Fadra D'Rethi
| Fadra D'rethi | |||||||
| Female Drow (Faerun) | |||||||
| Player: Gallant | |||||||
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| General Information | ||||||||||
| Full Name: | Fadra Derethoi | |||||||||
| Nicknames: | Lady Rosegold, The Rosegold Errant | |||||||||
| Age: | 164 | |||||||||
| Deity: | Sune | |||||||||
| Alignment: |
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| Occupation: | Paladin | |||||||||
| Faction/Rank: | Independant | |||||||||
| Place of Birth: | Ust Natha | |||||||||
| Physical Attributes | ||||||||||
| Height: | 5'0" | |||||||||
| Weight: | 115 | |||||||||
| Eyes: | Red | |||||||||
| Hair: | White | |||||||||
| Complexion: | Clear, Smooth | |||||||||
| Physical Build: | Athletic, Toned | |||||||||
| Physical Features: | She wears her long hair in a braid that reaches almost to her waist, and wears rose-hip piercings. She is always clean and well groomed, often smelling faintly of that plant. | |||||||||
| Skills | ||||||||||
| Aside from being an above-average swordswoman, she is a fair-handed scribe, and dabbles in painting. | ||||||||||
| Equipment and Items | ||||||||||
| She carries a Blade of Roses, and typically wears somewhat elaborately feminine fullplate or heavy armor. | ||||||||||
Overview
An anomaly, an aberration, and a stranger among strangers; a statistical impossibility. Fadra is well aware of her peculiarity in the cosmos, and therefore, rather self-contained. When she arrived in Sigil, portaled through an abandoned upperdark tower, she spent a full cycle assessing the nature of the place - got lost, met other peculiarities. And then, she sold her helmet, deeming the idea of hiding her face somewhat ridiculous, when so many other planar improbabilities walked the streets, and so few of those she spoke to happened to be truly, reprehensibly evil.
Whether it's fate, divine design, or just dumb luck, 'Lady Rosegold' has decided to make the best of her accidental circumstances.
Philosophy & Outlook
Some paladins know that they are called from a very young age. Some paladins are born good, grow up in cloisters, and squire, and have adventures alongside more experienced paladins, having bright and happy days in sunlight.
Fadra is not one of those. Every night her reverie brings her the fear, terror, and horror of her youth and early adulthood. Every morning showing bright on the surface is a reminder that it doesn't, and has never wanted her there. Every day is a conscious and directed choice not to fall on her own sword, and that pain is the price of empathy thrust upon a woman of a race to which it is otherwise foreign and unknown.
She knows, personally, the power of kindness given to monsters, because she was - and is - a monster herself. She does not compromise her beliefs, nor does she press them on others. She is not a sword for scouring the world of evil, though she bears one, and carries it well. Fadra instead views herself as an example and a living proof, having spent almost sixty years living as her former lover's goddess wished her to, as Beryl had painted her, long ago.
Every paladin wrestles with the question of discipline and compassion - the Tyrrans for instance believe that a good and well ordered society produces good and well ordered people. The Tormtar consign themselves instead to the rapid destruction of evil - but Fadra, a Sunite, bears a more personal and individual understanding of her discipline. She trusts her heart, and never acts against it, caring not a whit for what others wish of her, which can confound other similar paladins who defer to higher guidance or church structures - in short, she is more heavily good than lawful, when it's reckoned thus.
Brief History
Fadra was born to the fourth house of the smaller city of Ust Natha, in the upperdark, a port city for both spelljammers and more regular underdark shipping. The third daughter of that house, she was meant to be a power piece in her mother's political aspirations, and was bred and schooled to be a priestess of the spider queen from a young age.
She proved inadept and, though she tried, she was a poor and inefficient student. Rather than killing her, her mother instead sent her to a weaponsmaster for training and tried, sincerely, to forget about her. Less forgetful, her sisters engaged in a constant game of spite against their observably stupider and more absent-minded sibling, and bullied her relentlessly. For a little while, she commanded the house's slave-soldiers, though the position was nominal at best and she left most of the actual management to her older brothers, of which she had two.
In her adolescent youth, she pursued cruelty and hedonism as a balm, passing all of her misery off onto a string of slave lovers and lesser drow, body slaves, lower citizens - until one day she broke the hands of a human craftsman and was forced to buy him from his previous trade family.
The man's name was Beryl. With nothing better to do with him, she nominally paid to have his hands healed. Afterwards, he painted. Everything he saw, he painted better than it was. One day, he painted Fadra smiling. Not as she was, but how he seemed to wish her to be. She beat him for it, but still slept with him afterwards.
Time passed. He aged. But Fadra did not sell him. The drowess would watch him paint and eventually found him a ready listener. Like a girl with a puppy, she became fond of him in gradiants, and she had never had a sympathetic ear - so year after year, night after night, she began to fill his. With her life, her disappointments. The minor cruelties and the major ones. She found that it did not bother her to listen to his. For a brief, strange, impossible moment, a very tiny light blossomed in a very dark place.
Her sisters poisoned him, and he died in her arms. Afterwards, she found that she had changed, somehow or other that she couldn't place. Eventually she began to go through his paintings and belongings, and found a small sketch of Sune, with a dogmatic oath scribbled on the back of the old parchment in common.
She didn't try to get back at her sisters or her family; she didn't try to burn the house down. Fadra D'rethi just put on her pwifwei and walked out the gates past her soldiers and disappeared into the upperdark. They had been prepared to fight her vengeance, kill her in the streets, murder her in darkness - but they hadn't expected her to just, bold as brass, walk away one cycle out into the caverns.
Later the Elistreeans who had found similar paths in the North called her "Lady Rosegold", because that was the sigil that she took, and though she danced with them in silver, sometimes, she never took it for her own.
Oath of a Paladin of Sune, Circa 1240DR
- First love Sune, and then thyself; and do not be discouraged by others.
- Love freely, without expectation of personal reward;
- Encourage them to pursue beauty, not just of the body, but of the mind and spirit;
- For from this does goodness radiate most naturally.
- Encourage them to pursue beauty, not just of the body, but of the mind and spirit;
- Love freely, without expectation of personal reward;
- Protect the lover, the craftsman, and the artist;
- Never refuse to render them aid or service.
- Protect places, people, and things of beauty;
- These reminders shall not be defiled.
- And seek out those who will corrupt these places with vileness,
- To end their aberrant stain upon the mortal world.
- Do not hide thy true face away, from those who seek your admiration or regard;
- Wear not any thing that does not inspire pleasure, admiration, or your own joy.
- For those who seek your love, let warm friendship burn where love cannot blossom -
- The world is an ugly place, and thou shalt brighten it thereby.
- Last, to thy own heart be most honest; do not those things which will mar or pain it.
- Avoid intoxicants which rob the mind of its clarity, and of its greatest assets.
- Eschew those who scorn you, revile those who rile you, and abstain from self-destruction.