic comforts her parents mourned, this was no true inconvenience. What frustrated her about her nation was not that power resided with the people, but rather that it was wielded in such a capricious fashion. Her fellow citizens’ constant false accusations and refusal to abide by court rulings—not to mention the Gray Gardeners’ tendency to pronounce sentences completely outside the system—drove young Elhedril to distraction. It was inevitable that she would have to leave that chaos before she could find within herself the spiritual powers of art and song.

When Elhedril reached the end of her first century, having recently lost both parents in a violent robbery, her simmering rage finally came to a head. After the ruling faction sentenced the wrong man to death for her parents’ murders with flagrant disregard for due process, Elhedril overstepped by investigating the matter herself, turning up irrefutable proof of the man’s innocence. When her attempts to reopen the case were stymied, she returned the night before the scheduled execution and set the man free—only to run straight into a Gray Gardener patrol. The prisoner escaped in the ensuing fracas, and even as Elhedril ran, she heard the Gardeners shouting her name.

Elhedril fled for the border and, knowing that there was now likely a price on her head, she re-adopted her biological family’s name. Unable to return home to avenge her family by finding and bringing their real killer to justice, Elhedril instead chose to leave it all behind and begin a new chapter in her life with a new identity. For over a decade she followed the music that she so loved, traveling with various entertainment companies, working as a professional musician to support herself. Eventually, she found a budding community in the Stolen Lands to the North, which seemed the mirror opposite of her home in Galt; a place where people stood up for what was right, fought for moral reasons, passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. A place where wars were waged on poverty, not poor people. Where the people and leaders sacrificed, cared about their neighbors, put their money where their mouths were, and never beat their chest. A place she truly believed she could call home. It was there that the music had lead her, there where the rising crescendo of her power was felt strongest within her breast.