User:Katya

From HollowWiki
This Page has been marked as a Character Profile.
This page describes a character who is dead or retired from Hollow.

Character Profile

Name: Katya

Date of Birth: Many winter cycles have passed since Katya's coming of age rites, but Katya has not kept record of how many.

Race: An elf by birth, raised according to Ruslvik tradition

Class: Ruslvik mercenary and wind dancer.

Physique: Katya is distinctively large and muscular for an elven woman, only the telltale angular cheekbones and pointed ears making her race obvious.

Combat Style: Buckler partnered with Sabre or Scimitar. A combination of Ruslvik jighitovka and the art of the Wind Dance passed down by her uncle.


Physical Description

Many years in Ruslva, raiding on horseback and fighting from ship to ship, has honed the elven mercenary in physique as close to a Ruslvik warrior as an elf's natural tendencies and Ruslva's protein-rich diet would allow. Her acrobatic form of training and fighting has helped to keep her musculature lithe and rangy.


Katya's skin does not have the pale beauty of most elves, and is instead more like that of the Ruslvik people she had lived with for so long: tanned and weatherbeaten by the sun over the steppes and the ocean's tempers. The long silver-grey hair of her elven heritage is normally kept back in a Ruslvik warriors braid and rarely clean.


Riders of the steppes, riders of the waves: the warriors of Rus

The Rus are an agricultural warrior society, located on an island continent of cold tundras, steppes, and ancient forests.


A long tradition of raiding between villages has made them a hardy, albeit not numerous, people. Years of constant conflict has resulted in a culture where even the children are raised to the art of fighting from the moment they can sit astride a pony.


Although fierce fighters on their longboats, their true strength in war is shown when mounted on the broadshouldered horses of the Ruslvik steppes. Their horseback tradition of jighitovka, part acrobatics and part weapon skill, are used for both war, courtship, and competition.


The traditional weapons of the Rus are the sabre, spear, and javelin, and their horsemanship and jighitovka are largely enabled by the peculiar design of their saddles, which incorporates a wooden frame, almost reminiscent of a ship's prows.


Growing up alongside the Rus, Katya too was trained in jighitovka, fighting and raiding on horseback as befit any Ruslvik warrior woman.


A gift of heritage: The Wind Dance

Among elven families there are often affinities to particular elements. Katya's mother was strongly attuned to the element of air and Katya's uncle, brother to her father, would occasionally speak wistfully of her skill as an enchantress.


Although Katya's parents died in her early youth, her Uncle remained for a long time as her guardian, remaining as a guest among the Rus. Although Katya, precocious in temperament as she was, never questioned this, the Rus people often spoke of the haggard and grief-stricken appearance of the girl's guardian.


It was the uncle who, in order to constrain some of the recklessness in Katya, supplemented her Ruslvik upbringing with training in the Wind Dance, a meditative combat art passed down through generations of her elven family.


To harmonise one's movements with the air, and to then harmonise the air with one's movements, requires decades of physical and mental training. Katya, while never losing her impetuous approach to life, at least learned discipline, along with a slight hint of the long-term perspective which elves in more traditional environments would convert to wisdom. Katya, however, did not get quite as far as wisdom. But she learned the patience and strategy of the predator - a warrior's wisdom.


Over the years her Ruslvik training in the jighitovka helped her maintain the extraordinary fitness required to be able to move with the flow of air. Her uncle's patient lessons helped her develop the specialised skill of using the elven birthgift of inherent mana to sense and direct the patterns of air.


The uncle taught that, by moving with the flow of air and weaving mana into that flow, the wind dancer can lighten their movements allowing for feats of exceptional acrobatics and agility. Katya learned well, and though no master, incorporated her family's art with the jighitovka of the Rus, which served her well in the years spent riding and fighting alongside the Ruslvik warriors of their village.


This Page has been marked as a Character Profile.

Recent History: A wodka-drinking elven mercenary and bar-room brawler

How Katya first came to the land of the Rus involves a tale of tragic shipwreck which the elf barely remembers, and rarely tries to.


The circumstances surrounding her return to the main continent of Lithrydel is likewise kept a deliberate mystery by the combat-loving elven mercenary.


However, since her arrival, most of the elven woman's time has been spent in Gualon where she hired on as a caravan guard: a profession which perfectly suited her warlike temperament and paid well.


That she preferred the company of orcs to more civilised people did not go unnoticed, and remarks regarding the same often resulted in Grargh's grog shop being turned inside out by the resulting brawls which would erupt. Grargh never minded. His 'lads' always made sure that people paid for damages. With interest. Grargh often noted that Katya is a very good customer: she often paid for damages in advance. Especially on those nights she started the brawls herself.


Katya also became well-known to the Gualon healers, for even with great skill it is very hard to come out of a bar-room brawl unscathed where half the combatants are orcs. A fact which, to the chagrin of her long time work-partner and co-conspirator Thlag, has never discouraged the elf from starting a fight.


When in Cenril, she typically stays with an Ex-caravan guard and operator of her acquaintance named Gerard.