Tassam Stormcaller

Half-Elf / Druid

Submitted character story

Tassam Kalliola grew up on the wrong side of the weather, and loved it there.
Ocean's Point clings to a strip of high ground between the East Forest and the Maelstrom sea, a freehold that by reckoning of wind and water should not be livable at all. That its terraces bear fruit, that its children, human, elven, and a smattering of others, play along the cliff paths without being snatched into the sky or blown into the sea, is the patient work of its druids, a lineage of generations holding a ring of calm against a coast that would otherwise scour itself clean every few years. Inside that ring the life is old and fine and turned inward: long music, intricate weaving, the developed arts of a people who have been safe and mostly alone for centuries and who meet the wider world with equal parts wonder and mistrust. Trade trickles; strangers are marveled at and watched.

Tassam, half-elven and born restless, never trusted the always-calm. As a girl she would slip to the very edge of the' protections, where the tame air frayed into the true weather beyond, and stand with her arms open while the winds hit her as if through a door thrown wide. Each year she went a little farther out, stayed a little longer, matching her nerve against the wild coast until the going stopped frightening her. And then, one season, the pull of the world past the weather-wall simply outweighed the pull of home. She did not run away so much as follow the storm out and neglect to come back.

She has a faith, though she wouldn’t call it that. Tassam believes in the balance. A storm's fury and beauty mean nothing, she says, without the quiet to set them against; the gale is only truly glorious to someone who also knows stillness. But she has come to see that the balance is rare. Too few people ever let themselves love the storm, and far too many take the calm for granted, or worse, mistake it for something owed to them. Ocean's Point taught her both halves of the truth and then, insulated and content, forgot was was being taught.

So she has spent her years abroad putting the balance back by hand. She has traveled with companions of long standing, a handful she would still cross a continent for, and with brief, bright liaisons that flashed like a summer storm and passed like it too. She has fought and healed, called the lightning down where it was needed and, just as often, spread a stillness over frightened people in the middle of a howling dark. She is charming when she wants to be and formidable when she must be, and she carries a short storm-staff worn smooth by decades of open roads, which she calls Ukonsauva.
Her hair tells part of the story without her having to. It was brown once. It went cloud-white, sudden and total, the day she put herself in the path of a bolt she should not have survived. It passed clean through her and left her standing in smoking grass, unhurt yet changed; from that hour lightning has had no power to burn her. From then on as well, she took the name Stormcaller, while those whom she saved that day began telling the story of “the woman the sky refuses to kill.” Those who travel with her swear that when she works the weather, or takes up the staff, the white deepens to stormcloud grey, as though the sky were gathering in it. Others insist it is only a trick of the light. Tassam has never troubled herself to settle the argument. 

Now, at 48,  she is far south of anywhere she was born, walking a coast she has never seen, half-looking for a promontory of her own — some high, wind-bitten place where the sea and the sky argue the way they did over her childhood cliffs. She wants to settle there, eventually. Not to hide behind a ring of calm, but to stand in the seam between the storm and the quiet, and to show anyone who cares to learn that both are worth loving, and neither is ever owed.