Amaris

Official Character art by @helena.illustrated

Ash (Brother in Arms)

### *Early Life*

Nox was brought to Farleigh, a corrupt, church-run orphanage along Farehold’s northern border, as an infant. She was sold for 50 crowns to Matron Agnes by an unnamed thief. The Gray Matron sees her anomalous features as commodifiable, and Amaris spends the first 13 years under dehumanizing conditions of isolation from peers and others, valued only as a potential investment, which has a lasting impact on her ability to socialize and process emotion.

Amaris is kept from playing or doing anything that might ruin her market value, and she is hidden when the Bishop visits, lest the church want her to serve in a temple, rather than the matrons cash in on their investment. Nox is her only friend and is allowed to remain with Amaris to hide during church visits and on market day, both to keep her company, and help shield her.

### *The Night and Its Moon*

The Madame of a notorious brothel pays a king’s ransom to have Amaris join her in Priory at The Selkie. When the Madame arrives to collect her purchase at age 15, Amaris escapes with an assassin who’d sought shelter at the orphanage for the night. She demands that he take her with him, and is brought north to Uaimh Reev—home the continent’s peacekeeping assassins responsible for magical balance, “the reevers”, the sword arm of the church.

She trains for three years, running up and down the mountain each day, sparring, learning knife work, footing, swordplay, shooting a bow and arrow, and obsessively studying the continent’s demons.

She becomes a full-blooded reever at 18, and is sent on her first dispatch to investigate claims that Queen Moirai of Farehold is ordering the slaughter of northerners. It’s on this journey south that she discovers her ability for “true sight”, as she sees two winged fae men from Raascot, while her fellow reevers, Ash and Malik, see the feared demon ag’imni—it is here we learn of the curse on the border that forces citizens of Farehold to perceive ag’imni whenever northerners cross into their lands.

The Raascot military fae, Gadriel and Zaccai, join Amaris’s efforts (despite her protests) as they’re unified by a common interest. Her dispatch goes horribly awry when Moirai isn’t susceptible to her persuasion, and she and the reevers are instead, jailed, and accused of being demon sympathizers. Amaris is convicted of treason and faced to trial by combat in facing the queen’s demon dragon—the ag’drurath. Between her reever abilities and Gadriel’s combat skills, the two escape on the dragon’s back, narrowly evading execution.

### *The Sun and Its Shade*

Amaris begins at the university, which houses all the continent’s magic. It’s here she learns of the curse’s origins and she and Gadriel agree to set north to Raascot. On their north-bound journey, she asks to be trained like the fae—an unpleasant near-death process that causes fae to discover any hidden abilities through fight-or-flight. It’s here she learns of her shockwave.

Her relationship with the enigmatic General Gadriel grows more complicated as romance between them unfolds.

Across the continent, Nox learns of Amaris’s true origins through eating from the Tree of Life and seeing the Tree’s memories. She learns that Princess Daphne’s dying wish was a prayer for someone who might come along and free the continent from her mother’s curse, who might save them, who might protect her child. In the next memory, Nox sees the priestess give birth to a prayer, a baby as white as snow, and learns that Amaris was a prayer made flesh, born to break the curse.

Nox isn’t the only one who learns of this origin. A priestess has been captured and tells King Ceres of Raascot, who dispatches men to find this “child with white hair and white eyes” as his revenge against Queen Moirai. Amaris has little time in Raascot’s capital before she’s taken before the king and he attempts to force her to fight as his champion.

## Physical Description

Amaris’s description is consistent with albinism, from white hair, skin, brows, and lashes, to lilac purple eyes. At the age of 15, she inflicted two large wounds across her left eye/cheek, and down her left collarbone, which left permanent scars. She is small in stature, though an exact height is never mentioned. As an endurance runner and daily trainer, she has lithe, hard muscles, and grows into her preferred tomboyish features. She has a scar on her palm from her reever’s oath.

## Personality

Though timid early in life, Amaris makes her first bold choice when mutilating herself so that she would be devalued and no longer desirable to the Madame. Her coping mechanism is to shove things into “her box” where she chooses not to think about, reflect on, or remember the horrible things. She chooses humor, tenacity, and violence to evade her emotions, instead channeling everything into working hard to prove her skill and her worth as a reever.

## Known Powers

* Persuasion (“silver tongue”) where humans are under compulsion to obey her
* True Sight (can see through illusions, curses, and enchantments)
* Shockwave (this is discovered in fight-or-flight when she allows to let Gadriel to train her to see if she may have any further fae abilities)

## Trivia

* The matrons tell her name means “gift from the goddess” (though the etymological root of her name, more accurately, means “promised by god”). Odrin tells her that in northern dialects, her name means “child of the moon”. Both are etymologically correct, and have equal weight in plot-significance, particularly given the reveals in The Sun and Its Shade.