[Medium Sized Model - 25mm Base]
[Presupported with LYS files in 32mm & 75mm Scale]
The companion of Styrax, Illyria found her condition mirrored in the sorcerer in a chance encounter. Now the two are sailing the world together, in hopes to better understand their place in it, and the condition which they share. She only hopes that by the end of this journey, she will learn to control the fiery anger that burns within.
Left upon the doorstep of a priory as a babe, Illyria was thought to be a hellspawn, afflicted by Nosmarka’s taint from birth. Yet among the monks and priests that saw her, one saw in the child’s heart there was no evil, even if it was bound in anger. This monk would become her adoptive father, Crissius, who would be expelled from his order at the cost of adopting the child. Though the cost for him was great, he did not regret it, and it was the only path that saw the infant live another day, lest she be drowned in Tresford River. Exiled from his order, Crissius took himself and Illyria to the city of Delechor, where he found work as a scribe in the Duke’s archives. The work was long, but paid well, and Illyria’s early life was defined by loneliness and a constant waterwheel of differing nurses, doctors, wisemen and carers poking and prodding her, trying to diagnose her affliction.
The incessant barrage of medical instruments grew exhausting, and one day, as a doctor used a scalpel to extract a scale from her back, she snapped. Grabbing the scalpel from the doctor’s grasp, she thrust it into his neck. Horrified, terrified, disgusted at herself, she fled. The desperate screams of Crissius called out to her as she bound into the streets, though the two never saw each other again. She fled the road south to a nearby hamlet, where the villager’s were utterly repulsed by her, driving her out of town. Seeing the young, distraught girl weeping by the roadside, a seasoned elderly man offered her his guidance, telling her that he was set out for the city of Canos, and that his rations were enough for two to make the journey. When she told him of her plight, he told her that the greatest minds of Tharador gathered in that city, and she would be best to follow him.
Fate, however, held other plans. Though the first two days were uneventful, by the third, as the Favian Peaks began to reach over the horizon, they were assailed by a group of highwaymen. The stranger was able to slay two, before being struck down by a flurry of arrows from archers nestled in bushes and trees. Illyria was left alone, as the men began to torment and mock her horrid appearance. Something in her unleashed in that moment; a great rage that had buried itself for years. In a flash of fire and anger, she took up the sword of the stranger and one of the highwaymen, fire trailed her as she leaped forwards, dicing one of her assailants with a storm of blades. Though the archers loosed arrow after arrow at her, they simply bounded off her hardened scales, and one by one, she hunted them down, the scent of their fear and desperation drawing her to them like a beast to its prey. Each of them died painful deaths, only maimed, before she gathered them all in one place, slitting their throats one by one as they begged for mercy. When the adrenaline had lulled and calm had set in, she could only weep and fall sick at the atrocities she had committed.
Even the waters of Lake Canne struggled to wash the blood from her hands and hair, though her tears became lost in the sullen, blue depths. She entered Canos looking like a bedraggled savage from the highlands of Formen, stricken by some foul illness. Yet the stranger that died protecting her was right, and in the University of Canos she found plentiful minds wishing to study her, yet none could give her the answers she sought, save for one, a man she encountered beyond the isle, simply in the mundane setting of a bustling market. Styrax was his name, a boy from Belfrie, though he bore the same affliction as her.
Quickly the two became bound, sharing stories of their troubled lives before. For Illyria, there was now someone to calm her, to share in her misery. He told her that in truth they were both born with the soul of a dragon infused into their own, and that Illyria’s was one whose previous life was embroiled in rage and anger, but that it did not have to define her life now. Together they have travelled Tharador for nearly a decade, doing odd jobs and searching for answers about their condition, with things now pointing them east, across the sea in Zandoriel. There they hope for the final answers they seek to cure their condition, or at least set free the dragon that is bound to them. For Illyria, however, she fears that this might be the end of her pairing with Styrax, a man that over the years, she had grown to love, dearly, even if her tongue had never uttered it so.
