- Joliryn -'s page

Joliryn has always felt strange. She had incredibly vivid dreams that took her up into the stars, and soaring through the black of the nighttime sky. She spent every waking moment she could outside of her kindred’s underground homes and up on the surface. She walked as far as her parents would allow, and stayed up as late as she could, obsessing over the glittering stars floating amongst the ocean of inky black. She learnt their names, and charted their progress. Until, one day she suffered a terrible bout of nightmares. Monsters from the black rose up to terrorize her. They whispered foul ravings, and tempted her to madness. It went on for months of her childhood. But, every night, when the nightmares woke her she left her bed and crept back out into the night. She stared right up at the monsters that lurked in the darkness of the sky and did the most disrespectful thing she could imagine to them! She stuck out her tongue. Then she sat outside the rest of the night, watching the twinkling stars. For there was nothing so dark or evil that could ruin the beauty of the night sky. After a few weeks she had a new dream. A dream about a beautiful woman with butterfly wings made of stardust. Desna had come to her. And through her divinely-touched dreams, Joliryn learned her faith.

It’s been decades since then, and Joliryn has followed her dreams, and the stars, across the surface of Golarion. She’s currently in Magnimar, where she hopes to visit the Cynosure Tower, one of Desna’s only permanent holy sites in the region.

Joliryn is a relatively young dwarf, at 40 years of age, with red hair, smooth skin, and a stocky frame. She wears her hair done in elaborate braids, and paints lines on her face in blue paint, which depict regional constellations. Her clothes are well-worn, and clearly meant for overland travel on the surface, but are brilliant shades of purple, blue and teal. Dwarven knotwork is stiched onto her cloak and bodice in silver and black thread. She wears a silver holy symbol of Desna on a thick chain around her neck, which she bears with pride.

Joliryn is a bit of an odd dwarf. Although she shares her peoples stubborn resolve and ancestral pride, she’s clearly different from the rest of her fellows. She’s friendly, exciteable and exhuberant. She has a desperate love of surface travel, and longs to literally ascend into the skies. She’s prone to stargazing, and worships Desna wholeheartedly, eschewing her people’s ancestral gods in a move that many dwarves consider disrespectful. This bothers her little, for she fervently believes that Desna is guiding her to reach the stars through her dreams.

Her most heinous crime (at least as far as most dwarves believe) is her insistence that her people’s Quest for Sky was never completed. In her mind, the dwarves finally broke the surface and stayed rooted to the ground. They built homes in the stone, and hide from the sun as they always did. Joliryn believes that they were meant to keep going. To keep climbing. To live fully on the surface, under the light of the stars and the sun. And to, perhaps, keep going. Ascending up into the skies themselves. She desperately wishes to lead her people up onto the surface, and further, into the skies and perhaps even to the stars! Her mission is hindered by the fact that most dwarves think she’s addled (at best).