Aleatha Fondir
| Aleatha Fondir | |
|---|---|
| Created by | Aleatha (player) |
| Information | |
| Gender | Female |
| Occupation | Aes Sedai of the White Ajah |
| Affiliation | The Grey Tower |
| Nationality | Amadician |
| Attributes | |
| Talents |
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| OP Strength | 7.0 |
| Affinities | Spirit, Air, Water, Fire, Earth |
Aleatha Fondir is an Amadician Oathsworn White Aes Sedai of the Grey Tower.
Description
Aleatha is a tall, willowy woman with extraordinary physical characteristics. Her hair is long, sleek and silver grey, a colour not obtained by age but rather by a traumatic youth. Her eyes are steel grey and compassionate, albeit hard to read. She usually wears dresses in the white of her Ajah, sometimes complemented with grey or silver. Her voice is extraordinarily beautiful, a singer's voice of crystalline clarity.
Biography
Years ago, a cool wind blew through the Mountains of Mist, through a small village named Elman's Creek. Its cool force made the dirty hairs of a young girl fall in her face and with one of her pale hands she forced the locks back over her shoulder. In front of her rose the largest building she had ever seen; a tower created out of pale grey marble. The walls surrounding it were vaster than she could see and she gasped before walking up to the gate.
It took some time for the watchers to notice her. She stood tall against the background of snow and trees, dressed in what had once been a white dress. It was old though, and torn to rags. Her hair reached her waist and was grey, silver-grey like a moonbeam. Her eyes seemed to be forged out of the same substance, grey opals in her dirty, pale face.
"Please let me through, good men," she said. "I have come to see the Amyrlin Seat." They nodded, wondering what this girl's business was here. She didn't look threatening, so they let her through. The girl made her way to the main entrance of the building and walked through the open doors. She seemed invisible, like a part of the grey marble walls. Silently, she started climbing the stairs.
On the top floor, where the Amyrlin Seat herself had her quarters, the girl halted. She knocked on the heavy doors, softly, her tiny hands couldn't make more sound than they did at that moment. "Forgive me, Mother," she said, as the Amyrlin Seat opened the doors of her office. "I seek refuge here, for there is nowhere else I can go. They call me Mercia, Mercia Teardrop..."
The young wanderer told a story then, about how she had found herself in a cold forest in Amadicia over a year ago. She claimed not to remember anything that might've happened before that day. The girl who called herself Mercia told that she had walked aimlessly for days, searching for food and shelter. She told about the dreams she had, dreams about another girl, blonde with almond eyes, but those dreams were really nightmares for the other girl was bound to die, an outlawed channeler in Amadicia.
Apparently, Mercia had made a living singing in Inns during her days in the wild. She claimed she knew she could channel, for she had Healed people before and the way she had done it could not be explained in any other way.
Mercia Teardrop was enrolled as a novice of the Grey Tower the same day. She learned quickly and turned out to be as talented in Healing as she had claimed. No one could get through to the girl, though. It seemed as if everything close to emotions had been forced out of her during her exile, and she did nothing without a reason.
After little more than a year, Mercia went through the arches to gain the ring and the dress of an Accepted. That day meant a major change...
Memories returned on the winds of time and Mercia found herself back once more, with an identity of her own. The girl from her dreams, Aleatha Fondir of Valantor, Amadicia, it was Mercia in the life she thought she had left behind.
She was but nine years old when it first came to her. Little Aleatha, her honey-blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, was playing hide and seek. She had found all her friends, all of them except for a young boy named Solmar. He had a way of hiding himself most people envied. Aleatha giggled. "Solmar, where are you?" She had left the village by then, to the only place she had not yet looked. An apple orchard with high trees in which it was very possible to hide... She thought she heard a sound and silently pounced towards its source. It was not what she had expected, though.
The boy lay on the ground, hardly conscious. His leg was twisted in an unnatural angle and she wasn't sure about his neck either. "Solmar," she screamed, "what happened?" She knelt down by the boy's side. She knew he was dying. All pain and anger in the whole world gathered inside of her and she screamed, begging the Light for mercy. The Light came to her as an incredible power, a force running through her veins.
Aleatha Fondir from Valantor, Amadicia, had channelled.
The first months were strange to her, a time in which she had to learn to live with a person she hadn't known until then. She found back memories she had thought lost and explored her newly found Talent, the exploration of the World of Dreams. Most thought she would be an addition to the Yellow Ajah before long, but although she didn't stop studying the ways of Healing with the One Power, her true studies led her elsewhere.
She managed hiding it for years, although she had known from the beginning what it was. Channelers were outlawed in Amadicia, and if the Children of the Light found her she would be hung by charges of being a Darkfriend. She started hiding from people on secret places, hiding from everyone but especially from her father.
Godfrid Fondir was a high-ranking Child of the Light, a Lord Captain, in fact. He had dedicated his life to the pursuit of Darkfriends and witches and he was successful, a man with a kind hard and strict ways. His heart would break if he found out what his daughter was.
It came to Aleatha again, and again, never when anyone else could see. By the time she reached the age of fourteen, she had saved over ten lives, calling on the Light that had agreed on working for her. But no one can hide forever...
Aleatha was eighteen when she was raised to the rank of Aes Sedai. She surprised many people by announcing she wished to become part of the White Ajah, the Ajah of thinkers and philosophers. Her past had given her the wish to understand what made people act the way they did, and she became the Tower's first Philosopher of the Mind.
Her father had been gone for months on a mission in Arad Doman. A false Dragon had proclaimed and a legion of the Children under Godfrid's command had gone there to make him stop. Now, the false Dragon had been captured, the Light had won again, and Aleatha's father was returning home. It would be Sunday tomorrow. Aleatha and her mother Marlena had spent all day decorating the house, they would have a feast tonight to honour Godfrid's return.
"Will you fetch the table cloth, Aleatha, dear?" Marlena asked. Aleatha pouted. "I haven't finished the potatoes yet, mother. Can't you do it?"
Minutes later, a loud stumbling in the living room announced the ending of the first part of Aleatha's life.
Marlena had stumbled when walking down the stairs. Misfortune had made her land on her head and her neck was broken. Blood stained the sides of her face. She was barely alive.
With cries of anger and agony, Aleatha sat down beside her and called on the Light, the One Power, saidar that filled her body with its sweetness and power. She never noticed her father entering the living room.
Shortly after her raising, another event shook Aleatha's life. One of the few persons she had ever cared for, a young Asha'man named Edwyn, befell a strange accident. He turned catatonic in the struggle to get him back, Aleatha bonded him her Warder. He was saved.
"You must leave. You are not my daughter any more, you are no longer Aleatha Fondir. Run, and never let me see you again. Run, before I turn you in..." It caused Godfrid Fondir all the pain he had ever known to speak those words. Aleatha cried until she had no tears left, ran until her legs didn't let her go any further, then slept, and ran on. Her life had ended. Aleatha was no more.
Aleatha was raised to the rank of Sitter for the White Ajah after several months and she held that rank for years when she was elected Mistress of Novices of the Grey Tower. That rank, she held until Edwyn's downfall, which she is loath to speak of... Still, in the end, she prevailed, and it was not long after her return to the world of those truly alive that the Hall of Sitters called on Aleatha, electing her to the Amyrlin Seat of the Grey Tower.
Aleatha's descent was gradual, noticed by few. She had never had many friends, and the fact that she stopped inviting them to her spacious office in the White Ajah halls caused little more than perhaps an arched eyebrow or two. The novices sent to her to bring her food noticed that she slept a lot, but the ones who came in in the morning assumed she must stay up late, while the late visitors believed she got up as early as a novice. And she slept indeed, night and day, only waking up twice to eat a meal. At nighttime, she entered Tel'aran'rhiod and searched. It was a mindwrecking task but she could not simply not do it - duty compelled her to continue, as long as there was a speck of hope left that she would find him. The magnificent sensation that had been her Bond to Edwyn no longer existed, but a part of it still clung to her, as if there was a single thread still connecting him to the Brown Asha'man.
At daytime, she slept to fight the exhaustion that hours and hours in the Unseen world brought her.
It was a condition that would have to change at some point, either by her death or by completion of her quest. She had learned to love - yes, to truly give herself to another human being, to trust and open herself up, vulnerable as a flower. And then he had disappeared, and his absence tore her heart into pieces. On the outside, Aleatha was the perfect image of an Aes Sedai, sleek silvery hair reaching the small of her back, austere dark grey eyes holding an aloof compassion befitting a White sister with a Healing talent. On the inside, she was a storm raging, burning herself up.
The World of Dreams was as she remembered it, a cool place that seemed to stand a little distance apart from the real world. Objects shimmered into existence now and then, only to fade away as quickly as they appeared. She had no idea where this place was, a vast and ancient marble hall. She saw no other people, which had to mean that few, if any, knew about the existence of this place. Not for the first time, she considered entering the Dream in the flesh, if just for a chance to truly go to places like these, of which she had found quite a few. But the dangers were too great. It would serve no one if she killed herself. The Dreamer bit her lips together to stop herself from crying out. Life had never been easy. It wasn't about to become better. So many were lost now, taken by the Wheel itself to be spun away from her in the Pattern.
Need. She closed her eyes and thought of him, those dark eyes that could see straight into her soul. The remnant of their bond was still and quiet, sometimes she had to search for it to assure herself that it was, indeed, still there. She opened her eyes and found herself in her own office - the reflection of it in tel'aran'rhiod, that was. In her bed, she saw the shimmering form of a sleeping woman. So long had she been here, wiling away her days, that her physical presence was starting to become a part of the Dream. What would happen if it did? Would she still exist in the waking world, if the majority of her life was lived in this place?
On her desk, there was an object she hadn't seen before. A white rose, carved from perfect marble, every petal and thorn etched to perfection. She picked it up and felt a soft resonance that she should not be able to feel here, telling her it was a ter'angreal. She took two steps towards her bed, and the transition she made was fluent, the dream reflection of her room melting into the reality of her waking life. The rose was still in her hand, feeling heavier now that it had become real. Aleatha got out of her bed and walked to her bathroom, looking at herself in the mirror.
Her face, which had always been narrow and severe, now bore all the ageless qualities of an Aes Sedai visage. Strange, how she had never noticed it before. She wondered what the girl she once was would've looked like now. A tear ran down her cheek, crystalline and pure. She didn't want to know it, but she had to face the facts. Looking down at the rose in her hands, she forced her mind to look once more for the final thread that connected her to the only human being she had ever completely learned to trust - and found it gone.
When Aleatha Fondir entered the White Ajah halls with a book that afternoon, even the stoic White sisters who were usually the very image of aloof disconnection gaped at her. The wraith had returned.
Career History
- Novice
- Accepted
- Aes Sedai of the White Ajah
- Sitter of the White Ajah
- Amyrlin Seat
- First Reasoner of the White Ajah (7 February 2010)
- Mistress of Novices
