Legends of Belariath
Talise
Talise is the youngest daughter of the Tiburon family; one of the highest ranking noble families of Kaimana. It is the responsibility of her family to mobilize in the defense of city in times of crisis. As such the family boasts many powerful artifacts and weapons as well as priding itself in siring powerful warriors. As such Talise initially was a large disappointment. She was not a hearty child; in fact she was just short of being considered sickly. As she grew though her fragility faded and though she never acquired much in the ways of upper body strength she developed a natural grace that was enthralling. Her mind though was what made her a true treasure to the family. Not to say that her family was lacking of intelligence. There just weren’t many in the family that were as bright, clever and most importantly, possessed a magical affinity as great as Talise’s. Her days were spent acquiring as much knowledge as she could, her curiosity seemingly unlimited. Her parents did nothing to halt this as they saw no potential harm arising from it.
Talise’s curiosity however was more harmful than her family had given it credit for. By the time she was fifteen she had finished the family library and moved on to alternate sources of information. A few of her tutors commented that her areas of pursuit did nothing to aid her in terms of ever being useful to the family. She seemed to just learn magic for the sake of learning and not for actually using the spells. And her attention was quickly wandering to things outside of Kaimana. But these concerns were ignored. That was until Talise snuck away from home and went ashore one evening to observe the creatures of the land she had read so much about, but had never seen. She also learned of the ability to change to appear more like them. Her father was furious at her actions and “grounded” her. But the damage had been done. Talise no longer could focus on things like politics and warfare tactics when there was an entire world to explore. Her house arrest only made that desire to go back greater and soon she was finding ways to slip passed her guards and made several secret excursions to land, perfecting her disguise, learning their language and sampling of a little of everything that the world had to offer.
Of course her parents were not long in discovering her rebellious little trips and saw what they had done. They had not been strict enough with her. They hadn’t placed enough limits. She was out of their control. But all hope was not lost. While Talise was by no means the norm of merfolk high society she was beautiful and many had come to her parents expressing interest in a political arrangement between their families. They still had time to act on this before Talise did something to ruin their chances further. On her 19th birthday they came and informed her of the wonderful news. She was to be wed to a merman of one of the wealthiest merchant families in Kaimana. She would bring untold wealth and even more prestige to the family. The only thing was that, by her definition, the arrangement was akin to slavery. Her groom was… boring. And he expected her to live his boring life. She didn’t want to be balancing ledgers and overlooking trade agreements for the rest of her life. Faced with this she did the only thing she could think of. She ran, well swam, away from home and escaped to the land that she had spent so much time learning about.
Terrified that her family would be able to find her she moved quickly away from the coast, bouncing from stream to stream, lake to lake until she was many leagues away from the ocean. Her grace was robbed from her. She had never thought that learning to balance on two legs would ever be a skill she needed to learn. But even this far away from home she knew that her family was searching for her. They were not ones to ever give up a hunt. It was one of the things she had often complained about. A pointless waste of resources she had called it. Now that pointless waste of resources, she knew, was aimed to bring her home in chains, most likely to suffer death at the hands of her enraged father. So she kept her disguise up at all times and became a human in all regards. She dropped her family name, kept in constant movement, adopted the meek mannerisms of a peasant and finally stopped running a little more than a year after her parents had informed her of their decision. She was in a place called Nanthalion and she made her way into the bath house there, looking for employment as she had sold nearly everything she had left with to get this far. Being employed there would lower the suspicion of why she went there so often. She was tired of running and as long as she kept up her disguise her parents would never be able to find her. Employed she made her way into the Lonely Inn and began her new life.