[Amanaduial the archer]

Heeeere you go... I hope she's alright, I've spent rather longer than I usually would on this profile and the history is certainly rather obscenely long - I shall have my first post up later today or tomorrow.

Well. Anyway.

Character Description Form:

1.) Have you ever played in an RPG at the Barrow Downs? – YES - Which ones(s)? The Ambassador’s Son, An Audience with the King, Bloodstained Elanor, Brotherhood: a Story from the Last Alliance, Cirith Ungol, Crimson Sword, Escape from Nurn, Fall of the North, Gondorian House Call (unfinished), Kidnapped!, Land of Darkness, Last Hope for Moria, Legacy of Traitors, A Ride to the Dark Side, Rivendell, Roll Out the Barrels, Search for the Lost Messenger, Shadow of the West, The Shadows of Umbra, Wolf Run. I’ve missed something, but can’t remember what…

2.) How many RPG’s on the Barrow Downs are you currently involved in? Two: Fall of the North and Shadow of the West.

3.) Have you posted in The Green Dragon Inn – YES.
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Amanaduial's Character

NAME: Narisiel Mirdain

AGE: 1210 at the time of the forging of the rings, 1313 at the beginning of the War. (born in SA 380)

RACE: Elf, originally from Harlindon, now dwelling in Ost-in-Edhil

GENDER:[ Female

WEAPONS: As a woman, Narisiel was not formally trained with weapons, but her father taught her more than a little practical knowledge with a sword and arrows, somewhat more than simply self-defence. Her husband, Sirithlonnior, a soldier, echoed this concern that she should be able to use a weapon, and so subsequently Narisiel is fairly proficient with a sword. She therefore crafted for herself a sword that can be used double-handed but also works well when used single handed: she is strong enough to wield a heavier weapon due to years working in a forge and is therefore strong for a woman, but knows that in a battle situation when she might have to use her sword, there would certainly be others with simply more brute strength than her, and so the skill that can be gained with a lighter weapon may be favourable. Hers is therefore lighter than a traditional double-handed sword, but a little heavier and longer than might be expected of a single-handed short stabbing sword. It is more a thing of beauty than weaponry, with the finest leather binding its hilt and a pommel and guard laid over with silver, and alfirin leaves winding a slim, delicate chain down the blade to the tip: Sirithlonnior teased her that such a flower is too associated with death, but Narisiel simply smiled and pointed out that did that not make Alfirin all the more appropriate for a weapon?

APPEARANCE: Narisiel’s features could have been crafted by her own delicate fingers, her fine boned face symmetrical and certainly striking. Her skin is pale due to the hours hidden behind a guard in a forge or in her workshop poring over some delicate piece of finery, her chin a little pointed and determined, her sharp, intelligent eyes solemn and thoughtful yet quick to flash with amusement: they are surprisingly dark and so are all the more striking when set in her pale face. Her pale face is framed with almost black hair, again making a stark contrast against her light skin; it falls down to her waist, although this is not particularly practical for her work, and so is usually tied up in a long plait down her back, or twisted in several plaits to keep it out of the way: this means that whenever she lets it loose, her hair retains a permanent series of waves all down its length. Narisiel is not especially tall for her people, standing at about 5’9”, and she is quite slender but muscular: outside of her forge or workshop, she wears clothes similar to any other lady of high standing, for her profession has taught her to love beauty, and such dress belies her muscles to an extent, lying in context with her delicate features; but in the forge she wears clothes much like any of the other smiths but obviously with a few adaptations: dark, sturdy clothes, often of leather or similar primarily practical, hard-wearing materials: a jerkin worn over a shirt, whose sleeves are usually rolled up above her elbows, breeches of a softer, more easily moveable material, over which a long apron is worn, which reaches down to mid-shin. These are the clothes that are usually only seen by other smiths, however: in public she dresses as a lady.

PERSONALITY/STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES: Narisiel is a woman of natural intelligence that she had done her best to use in her studies to become one of the foremost smiths of Eregion. This also required a fair amount of determination of course, and determination she certainly has: she is not one to back down from a challenge or from something she believes in or loves dearly, and her determination reaches to the point of stubbornness. However, that is not to say that her heart will always rule her head, and her prudence and wise advise is valued by Celebrimbor, as is her quick wit by both her Lord and her husband. It is a wit that is not always seen, however: in public, Narisiel remains quite quiet with those she does not know well or yet trust, and she is quick, often too quick, to judge other people. Her quiet, often solemn nature probably came initially from her father’s own rather sombre personality when she was growing up, always in comparison to her dead older brother although he always valued his daughter for what she was. The quiet, modest understanding that existed between Narisiel and her father is something that remains in her relationships in the present as well, and she is not, as some are, afraid of silence in a conversation. But that is not to say that she is always so: she is quick to show her amusement or her love when in private, and her son’s birth has perhaps extended her capacity to love, and love him she does, with a fierce, protective love that, for almost the first time in her life, overshadows her work. Maybe some of the fire from her forge has slipped into her nature, for her fierceness often shows in other areas as well, and in a debate her quietness can quite vanish in place of powerful and heated oratory skills. She is a skilled smith, a wise counsellor, a loving mother and a good wife, all at once a very private person as well as a public figure.

HISTORY: Born in Harlindon, Narisiel was the only daughter and eventually the only child of her parents, her mother and brother both drowning only a few weeks after she was born. Her father, an elf much older than his young wife, never blamed his daughter for surviving in place of her strong, intelligent older brother, and neither was he consciously disappointed in his only child being a daughter, but nonetheless Narisiel always felt the pressure, his need for her to succeed in place of her brother. As she was female, Narisiel would not trained as a warrior, as a brother would have been; but her father was not an especially affectionate or excessively extravagant man, and subsequently his way of showing his love for his daughter was not to spoil her as an only child, but to instead lavish upon her a gift that would last her far longer than material goods: the gift of an education. Instead of being given jewels, Narisiel was to learn how to make them – to earn a living and, at the same time, to earn a way of making her father proud. Subsequently when she came of age, Narisiel was sent East to Eregion to a friend of her father’s, for where better to learn to be a smith than from the Mirdain themselves?

Narisiel studied hard and her natural intelligence and hard work paid off as she rose in renown in her profession, being unusual both as a female and as a foreigner, but always with the backing of her father, although he remained in Lindon, and her mentor, an experienced jewelsmith – Narisiel in turn specialised in jewellery especially. The great effort and time she put into her profession often left the young elven woman with little time for herself, but, coming herself from the ‘land of music’, she had a love of music and kept this up – and eventually it was through music that she met her husband, Sirithlonnior, a captain in the army of Eregion, who she married in 1482. But Narisiel continued to rise in renown and skill, reaching the dizzy heights of the innermost forges in which Celebrimbor himself worked, and there faced her greatest challenge yet: working on nineteen rings, the greatest rings that would ever grace the face of this earth. Like the rest of the smiths and craftsmen who talked to Annatar of the rings, Narisiel fell under the spell of the magic and wonder that these rings would be, and so with those select few, she threw herself into the creation of those rings. To an extent, maybe, she was jealous of Annatar, his skill so great that he was immediately welcomed into Ost-in-Edhil without question, rather than having to work his way up as she had; on the other hand, maybe part of her wished to impress him, and to impress the Lord Celebrimbor. But the best was not yet to come: in the year 1590, Narisiel, along with a few more select jewelsmiths, was to work on the pinnacle of nearly a century’s work: the forging of three rings, three rings that would almost cast the others in shadow, fire, water and air; the three greatest elven rings.

Her enthusiasm in those last six days almost turned to an obsession, and not for any of the three men in her life would she come out of the forges – or reveal her work to them. Narisiel barely stopped to sleep or eat, so determined was she to prove herself as one of the Mirdain, to live up to the honour that had been bestowed on her. But as she had worked on the rings, from about halfway through their forging in the 1540s, she had felt some sort of unease, something…not quite right about the making of these nineteen rings, and in the last six days as Celebrimbor locked himself away with only those few smiths and the mysterious Annatar, she realised that she was not the only one to feel that unease: Celebrimbor had the air of a desperate man, a man working to forge paradise but with the worry that it would simply yield only an empty utopia. And as the three rings were finally completed, their delicate finishing touches detailed by Celebrimbor himself, the pride in Narisiel’s heart was somewhat overshadowed – overshadowed by a doom sense of ‘what have we done’. Things that powerful could not be all good…but little did she know the power of what those beautiful, perfect creations could do.

In the last one hundred years, the elven smith continued her work as a jewelsmith, but also extended her expertise into other areas of crafting, working secondarily on armoury, often fine, ceremonial pieces, as close to jewellery as possible; for how could she work solely on jewellery when she knew that she could never create something as perfect and powerful as those rings? She tried to put them out of her mind, but seemed haunted by them: she was blessed with a son, and Sirithlonnior gave him the name Artamirion, noble jewel, and although the name seemed to fit, her son being the only thing she could imagine more beautiful than those rings, she was unsure if she liked such a comparison, the dread that it seemed to entail. After the creation of the rings, Narisiel became an advisor to the Lord Celebrimbor, and at the same time a friend, but it was a somewhat wary, almost guilty friendship, both elves unable to forget the three elven rings. In time, the memory of them dimmed, and Narisiel was able to get on with her life as a counsellor, as a wife, as a mother, and as a smith – but little did she know how those rings would stir the folds of history, more than a century after their creation…

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Amanaduial's post

SEE POST #134