Simra Qalael

Half-Elf / Bard

Submitted character story

Simra Qalael was in the vault when the Overdraw hit, and didn't lose hre life, but might convincingly argue she lost more there than anyone else walked out of it. If she cared to argue. A half-drow heritage made her something of an outsider even upon arrival at Slefwerra; too surface for the Lowerworld and too dark-elven, with its undeserved stereotypes, for the surface. Yet she'd found at the Lyceum a place that judged her by her work, and much to her surprise, a person who loved her. Tilonim had been also one of the dozen friends and compatriots contributing to the effort in the vault, and one of the four that did not survive the Overdraw. The more-than friend relatinship between him and Simra wasn't known to anyone else until much later, because Simra never once talked about it. And Simra lived while Tilonim didn't.

It was a matter of inches. He'd been right next to her, attempting to hold back at least a part of what was breaking lose, and Simra could only watch as uncontrollable forces unmade the person she loved. She let out a single cry, torn from her center, the essense of grief. Though from that cry, the seed of her power bloomed: sympathetic resonance, the art of finding a thing's true frequency and making it sing. Or shaking it apart, echoing the moment that had shattered her. Either the blast, or its magnification and warping of her cry took her hearing, and something in her took the rest. She has not spoken since, not a word, not any kind of vocalization, and it's not clear to anyone whether it's because she can't, or because she won't. She speaks in signs now, and in the vibrations, musical notes and drumbeat tones she reads and sends through air and floor and bone, and in a silence many find hard to bear.

The silence, she is slowly learning, has a second aspect, a medium of transmission other than air or water or solid. A kind of voice can still be placed, unspoken but whole in meaning, directly in another mind. The same pitch that shatters glass can, turned on a living skull, become an unheard scream few minds can withstand. It comes to her now sporadically, under deep concentration or as a fight climbs toward a dangerous climax; towards a final note. Of the whole company, only two reach her without strain: Veyla, who simply refused the distance — and Rill, who is air and water both, the very medium her vibrations ride, and who meets her halfway down his own paths.

Forgiveness has come to Simra slowly. First, and hardest, herself, for living, for the temerity of being saved by Tilonim. That took a year. Then Coriel, who had led the working and pushed it too far. Even after eventually seeking joining the company, Simra cannot look at her without remembering. And yet Coriel didn't bristle or argue, and endured being unforgiven, never asking to be released from it. That patience has slowly worn the sharpness of blame into something Simra thinks might be the beginning of grace, and it surprises her.

Nathair she will not forgive, and believes she cannot. Where Coriel reached too far out of, yes, ambition, but also reckless love for the work, and has spent every day since paying for it. Nathair looked at the same ruin and tok it as a revealed truth, that the entropy that ate Tilonim was merely the world being the world, and that grief is a failure of that logic. He hasn't apologized or sought forgiveness; why would he if he was simply right? When her resonance rises unbidden to a point that threatens escape of her control, it is always his name the note is climbing toward.

The un-sought mercy in her life is Veyla, who's self-appointed sibling attitude Simra can't shake off. Simra's walls of silence, real and emotional both, were un-able to keep out the cool, elegant elf who refused to stand on the outside. Veyla closed the distance, learning Simra's sign language, standing closer to her than she would anyone else. Somewhere through the persistence, Simra stopped minding. It is the first real friendship since the vault she has let herself simply have.