Appearance:
Lanael is of average height and looks for an elf. He has dark brown hair, brown eyes and kept wearing brown or gray clothes over his armor, providing camouflage in his rocky mountain home but making him look slightly out of place in many other places.
Personality:
As is typical for many elves of that region he has taken in some traits usually more likely to be found in dwarfes than elves. He is stoic and takes his duties quite serious.
In combination with his readiness to accept any challenge to hone his skills and the typical remoteness many of the short lived races correlate with elves those often see him as arrogant and even slightly dangerous while that in no way is his intention or how he sees himself.
Backround:
There are only a few elven settlements at the southern border of Kyonin, at the foothills of the Five Kings Mountains nestled between the Treerazors domain and the dwarfen Kingdoms.
With their main purpose being to keep the Tanglebriar from spreading into the mountains while keeping up trading relations with Dwarf live here is different from that in Greengold or Iadara. The contact with non elves is mostly limited to grumpy dwarfen traders at best and demons at worst. Thus even more than usual in Kyonin every inhabitant is trained in sword, bow or spell to keep themself and the rest of the country safe and the lack of big, thick forests led to a stronger connection to the earth open sky at once.
Almost 200 years ago Lanael was born in one such small village, son to two wizards which traded in gems and who's families had settled here right after the return to Golarion. As such his long childhood maybe could even be called calm and protected, whatever that may mean in this rather wild and dangerous part of the elven kingdom. While his parents taught him the mystical arts from a very young age, he was always fascinated with the primal bodily power of the dwarfs they traded with and to his parents dismay, even got into quite a few friendly brawls with young, often drunken dwarfes. Usually he lost, so with time he had to accept that he could never equal them in brute strength and thus decided that he should use his elvish grace and magic training to outwit them instead of trying to meet their force directly, asking his parents to study the ancient art of Spell Dancing in Iadara. While they were not really happy, believing hand to hand fighting no place for their son, they agreed, hoping the loss of dwarfen influence would help showing him his error.
They were quite wrong, as indeed Lanael did flourish in his training. Over the century of his training he even made somewhat of a name for himself, being one of the best of the admittedly few students of the ancient and almost dying art of spell dance, surpassing the brawlers of his youth by far. Thus it came that he got noticed by the Shin’Rakorath, always on the search for new recruits to keep up the eternal struggle against darkness...
