User:Dinnae Fenmyre/Dinnae Fenmyre

Dinnae Fenmyre
Dinnae Fenmyre of Dale
World:	Landroval
Vocation:	Yoeman
Class:	Minstrel
Race:	Race of Man
Region:	Dale
Age:	21
Height:	5’7”
Sex:	Female
Skin:	Fair
Hair:	Muddy Brown
Eye:	Grey

Description

Physical Description: The quiet docility of the woman’s demeanor is nearly the perfect reflection of the purple heron upon the ruddy moor. Her body is thin and fragile, only giving the appearance of height in her carriage and the curve of her slender neck. She walks with the languid grace and listless gentleness of the wading bird in the soft angle to her narrow shoulders and a mild response of her hands to the touch of the wind. The tenor of her reedy voice is pure but soft and low and frail as a whisper. Her mouth is pale and wide, and the turn of her upper lip casts only the meekest of shadows.

Dinnae Fenmyre of Dale

Too often in the sun, her skin is tinged with a nut brown, but possesses the softness of a bird’s wing marred only by occasional marks of dark pigment like flecks of mud beside dark eyes. Her face bears an oscine sweetness with the bloom of youth still blazoned in her cheeks. Yet in her eyes is that semblance of wisdom that only a songbird sings of: that simple knowledge of little but what is pure and good. They are a dove’s eyes that soften her mild face, serene and placid--far larger than ordinary eyes--fuller than a doe’s. Dark and deep and wide, the grey within them is strewn by the dewy colors of twilight and cast under shallow eyebrows that are more like twin blades of moor grass or a painter’s stroke of shadow. Her muddy brown hair is feathered and dry from neglect, but the fullness of the wispy strands is neatly gathered and tied in a nest of woven braids that only half masks the exposed nape of her neck from the sun. From this, one tapering plait of hair swings nearly at knees length, shaking the darkness from its downy tips.

Her garb is poor and weather worn: a faded dove-grey cotehardie over a chemise of ruddy brown. The short sleeved cotehardie, laced down the front and open at the neck reveals the deeper tint of blue beneath. And slipping low on her waist, a black leather belt is tipped with copper and chain. Beneath all this, quaintly dark feet, bare and stained with clay, foil the paleness of her slender ankles.

Personality Description: Dinnae began life with an amazing imagination. Now, a dreamer, she looks for company in the beautiful things of life and idolizes all that she sees and all she does not. Swept by the love of peace, patience, and gentleness, she shirks reality and her responsibility to it. She has lost many things, but clings to hope and dreams for survival, never admitting, never confessing, that her life is only bitter survival and bleakness. She herself is a story teller, thinking of what could be and not what is; a singer of beautiful tales, more interested in the word and emotion than its meaning.

Background

Dinnae’s is a tale of music, for every moment that meant something began with an unassuming strain of song. It is not a story worthy of ballad-making, but it has that air of a melody sung sometime in the past that is only faintly worth the remembrance.

The first voice she hears from the halls of her memory is that of her mother crooning the cradle songs of her youth. Fawne Willowren was a beautiful woman, a daughter to a lute maker, with the measured temperament that is pleased very well with small things. She had married young to a chandler who had no money, few manners, and little else to offer except his persistency and a handsome mean. But Dunstan Fenmyre would play for her on his gemshorn and she would dance, and neither needed to speak a word, but shared only the cadence of his song. Music was all they had in common. And it proved to be too little when, against her father’s better counsel, they married.

The Fenmyre Minstrels

It was not long before they forgot why they had loved each other. He had pursued the impossible beauty and, having obtained her, his interest dissipated. Tired with work, and tired of talk, he only played the melancholy songs of the evening under the thatch of his moldering home. And she, once lithe and spirited, no longer danced except to cradle their daughter in the sway of her steps and lullaby. That daughter--a sweet child with doe-like eyes and a gracefulness that, even in her youth, was an honor to her mother--was Fawne’s every moment and single happiness. And then, even as Dinnae was learning to play the first unmelodious notes on her father’s pipe, a misfortune broke what harmony was left in the family. Her father, while rendering the suet for his candles, stumbled and fell into the fire and boiling tallow in his workshop. He would not die, but the face that bore his conceit would be marred forever. In his shame, for his vanity was great, he took his family and belongings to live far away from any peopled place. His wife, then carrying the second of three daughters, would follow reluctantly, abandoning her home of Landeroth and any connection she had there to live in the isolation of the Long Marshes beside the Forest River.

Only one man knew where they were and visited occasionally. He was Jesper Sedgewick, a trader of furs, and friend enough to teach Dunstan the skills of trapping mink. The coats of these were all the currency the family would need to trade with this same friend for those few things necessary which could not be gleaned from the land itself.

It was upon this land--the fen beyond the River Road, swathed in the very mists from the forest to the west--that three daughters grew with innocence and gentleness in their home upon the hummock. And the wife, for whom sweet belonging had so soon become a burden, even she learned through dependency and isolation the joy of her family’s concord. And together, teaching their daughters the beauty of music and dance, husband and wife also learned the value of each other. The daughters, each pursing their love of music, studied daily the lyrical muses of nature, coming home to compose their songs learnt from the heath and moor. Dinnae, the eldest of the daughters, followed her father’s love of the sound of the wind and the woody pipes that summoned it, searching for the voice of the wild. Her first sister, Shylah, almost the picture of her mother, moved with the measures of the world, dancing as lightly as the leaf upon the breeze. The youngest daughter, Mavelle, the sweet songbird of the family had a voice that rivaled the giddiest warbler, and inherited, by her mother’s wish, her grandfather’s lute. This covey of songsters loved each other through their song--singing, dancing, and playing to the others’ music. It was their perfect expression of joy.

But joy invites unexpected visitors and, very often, a sadness felt more strongly in the foiling of it. A shadow was falling across the land, and the threat, though unseen, could not help but be felt. As it happened, a man dressed in the habit of a fighter and a traveler was discovered in the bog near the Fenmyre land. Wounded and fevered, he was taken into their mud brick home and given the attention he required while inciting the unquenchable curiosity of three little girls. When two weeks passed and the stranger gave little more than a name and the trembling thanks of a dying man, the younger girls abandoned their curiosity for the more familiar paths of their world. But Dinnae, temperate and mild in all her interests, would not leave his side. She wetted his graying hair and feverish brow and sang to him the lullabies of her own innocent making. And sometimes he found his own tales, fanciful and childish tales, retold to the theme of a flute or in a lyrical ballad from the girl’s reedy voice. Bowen, for that was the name he gave, could not have had a more attentive maid to watch over him; Dinnae was an eager listener with a heart whose love was innocent. That naiveté was a blessing to them both, for she never questioned where he came from, nor did she question the reason of his passing into death. But, at the very young age of nine years, Dinnae had fallen in love in that child-like way that admires and dreams and knows no more than what is good and kind.

It was her father that reflected on the purpose of the man’s coming and falling. It was a sign of the threat he knew existed in the forest and wood. But he could not let himself look into the shadow of that truth, not even when his own wife disappeared and did not return. The tragedy of their mother’s death did not touch the girls as it did their father. Their gentle minds could not comprehend the loss and whatever pain or sorrow was felt with her death passed away with the passing of time. But her memory lingered and superstition replaced the hollow wherein her memory once dwelt.

Sometimes at night on the moor when the Will’o the Whisp danced upon the murmurous wind and the moon was blurred by the creeping mists, the youngest daughter would chase the floating corpse candles. And though Dinnae would reprove her sister and try to drown those memories in reason and sense, she could not help but listen for the voice of her mother calling out across the fen--but not for the sake of sorrow. For Dinnae, above all things, is swayed by her sensibilities. She, like her sisters, has that birdlike quality of unassuming joy that cannot be quenched and seeks always to know the world with the wind’s eye. She would rather spend her hours composing the idylls of a heath hen or a ballad to the silver minnows than meet the world in more practical measures. She is a dreamer that looks for company in the smallest of things and idolizes all things she cannot meet or know. She is a story teller, more interested in the tale than the truth of it, more enamored with the sound of a word than its meaning. And to this day in her twenty-first year, she still is sworn to love no man more than the one she knew and danced for so many years ago--in love with the romance of the idea more than the memory itself.

But reality does not stop the truth from settling upon even the sweetest of thoughts. Jesper Sedgewick, the one link to Lake Town, did not come when he was expected. Weeks later and still he has not come to take the pelts that are his and the Fenmyre’s livelihood. And now while darkness and fear press on the thoughts of Dunstan, he comes to a decision. The fen and moor that is his home is no longer safe. With the loss of his vanity, and the loss of his wife, he has no reason to leave his hermitage, but his daughters, his isolated cagelings, these, he must safe keep. And so with the pelts, and instruments, and all that is of value stowed in a wheelbarrow, he leads his daughters to the edge of the Tanduin to where the road is safe. There he instructs them to walk beyond the marsh to Esgaroth and there to wait for him to come, to wait until it is safe to return home. Though they, and he, know well that day will never come.

Friends and Enemies

Friends:

• Mavelle Fenmyre: Her sister, now lost.