Ishlyn's page

Early years:
Born in Korvosa, Yaziyah was very conscious of her roots while growing up. The sight of Castle Korvosa was a constant reminder of how the Chelaxian invaders had stolen and desecrated their ancestral lands and she lapped up the tales of glorious (and often tragic) skirmishes against the Korvosans. For even though she was born there, Yazi didn't consider herself a Korvosan. No, Korvosans were "them". Them, the invaders. Them, the thieves. Them, the murderers. The enemy.

Her parents were tshamek, despicable in her eyes for abandoning their tribe's ways and allowing the outsiders to break their spirit. She despised them for being weak, for bringing her into the world here, in this filthy city, for robbing her of her birthright as a proud Skoan-Quah tribeswoman. They fought often, Yazi berating them for their weakness and their betrayal; them scolding her for being a reactionary and a troublemaker. She gravitated towards people like her - the small minority of Shoanti in Korvosa who hadn't renounced their traditions and their past. They called their loose group of firebrands and rebels "The Spirit Wolves". Most of them were young, and all of them were burning with passion - revenge, retribution, reclamation. Graffiti, civil disobedience, sabotage. They pieced together their own rites of passage and gave themselves adult names. Yazi's was Fire Tongue, for her passionate words could ignite hearts when she spoke of taking back their sacred lands, of driving off the accursed oppressors.

So when she said "let's take the fight to the enemy", they listened. When she pointed north, they looked. And when she led them to blow up the City Hall, they followed. Fortunately, their plan did not succeed; their knowledge of the underground tunnels in North Point wasn't very good and they got lost while trying to get beneath the City Hall. But it didn't matter very much to them; they just wanted to make a statement, to send a message. Unfortunately, their failed conspiracy didn't fail enough. More than two dozen people, some of them women and children, were injured in the attack. Four lost their lives then and there, while five more died of their injuries later. The city guard tracked down their group and arrested all the "Spirit Wolves" they could find. Yazi tried to run, but they caught her. At her trial, she expected to be sentenced to death and had already cast herself as a martyr for her people in the theater of her mind. But her lieutenant took the fall for her, claiming all responsibility and swearing that it was him who was the mastermind, him who had planned it all. As they carried him off to be tortured to death, she couldn't help but resent him for stealing her spotlight, even as she wept in relief. She was tortured as well, then sent to prison. Since she was not an adult, her sentence was not long, but it was long enough.

Post-revolutionary times:Prison brings out the worst in some people. For Yazi, it brought time. She spent her first few months railing against the system, the sentence, her captors. She got into fights with the guards and other inmates, fights that she invariably lost. Little by little, she stopped struggling quite so hard. She fought less and listened more. She talked. And she thought. About the lives she had taken and the blood on her hands. At first she tried to tell herself that they had deserved it, that they were the enemy (or close enough), that it was just retribution for all that her kind had endured. But that voice grew weaker and smaller, until Yazi saw herself for what she was - a murderer. She still felt outrage at how her people had been treated (and still were), but her anger was tempered by guilt and regret. Her "Spirit Wolves" started to look less like noble freedom fighters and more like malcontent thugs drunk on their own fantasies. And blood. She could not forget the blood.

At the end of her 10 year sentence, the Yazi who had went in through the prison doors was gone. The new Yazi was older and, if not wiser, at least not quite so stupid and foolish as she used to be. She sought out her parents, who received her with acceptance and forgiveness (both undeserved, she felt). She started reconnecting with the Shoanti community, no longer caring quite so much who was tshamek and who wasn't. Still trying to discover her roots, she travelled to the Cinderlands and spent a few years with distant relatives from the Skoan-Quah in the southern Storval Plateau. She met Narak Bonecaster, who had been an apprentice of Thousand Bones and who taught her how to etch symbols on the skin. She discovered that the Shoanti "wild" tribes were not the heroic, noble warriors from her idealized fantasies. Their lives were harsh and there was little harmony with nature; rather, they struggled constantly to eke out a meager living from the inhospitable land. They had kept their traditions, yes, but some of these were pure superstition and Yazi found that their rituals were just as rigid and confining as the laws and regulations she had found so oppressive in Korvosa, or even more so.

The spirits came to her late in life. Perhaps they had always been there, waiting. Waiting for her to start listening. Until she had known her past and saw both its wisdom and its flaws. She had chosen the wrong future once, and had paid for it with ten years of her life. She had to choose the right future now, and this time she had the guidance of the past.

Present times: Eight years after being released from prison, Yazi is now a shaman in the Shoanti community in Korvosa, trying to bridge past and future. She wants to preserve the Shoanti heritage while working towards better relations and integration with the rest of the city's inhabitants. She acknowledges the values and advantages of both ways of life and tries to bring them together in a harmonious whole. Her attempts are met with some resistance from both the hardline traditionalists and the ultra-progressive who have abandoned their roots entirely. She provides many community services - tattooing the Shoanti who go through their rites of passage, tending to the sick and the old, providing guidance and counsel, speaking with the spirits and sending off the dead.

Yazi is in her early thirties, tall and thin with lightly tanned skin and very long hair worn in a thick braid. The tattoos on her face and arms are a bit unusual for a Skoan-Quah, but those who know her well can probably read her life's history in them. She has a deep voice that can be in turns rough and smooth, depending on the message she wants to convey beyond the words.

Outwardly, she worships Pharasma, as that is the more "civilized", the more accepted version of her tribe's beliefs. In truth, she mixes in spirit worship, animism and ancestor worship into her own personal belief system.

Although age and experience have done much to moderate her attitude and methods, she still holds some of the convictions of her youth. She still has that bone-deep feeling of wrongness when she considers the treatment of the Shoanti by the colonists, then and now. However, she no longer sees the Korvosans as enemies; what's more, she has learned that some of them can be considered allies. The Shoanti are not the only ones to have suffered tragedy or loss. While her foremost goal is still advancing the cause of her people, her ways of achieving that are vastly different. She understands the value of compromise, of making alliances and striking deals. She works to educate the young Shoanti about their tribes' history and traditions, subtly glossing over the more... barbaric practices and attitudes and reinforcing the ones that she considers to be most compatible with life in Korvosa. It doesn't much matter to her that others may contest the view that she knows what's best for the entire community - she has never been one to care about people's opinion of her. She has mastered the art of the carrot and the stick and doesn't shy away from using either.

Yazi regrets her violent past and, while not entirely reformed, she would like to make up for it. She would also like to help forge a new identity for the Shoanti of Korvosa - one that blends respect for both their tribal traditions and the city's laws and inhabitants. She has a vested interest in maintaining stability, both among the Shoanti and within the larger Korvosan community. Since her shamanistic powers are a relatively new development, she is very keen to develop them and to learn more from the spirits she communicates with.

The skin hung over the entrance was pulled aside, flooding the room beyond with sunlight. Yazi was often saying "my door is always open for fellow Shoanti" and it wasn't an idle proclamation; her house didn't even have a door. And those who would take advantage of this apparent lapse in security soon found out that this was not a smart idea at all. Speaks For The Dead could do some nasty, nasty things to you if she didn't like you. The newcomer obviously wanted to be on her good side, as the savoury smell of freshly baked muffins wafted in. "Mistress?" the boy called out hesitantly, his eyes still adjusting to the comparable penumbra of the room. Yazi unfolded from her seated position on the floor, scattering cushions. She was a tall woman with long, bony limbs and a thick braid of hair that fell to the back of her thighs.
"Yes, lad? How can I help you?" Her voice was deep, a gravelly baritone with smoky honey poured on top. The honey wasn't always there, of course; some people didn't deserve it.
"My name is Catches Smoke. I'm here for a tattoo." He had hesitated slightly before giving his name; a new name then. The boy had just completed his rite of passage and was a boy no more. There was pride in his voice, and a little nervous tremour that he tried to smooth over.
"Are you now? Well done, well done. You'll have to tell me all about it." She started gathering her needles, cleaning rags and ink pots as she gestured for the youth to sit. "And what do you have there, Catches Smoke?"
The forgotten muffins were proferred with alacrity. "Double bacon, mistress!"
"Very good, very good. Now, sit. Where do you want it?"
"Umm, over the eyes, mistress. I was thinking an owl mask..." He trails off as Yazi gives him a sharp look. "I mean, it's your decision, of course."
"Mm-hm." She puts a finger under his chin, tilting his face into the shafts of sunlight. "You are Lyrune-Quah." It was not a question.
"Yes, mistress."
"Hm. We should really be doing this by moonlight, but it's new moon tonight. Unlucky you." Seeing the lad deflate, she patted him on the cheek. "It doesn't matter that much, moon and sun are sisters anyway. Here, hold this." She dropped an open ink pot in his lap and watched Catches Smoke snatch it out of the air without spilling a drop. Quick reflexes and a steady hand, then. Not bad, not bad. But he was so solemn and focused holding that ink pot, like it was the sacred jewel of the Sky Father, it almost made her laugh. To distract herself, and him, she placed a copper on his forehead and spoke a few sharp words. Time was she would know everything there was to know about everyone in the community - their relatives, their friends, their enemies, their secrets. Like all cultures based on oral traditions, the Shoanti were unsurprisingly gossipy. But these days she had more important things that occupied her time, and besides the spirits could tell her in a blink all she wished to know. "So, tell me. What was your trial?" Yazi casts Discern Next of Kin to find out about Catches Smoke's family and relationships.

Over the next hour, as Yazi worked, she listened to him describe his rite of passage in excited tones, using the information that the spirits fed her to remark on how proud his mother must be, she who used to hunt cinder wolves by night, or to ask if his younger sisters will take their trial next year. He described the chase over the rooftops, his target an imp escaped from the Acadamae. For a while he thought he had lost it, then he had seen the slight shift in the thread of smoke from a chimney, and loosed a bolt in that direction on a hunch. The imp had turned invisible, but that little disturbance betrayed it. Yazi appreciated how the lad's name weaved that little detail in the story of Catches Smoke. It took a keen eye, a quick mind and even quicker reflexes to pass such a trial; not an easy feat, hunting a prey you cannot see. She also appreciated the community service element in designing the trial. Escaped imps were often a nuissance, and sometimes more than a nuissance. The chatter had the added bonus of distracting the lad from the pain, so he was surprised when she put away her needles and wiped his face with a clean cloth. She sat back for a moment, admiring her handiwork, then reached out for a brass platter, using the polished surface to show him the result. If he was surprised, he didn't show it. Another mark in her good book. And she had judged right - the mountain lion suited him much better than the owl.

The old rogue has been preying on the city Shoanti with impunity lately. It started with drugs; most dealers in Korvosa don't bother with trying to sell to the so-called barbarians. Gaedren found quite a lucrative market amongst them, however, as many suffer from disillusionment and identity crises, seeking escape or relief. As he got to know them better, he realized how marginalized they were in the city and how little the authorities cared about them. So Gaedren became bolder. Scams. Extortion. Protection rackets. A child going missing here and there. Then more.
Yaziyah has learned of some of these happenings and has set all else aside in order to focus on this crisis. Patient questioning has given her a few leads, and a name.