Talavar Nightstrider

Holding page.
==Instability==
"I was born in a crossfire hurricane... And I howled at my mama in the driving rain.
Well I'm all right now (in fact it's a gas)
Well I'm all right, I'm Jumping Jack Flash it's a gas, gas gas."
Talavar DuMonde was born some seventy five years ago to young parents who were both overjoyed with the arrival of their first-born. Young Blood Knight Teniel DuMonde and his quiet, historian wife Elissa loved the boy from the moment he appeared in the world, even though they were both dealing with the knowledge that Teniel would soon be dispatched on some mission or other. It mattered little: what short time Teniel had with his beloved family, he cherished.
The family were not particularly well-to-do, but lived in comparative comfort in a small cottage in the heart of Eversong Woods, beyond the borders of Silvermoon City. During his first formative months, Talavar - named for Teniel's long-dead great-grandfather - was a difficult child, always alert, rarely sleeping through a full night and leaving poor, somewhat highly-strung Elissa frequently at her wits end. Things changed little as the baby grew into a toddler and began discovering the joys of what could only be described as falling down a lot. Constantly covered in bumps, bruises and scratches of all description, the flame-haired youngster was a constant joy to his parents. Always happy and rarely demanding, his clumsiness was the only thing that gave his parents cause for concern.
When Talavar was around ten elven years old, still a toddler by elven standards, Teniel was sent away with his Order to deal with threats that he never expanded on. Elissa never asked where he was sent and he was honour-bound not to tell her. Regardless, the young couple communicated regularly in writing. Somewhere in a stack of personal belongings, Talavar has the pile of letters from his father that were sent to Elissa. He has never read them.
Unable to cope with the demands of a small child, particularly one as accident-prone as Talavar, Elissa, who missed her absent husband terribly, had a conversation with her brother-in-law, a leatherworker by the name of Lenris DuMonde and practically begged him to look after Talavar so she could get back to her work as a historian. Lenris, something of a confirmed bachelor, took pity on the young woman and agreed to look after Talavar for a few weeks.
The few weeks became a few months, became a few years and eventually became a permanent arrangement. Talavar rarely saw his mother and never saw his father and assumed, therefore, that neither had any particular interest in him. Eventually, his uncle, annoyed at his brother and Elissa's apparent abandonment and frustrated at not knowing how to answer the boy's increasingly despondent questions about his heritage, spun Talavar a yarn about how his father had died when the boy was a baby. The story was never questioned and whilst it was essentially a lie, Lenris chose not to elaborate.
Talavar, never the greatest of students, nor the brightest of sparks, has never reconciled the dates given to him by Lenris and, latterly, Kerelan who had served with Teniel during the second orc wars which killed him. Should Talavar ever work this out, he will make the probably heart-breaking discovery that a man he thought dead for some sixty five years and who never got the chance to see him grow, has in fact, been dead for only twenty.
So, under the upbringing of a crotchety old confirmed bachelor, Talavar DuMonde grew, unaware of the truth surrounding his parentage and more, unaware of the heritage surrounding his disgraced true family name - Nightstrider. Truth would be a few years coming.
==Shifting Sands==
"So young so strong, ignorance is blissThin skin caught up again, in a place like thisBig people set the trap for you, using you-know-what for brainsYou're just another lab experiment and you're easy to replace"
Childhood passes swiftly for some races, for but the elves, whose longevity is the subject of much debate amongst scholars, it is a veritable lifetime. Largely given the complete freedom of Eversong Woods as his playground, Talavar primed his ability to fall off things right from the start by developing an unhealthy obsession with tree climbing. Barely a month would pass without a broken arm. Even now, his shoulder, dislocated when he was a youth, periodically finds itself more inclined to be on the wrong side of its socket than the right side. Still, practise makes perfect, and after a while, Talavar mastered the art of scrambling up to the highest trees and looking out with delight over the panorama of his life. He could see Silvermoon City from up there. The canopy of Eversong was Talavar's whole world.
From time to time, his mother would visit, but her appearances grew less and less frequent. She confided miserably in Lenris that the growing boy was too much like his father for her to bear. Lenris quietly told her the lie he had fed the boy and she accepted it as a necessity. She knew the true reasons why Teniel DuMonde didn't come back to visit his only child, but Talavar was too young for her to be open with now. She did share with him that the family name had been changed by his own grandfather for reasons she'd never known. On further questioning, she admitted that Talavar should have been born a Nightstrider.
He'd secretly thought that Talavar Nightstrider was a far more wonderful-sounding name than Talavar DuMonde and as a lanky teenager, all knees and elbows, he made an earnest vow that some day, he would claim back the family name and make them proud of him.
Elissa's visits dwindled into barely anything, but Talavar, accustomed to the rarity of seeing her, did not really miss her that much. The young blood elf and his uncle formed a tight bond, despite the fact that in terms of personality, they were like chalk and cheese. Where Lenris was calm and rational, Talavar demonstrated his father's worrying tendency to crash headlong into situations without engaging his brain. Where Lenris was patient and could spend hours working a single piece of leather, Talavar was impatient and spoiled more than one hide through his lack of interest in the job.
He would never be a leatherworker, that much was obvious. Lenris gave up trying to teach him the delicate art of stitching leather together to make useful clothing and items. Whilst Talavar had a flair for skinning the animals that provided the leather for Lenris's creations, he had neither the care nor the patience to successfully make anything. As such, even now his knowledge of the practise is sketchy at best. No, Talavar's interests lay far more in learning to use weapons. His peer group found his earnest attitude almost comical and laughed at the idea that the boy would ever be anything more than one of Silvermoon's dropout crowd. He had no noble blood, no great upbringing - no opportunities. But when your calling finds you, nothing can stop it.
==In at the Deep End==
Deployment to the Sunfire Vanguard.
==Relationships and Friendships==
"Friends wil be friends, when you're in need of love they give you care and attention
Friends will be friends, When you're through with life and all hope is lost,Hold out your hand cos friends will be friends right till the end..."
==Trivia==
*Talavar is a natural redhead. Unlike some of the elves of Silvermoon who pay good money for the colour, his flaming hair is all his own genetic work.
*He is utterly petrified of spiders, no matter how big or small. This isn't a fear, it's a genuine phobia that's been known to incapacitate him. He's trying to work past it.
*He blushes at the drop of a hat and due to his fairly conservative upbringing has what can only be described as an old-fashioned view on the world.
*He hates naming his pets. Thus, his first riding mount is called 'Horse', and his beloved charger is called 'Second Horse'. You don't want to know what his wind rider is called.
*Talavar has a temper as fiery as his hair. He has a tendency to act first when he loses his grip on it and then only afterwards think on what he's done. Usually whilst sweeping up bits of broken glass.
*Talavar is a very-well accomplished barefist fighter. He is nimble and agile - and has strength enough to pack one hell of a punch.
*He has natural charm and the fact he's completely unaware of it means that it shows even more.
*When he was younger, Talavar tried to win the heart of a young noble woman by writing poetry. It didn't end well.
Category:Characters
Category:Horde
Category:Blood Elf