Appearance

Kalaya’s tall and lithe figure gives her the look of a dancer and she moves with a smooth grace which matches her form. Her face is lovely with sweetly curving lips and dark auburn arching brows which rest over wide, dark eyes. Those eyes often seem to snap and flash with a burning inner passion which cannot always be contained. Her shaven head lends her appearance a severity which it is otherwise lacking.

A plain, undyed shirt is belted snugly about her trim waist with a simple sash denoting her as a lowly first coil. Loose fitting pants are gathered where they meet knee high tabi which they are tucked into. Straw sandals complete the simple ensemble made slightly less so by the presence of a pair of red jade short daiklaves. When traveling, Kalaya often wears red jade lamellar armor over the rest of her garments.

Background

Kalaya grew up in the far north, and her life was a rather simple one. At least until the Terrestrials came to challenge the Bull of the North, a familiar figure in Kalaya’s village. She was about eight years old when the fighting started but she is not entirely sure since at the time it seemed that the fighting had no beginning and no end to it. It was just there, always a constant presence while never actually touching her life directly. She saw people from the village go off to fight but none of those who she was close to left. Kalaya was just beginning to enter an age where she might begin to train to defend her village when the fighting at last began to draw to an eventual end.

Troupes of the Dragon Blooded were retreating through her village when they were attacked. Being all of eleven at the time, Kalaya simply couldn’t see how it could be right to attack retreating soldiers who were carrying their dead and wounded home; she failed to see how they could be considered a threat. She tried to ask the elders why it was that they were attacking those who she considered to be innocent. They tried to catalogue the crimes of the Dragon Blooded for Kalaya but she would have none of it. These people just wanted to get their dead and wounded back home! They were not here to harm the village.

Kalaya made a choice then and went out to where the slaughter was taking place. She was not sure what she could do but she knew that she could not stand by and let this happen. She turned on those who had been her people for she considered them her people no more; they had become monsters in her eyes. The people of her village looked on with shock as this little child struck out at them. She had been one of theirs but she had obviously gone mad, they prepared to kill her. But while Kalaya was defending the soldiers, she felt the breath of Hesiesh as she struck out at the very people she had grown up with in order to defend the enemy.  

She helped the Dragon Blooded who were still capable of fighting drive off the village force and now she could never go back. Even if she had not just helped to kill some of those who she had known her entire life, she had exalted as a Dragon Blood. She knew the fate of those so blessed by the dragons within the domain of the Bull of the North. She knew because she had once had an aunt who had exalted long before Kalaya was born. As soon as her family saw this, they sought the help of the village’s warriors to destroy her.

The Dragon Blooded of House Tepet took pity on her, or so she saw it, and took her back south with them. She was adopted into House Tepet and entered the long and arduous education required for those upon the Blessed Isle. Her fiery temper and sharp tongue made for an interesting life among Dynasts whom Kalaya saw as spoiled little brats. Although she eventually learned to tame her tongue, she never lost her contempt of the pampered “Princes of the Earth”.

Her House faced a dilemma deciding her fate. House Tepet needed soldiers but they hesitated to send Kalaya out in the field like that. They had already seen how she would turn even on those she loved best in order to do what she felt was necessary to protect those she chose to. Would she follow orders given to her as a soldier? It was decided that although she was not seen as particularly strong in her faith, she might be sent to the Cloister of Wisdom in order to gain some perspective as well as to smooth out some of her rough edges.

At first this seemed to work. Kalaya did seem to become stronger in her faith and she proved to have a great passion for caring for the needs of the common people around her. Yet she still fostered a great deal of dislike for the Dynasts, although she was admittedly a great deal better at hiding it than she had been previously. Deciding that perhaps getting out and serving the people away from the majority of the Dynast population might be best for Kalaya at this time, she was sent out to Greyfalls to serve.