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Old 10-07-2006, 09:56 AM   #109
Anguirel
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: The 1590s
Posts: 2,825
Anguirel is a guest of Tom Bombadil.
My Ulfing woman is here. Fea, if you want me to change the last bit, do say.

I'll write a bio for her son Drenda too at some stage.

Linked ~*~ Pio
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Anguirel's character - Gausen

NAME: Gausen

AGE: 34

RACE: Human, of the Ulfing tribe of Easterlings

GENDER: Female

WEAPONS: The sharpness and acidity of Gausen’s tongue is proverbial.

APPEARANCE: For a woman of the Ulfings, Gausen stands tall and proud, at 5’3”. She is slender, even slightly wasted looking. Her features have a lean delicacy to them, enhanced by the intensity of her stare. She always dresses in a black robe topped by a sable cloak to drive away the cold; she wears a translucent black veil which she sweeps off in moments of anger.

PERSONALITY/STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES: Gausen is an intimidating proposition, dignified but ready at any moment to succumb to the grip of cold fury. Her temper is colloquially known by the Ulfings as “The Anfauglith Wind”. But, as so often, this furious imperturbability is a shield that hides considerable vulnerability. Gausen is cripplingly vain and cannot understand that the harshness of her life is causing her beauty to fade. As such she is apt to exploit more power over men than she possesses, a debtor to pride.

HISTORY: Gausen was married at the age of fifteen to the Chieftain of a lesser clan under the vassalage of Ulfang the Black, Drenduld; her own ancestry is similar; noble in the pettiest of senses; and this makes her apt to assume airs apposite to a great Queen or Empress. Drenduld was a vile husband to her, but she loved him to worship and dreamed that he might one day take Ulfang’s place, swaddling herself in an elaborate image of a paradisical marriage she had never truly known. She quickly bore Drenduld a son, Drenda; but Drenduld showed her if anything less interest or consideration than before. The child Drenda became, and remained, the fulcrum of her existence.

Shortly after the first banishment of Uldor Ulfangsson, Ulfast, the Chieftain’s second son, gathered power in his hands for the first time and did not hesitate to use it in the punishment of his enemies. Drenduld had once slighted him, or so he said; many rumoured that he in fact sought to seize Drenduld’s petty estate. A duel between the two men left the arrogant Drenduld dead, and Gausen’s life forever changed; her husband’s possessions seized, she and her son were plunged into poverty.

They never left it. Gausen rents a pair of beds in a hovel near the hall of Ulfang. It is a strange and chilling place, lavishly decorated with all Gausen’s remaining, tattered finery, where her son Drenda, now sixteen years old, is nurtured for the great destiny Gausen believes is his birthright.

In the meantime she schemes for the restoration of her former comparative glory. She nurses a hopeless but determined fantasy; that Uldor, greatest son of Ulfang, whom she has often seen in passing and whom she has been presented to at the hall, might deign to love her and protect her son. Uldor’s lecherous disposition has led him to give her faint encouragement.

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Anguirel's character - Drenda

NAME: Drenda

AGE: 16

RACE: Human, of the Ulfing tribe of Easterlings

GENDER: Male

WEAPONS: Drenda can wield a scimitar with a good deal of skill, though not as much as he supposes, and is also extremely competent with a bow and arrow after a childhood filled with hunting. He has never fought anything other than wild beasts before, but imagines he would be perfectly capable of doing so.

APPEARANCE: Drenda's handsomeness is a credit to his mother - and indeed entirely due to his mother, for his father Drenduld was thuggish and grim of visage. Taller than most fully grown Easterlings at 5'7", he seems set to become taller still. His form is lithe and agile, his limbs long and wiry, his shining black hair is his mother's delight, and his sparkling eyes seem set to charm the women of the Ulfings.

PERSONALITY/STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES: Apart from the vigour of youth, Drenda's character has in truth few attractive characteristics; for if his looks are his mother's, his mind is his father's. He knows how Gausen dotes on him and is perfectly filling to exploit it when he needs coin or credit; but he feels no loyalty, let alone devotion, in return, only a vague sense of possessiveness that lead him to be suspicious of men who visit the hovel. He longs to prove himself in battle, but his convictions are too shallow for him to care much about the circumstances.

HISTORY: Drenda has spent fourteen years soaking up the love, energy, and funds of his widowed mother. All that can be spared has been spent on Drenda's advancement. This has been to a degree successful; Drenda was granted the status of a lesser chieftain's son by Ulfang two winters ago, and since then his days are spent more often at Ulfang's hall than with his mother. This has tripled his vanity, already inherited mightily from both his parents.

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Anguirel's post - Gausen/Drenda

The quietness of the hovel was disturbed only by the recurring circles of Gausen’s distaff. She span the greyish flax, and watched it form, coagulate, like some eerie shadow of a marsh. Once brought out of this dim room, peered at by her narrowed, unadulterated glance, it would become a garment like any other. It would be given, along with the rest of the batch, to the horse-trader’s wife, and the horse-trader would in turn allow Gausen’s son to retain his steed for another month.

Any service that could be done for him was worth any length of gropings upon a darkened loom. She would have worked outside, for the day was bright – she could see that from where she sat – and it would have allowed her eyes more rest. But that would not, in this instance, do at all. Only lesser women worked outside, where the female art, the feminine struggle, for illusion failed them; where tears and stains and lines were mercilessly revealed. Better by far to shroud herself in propriety, Gausen knew.

She had not seen the subject of all her toils, the redoubt of all her hopes, for above a week. Gausen did not consider blaming her son for this; far from it. She had brought him up now; he was a man, in all, she wryly thought, but his extravagance. But that too was Drenda’s affair, not hers. He was by right, she thought in fury, a chieftain’s son; a right confirmed in oath by Ulfang himself! Why should he not live like one? It was reasonable, then, that he dwelt at Ulfang’s hall, burning with the splendour of his youth, and kept his horse, two hounds and a falcon. How her pride blazed for him then. For Drenda was beautiful, not merely to her, but to all others. He towered already among the tallest of the Ulfings. His features, which were her features, shone with grace and power. And if she had to labour in the dirt to maintain that power? Then by the gods, labour she would.

And then she heard the word, its unenthusiastic tone belying its enchanting significance, at the entrance to the hut.

The word was “Mother”.

Like a lapdog Gausen leapt from her seat, throwing back her veil, her eyes gleaming with anticipation. He had come. He never came here now, never usually. But he made an exception now. What filial piety... she ran to the threshold and embraced his tall, thin, figure, like a sapling still, she thought fondly, a handsome sapling, but no tree yet.

“Drenda...” she cried, but he endured her clutches with an ambivalent glance, and stepped uneasily out of them.

“Mother, we should talk.”

“Come in, then, come in!” But still Drenda hesitated upon the wooden doorstep. The look in his eyes moistened his mother’s. He is ashamed, now he is a great man, she thought, to enter the room where he lived as a boy.

“Drenda,” she said, summoning some of the sternness she reserved for all but her child into her voice, “it is not the feeling of a nobleman to quail at his mother’s house.”

Drenda bowed his head, surly but not wishing to argue, and stepped in. At once Gausen reproached herself. Had she been too sharp with him? Would he leave more quickly now? Had she squandered minutes with her son over a point of pride?

“Mother,” Drenda said, “have you got Father’s things? I need them.”

“Your father’s things?” Confusion mingled with relief in Gausen’s mind that Drenda had not taken offence. “The circlet of his lordship and the sword-belt of his authority? Are...are you certain you need them, my dear?”

“I’m not going to pawn or sell them, if that’s what you mean,” Drenda answered sullenly. “Yes, Mother, I need them. Things are happening fast outside your hut. There’s...there are going to be opportunities, Mother. I need all the dignity I can muster.”

But Gausen had shrunk back further into the darkness of her dwelling; partly to find the relics of her husband she had stored for fourteen years, but also to conceal the fear that spread across her face.

“Will there be war, then?” she asked quietly, her back to her son.

“I do not know for sure,” Drenda answered without emotion. “But an envoy has come from the Eldar. Whatever happens...”

“Oh, Drenda, Drenda, my boy, be careful with your life,” Gausen exclaimed, the sobs starting to conquer her soft voice, “which I have preserved with all that remained of mine.”

Drenda coughed, embarrassed. “Have you the circlet and the belt, mother? I should be present at the Hall to watch the Envoy’s reception.”

“Ay, my son, ay, my good lord,” Gausen whispered. “Take the emblems of your right, my boy, and stand tall in the hall. I know you will have no equals there.”

She passed over a bundle of black silk, laid her hand on her son’s shoulder, and stole a swift kiss from him before he left, laughing at the bristles of his fresh beard. He did not give her another look, but she listened, rapt, to the beating of his horse’s hooves as he made his way to the hall.

When they died away, she considered the news he had brought. If war was to come, she had but little time. She must see Uldor, must convince him to accept her, must solemnize their bond, before the men of the Ulfings left for the north. That way lay glory and preferment for her son.


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Among the friendly dead, being bad at games did not seem to matter
-Il Lupo Fenriso

Last edited by Anguirel; 10-13-2006 at 02:56 PM.
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