Tabby

Backstory

Tabby is young by elven reckoning — barely thirty-two, which is to say she is old enough to be capable and young enough that older elves still sometimes speak around her as though she hasn't finished forming. She grew up in the canopy settlements of the Aeltharion outer reaches, the daughter of a fletcher and a cartographer, and she learned to shoot before she learned to sit still, which her parents considered a reasonable trade. Where Paunth earned his instincts through decades of patrol and Del carries the weight of a century of governance, Tabby's gifts are rawer: a ferocious natural eye, reflexes that have made veteran archers quietly envious, and a curiosity so relentless it has gotten her into trouble on three separate continents and at least one place that does not appear on any map she has ever seen. She does not have a grand purpose, and she would be suspicious of anyone who claimed to. She entered the Whispering Woods on a dare — or something that started as a dare and became, somewhere in the first hour, something she couldn't put down. She had been passing through the woodland borderlands on a courier run when she heard the portal stone near the eastern treeline make a sound she had never heard anything make before: a low, fractured hum, like a bell struck wrong. She stood there for a long time listening to it. Then she followed the sound inward, because that is what Tabby does with things she does not understand. She does not have the patience for the alternative. Her motivation is not heroism, exactly — it is closer to the particular itch of someone who has seen something that doesn't add up and cannot walk away until it does. She is bright and irreverent and occasionally reckless in ways she would describe as calculated and others would describe as alarming. She is also, underneath the quickness and the humor, quietly loyal in the way of people who choose their attachments carefully because they know how much they mean them. She has no idea how deep into something significant she has wandered. She is beginning to suspect it is deeper than she planned. She plans to keep going anyway.