Paige Ward's page

Paige knew that life on the streets in Korvosa was a miserable and arduous experience. But it was still somehow, for all of the cold and the starvation, more preferable than life as one of Gaedren's "Little Lamms", and Paige thought that was one of the least miserable of that lot. The plucky orphan girl had been left on the streets at the age of six when her mother passed away from illness and her father's new love didn't wish to raise another woman's child. She didn't even remember her last name anymore; it had long since been beaten and cried out of her. She spent only a few days begging on the streets before she found herself before Gaedren, who offered the young girl who didn't know any better a bed and some food.

It took little time for her to be put to work at performing petty crimes for him. Paige started out running distractions so that the other children could pick pockets, but as she grew older she began to sneak and pick as well, proving a surprising acumen for devious behavior. Not necessarily out of some grand joy for it, but because the only way that she could stay in Gaedren's good graces--for as much as the loathsome toad of a man could be kind to anyone--was to excel in her duties and bring him plenty of gold for him. She often managed to allay his wrath because of that, though there were some days when her luck simply didn't help her and she came home nearly empty handed, and when she did, none of her successes meant anything to the criminal.

Aside from being a good sneak, Paige had a certain charm about her even at a young age, a smart girl who could speak well, and whose sweet singing voice often provided the most potent form of distraction for others to do the pocket picking. She began to pilfer other things as well, and in a small corner of a back alley where nobody looked, she had a small stash of books she hid in someone's bushes. It was a small joy, but it was all that Paige had in life, and she would absorb any knowledge she could gleam of the world beyond, not wishing to spend her life a criminal under a horrible man's fist. Sometimes she could only manage a few pages a day amid her other duties, but when she found the time, she did her best to read as much as she could.

When her bardic magic manifested, it only made her more valuable to him. Paige didn't know how she had an innate gift for magic, but she didn't shy away from it, for whatever good it did her. She used it to help further her goals in stealing, although the shame of putting such a beautiful gift to work to better serve such a horrible man weighed on her conscience more and more. Her spells and her captivating song, which she learned had held people through magic as much as through her sweet voice, were gifts she felt too valuable to be used for Lamm, but she knew she had no choice but to do exactly as she was told.

As she grew older, Paige became the big sister figure to many of the children there, some of whom were in fact older than her. She did her best to teach them her tricks and to help them out, and often if she pilfered a particularly generously plump coin purse or managed to pilfer something very valuable from a shop, she would slide some coins to the other children so that they could claim to have 'succeeded' as well. Lamm's cruelty angered her more and more with time, even though she became better at avoiding his torture and his ire through her successes. The criminal grew weaker with age and with that only came cruelty, and she wished for the day she could rise up and do something to stop him.

Such a day never came, but her fall from grace did. When she was sixteen, Paige was found giving some of her haul to a small boy who had been beaten for the past several days straight for his failures, so that he could avoid the torture this time around, and for it, she was savagely beaten. The other children were made to watch as for hours, Paige was tortured and cut at, left with scars all over her torso from the abuse. Her body was left in an alley for dead, and she would have perished right there were it not for the kindness of a Sarenite cleric who found her while she lay dying in the gutters. Taking her back to the church, the priest, named Doriana, healed Paige and showed her the first kindness she had known from an adult in years.

When she awoke, Doriana asked how Paige had come to lie in such a horrible predicament, and for as much as Paige wanted to lie and fight against confessing what she had done, she couldn't help herself. She opened up everything to the priest, explaining that she had spent a decade working for Gaedren, pouring out her soul in such swift and feverish confession it overwhelmed her, but the priest remained patient, calm, and gave her a shoulder to cry on, letting her work through all of her frustration and sorrow. It was a cathartic but very miserable experience for Paige as a lifetime of pain was unloaded, and Doriana understood one thing above all else: this poor girl had never been given a chance to be free or make decisions for herself, let alone have somebody care about her at all. It was a bizarre feeling, but a relieving one, in some odd ways.

When finally her emotionally grueling release was over and she had been given some food, a question posed to Paige gave her a lot of thought: was she willing to atone? The question struck deep, as so concerned with survival, Paige had stolen and lied for years. Suddenly, she was confronted by those decisions, as the priest sought to help her turn from the dark path and find light in her life. That question set Paige on the course to right her life and to set right what had been up to that point a life of crime. Necessary crime, but she had still taken from people who needed, still hurt people. She needed to make up for that.

Doriana took Paige on as a ward of the Church of Sarenrae, and she had finally settled on that as her last name. "Ward". It was simple, and she liked something about the ring it had. At sixteen, she was a little too old to be sent to an orphanage, so she remained at the temple and was put to work in various ways to serve the church, not only to earn her keep (and very modest stipend of personal money every week), but to help serve to further her redemption; her soul was not blackened and her heart was true, but she still had to make up for what she had done, and being put to work with the church helped. She served as an aid to the healers by fetching things, changing bandages, and even doing menial cleaning and upkeep around the temple. She did it happily, because the priests were kind to her, her meals were warm, and she even had a small room of sorts where she had stacks of books lying about everywhere in mild disorder.

It was clear the girl did not have the discipline to be clergy, but she wished to continue serving the church into adulthood, and there were indeed uses for the girl. With her sweet charms and her very versatile skill set fostered from a life of petty street crime and knowledge-seeking, Paige found work serving the church out on the street. Sometimes, that meant playing bodyguard for priests who had to venture into dingier parts of the city for one reason or another, other times it was to sing on street corners about church events or even just the Dawnflower's glory. There were many in need in the city of Korvosa, and rather than bilking them for her own sake, she put her skills toward helping them.

With ample people skills and a streetwise sense of how to use them, Paige began to fall into a community organizer position for the church. She had a certain way with words, and charity efforts under the church found more success thanks to her well crafted and eloquent, impassioned speech. Other times, she would serve to help stop crime in the streets, as no shortage of incidental crime took place in open daylight every day, and when Paige was nearby she could always be counted on to stop it, which was something the city guard had mixed views on. Some saw her as a good samaritan, others found her overbearing, and some crooked guards simply wished there wasn't some do-gooder poking around.

But where she really threw her efforts was in regard to the "Little Lamms". The poor children still stuck under Gaedren's grasp needed help, and Paige did the best she could to try and keep them out of trouble, negotiating more than once with friendly guards when a child was about to be arrested, and on more than one occasion managing to rescue a child by bringing them to the church and personally ensuring they were placed in an orphanage where they could be safe.

It wasn't always easy work, but Paige felt fulfilled and joyful for the first time in years. The scars all over her body were horrible reminders of her past, but she had found redemption and a new, better life under Sarenrae's grace, and she was eager to show her devotion to the church back in return for it, giving her life to the Dawnflower as an agent, perhaps not one of divine magic, but one who could help her clergy and the people find common ground and understanding, a bridge between the ailing street and the temple that wanted to help them.

Korvosa was a city with problems. Paige had known that from an early age, but now, with the Dawnflower's guidance, she felt like she had a divine mission to fix it, and to help all the people she could along the way. The church had saved her life and set her on the path of redemption, and she would in kind return the favour for all who needed it.

After a decade of living under the oppressive control of Gaedren Lamm, freedom has given Paige reason to be bright and bubbly, and perhaps in her new line of working skirting the pun a little too cutely on being a ray of sunshine. Some in Korvosa need someone like that sometimes. Her life of crime is behind her now, and she has resolved herself to kindness whenever she can afford it, performing acts of charity and carrying herself with joy in the hopes of lifting the spirits of others. Sometimes it's the smallest gestures that matter most.

On the inside, she is a bit more torn up. Her old traumas don't fade easily, and every night she has the scars she earned from Lamm's beatings to remind her of her past. She doesn't let her pain show through, and she's come to a point in life where she can be genuinely happy and open about such matters, but beneath the surface there is often a twinge of pain and regret. She channels it as best she can into empathy for those also suffering, and her inner pain gives her all the more reason to throw herself into what is right for the purposes of distracting herself and burying her trauma beneath the satisfied feeling of doing a good thing to help someone.

Due to the abuse she suffered as a child, she is particularly sympathetic toward children, always committing hardest when there is a child in danger, sometimes going out of her way to help them. Of all the things Paige is willing to do for a greater good, harming a child is out of the question. She sees Gaedren Lamm in particular as a grave threat to the city and its children, and hopes for the day she may be able to cleanse such an evil off of the face of Golarion. She does not push the church to act in haste, but nothing could disappoint her more than his natural passing or some rival criminal stabbing him in an alley before she was able to mete out justice upon him.

Somewhere out there is Paige's father, the answers about where she came from and what her family name even is, and perhaps what her role in this world is. She's disconnected from it all, unsure what to think, but knowing her father, if he's alive, is a man who cast out his daughter callously and left her to starve on the streets. She does not seek him out, but on some mornings she awakes wondering if today would be the day she would finally meet him and be able to receive the answers and apologies she craved. Surely, he was still somewhere in Korvosa, and perhaps there was more to her heritage than she knows, but for the time being, she has work to do, and she cannot let her parentage be a distraction against that.

Although not officially a part of the clergy, Paige is still a member of the Church of Sarenrae, and she carries herself as such, holding herself to the tenets that a knight of Sarenrae often would: protecting the weak,fairness to others, offering redemption before offering the blade, and upholding truth. Faith helped her survive and turn her life around, and so Paige holds onto it firmly, and wishes above all else to find a role to play in bringing Sarenrae's word, finding some way to serve the church as more than an errands girl performing small duties for them. Now an adult, surely there is something she can do and some purpose she can serve, if not the church directly then Korvosa in Sarenrae's name. Some wrong she can right, some evil she can vanquish.

It gives Paige an almost restless yearning for something. She has found her redemption, but now she craves higher purpose. The weak will always need protecting and her blade is happy to serve in any capacity needed, but surely there is something deeper that she can do instead. Whatever she does, she only hopes it can make the streets of Korvosa a better place, for its dangers and failings were what drove her to suffer as she did. This city has hurt her a lot, but a large part of redemption is forgiveness, and Paige is ready to forgive Korvosa for failing her.

Paige is a tall, slender woman with long, straight brown hair and light brown skin often tanned from lots of work and time in the sun. A faint Qadiran heritage lingers in her blood and informs her very strong facial features, but she doesn't know enough about her family to know much more beyond that fact, and she holds little connection to that heritage due to her life as a child of the streets.

She dresses the part a little bit though, owing largely to her interest in the lighter of fashion senses among some of the clerics in the church who came from Qadira. It helps her cut a distinct but also distinctly Sarenite figure when she walks, her leather armor showing colours and symbols of the Dawnflower proudly. A blue cloak drawn over her shoulders billows as she walks, something she feels gives her a bit more presence. She makes sure to always keep clean and to wear fresh clothes, as she spent long periods of time wearing the same ratty old unwashed clothes under Lamm. Being able to dress properly is of the utmost importance to her as a result of that.

She's always dressed for action, due to how dangerous Korvosan streets can sometimes be. A weapon at her hip and often a few more hidden away just for security's sake; unlike the clergy she often guards, Paige understands the streets and has to be prepared for anything, and part of that process is to show that she's armed and not to be trifled with. Paired with her armour and the symbol around her neck, she makes sure it's clear that she's part of the church, availing her self of help at any moment. She's often confused for a priest because of that, and she doesn't mind the confusion; if anything, it's an advatange. Certain expectations about how to deal with a priest make it easer to come out swinging as a plucky, streetwise fighter.

All across her torso and arms are a myriad of scars from the almost lethal beating she endured thanks to Lamm. She hides them under her armor as best she could, and has worked slowly at trying to hide the ones on parts of her that are exposed with tattoos meant to help her grow from her traumas in constructive ways. It's not much, but it's something, helping to hide the reminders bit by bit as she grows into it. Ornate designs and fancy symbols help her make beauty out of her tragedy.