Raithen Nightsong

{{Character|

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| image=

| name=Raithen Nightsong

| aliases=

| gender= Male

| race=Teu'Tel'Quessir

| parents=Evaris Nightsong, Lissel Nightsong

| dob=The Year of the False Bargain, 1118 DR

| pob=Nimrais, Lake of Dreams, Evermeet

| occupation=Ex-Bladesinger, Adventurer

| affiliations=Ex-Clan Arras

| spouse=None, Ellenor Mistwinter (deceased-1294)

| siblings=None

| children=None

| class=Eldritch Knight

| alignment=Neutral Good

}}

You might think I would be used to this by now; accustomed to my situation. You might say, all unknowing, that with age and experience, with the training of a mortal lifetime, this must be just one more routine process of life, like a painful case of flux. You would be wrong. Sehanine reveals her beautiful face to me and my body goes mad. I’ve heard accounts and tales that for some like me, the process of transformation is akin to sexual climax, a rolling tide of contortion and sensation that abates only just before the shear physical pleasure of it should drive the mind insane. Such is not my affliction. For me, the transformation is akin to being pressed to death beneath the weight of a mountainside while every bone and tendon is being set afire, and a million insects burrow their way through my skin from the inside out. Three nights of every thirty, I die a death of unmitigated agony; and people wonder why the Beast is a ravening monster. As I sit here, upon a mist dampened stone in an ancient wood so similar to the one of my birth and yet so far along a road with no end, I have closed my eyes against the piercing light of the full face of the Goddess, and with my secret eye stare defiance at the Beast who is me. I am aware of the tension in my physical body, the sweat that pours down across my back and chest; that soaks my hair from root to tip. I am all too conscious of the rigid vibration of the tortured muscles of my shoulders and lotus-crossed legs, fairly strumming with the exquisite agony that even now I am just learning to bear, for if transformation beneath the light of Sehanine’s grace is a death of horror, then the refusal to do so is the Abyss itself. In my mind’s eye, I sit, naked and alone upon the rich earth and loam of the forests of my distant childhood, the forest that once held no fear or terror for me, whether beneath full light of day or as now, in the cool enfolding comfort of night. But terror is here with me now, in the shadows of the trees and beneath their uncaring boughs. It is here, the Beast. I can hear its heaving breaths, smell its carrion stench. Every now and again, I can even catch a glimpse of it. Here the flash of white teeth, there the ripple of black hair so like my own but matted with the viscera of its prey. Beneath me I am building a fortress of sand and will, an intricate design of multi-colored dust. The mandala beneath my legs is always a ring against the coming of the Beast, but it is also always different, always new. It has to be, because He learns. If I tried to use the same pattern night after night, month after month, He would find his way through, and He would have me. So I learn, and adapt, and I fight him because I must, and I think and remember about what has come before…

The seagull fought valiantly against the swirl and buffeting of the brine-soaked winds. Its wings occasionally fluttered to correct a course largely out of its control. Despite the overwhelming adversity, it stubbornly held on to its determination to pluck an afternoon’s sustenance from the turbulent gray sea. The gull was small, but strong. It would have to be to make its home on the pale white wind-swept cliffs of Evermeet’s western coast.

It has been said that the island of Evermeet is the Last Refuge of the elves, a sanctuary and a final departure point for the Tel’Quessir as they journeyed through the ilhanas, the mortal time. Regardless which direction an elf walks during his or her time of mortality, ultimately, it is to the West that their steps take them, following the path of correllos the sun and sehanis the moon beyond the final horizon, to the Golden Realm of Arvandor, where rest and rebirth awaits them. So it is that the westernmost coast of this, the most westerly of all elven realms was left a wild and untamed shore on a sea with no end. The White Cliffs of Nymrais, more so than any other place in Evermeet, stood untouched and alone, a testament to the primal and lonely beauty of the final journey into the West.

In a wind sheltered nook of white rocks on the top of the hill of storm lashed cliffs sat a lone figure, shrouded against the spray of the Endless Sea in a cloak of richly tooled deer skin. Raithen Aramas Nightsong watched the struggle of the gull to acquire its daily fill of the rich shellfish that clustered at the bottom of the white cliffs with admiration and no small amount of wistfulness. Having been born not far away from these cliffs at his extended family’s home, the Halls of Cedar, the young elf had been coming here whenever he needed to get away from the tumult and distraction of his large and boisterous family. Today was just such a day.

The elf was young as the Fair Folk reckon such things, slightly more than fifty years. By almost all measures, Raithen was a comely child, with raven black, perpetually disheveled hair, storm gray eyes, and an open, expressive face. Though never particularly large or strong as a child, he was always fast and quick, both of hand and wit, traits that had served him well growing up when coupled with his penchant for mischief and pranks. His aunts and uncles said that he possessed the beauty and voice of his mother and the headstrong will and tempestuous nature of his father. Young Raithen wouldn’t know, for both had died long before he could have formed memories of either; his father before he was born on some distant shore and his mother here, where she had fallen from these very cliffs. Because of the way his mother had died, his aunt was adamantly opposed to his occasional sojourns to the Cliffs of Nymrais, fearing perhaps that he might one day follow his mother down the treacherous sliding rocks and plunge into the iron gray, crashing sea far below. Obedience, also, was not one of young Raithen’s strong suits.

Today, young Raithen was nursing a black eye and a split lip, his legendary reflexes having failed him in a tussle with his cousin Edrigal. It was not the first time the boys had fought, and certainly wouldn’t be the last. The two headstrong cousins were like oil and water. Raithen’s insouciant smirks and clever ripostes infuriated his arrogant and by-the-book cousin to no end, and truth be told, the clever young outcast went out of his way on many occasions to deflate his pompous ass of a cousin. This particular disagreement revolved around the homecoming of Edrigal’s elder brother, gone these seven seasons among the initiates of the car’corren abbas'', the Order of the Bladesong. Clustering with his friends visiting from nearby families, Edrigal had deliberately declared within Raithen’s earshot that his brother Ardigen, only in his first tier of training, was already far too skilled with a blade to fall victim to some human’s dagger in a mud-hump tavern in some stinking mortal city across the Eastern Sea. Unlike Raithen’s father.

Pulling the weather cloak tighter around his bruised and aching ribs, Raithen remembered leaving behind his game of wood shrike with his young cousin Naman, remembered the red haze of his vision turned to behold the scorn and black laughter of his much larger cousin and his friends, and then little of what transpired after. From the pained wailing that fell behind him as he fled the outraged pursuit of his cousin’s friends, he suspected that the larger boy had gotten the worst of the argument, a thought that tinged Raithen’s dark mood with a bitter and painful smirk through swollen lips. But his satisfaction was short-lived. Soon again the boy’s thoughts turned to the gull that had now disappeared from view beneath the cliff’s edge.

Though he had never met them, Raithen felt the absence of his parents like a missing tooth or a hole in his heart where something important used to reside. True, his aunt Lauranen cared for him, and he for her, but in her home he was just one child among many, and always the boy who lurked at the edges of the family. His cousin Ardigen was far too old to ever really connect with, though secretly young Raithen harbored much the same admiration and no small amount of hero worship for the older boy as his cousin Edrigal did. The girls, Seles and Sarwen, were close mostly which each other, secretive and quiet. As for Edrigal, the two had been friends once, years ago when they were younger, but as far as Raithen could tell his cousin had decided to gain the attention and respect of his peers by belittling and humiliating him at nearly every opportunity until their friendship had long since foundered on the rocks of adolescence. Now, the only friend he really had among his aunt’s home was little Naman. The little elven boy was ten years younger than him, so the friendship was often one-sided with the child following him around and generally making a clinging nuisance of himself, though Raithen had more fun at their games and mischief than he would ever let on, least of all to himself. His uncle, Baranen, was a distant and disapproving man who Raithen suspected judged him against some ancient disagreement with his father or mother.

Having come to his favorite hiding place to be alone with his adolescent thoughts of melancholy and consumed with the unfairness of life, it took Raithen longer than normal to notice that he was not alone among the white rocks beneath a gray, glowering sky. The first clue that company was nearby was the faint sound of crystalline bells tossed erratically to his keen ears on the fitful wind. His eyes were drawn to the dark cedar wood that advanced very near the cliff side as a narrow line of gray-clad elves emerged from along a well traveled westward road. Nearly thirty elves strong, the figures were of many sizes, both adults and some children. Many of them carried with them staves of strong white birch decorated with small silver bells, the source of the haunting sounds.

At their head walked a woman, clothed only in a simple shift of white. Barefoot and unhooded, her white hair streamed unbound out from behind her, emphasizing her thin neck and all too bright eyes. Her skin was paler than milk, bearing almost a translucent quality, and faint lines and wrinkles decorated the sides of her mouth and the corners of her eyes. Her smiling gaze seemed to take in the storm tossed white cliffs, the green grass of the hillside, and the sky leaden with rain with equal parts joy and wistful memory.

Behind the woman, the procession of elves moved with solemnity of weighty ceremony.