NPCs of Haven Weyr

A'lan and Ydreth - The Champion of Aeon

It was a time on Pern where the agricultural culture had begun to rediscover technology. Thread was, it was thought, in its last fall over Pern. The Dragonriders were about to become obsolete, though they hadn't yet.

On the hatching sands stood a conflicted youth of fourteen years. Assigned female at birth and named Alanna, the youth had always harbored the feeling that she was a he, though he kept this true identity to himself, obediently playing the part of the Lord Holder's daughter. Alanna was afraid, you see. Weyrfolk were more open about such things, but life in the holds was not so kind to the irregulars.

Alanna was sure that if he Impressed at all, he would probably Impress green, because green dragons chose women and effeminate men as their riders. Possibly he'd Impress blue, as blues chose men and masculine women.

What Alanna didn't expect was that the first egg to hatch would be a bronze, and that the bronze would toddle unsteadily towards him. Alanna was still deeply ensconced in his closet about his gender identity, wore his hair long and his blossoming breasts unbound, embracing the femininity of his body for the protection it offered. And then along came the little bronze, declaring himself as Ydreth, and all of Alanna's plans to remain transgender only in secret crumbled into dust.

Thus Alanna became A'lan, who cut his hair short, bound his chest, and learned to gain confidence in requesting masculine pronouns.

Some years later, when the new-found scientists of Pern decided to tackle the question of mechanically replicating the dragons' and firelizards' ability to between from one place to another, A'lan and Ydreth were among the volunteers that lined up to test the machine. Nobody thought too much of risking the dragonriders now, since Thread was no longer a serious threat.

So it was that many curious and adventurous dragonriders, plus their dragons, bonded firelizards, and watch-whers, stepped into the machine's portal. The thought was that they would all appear somewhere else on Pern, to another machine in another Weyr. Nobody planned for the Illogical Field of another universe in its entirety to reach out and snatch them all up.

The dragonriders knew that they weren't on Pern anymore when they took in the utterly alien landscape of Teragaia. They mounted their dragons and tried to between back to Pern, to no avail. They were well and truly stranded.

A'lan and Ydreth were among the first of the large group to stop panicking. To survive, they'd have to adapt, so they did. They found signs of civilization, made contact with the native villagers, got themselves established in a coastal caldera that would in time become their Weyr.

The Dragonriders of Pern rode again, except instead of fighting Thread, they protected their new territory from wild dragons (utterly unlike their own gentle beasts) and demons and the other nasty business Teragaia had to offer.

Over time, the other original dragonriders died, either of injury or of old age. But A'lan and Ydreth seemed untouched by time, and no injury ever proved fatal, no matter how grave.

Because Aeon had chosen His champion, and the Champion of Aeon was A'lan.

Every Weyr has a Weyrhealer.

Most healers are compassionate, gentle souls, soft-spoken and delicate with emotional instability. People who need healers often need a deft and tender touch, after all.

And then there is Larandaithiel.

Oh, he's a compassionate sort, and gentle after a fashion. He is a healer, after all, and a master of his craft. He just doesn't allow anyone to see the compassion and the gentleness, covering his personality with a thick and nearly impenetrable layer of thorns. Larandaithiel is short-tempered, snappish, and cranky...on a good day. On a bad day, he's a terrifying spectre of temperamental rage and thrown surgical instruments bouncing loudly off of walls.

What most people don't know about Larandaithiel is that he cares. He tries not to. He rants and rails and flings insults like mud to drive people away, but it doesn't work. He cares regardless. He cares so much it hurts him, and that pain fuels his temper.

He was young once, Larandaithiel. And arrogant. A noble-born snob sure of his place in the world and assured of his own competence, complete with a youthful disregard for abject mortality. He was invincible, see, and so was everyone near him.

That attitude lasted exactly as long as it took the young healer to be flung into his first war, into the chaos of triage and trying to make five patients' worth of supplies hold over thirty wounded as the injured poured in faster than healthy soldiers could be tossed back out into the fray. Added to that were the faces of the wounded. They were all friends, or lovers, or associates under Larandaithiel's personal protection. These were people he had been so sure were impervious to harm because he was there. He discovered, all too often, that he was wrong.

Elves live long lives, and Larandaithiel had centuries to have the arrogance of his youth beaten out of him with every dead friend he'd personally failed to save. What had once been egocentrism became bitterness and a shadow of fear over every action. He's lost so many people. It crushes him every time.

Eventually he left the elven lands and made his way to the small and mostly-human village of Haven, looking for peace. He didn't find it, of course, because Teragaia exists within reach of the Illogical Field and between that and the nation of demons to the south, peace is a fantasy.

But Larandaithiel is a veteran of tumult and war, and when the village came under attack, he was the first one barking orders and setting up makeshift hospitals to treat the deluge of wounded.

He was discovered by then-junior weyrwoman Sandasa, still barely a teenager with golden Yuleth too young to mate, and convinced to come to the Weyr to talk to the Weyrwoman about becoming their healer. Haven Weyr needed a Weyrhealer, having lost the previous in the chaos.

Larandaithiel has been trying to make Sandasa hate him ever since, but contrary to his efforts, she seems inordinately fond of him instead. They fight, they argue, they disagree, but still, Sandasa is the one who comes to the infirmary when it's peaceful just to keep company a bitter old elf who would much rather be left to stew in his own loneliness. And so has been their dynamic for sixty seven years.

Standing about five feet and seven inches tall, Larandaithiel is not an imposing figure. He is instead willowy (some might call him frail, though he despises the implications of that word). His dark brown hair comes down to the middle of his back, and is usually kept tied into a tail or bound up in a braid to keep it out of his way while he works. His skin is a very light brown, nearly white, his eyes are dark green, and he is usually found wearing robes that mark him as the Weyrhealer and not, say, a dragonrider or a harper.

Of the many weyrwomen that call Haven Weyr home and stand in as Weyrwoman Sandasa's secondary authority, Jahena is easily the most terrifying.

She pretty much always has been, ever since the beginning. If anything, Impression has mellowed her sharp edges, though the weyrlings she terrorizes might argue that point vehemently.

Jahena's astounding infamy stems first from the circumstances of her birth. Most people begin in houses or healing-huts (or hospitals, depending on the advances in medicine relevant to the place and time), in a village or town or city, citizens of some kind of national identity. Most people begin in a home, and many even begin with two parents. Jahena began in a cave in the middle of an ambush, her then-seventeen year old mother going into labor as the mercenary company she was a part of made lethal contact with a group of bandits in the wilderness.

Marenni killed nine men, two women, and some manner of summoned badger in the time it took her to give birth to her child. Haven Village slept more safely that night, the bandits wiped out. The Pit Vipers lost a man, but they gained a baby, and a payout for services rendered, of course.

Jahena was familiarized with weapons almost before she could walk or talk, first, just which side of the knife was sharp and which wasn't, then more. She was going to grow up in the family business, after all, it wouldn't do for her to grow up without training. When she started walking around, she was given a child's set of practice weapons, a little knife and a little bow with its own equally little arrows.

The weapons were little more than toys, but she was learning.

She killed her first man at the age of six, when the Pit Vipers' base camp of the week was overtaken by a rival band of mercenaries who didn't like the competition. Marenni killed a number of the invaders, but one of them finally got under her guard and got a blade in her ribs...only to find an arrow in HIS ribs. Because even a child's training bow could pierce a human body. Jahena couldn't save her mother, but she could avenge her, and Marenni died with Jahena calmly holding her hand, bow across her lap.

The Pit Vipers dealt with their attackers, at a cost, and Jahena was raised by her uncle Tiurek after that.

Jahena grew into a cold, efficient killer. Not a terribly social girl, she dedicated herself to weapons mastery. Proficient with melee weapons, her true specialty was the longbow. She was death on the wind, never seen, never heard. All the same, she operated under a certain code of honor as impressed upon her by her mother and her uncle. The company was her family, the company was her life, she would keep them alive at all costs. Operations were surgical -- no bodies that didn't need dropping got dropped. No innocents in the crossfire. The captain's word is law.

That worked for a while, until the captain lost his way. He got greedier, more paranoid. His operations started getting more erratic and risky and lethal (often to the Pit Vipers themselves). He used Jahena as his pet assassin and his personal toy in the bedroll. She was on the verge of turning fourteen when she discovered she was pregnant, and her disdain for the captain truly began to boil over into something ugly.

Her first urge was to get rid of the baby, but Tiurek talked her into keeping the baby at least long enough to birth it. He knew a couple on a farm outside of the village, he said, who had been trying to have a baby for thirty years. They wouldn't ask questions...and planning a coup took time anyway. So they planned while her belly grew, and Tiurek took Jahena's baby boy away in the middle of the night when the lad was born. Jahena only knew he was male and had her eyes. They told the captain the baby had died and been buried.

The captain died the next day, along with what few loyalists he had left, Jahena leading the mutiny. She dived straight into management after that, cleaning up contracts, sorting out agreements, turning the Pit Vipers back into a respectable outfit within a few months. None of the Pit Vipers questioned that a fourteen year old girl was calling the shots. It was better for everyone to just stand back and let her do the work.

It was not ambition that led Jahena to take command, but she'd just watched a competent captain crumble down into a liability. If she wanted things done right, she figured she'd damn well roll up her sleeves and wade in herself.

The Pit Vipers actually prospered beneath Jahena's command for an entire year, looking up to her as the captain. And then a blue dragon dropped out of nowhere onto their camp one day, insisting that Jahena was needed at the Weyr. There were eggs on the sands and not enough Candidates! And the gold egg needed a strong-willed lass like this!

Jahena told the bluerider and his dragon to stuff their Search, of course, which required them to kidnap her, proverbially "kicking and screaming", though really it involved less screaming and more punching and biting.

She was not a willing Candidate when the time came. At least until the pure gold hatchling approached her, introduced herself as Alimbeth, and Jahena was henceforth forced to swallow all objections in the wash of Impression. She was neither the first nor the last reluctant Candidate to abruptly change tune from opposition to acceptance in the instant of bonding, completely in love with the awkward, creeling creature who was now inseparably joined.

Of course, even loving Alimbeth totally and completely couldn't take the natural Jahena-ness out of Jahena, and when it came time for weyrling practice, Jahena met the Weyrlingmaster -- the man in charge of training all the new dragons and riders -- and learned the basics of dragon care and flight drills and...came to the realization that Weyr training was sadly deficient. She was learning more about safety and combat flight formation in the gossip journals in the archives than in her training with the other weyrlings.

In true Jahena fashion, if she wanted something done right, she had to do it herself. She did her weyrling training under Weyrlingmaster G'laren, of course, but she supplemented her training by practicing on her own time with Alimbeth, off of notes taken from the archives. Slowly, she began to overtake the Weyrlingmaster, as her fellow weyrlings began to come to her for knowledge and demonstrations and clarity that G'laren wasn't providing.

She edged him out completely and took his job as soon as Alimbeth was old enough to fly.

Other weyrwomen, bronzeriders, weyrfolk, even townsfolk questioned the wisdom of a teenage mercenary captain queenrider becoming Weyrlingmaster. Many complained, more demanded Weyrwoman Sandasa do something about the menace before she did any real damage.

Sandasa, however, had been meaning to replace G'laren anyway, as soon as she found someone above his level of competence (no use replacing him with someone even less capable, after all). She waved off the concerns and promised she would act if and when it became necessary, but she wanted results before she did anything official.

Ultimately, Sandasa officially appointed Jahena as weyrlingmaster. She was a competent leader, she spoke clearly, she trained caution as well as ingenuity, she focused on safety as well as utility, form and function, everything that the new riders needed to learn to be the best dragonriders they could possibly be, best prepared for anything that Teragaia and the Illogical Field could throw at them. She wasn't kind or popular, of course, but she was thorough, and she was intimidating enough that weyrlings tended to remember what she taught them.

Jahena was nineteen when she was confirmed as Weyrlingmaster, and now she's thirty seven, though by looking at her hard-edged, gaunt, weathered face, one might almost guess her age at a decade older. Her cheeks are sunken in and her cheekbones entirely too prominent to be appealing, chin strong enough to be called masculine, jaw stubborn, cold grey-blue eyes a winter sky threatening a storm. She keeps her blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, or some variation of a ponytail, at all times to keep it out of her face and out of her way. Seen without her flight jacket, Jahena is usually dressed in some kind of tank top shirt, which shows off her whipcord muscles and her tattoos, including the Pit Viper tattoo around her left wrist. She's tall, about 5'11", lean, pure gristle all the way down to the bone all over her body.

She's an abrupt, abrasive woman, Jahena is, balancing infinite operational patience against zero tolerance for stupidity. She tends to be direct and succinct, sometimes to the point of insult, though insult is rarely the point. Her apathy about the feelings of others means she's as ambivalent about their anger as she is about their hurt. The point is always the point, whatever's relevant to the situation objective of the moment. Haven Weyr has become her company, which she'll defend until her dying day, but don't expect sensitivity from the last sitting captain of the Pit Vipers.

By contrast, Alimbeth is startlingly politic about many things. Though a pedigree Pernese gold with not a drop of wild dragon blood in her, Alimbeth is disturbingly intelligent, and beyond that, perceptive. Nuanced. She grasps connections in ways most humanoids can't, and worse yet, she's manipulative as all hell when she thinks she needs to be. Alimbeth is a puppeteer when she puts her eerily sharp mind to it, and even Jahena is occasionally alarmed by her capacity to orchestrate. Together they make the second in command of Haven Weyr, right hands to Sandasa and Yuleth.

Gul'drek'kathar Tribe of Orc


Ulthren = deceased Chief, rightful leader, had visions that led the tribe to the Haven area
Spear = Dhundak, leader of the tribe
Axe = Arzor Stormbringer
Arnidak - Bold (half-)orc child, approximate age 7
Urzog - Hunt Leader