Elia Atyl

Human / Cleric

Submitted character story

Elia grew up an urchin scraping by in the streets of Galliandra on wits and intuition. She wasn’t orphaned or unloved, however, quite the opposite really. Both of Elia’s parents still live, and run a small leather goods shop in the Trades Quarter. Elia, the last child of six, has three surviving older siblings, and is five years younger than her nearest brother. The problem was how easy she was easy to lose track of, but she liked it that way, so it wasn’t exactly a problem for her. 

Her restless spirit, added to the increasing danger of the streets to a woman emerging from adolescence, drove Elia to leave Galliandra to “seek her fortune” with the naive optimism of so many her age. She prepared as best she knew, which wasn’t terribly well, and set out traveling south to and then through the Western Woods. Several nights into the dense forest and starting to run low on food, Elia realized she had also not prepared for the increasingly cool season. Second thoughts about this adventure began to grow. Late on the seventh evening of her journey, her campfire had dwindled to embers and she was dozing off, a little cold, a little hungry, a little lonely. Sadly, she made up her mind to return home. She would try again, better prepared, perhaps in the spring. 

If it had been mere bandits that came upon Elia that night, she would have been robbed, and perhaps injured or killed. Instead, fate or fortune blazed a different trail. As her fire died and her breath frosted in the gloomy night, shadows enveloped her little camp. These shadows, however, weren’t merely the absence of light. These shadows were something else; cold and empty and hungry. They reached to consume the warmth of the last embers of the fire, and spark of soul that was Elia as well. These Shadows were not mere dark and cold; they were the *absence* of light and warmth. What they consumed disappeared, forgotten.

In unnatural silence the void edged up to and then into the fire pit, dimming it toward extinction. It moved over the corner of the thin cover Elia had pulled over herself, then over her boots and legs, reaching for her chest and heart.

Suddenly, in the near total darkness, the silence was shattered by a figure staggering into the small clearing through cracking underbrush. A woman’s voice, hoarse and harsh, cried out “Awake! Awaken child!” A faint, amber glow of something held aloft in a slight hand was the only indication of the presence of an actual figure. The paltry light nevertheless emanated warmth. The shadows froze as the light flared enough to reveal the mature features of the woman holding it. Seemingly in response, the fire in the pit reignited, suddenly blazing brighter and hotter than Elia had ever been able to get it. It dazzled her as she startled from sleep, shivering and sluggish, feeling colder than she’d ever been in her life.

“Orys protect and aid us!” The woman called out. Elia didn’t understand how she knew that was the meaning- she’d never before heard the language the woman was using. With a campfire’s pop, the rejuvenated campfire burst from the confines of its small pit, flashing out in a circle that passed over Elia without burning her. The heat and light seared away the shadows ringing the pit and crawling up her body. The shriek they gave off was inaudible - felt more than heard.

The circle of heat and light ended just beyond the small space they occupied. Beyond that, among the dancing shadows of trees and underbrush, moved a number of small, and one very large, darker shapes. The woman, now standing opposite Elia across the fire pit swept her arms in a great circle. One hand held the source of the initial faint light, now visible as a brilliantly glowing stone. Her other hand held a staff of stout wood. From both stone and staff tips, streaks of firelight spiraled and spread away into the darkness around them. More silent shrieks ‘sounded’ as small shadows shuddered and disappeared.

Elia’s eyes widened and a scream rose in her throat as a limb of darkness swept from behind the woman and struck her side, knocking her to one knee. She cried out also, and Elia could see the pain in her face - and more. The woman was weary, nearly spent. She spoke again, now in the common tongue, barely loud enough to hear, not addressing Elia.

“I’ve failed you, my Orys. Again I’ve failed.” The sorrow in her voice was almost a physical blow to Elia.

A second lash of shadow struck at the older woman from another side and she shrieked and shoved the hand holding the stone towards it, forcing it to retreat with the sound of denied emptiness. She struck down with the staff end into the fire pit, raising a shower of sparks that shot out in all directions. She gritted her teeth, speaking seemingly to the fire pit itself.

“I’ve tried for so long. My love is not enough. My power is too weak.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I can’t carry you any farther. I can’t help you live. But I will not let you die.” 

These last words contained a resolve, a vestige of strength and power, that made Elia shiver again, but this time not from cold. The woman turned away from the fire, bringing her eyes around to look into Elia’s. “Maybe the best I can do is find another, a stronger ember, a brighter flame for your hearth. Maybe it will be enough.”

A cold wind swirled around the clearing, far too quiet for its violence, a tornado of darkness whispered instead of howling, scouring the ground outside the fire-lit circle, pressing it closer. The woman’s outstretched arms trembled with strain, as if keeping the storm at bay. She fixed Elia with a gaze far older than her years. These eyes, Elia somehow knew, saw the past, through all the hearth fires of history.

“Know this, child, Elia, youngest daughter of Elara and Danian Atyl.” Her voice rose, and steadied as she stood straighter. “Orys protects us. Orys is the Hearth Watcher, the Candle, the Forge, the Spark in the Ash. Orys warms us, illuminates us, shows us the way.”

She pushed her arms outward, straining against invisible resistance, widening the circle of brightness. The effort couldn’t prevent a lashes of shadow from whipping in from the surrounding swirl of void, one coiling around leg, another around her waist. A third wrapped around Elia’s boot, and nothingness crept up her leg again.

“I am Kitha Fardawn, Ember of Orys!” The woman shouted, pain and defiance in her voice. “I am–I *was*–the last Ember. Orys’s fire will yet live! As my spark fades, Elia Atyl’ grows. May the Ember that is Elia Atyl burn bright enough to bring Orys back to all hearths.”

The woman, drew her arms in, pressing the stone to her chest, and the staff over. In more words Elia could not recognize but yet understood, she cried “Burn this old wood, that the new spark may live!” 

Her voice transformed even as she finished the few words. The woman, Kitha, body and clothing, flashed incandescent, and then exploded into an expanding pillar of white-gold heat. The pillar expanded from where Kitha had stood, sweeping over the fire pit, over Elia, across the clearing and well beyond, obliterating the every shadow around them to ash and memory, and spreading away through the trees. The detonation was nearly silent, the loudest sounds of the entire event being the woman’s - Kitha’s - voice. As her final cry ended, only the sound of a gentle fire and light breeze belied the violent beauty of the shadows’ destruction.

Elia saw Kitha die, saw the shadows destroyed as the flash and heat passed over, but would not remember those things until later. In that moment, Elia saw campfires, hearths, torches, forges around her near and far and back. Back through the history of fire created, summoned, and used. She heard laughter, song, talk in a hundred languages. She smelled baking bread, the forging of iron. She felt the warmth of her mother’s hug, the radiant heat of a bonfire. She felt the love, the comfort of the people for and from the fire, and of the fire for the people. And then she felt it all fading. People began taking the hearth, the candle –the tamed fire– for granted, and turned toward newer, younger gods to love and fear and beseech. Elia felt the pain of love unreturned, the loss of radiance unreflected in eyes and smiles. She felt the tired beat of a heart infinitely older than her own.

A loud pop and crackle sent a shower of sparks scattering up from the small blaze in the fire pit, startling Elia back into herself. The Shadows were gone, the forest around her dark, cool, deeply peaceful; sleeping save for the scurries of small night creatures. Kitha was gone. The circle of light around the fire revealed scorch marks radiating from where she had stood. Elia was alone. 

No, not alone. In the center of the scorched earth was a smooth river stone, something she could easily fit in her palm, glowing but fading. Last to fade was a streak of quartz cutting through the grey stone. Slowly, limbs still aching with lingering cold, Elia stood and retrieved it. It the stone remained warm, like it was alive. Not far away lay a staff, half scorched black, but still solid looking.

She looked from the staff, to the stone, and then into the firepit. 

“Orys? I am Elia. I… Thank y-… I hope… I hope Kitha is with you, somehow. I wish… No. I promise. Your spark will not die. As I live, it will grow. This I swear.”

The fire danced.

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Current Events: Elia emerged from the Western Woods at the town of Bardsdale where she met and befriended the centaur cavalier Hastur. They have agreed to travel together to seek their futures. They have already rescued a centaur village from a misplaced, lonely Dryad (and found the dryad a new home), fought and vanquised robbers on the road, and learned new magical crafting skills from a wizard they escorted along the road. 
In Bardsdale town, a very enthusiastic (and somewhat reckless) half-gnome blacksmith, charged with finding a way to more securely hold Elia's Warmstone holy symbol in the Staff of the Hearth, accidentally and inextricably bound the two items together, and the staff and stone are now… more. What exactly is yet to be determined.