For use in: General purpose RPs
Name: Vira Demarcias (NSW)
Place of birth/raising: Arafel
Age: 107
Warders: Lillias Jake (49, Me’Arearth), Jethraya Sorand (37, Thunder), Garen Desoran (29, Path of Water).
Physical description: Vira is tall and willowy, with angular features. Her hair is jet black and shiny, to her shoulders. She has no fringe, just hair of equal length all around. Her eyes glitter black when she is angry, but usually they are a midnight blue colour. Vira has a wide, thin mouth and overly tanned skin, with several scars over her face. There are even more scars on her body, most of which were earned before her raising to Aes Sedai. She has thick black eyebrows that generally overshadow the blueness of her eyes. Her features combine to make a striking appearance but she isn’t classically beautiful. Nor is she ugly or plain.
Character History[]
Vira grew up in Arafel with her father and siblings. Her mother died when she was four and her memory of the woman faded increasingly as she advanced in years. Vira loved her father dearly but also got intensely frustrated being his daughter. He was overprotective and didn’t let her spread her wings the way other Arafellin fathers did with their children. It was perhaps the fear of losing her, and his other children, that kept him from giving them ultimate freedom. Vira had knives and other weapons that she was permitted to play with, but where other girls received training, Vira had to teach herself. The result was that she had quite a few accidents, earning herself her first series of scars.
At the age of fourteen Vira was taken to a small house in one of the Arafellin cities to be tested by the Aes Sedai who had taken up position there twenty-three years earlier. It was a visit that many Arafellin girls in the area Vira grew up in made, at the age when they were becoming women. Nobody really expected Vira to be found to have the ability to become Aes Sedai, so it was a great surprise when the Aes Sedai’s eyes began to gleam and she nodded firmly. The woman informed Vira’s father that Vira must go to the Tower and learn to control her gift. Vira had been astonished, but not as much as she was when her father assented.
She felt intensely hurt as she watched her father fighting to keep the feelings out of his eyes. She realised that was what he wanted – to ignore his feelings, to forget them. To forget her. She tried to cling to the knowledge that her father loved her, truly did somewhere deep inside, but this didn’t stop her from being miserable. She was that way for her early years in the Tower, but one day she realised the image of her father’s face was fading from her mind. She had not heard from him once since arriving at the Tower, nor had she heard from siblings or old friends back in Arafel. Against her will she began to lose her ties with her homeland, and found more and more that she felt at home in the Tower.
She turned her eyes to the future without even realising it, and focused on the friends she was making in the Tower. She was making enemies too, and it was from interactions with some of these that she earned even more scars about her person.
Vira spent fifteen years as a novice and twenty-nine as an Accepted, which meant that she became Aes Sedai at the age of fifty-eight. She knew exactly which Ajah she was going to choose, from very early on in her training, and to her dismay she petitioned the Green Ajah head only to be rejected out of hand. She stared in disbelief and found her fingers were itching, wishing for her knives which had been left back in her room in the Accepted quarters. Instead she shouted loud abuse at the Ajah Head and had tried to struggle forward and attack the woman. She was held back with strong bands of Air and booted out of the office with a few sound words.
Vira was infuriated by the slight she had suffered, but was soon put in line when a much older Green sister told her that everyone had gone through what she had – even the legendary Greens you heard about in stories. Those legendary Greens had themselves refused fellows entry into the Ajah until they completed further training. Those legends Vira looked up to had both slighted and been slighted at various times. The realisation calmed Vira enough that she could shift her focus onto excelling, rather than stewing in her anger. She fed her frustrations into her studies and as a result did spectacularly well in training. She completed her training rapidly and was soon raised to Aes Sedai of the Green Ajah.
Vira is now 107 years old, and has worn the Green-fringed shawl for forty-eight years. She is still relatively young compared to many of her fearsome sisters, but is one of the most proud and ferocious Greens in the Tower.
Personality: Vira takes all that she has suffered in the past, from being abandoned by her family and homeland, to watching sisters and Warders die, in stride, enabling it to make her a better warrior and more steadfast in the present. She is always sharp and to the point, never beating around the bush. She treats her Green sisters with the utmost respect until they treat her badly. Then she turns on them with intense wrath and makes them regret the day they set a foot wrong. She is rather disdainful of women in other Ajahs, seeing them as rather useless. This is one of her greatest faults, considering the Green Ajah to be the be all and end all of all things.
Vira has shrines to all her lost sisters in her room. She has painted portraits of lost Warders, even those who belonged to other sisters than herself. She has the largest collection of Green Ajah artefacts out of any sister. She has become incredibly possessive of her treasures, and doesn’t like anyone to touch them. Many of them are stored carefully away for preservation’s sake, but some she cannot bear to remove from their display.
Vira cries sometimes when she is alone, in memory of sisters who have left her behind. The loss of sisters and Warders is what causes her the most pain. She has eyes on the Green Ajah’s ultimate goal, winning Tarmon Gai’don, and is rather unusual in that she doesn’t much care about anything else. All she cares about is reaching Tarmon Gai’don and fulfilling her destiny. Sometimes people in the present suffer because Vira’s eyes are so firmly fixed on the future.
Vira causes great consternation in many of her sisters, but almost everyone loves her anyway. She has made a few lifelong enemies over the years, but most Greens are in her eyes competent and worthy of the title, and so safe from her retribution. There is of course always room for mistakes to be made, and Vira is always on the alert.