Character Vatrës Dhalis | Avatar of Vahl

[Vatrës Dhalis]

Vatrës Dhalis

Age	Mid-20s
Species	Vahla
Gender	Female
Height	5'10" | 178 cm
Weight	115 lbs | 52 kg
Force Sensitive	Yes

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION

Vatrës Dhalis is tall and willowy and usually gives an overwhelming sense of stillness. Her flesh is porcelain pale, with the occasional blemish and a few faint freckles across the cheekbones and the straight, narrow nose. She has a soft, precise mouth, a touch wider than would be traditionally beautiful. Her eyes are purely black, as if to suggest the complete absence of iris and only dark, unfathomably deep pupils, and also a smidge too widely-set to be considered classically beautiful. Her face is fine boned, oval-shaped, and featuring high, flat cheekbones. She has a strong yet narrow jawline. Between her collarbones and slightly below, just at the sternum, is a set of pale markings that could well be scars if they were not so symmetrical, almost like a brand.

Her hair is so white as to be nearly silvery ash, and she wears it straight, often loose but sometimes braided. It is fine and light and glossy, giving her an ethereal appearance. She has a long and graceful neck, an extension of her willowy height. She is lithe and slender, toned from a life of work but not overtly muscular, with trim shape where her torso narrows from shoulders to waist before flaring a little at the hips.

INVENTORY

Nothing special. Watch this space...

PERSONALITY AND BELIEFS

Vatrës Dhalis is precise and economical in her movements, observant more than performative. Her humor runs dry, when she does speak, with which she is sparing. She is not one to chase a fight, but she is perfectly willing to have one where it is required. She does not concern herself with such pedestrian concerns as good and evil; the question is where someone or something stands in the judgment of the dark goddess Vahl.

STRENGTHS

• Firewall of Composure: Vatrës holds focus in difficult, chaotic situations.
• Impervious to Heat: Not quite, but she can deal with heat at a higher level than the average near-human.
• Flame Affinity: Open flames respond to Vatrës in subtle ways, susceptible to her subtle manipulations in the Force.

WEAKNESSES

• Water and Vacuum: Without the necessary building blocks of fire, Vatrës is without her greatest ally: fire and flame.
• Rigid: She struggles when adhering to her core principles becomes untenable.
• Scorekeeper: She is exactly the kind to keep track of those who have wronged her or betrayed the ways of the dark goddess, and she makes it her business to enact vengeance.
• Emotionally Private: Not one to seek comfort, she instead draws inward when strained.

HISTORY

where ash upsoareth and sound grows thin
a shard, her will, doth wake within
not saint is she, nor balm, nor priest
she is the fire, not the feast
​

Born to a pair of Vahla nomads, Vatrës drifted with them as they went along with seasonal work. Her mother always told her that she was destined for something more, though she could never quite articulate what. They died during her early childhood, long before they could teach her their religion, working the mines in Sarnus. She was put to work to earn her keep. Vatrës was highly literate, taciturn, and trusted in solemn spaces, earning her a position as a names-keeper's aide and lamp-tender at the memorial on Sarnus. Over the course of her work, she began to notice odd things: whispers of an unfamiliar voice when she was alone; the way an open flame didn't burn her flesh when her sleeve caught fire; dishware that she habitually used crazing while others remained pristine, among other things.

she draw'st a ring; the circle bitten
the vows once voiced forever written
if thrones would bide, step in her heat
endure the trial or yield the seat​

Vatrës was sent to nearby Garsala to obtain resources for the memorial's eternal flame. It was there that the goddess Vahl came to her as she stood on the rim of a roiling volcano. Beautiful and terrible, the woman's white hair and black eyes mirrored Vatrës' own, and at the touch of Vahl's burning finger to her chest, the scars at her sternum seared. Later, she was told that the screaming made her colleagues think she had fallen into the volcano, but all Vatrës could recall was the rapture of being in the presence of divinity, hearing the voice that had whispered to her for so long finally speak out in the open, unambiguous, claiming her as the goddess' own avatar, promising to indwell within her, to lend divine power and judgment to Vatrës. When she left that volcanic mountainside, she left a relic of her presence: her footprints, embossed in a circular disc of volcanic glass that had not been present at her arrival, but she took much more: sure knowledge that she was an aspect of the dark goddess Vahl, with a purpose, a charge, a reason.

naught granted free, nor boon at need
her price is burnt where all may heed
a life spared here, a lineage shorn
the flags unstitched, the ledgers torn
​

Word did not spread immediately, but it did spread. The Vahla were a nomadic people, coming and going, seeking and finding. She began to meditate, to self-teach in the Force with the guidance of Vahla herself whispering in hear ear. And then word reached an enclave of the Ember of Vahl of a young woman some identified a heretic claiming to be an aspect of the goddess herself. The audacity of the claim, the breathtaking arrogance!

when glass doth tick and ashes fly
hold fast thy tongue, or speak and die
hearth that walketh, shard made whole;
fire wears hands and reckons souls
-'Hearth that walketh', IV.12-IV.23
The Ember-Oracles: A Critical Approach to Vahla Ash-Cycle Prophecy
Obroa-Skai University Press ​

Such heresy would not stand.