Lorelei Frostwind's page

There’s a little village at the edge of the woods named Belran. It is a small, unassuming farming community who had two notable pieces: a surprisingly extensive library, and the nearby temple to Erastil. The library was owned by an elderly mage who claimed to come from the city of Magnamar, looking for peace and quiet for his retirement. The temple and Belran have a working agreement: the paladins of the temple work to keep the village protected and in return the village provides them with food and trade possibilities. It is in this sleepy little hamlet where we find the Frostwinds: Valerie and Lorelei. Valerie is by trade a tinkerer. If there is a knick knack that needs fixing, or a doodad that needs inventing, Valerie is the woman to see. She could easily move to a town and charge for her services, but she’ll never leave after the kindness the villagers showed her when she showed up all those years ago, on the run and pregnant with her daughter, Lorelei.

You see, Valerie was a mistress of a mid-ranking elven noble. Being a human, this was an extremely taboo situation the two were in, but they were in love, and felt that the codes were wrong to try to keep them away from each other. This idea of course changed, when Valerie had told her lover that she was pregnant. In an attempt to keep her from being discovered, he had sent mercenaries to ….take care of her. Luckily for Valerie, she managed to escape with her life, and ran as fast as she could to the middle of nowhere, hoping to never be found again. And so here we are, living in a small village in the middle of nowhere that’s protected by friendly paladins. This was a good enough place to raise her daughter.

Though Lorelei was a half-elf, she looked remarkably human with a few prominent elven features, specifically her silver hair, and pointed ears. Besides that, she could easily pass for human, with an average build, complexion, and facial structure. From an early age, she knew that she was different than the rest of the humans in the village, but rather than let that get her down, Lorelei took it in stride. If she wasn’t destined to be normal, then she’d be as abnormal as possible. She took up the art of tinkering from her mother, and took to it with a passion, spending day and night in her mother’s workshop, learning the fine points of crafting, explosives, and some machinery. Any time Lorelei decided the village needed something done, she’d have created an object to do the job within the week. Valerie couldn’t have been prouder of her tinkering protegee. Lorelei, however, was content, but not happy. She didn’t want to spend her entire life trapped in this little secluded spot of the world. There was so much more to see. In the mage’s library, she had read about great metropolises, massive empires, kings, queens, armies, and spies. But the most interesting stories were always about evil tyrants, who were cruel and unloving towards their subjects, and taking advantage of the downtrodden in order to fuel his own hedonistic tendencies, only to be taken down by a band of gallant heroes who had banded together with the very people the tyrants had cast aside. These stories of heroic adventurers only made her yearn to go out and see the world, and there was only one way to do that.

Growing up in Belran, the only real connection to the outside world was the very infrequent traveller, or the paladins of Erastil. Therefore, it was always seen as natural when the adolescents decided that they wanted to serve Erastil and become paladins. It was a prestigious career, and most of the boys would try to join their ranks. Once they were accepted into the ranks, she would only get to see her friends about once a month. However, when Lorelei was ten, her two friends had another boy tagging along with them, a human from another village named Kieran. Lorelei saw this new kid as a source of first-hand information about the outside world, and spent the entire day talking to him, grilling him about his life before the temple. Over the years, the two became good friends, going on miniature adventures into the forest nearby, spending days in the workshop, blowing things up, and getting into (and having Kieran talk their way out of) trouble. During their time together, Kieran would give Lorelei lessons about Erastil and the paladins that follow him, she would teach him some of the finer points of tinkering, though it seemed as though he didn’t have a talent for such crafts. At the age of twenty, Lorelei had taken the lessons Kieran had been teaching her and decided to attempt to become a paladin of Erastil. Unfortunately she was much too old to be accepted into the training program, but there was another way: the proving. This was how adults could prove their worth, and become avatars of Erastil. So, after years of learning and training, Lorelei traveled to the temple in order to perform the proving. Unfortunately for Lorelei, she wasn’t strong enough. She couldn’t effectively wield the bows of Old Deadeye. So, Lorelei was not accepted into the sect.

Seeing this as a challenge, Lorelei locked herself in the workshop for an entire year. When she came out, she had the solution, a musket. Lorelei believed that if she was not strong enough to draw the bows of Erastil, perhaps Old Deadeye would accept another form of weaponry. Unfortunately for her, when she went back to the temple to try again, she learned the cold truth. It wasn’t her strength that was the problem: she simply did not have even the slightest bit of Erastil’s power within her. Without his divine guidance, there was nothing the paladins could do to help her in her training, and so she could never become a paladin.

Devastated, she ran home, knowing her one chance to leave the village just died. That was, of course, until her Kieran came back to the village about a week later. Having completed the final rituals, he had become a full paladin of Erastil, and had been given his first assignment. As he was leaving, however, he stopped in the village to let Lorelei know that he was still in need of an adventuring partner, and he couldn’t think of anyone better. Completely overjoyed, Lorelei frantically threw some gear into her backpack, said her goodbyes, and took her first steps outside of the village with her best friend, ready to see what the world had in store for them.

It’s one thing to read about evil tyrants and their strongholds, and it’s another to experience it. And even that is different than having this setting be your first impression on the outside world. But, alas, this was what Lorelei was subjected to when she and Kieran entered Kintargo. On the surface, Kintargo was a beautiful city, loving detail in the architecture of the buildings, the existence of opera houses, art galleries, and temples, all intricately designed, and while well used, still in beautiful condition. But the beauty of Kintargo is only at the thinnest of surfaces. For immediately upon entering the city, the two were accosted by the guardsmen, who began barking orders, rifling through their bags and packs, and claiming inconsequential trinkets as “contraband.” Then their attention turned toward her new musket. When they asked her what it was, she managed to (along with Kieran’s help) convince the guardsmen that it was simply an ornate walking staff, and something of practically no value. For whatever reason, they believed this blatant lie, and let them pass through without any further problems. Since Kieran had come on official paladin of Erastil business, there were times that the two would have to split up, as he followed up on a lead, or met a secret contact, so Lorelei had time to explore the city by herself.

The city itself was was a desolate place. Guards and the Chelish Citizen's Group were roaming the streets, looking for any reason to exercise what little power they had over the civilians, breaking merchandise, extorting gold, and even arresting citizens for seemingly nonsensical reasons. This was a miserable place and Lorelei didn’t like being here one bit. The sorrow contained in such a beautiful city was an irony not lost upon her, and she felt as though there had to be something she could do to help these people. So, for her first few days, she would wait until the guards or CCG stopped antagonizing their victim, and when they left, Lorelei would walk over to them, and try to help as best as she could, using her tinkering skills to repair broken equipment or goods, and would help the citizens clean up the mess afterword. Though she would receive wary thanks from the victims, it seemed to Lorelei that she was merely attempting to treat a symptom. But there really wasn’t much she could do, she was just one Half-Elf.

This way of thinking changed on Lorelei’s fourth day in Kintargo. On the fourth day, while walking through the Harbor District, admiring the glint of the morning sun on the water as it rose, she saw a victim of “doghousing,” the newest punishment Thrune had thought of. The “criminal” in question was one of the people Lorelei had helped when members of the CCG had smashed his cart’s axle. This man was nothing but a lowly cabbage salesman, and now he had been thrown into a crudely made box, covered with nails in the square, and was being tortured on the grounds of “conspiracy with intent to rebel.” Two guardsmen, each walking with some scraps of meat, moved to the poor man’s box, and unlocked the front door. Squinting from the light, the man crawled out of the box, wincing as one of the nails dug into his back. The guards laughed and kicked him as he struggled to remove himself from the box. When the salesman had finally left, the two guards said something to the man that Lorelei couldn’t quite make out, and they threw the scraps of meat a few yards to their right, rousing the two hounds who laid chained at the edge of the square. The man hobbled over to the food as best as he could, half limping, half running, hoping to get there fast enough. Unfortunately for him, he reached the few morsels of meat just as the dogs did.

Lorelei watched in horror as this man screamed in agony as the hounds tore into his flesh. His death was violent, but swift, and as the dogs began to feast upon their kill, the guards watched for a few moments, and then after a short squabble between them, one reached in his pocket, and placed a few copper coins into the other’s hand as they walked away. Lorelei couldn’t move. She was simply stunned. Waves of both fear and hatred crashed into her, stealing her breath and threatening to knock her to the ground. And it was right there, standing there at the edge of the cage as an innocent man’s blood trickled down the streets and onto her boots, that Lorelei decided to take a stand. A real one. This was unacceptable, and she would not leave Kintargo until the people were free from the executions, free from the antagonizing, free from the fear, free from Barzillai Thrune.

The next day, while eating breakfast at the inn she was staying at, Lorelei overheard two citizens talking about a protest that they were planning on staging, and she caught the location it was going to take place. The vision of that cabbage peddler came back to her, and as her hands shook from the memory, she knew that the protest would be the place to start.