Elspeth clignotait owlishly, une bouffée d'embarras familière se précipitant dans l'arrière de son cou et jusqu'à ses joues. Elle a glissé un instant, a trébuché et a essayé de comprendre ce que le mot «ignorant» signifiait avant de pouvoir dire : «Je ne suis pas – je suis vraiment désolé, je ne l'ai pas fait» Ses sourcils se sont sillonnés dans la confusion alors qu'elle essayait de trouver ce qu'il fallait dire et comment le dire dans un accent qui n'était pas si étrange.
Étant d'Inisad, elle a renoncé à ça rapidement.
"Je vais le faire tout de suite", a-t-elle dit grincheusement. Elspeth a hurlé devant le vieil homme et a commencé à avancer dans la direction qu'il a pointé, souriant dans des excuses. Ça prendrait beaucoup trop de temps pour expliquer pourquoi elle était là. Quelque chose dont elle n'était même pas sûre. Le sourire d'Elspeth s'est élargi alors qu'elle pensait que ses parents étaient appelés de leurs fonctions respectives – la femme au foyer et la piraterie – pour faire face à quelque chose comme ça. Ça l'a chatouillée, même si c'était un peu morbide.
Elspeth a glissé dans le couloir vers l'endroit où le concierge était censé être et a ensuite marché au-delà, tournant sur l'escalier. Si le doyen était la personne la plus importante de l'Académie, Elspeth a raisonné, il serait au sommet du grand bâtiment. Et, de plus, le doyen serait la personne à qui parler de ses rêves. De lourdes bottes résonnant sur l'escalier désaffecté, elle les a houlées rapidement. Si elle imaginait ce que seraient les étudiants, ils se plaignaient d'une telle chose – des faibles, c'est sûr – mais à Elspeth les escaliers n'étaient pas grand-chose. Les montagnes étaient plus difficiles à escalader.
Au sommet, elle était assez certaine qu'elle avait pris un mauvais virage quelque part, mais ne s'est pas arrêtée. Elle était morte jusqu'à ce qu'elle trouve quelqu'un, ou quelque chose qui pourrait l'aider. Elspeth s'est réconfortée du fait qu'elle avait probablement l'air assez confiante dans l'endroit où elle allait.
Elspeth Scout

Animals/Plants

Twenty-Five

Female

Elspeth is, in a word, striking. She is not conventionally attractive, refusing to even try to look weak and demure at 5'11" (six feet tall in her heeled boots) with broad shoulders, a stiff, straight-backed posture and long legs. There is nothing lean about her: she has muscle enough to eradicate most of the gentle curves of a woman's body, leaving her flat-chested and boyish to say the least. Indeed, it is easier to consider her "handsome" than pretty; however, she is undeniably female, possessing girlish facial features like big doe eyes and long eyelashes.
When it comes to her eyes, her pupils are narrow – feral – and they seem to take on a lustrous sheen in total darkness. They are a shade of dark amber, almost like those of a hawk. Her canines and incisors are sharp, pointed, giving her a 'fanged' look like some sort of large wolfhound. Finally when it comes to bestial characteristics, running down her spine is a line of soft, downy fur, inexplicable to all who have seen it.
Elspeth would have dimples, if she smiled more. Her eyebrows are almost permanently turned down as if furrowed in anger or confusion, but she can't help it. Often she is seen sporting a dark farmer's tan from time spent outside that makes the pale scars all over her arms and legs and face, evidence of a life well-lived, stand out more. Elspeth has dark brown hair that is often left flyaway, chopped and cut at with a dagger when it gets too long. The uneven sides of it make her look even younger than she already is, combining with some damaged skin – eczema – to create the appearance of a teenager rather than a young adult, albeit a tall one.
Elspeth wears nothing particularly notable. Her regular outfit for travelling or hunting involves simple leathers, usually in mud-browns or greens, and they are well-worn by now with signs of being mended several times in the past. She carries with her an ornate bow heavy with hand-carved decorations to the point where it looks like something made for a nobleman. A simple sword of no great strength or durability hangs at her waist or is strapped across her back.

 all else, Elspeth values her freedom; the ability to go wherever she pleases, to love whomever she chooses, and do to whatever she wants and damn the consequences. Growing up in a small island community, Elspeth was known for her disregard for normal, social conventions – she didn't wear shoes until she was ten! – and her ability to disappear whenever she was faced with the prospect of being forced to do something she wanted to do, like marriage.
Elspeth is an upbeat person, optimistic even against unbeatable odds (though she is convinced there is no such thing) but she can be noticeably thick. She was never the sharpest tool in the shed, struggling through learning her letters and how to count, and often it was a sore point for her – a chip in her shoulder that never really faded. She has no interest in intellect or intellectuals, and it is the traits of hard-work and determination that she favours instead, just as her father taught her. Thankfully, Elspeth is thick-skinned, so any insults sent her way tend to just roll off her.
It doesn't stop her from being jealous of others' talents, though, and it doesn't lessen the sting of being untalented.
Other than that, Elspeth's bravery is a key characteristic which borders on the foolish. Whilst she doesn't have anything to prove and constantly tells herself that, what she does says otherwise. Suffering is nothing to her, and if she can go through with it to prove herself stronger than the average woman (or man), she will. Surprisingly, she has no qualms about the use of violence or aggression despite a kind nature that leads her to help little old ladies with their chores and save nests of baby birds from falling.

 are for heroes, not farmgirls and fisher(wo)men and huntresses who just want to make an honest living because it's the only thing they were destined for. Elspeth comes from unimpressive beginnings in that she is from Inisad – a rural, backwards island community – and that leaves her completely out-of-sorts with life on the mainland.
Born to a farmgirl, Elyssa, but without even a name to know her father by, Elspeth was not brought up in shame but neither was she held in high regard due to her parentage. Later, once she could understand words and letters and spent a good few hours slaving over a secret box of hastily written correspondence between her parents, she would find that her father was a raider – a pirate, a slaver, and all sorts of evil – whose home port just so happened to be Inisad. Even so, he didn't return home and was expected never to, not when he spent most of his time in the seas around the realms of Spiritus Raptor and Xaviar.
He was not a nice person, but he did send her a sword for her tenth birthday – a man's sword, of course, and oversized, so it was a good thing she would end up growing into it. Elspeth's early years were, for the most part, nondescript, marked only by a refusal to conform and learn how to sew and instead an apprenticeship to an exasperated hunter in town who didn't really want to take her on, but he had nothing better to do. To him, her aim was "passable" and her skill with the bow "alright", enough so to hunt for her mother's dinner rather than relying on the handouts of their neighbors.
To pay their way in the world, she worked as a messenger between all the little hamlets of the island, the individual houses and huts. Horse-riding became another thing she could "sort of" do to a reasonable degree, and it toughened her up, riding in all weathers. She would never be a princess (and thank the Goddess for that!) or even wealthy and in her younger years, just as she was on the cusp of adulthood, the prospect of remaining a no-name huntress and errand girl bothered her.
So, without a mentor anymore (since her own had long since fobbed off to another city's bar), she took a fancy to hunting more vicious beasts, just like in the stories her mother used to read her as a child. After a tearful goodbye – Elyssa didn't expect her daughter to return – she set off across the waters to a place ravaged by war and monstrous armies.
On the voyage, she turned seventeen, and it was like a switch had flipped. Still on the water, there were no mammals around for her to realise her abilities, but there were birds – gulls and albatrosses and all sorts. When she heard them, they didn't speak, but she understood their cries and whether she mimicked them or just spoke like a normal human being, they understood her. Elspeth could no sooner control them than she could another human being, but they were amenable to helping, or offering information like the storm that was brewing on the horizon.
Elspeth left the boat as soon as they stopped near Jeorvo and spent the rest of her journey on foot. She looked in the mountains of Diedremere for rumours of dragons (and found a wyvern instead that mauled her but didn't escape with its life), doubled back towards the Wisdom Mountains to look for others on the lower slopes but was pushed back by unforgiving weather with only one kill to her name, and finally she closed in on the shifting borders of the lands of Spiritus Raptor.
She didn't dare go in, not when the occasional orcish warband passed by her camp or her sleeping spot and she was awoken by the urgent cries of her watching birds. Her 'talent' for communicating with the animals had by then been accepted as just an ordinary occurrence, just a quirk she happened to have to help her with hunting. Having achieved very little on her journey except a few monster kills and a knowledge of the lay of the land, Elspeth was set on returning home to Inisad, but stopped.
She stopped in Diedremere, a place that had caught her interest and weren't so judgemental of her strangeness or foreign mannerisms. Quaint, and far from armies and warfare. Idyllic, even. Elspeth was fairly certain that she would never amount to anything special, not when her first and only attempt to do something to build her renown ended so anti-climatically. Therefore, she settled down for a good six years, earning a place in a village; going on hunting parties for wyverns in the mountains whenever they stole a child or two to eat; teaching the local kids to shoot a bow though she herself was not much older; and, of course, raising a hound – one that would understand her perfectly clearly and would be loyal forever.
Elspeth's life became boring and monotonous, and it stayed that way until the dreams started.
 of now? Elspeth isn't really one for fanciful dreams – she knows her place in life. Despite this, she does have this wild hope that one day she'll move up from hunting animals and deadly monsters to hunting a dragon. Her name getting recorded in the annals of history for that reason sounds nice.
 Bow & Quiver:

30 x Arrows

Sword – 'Quickling';
Skinning Dagger;
Knapsack:
Winter Furs – Cloak
Knitted Socks
Flute
Tinderbox
Waterskin

Hunting Dog, 'Conrad'