Syen

Name: Syen

Investiture: Truthwatcher of the 2nd Ideal

Weakness: no family to support her, still mourns the loss of her brother, can’t move her left arm to 100% due to a festering wound as a child, illiterate

Special skills and Weapons: Knows some things about different plants and how to use them in potions, basic to advanced healing skills

Physical characteristics: young woman about 20 years old, darkeyed (original), long hair, 1,70 m high, not too thin and not too thick, common face

Family: Daughter of a farmer; mother died when she was about eight years old in childbirth; afterwards her father started to drink and she mixed him some teas to help him sleeping at night; two brothers, the younger one died from a fever, the older one married and took over the farm

Home: Roshar, a small nameless village next to a river near Kharbranth

History/Biography: Syen look at the cup in her hands and sighed. The liquid sloshed around sickly every time she moved it and there was a small, but insisting, part of her telling her to put the cup away, to not drink whatever it was. She sighed again, waiting for a customer didn’t help to improve her mood. Four years, it was four years ago that she finally decided to leave the farm and her elder brother behind. She couldn’t stay there anymore, not with the ghosts of both her mother and her younger brother haunting the place. She knew that people died, especially poor people, but she couldn’t stand it. She helped raise her brother, looked after her father and then a new woman entered her life, the farm and suddenly everything she did was wrong. Her sister-in-law took complete control of the farm, of the work, even of the little garden Syen had looked after. Her precious herbs that saved her brothers lifes more than once were gone, gone the last thing she had left from her mother, because some woman thought to use the soil for a cow. For years her father slept fine when drinking one of her teas, but when she was forced to stop, his nightmares came back. Syen liked telling herself that she only left because of the change in her routine, because of the ghosts, that these were the only reasons. But that wasn’t true. She left because she saw no future there. She had no farm, no heritage. She could hope to marry a decent man, bear his children and die in childbirth. And one day, she stopped accepting that as her faith, putting the blame on her sister-in-law, taking a second pair of trousers and some bread and walked away. The travel to Kharbranth hat seemed a long way, two days on the road, even sleeping outside. It was dangerous, scary and nothing happened. She arrived in Kharbranth unscratched.
Looking up she saw a man entering the house, searching for someone. He was there finally. When she left Kharbranth a year after her arrival she’d never have thought that the skills her mother taught her would be sufficient to sustain her, but they were. She sold sleeping potions or teas against a fever, all depending on the plants she found along the countryside. And they work, she told herself again. Otherwise her father wouldn’t have slept all those years. If someone asked about a poison she always told them no – and approached them after finding a suitable plant. Nothing to vicious, but who could blame an uneasy stomach on her? She waved the man over and gestured for him to sit down, a false smile on her lips. A love potion. Well, they usually didn’t work. But who was she to tell her customer?

A few minutes later Syen left the small, dirty room and stepped on the street. Her eyes follow the street and she then follows it into the even poorer parts of the little town.
“Who needs help?”
she asked quietly feeling more than seeing how Essun answered her question. A slight shimmerof light to her left answered her question.
“Thank you.”
Her voice was soft, but her steps were sure when she entered those places most people never saw, helping those who needed help, those nobody else cared about, just like she had sworn a few years back. She always had a good feeling for plants, for animals only recently she understood, that her talent wasn’t simply a talent but so much more. Smiling she knelt next to an old man and looked him up and down.
“How can I help you?”

Cause of Death: Killed in a fight with a Chaos Marine.