Veyla Sathar

Elf / Kineticist

Submitted character story

Veyla Sathar wasn't outwardly changed by the Overdraw. She remained an elf where Coriel and Ozur were altered, blood and bone, from what they had been. The catastrophe instead woke something latent in her: a pull toward metal and iron and the invisible lines running through the world. She is one of the survivors who looks the same as before, but knows she isn't. Others in the company might be able to point to the moment they became someone new. Veyla simply discovered that the distance she had always kept between herself and everyone else could now be *enforced.*  She could hold a a person or a crowd at exactly the reach she preferred, and never be touched unless she chose to be.

She'd always been aloof. Elven long-sight makes a certain coolness easy, and maybe even necessary. Veyla had already gone through watching shorter-lived friends age and worry and rush, and learned to love people from a slight remove, the way you love a season you know will pass too quickly. The Overdraw gave the habit an all-too-easy enforceability. Now, blades hang back when she wishes and the armored keep their distance. Veyla rides the lodestone-lines above the melee where nothing reaches her without her leave. She is elegant about it, even gracious in the heat and heght of combat. She's also, if you watch closely, lonely, in a manner arranged so carefully as to look like preference.

Which is what makes the thing with Simra so strange, and so revealing. When Coriel formed the company, Simra was drawn in with the others; silent, but radiating a grief that made most people give her the same space Veyla preferred to live in. For Simra, though, Veyla did the opposite. She closed the distance. She sat nearer, learning Simra's signs faster than anyone else, appointing herself without a word a kind of sister to a woman who had not asked for one and did not, at first, want one. Simra found it maddening. Veyla, who can keep the whole world at arm's length, had apparently decided there was precisely one person she should not - and would not.

She has never explained it and probably couldn't. Perhaps Simra's silence is a distance Veyla recognizes and trusts; a person keeping the world back for reasons Veyla understands in her bones. Perhaps it's simpler than that. Maybe after a lifetime of loving from a remove, she saw the most cut-off, closed-off person in her circle of necessity and felt, for once, that closing the gap was worth the risk. Simra is coming around, though it has taken time. It is the only relationship in the company Veyla has ever visibly worked to make closer, and watching the guarded one try persistently, past every rebuff, is how the others learned her coolness was not in fact the whole of her. To most everyone else she remains the lodestone: beautiful, exact, always at the distance she choses. Simra gets to watch her choose differently on purpose. Perhaps others are not too far behind.