Wysteri Vineguard

There are few Fae as smug and pompous as the Countess of the Creeping Vine. She is vain and alluring, a lover of luxury and gossip. Before the Sin of Dragons, she was a regular guest of the Dragonkin Imperial Court. She dined and laughed with King Narses and Queen Ankora in Valdemar. Each year the Countess was a guest of honor for the Aravian royal family, whom she delighted with her stories from the parties and feasts of the world’s great and good. Nothing has changed her, not the Sin, not the Great Wars, not even the Corruption of the Mistwood. She only truly cares for social events in which she outshines all around her. Nonetheless, the Countess is no fool. She knows that she might not care for the world’s ills, but sometimes they might come for her. She also knows that she inspires jealousy not just among her own people, but among others, including Sylvan Elves and diplomats from Yakai, the Skyiron Dominion, or beyond. Thus the Countess ensures she is always well protected, though in no way that would affect how she is perceived – to travel with a host of guards of any kind to parties and balls would be ‘vulgar’, ‘distracting’, and ‘give the wrong impression’. The Countess makes no public appearance without being bedecked with jewelry. Gemstones, the chrysalises of harpgold butterflies, and the buds of crimson opal flowers are but a handful of dozens of varieties of precious materials embedded in her necklaces, rings, and bracelets. Observers also note that she wears several golden crystals across her breast. What they do not know is that they are Shards, each one containing the soul of a skilled Sylvan warrior sworn to protect her. One of them is Wysteri Vineguard, enclosed within her Shard since the middle of the Corruption. Wysteri is a superb archer, her beautiful techniques and elegance demanded by the Countess, who suffers ‘not the brutish or the ugly in anything’. Years of training have made her the master of her body and her bow an extension of it – few Elves can match her agility, speed, and flexibility. Her armor is made of magically fused and hardened ivy leaves, granting her protection from the daggers and arrows of would-be assassins while flowing around her body like the waters of an emerald river. The Countess demands perfection, and so Wysteri’s accuracy is unerring, always finding the weakest part in any target to ensure a clean and swift kill. Equipped with arrows made of snaregrip drainvine by the Countess herself, Wysteri is made even more lethal – just as vines suck the life out of the trees they ensnare, so her arrows do the same to her targets. Who is Wysteri? Why does she serve the Countess of the Creeping Vine? None but the Countess herself know she exists, and even the ostentatious Fae does not know her servant’s true motives. What she does know however is that Wysteri proved herself trustworthy beyond all doubt, through her arduous training and the willing acceptance of her name, which the Countess gave her. The Fae suspects that the Shard gives her peace, and that serving a Fae who cares only for life’s pleasures, not politics or war, gives her a level of distance from the world, a kind of respite. Undoubtedly Wysteri would have beheld many atrocities and horrors during the Mistwood’s Corruption, experiences few could blame her for wanting to put far behind her.