Willow

## Appearance

**Hair:** Chestnut brown and shoulder-length, left loose often but bound into a ponytail when at work.

**Skin:** Fair

**Eyes:** Blue

**Height:** 5’ 6”

**Weight:** 122 lbs.

**Body Type:** Slender

**Noticeable Features:** A narrow knife scar along her left hip. Her ears are pointier than those of a full-blooded human, and she keeps them hidden beneath her hair when at all possible.

## Personality

Having spent years in the specious company of nobles, very little of Willow’s personality remains authentic. She appears pleasant, friendly, and engaged in whatever she does, striving to please her clients and maintain her connections to the gentry. The only sincere parts of her that remain are her obsessions: to acquire new experiences that can fuel her art, and to live the best life she can.

## Abilities & Proficiencies

**Weapon Proficiency:** Growing up in the slums of Norve, Willow became a dedicated student of knives and their many uses. Whether for cutting into food, adjusting the paint left caked on a wall, self-defense, or doing cool tricks and almost cutting her fingers off, Willow went nowhere without a knife. She still carries a knife with her wherever she goes, though she tries harder to keep it out of sight.

**Magic:** *Soother.* Having learned to perform magic through artistic expression, Willow channels her magic and emotions into the art she creates, leaving lasting effects that influence the viewer toward her emotional state at the time of creation.

**Other Skills:** Painting, reading, lying, thieving.

## History

Willow’s parents were poor, her mother a maid for a lesser noble house and her father a butcher, operating the shop beneath their lodgings in the slums of Norve. After sickness claimed her mother, Willow’s father became withdrawn, drinking away the hours not spent splitting meat. Willow grew quickly estranged from him and her empty home, and took to the streets and urchin gangs to feel a sense of belonging.

She stole, taking knives from her father’s shop, comestibles from the hands of street vendors, and performances through smoky tavern windows. She cheated and lied, charming and mugging the gullible, rigging street games, and exploiting the generosity of the well-to-do. She fought, defending her territory from upstarts, protecting those she considered her kin, and paying back betrayal with twice the bloodshed. It was life, petty crime the order of the day, but it was altogether empty.

One listless evening, possessed of an acute sense of nostalgia, and after her father had drunk himself into a stupor, she stole back into her family home to pour through keepsakes. Most of the trinkets and baubles she’d had as a child were gone, as were any baubles and jewels her mother had scrounged together from her days as a maid, but deep in the back of a dusty closet Willow found a true treasure: her mother’s paintings, remnants of a hobby she’d never known of, and the congealed supplies she’d used to make them.

Willow stole away with the canvasses, securing them at her roost, and spent the next days pilfering and robbing to amass her own small horde of supplies. She was possessed of a burning need to follow in her mother’s footsteps, and to make her art the signature that set her apart from the other crooks.

Street art and ribald graffiti took over her days, and the alleys of the rookery became her canvas. She painted heroic portraits of her comrades and mocking caricatures of the slum’s corrupt guards, slowly improving in talent and throwing herself into her work to the exclusion of all else. Her ambition grew, and it was no longer just alley walls: the sides of buildings, the steeples of crumbling towers, public fountains; her canvas expanded without end. Her crew was beset by the same wild abandon she’d felt, and that she’d poured into her artwork, and they utterly abandoned any sense of restraint they’d once had.

Whipped into a frenzy of crime and public defacement, Willow and her companions caught the eye of a more competent class of guard, and the lot of them ended up beaten, chased from the city, or imprisoned. It was her art, and the canny eye of a collector, that saved Willow from the same ignominious fate.

She was offered a deal: a work release program, as it were, for a minor noble carrying some influence among Norve’s lower courts. In exchange for her time and efforts, and assuming she could please her patron, her charges would be expunged. Lacking any other promising options, and any access to her supplies while behind bars, Willow entered the life of private portraiture.

Three years of indenture behind her and she was a changed woman. Her disposition was more refined, if no less fierce, she’d cultivated both a minor reputation and a list of clients, and most importantly had come to understand just how she’d driven herself and her crew into a feverish mob. It was in the paint, or in whatever medium she chose to employ; her emotions had rubbed off on her work, leading to a feedback loop that made them feel like they could do anything.

Living now in a small flat atop a studio, understanding much better how to express her emotions through her art and into those who viewed it, Willow had goals beyond survival for the first time: expand her client list, rise through the ranks of Norve’s artists, and discover new sources of potent emotion she could use to fuel her projects.