Activity

Doing this literally right before work but since when has time management been a skill of mine…

Also hi

Beginning of my main Haven world story

@joelle-stone @this-is-not-an-alien (the one Brendin’s in)

Ada Warin was beautiful in a wild, hunted way.  Her narrow face, framed with the waist-length knotted brown curls that adorned her head, had an air of fear and trepidation about it. The sharp, high cheekbones and delicately tapered chin only added to the effect. Her small, mute mouth was often pressed into an apprehensive line below wide, deerlike eyes that had a look of wariness and suspicion about them, at times even terror.  They were wild eyes, hunted eyes.

But Ada’s inborn wildness did not stop at her eyes; it spread from them.

Her fawn-like face was balanced on a long, thin neck perched between narrow shoulders on an equally narrow frame.  Her limbs were long and willowy, as were her hands and fingers.  The nails at their tips were naturally pointed and clawlike and added yet more to the air of ferality about her.  Her feet were narrow with high arches and she tread lightly, with a nimble step and easy, skittish grace.

Lord Northiron called her the ‘little wildling’; to the staff she was simply ‘Fawn’.

Ada was, by all accounts, a nervous creature, and her friends were few.  They consisted almost solely of the Eya gypsy Nadia Fabian, a minstrel maidservant in the employ of her foster mother.  Ordinarily the Lady Warin did not hire minstrels, but Nadia was an orphan being raised by a traveling troupe, and Ada latched on to her so quickly as a friend that the Lady hired her in the official capacity of a minstrel but in reality as Ada’s constant companion.

Their friendship was a strange one for certainty. Where Ada was skittish and high-strung, Nadia was outgoing and confident.  While Ada sat tense and silent in the corner Nadia would stand in the center of the room and fill it with stories and songs of the Eya, her people.  In appearance too they were less alike than not.

Nadia’s skin was unblemished and nut brown in color in comparison to Ada’s pallid and befreckled complexion.  Her hair was thick and black and fell in waves about her shoulders, silky to touch and easily tamed, and while not exactly plump Nadia had more curves to her figure.  She, like Ada, was long-limbed, but there was a considerable amount of sinew between the skin and bone and years’ worth of hard callus on her hands and feet.  Her face was much like others of her race, with a square jaw and broad forehead still free of worry lines. Her nose was straight where Ada’s was slightly crooked over a pair of full lips often upturned at the corners.  Finally her brows were arched loftily with a wry irony above narrow, half-lidded eyes at a catlike slant so onyx in color to be blacker than her hair.

The eyes were the greatest contrast between the pair of them.  Ada’s wide and fearful, Nadia’s lazily half-open and contented, almost sly. The residents of Castle Ironstorm could not see how such a friendship formed between their skittish fawn and the gypsy cat.  Nadia, it seemed, was the only person Ada trusted.  She relaxed around no one else and always seemed prepared to flee at the slightest provocation if she was in the company of others without Nadia present.  The gypsy was her constant companion, telling her stories and singing old folk melodies in the foreign-but-familiar language of the Eya.  Often they would sit on the wall of the ravine through which the Ironflow River coursed and Nadia would fill the air with words of old heroes and older magic as Ada simply sat and listened.  So they sat two days before Yuletide when Alexander Northiron fell into the river.