Morgyn's page

Forgettable. That's the best that can be said of the grubby and impecunious appearance of the slight boy standing before you: he looks like every other urchin from here to Tian Xia. His narrow face might be pale beneath the dust and grime; his brown hair is cut messy and uneven; and his layers of ragged clothes hardly deserve the name. Hollow-eyed and not even five and a half feet tall, he's likely another malnourished orphan: neither strong enough to find honest work, nor handsome enough to attract more than a momentary sympathy from those passersby who don't surreptitiously check their purses instead.

Then something takes his interest and he glances up, and his whole appearance is transformed. His brown eyes are bright with intelligence and frank appraisal, and the liveliest curiosity is apparent in the tilt of his head and unconscious lean of his skinny form. This is no beaten-down wharf rat, but a confident and wary survivor.

Morgyn doesn't remember a time before Mother Tibb, but she figures that's just as well. The crippled old Besmaran adept who took in her and some other Wiscrani foundlings was no saint, but she kept them from starving or going to the Asmodean orphanages, and she taught them a useful trade. An illegal trade, to be sure, but a useful one. Most importantly, she kept Morgyn on, knowing she was a girl and helping her conceal the fact, years after anyone else would have sold her to the stews for a quick profit.

Then someone peached on Mother Tibb to the robins, and Mother Tibb swung. Most of the rest of the gang was transported, but Morgyn escaped justice. She made it on her own another two years before being press-ganged for a Navy ship by some officers who mistook her for a boy. After only a few months at sea, that ill-fated tour of duty was cut short on its way to Sargava by the whims of a storm out of the Eye of Abendego. As the foundering ship was blown out of her sight by the gale and the pounding sea, Morgyn clung desperately to a spar to stay afloat. Just as her endurance was reaching its end, she saw the ghostly light of another ship. A dangling rope beckoned to her; she seized it and scrambled aboard. Hiding behind a capstan, she watched the dim figures of the crew ignore her and go about their duties in total silence and calm despite the lashing rain and winds. As the storm ended, the moon shone through the clouds, and through their missing flesh: skeletons. Not a single living person crewed that silent ship.

Morgyn doesn't remember much of the rest of the night through the haze of terror and exhaustion. Even she will not swear the veracity of her memory that at one point the ghost ship simply lifted itself from the water and flew upon the clouds as on the sea, every moon-white sail limned with Arazni's Fire. When she came to her senses, she had washed ashore on a remote beach near Port Peril, hundreds of miles from Sargava, with nothing but the ragged clothes on her back - and a small waterlogged book, clutched in one hand.

The need to understand what had happened - to decipher the secrets of the still-legible sections of the book - became her new purpose and sole goal beyond survival. When she became frustrated with the pace of her progress on her own, she broke into the house of a Port Peril wizard one night to read from his books and compare them to her own - carefully replacing them when she was done. It was several break-ins later that she realized that the books most useful to a fledgling wizard had all been stacked together, along with ink and quill. On subsequent nights scattered and seemingly forgotten bits of spell components appeared; then a plate heaped high with cookies, from which one or two would surely not be missed. Muleheaded scrap of humanity that she was, Morgyn never approached the wizard himself - trying instead to repay him by chasing off other would-be thieves - even as she became more and more comfortable in the little study with its squashed armchair. It became routine, even comforting, to spend her days scrounging for the bare minimum of money and food and her nights in study.

So when Morgyn felt a familiar wooziness in the Formidably Maid, where she had stopped for a drink, the last thing to cross her mind before the black was not so much "What's happening?" as "Oh, not again."

In the character alias! Please note that I've tried to represent all starting wealth as only more first-level spells, which cost 10 gp each to write in a spellbook. Having few possessions is part of the backstory.