Estelia - Renegade Golden Griffin

A half-elf warrior whose wanderlust and longing for adventure saw her join the Golden Griffins in a time where they had begun making a name for themselves after their role in the Battle of Duskweave and the peacekeeping operations they partook in for the colony after that. Bright-eyed and optimistic, she hoped she would find a place in heraldry and herodom like Yinsylim and his companions whose bardic epics had first kindled her passion for adventure. Yet the mundanity of mercenary life was far from the grandeur she had imagined, and whilst she enjoyed the occasional contract for escorting a caravan or clearing a lumber yard of goblins, the months in between of naught but hard labour and endurance-building were mind numbing are poison for her adventurous spirit. Just as she was readying to hand in her resignation and pursue her wanderlust on her own terms, the Golden Griffins were called to fight in the Liturium War, warring against her own countrymen of Belfrie. Slaying a Belfrian soldier was never something she intended, but the threat of death loomed over her if she chose to desert, something she had seen reinforced dozens of times as deserter executions were common at the war’s start, with the rank-and-file forced to behold each one. Though there was some relief when the Griffins turned against their employers, Estelia was now forced to drive her blade through the bellies of those she had befriended and called ally for the past year. By the war’s end, her mind had been shattered, along with any sense of loyalty, morality and justice. A bleak shadow was all that was left of the bright-eyed girl who longed to be a hero of the age. In the months that followed her posting, she was stuck in the Coalition-occupied Leacianus, where the worst horrors of the war began to rear their head, months after the fighting had ceased. Families and neighbours murdering each other over scraps of rations, soldiers performing unspeakable deeds on the vulnerable villagers and townsfolk for their own amusement and satisfaction. The worst came in the arcane anomalies that had taken shape in the fallout of Nirloom’s fall, men turned inside out after stepping on an arcane imbued stone, or launched sixty feet into the air after stepping on a patch of mud. Death seemed inevitable as the anomalies grew more severe, and more common. Estelia fled her post in the dead of night soon after, moving south into Nan Thalias. There, seeking refuge, she joined one of her employer’s rival faction in the city of Dae Valle: The World Explorer’s & Hunter’s League. Though the WEHL were unaware of her current tenure as a Golden Griffin, Estelia hoped that should the Griffins send hunters after her for deserting, they would think twice before making a move against a rival that could spill into corporate warfare.