Ellone the Golden

Name: Ellone the Golden
Race: Human
Sex: Female
Age: 67
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Appearance
Tall for a human female, Ellone stands about five feet and nine inches tall even without her boots. Her skin is the pale golden brown of mixed heritage, and her hair is dark brown…barring what is streaked with grey. At least, usually. Sometimes her magic backfires on her and her appearance changes in color, shape, size, gender, or species, but after over sixty years of studying wild magic, she mostly has that under control. Usually. Just like she likes having the whiskey-gold eyes of her birth when wild surges don’t alter the color. A wizard, she dresses in golden robes as a sign of her House and station and is rarely seen without her white dragon familiar.

Personality
If Ellone is two things she is proud and she is stubborn. Traits instilled in her by her bloodline, her raising, and her pursuit of, of all things, wild magic, the most uncontrolled and undisciplined discipline of magic in the history of the Weave. As far as she’s concerned, there’s next to nothing she can’t do if she sets herself to it. Even killing gods is not beyond her purview. She was born into a society that placed women as less than cattle and established herself as an effective lord of her own House, a new noble wizard House in the Hosttower of the Arcane Brotherhood – a Brotherhood that wanted no sisters but had to make way nonetheless. Grand ambitions aside, Ellone is generally well-meaning and occasionally helpful, but she really doesn’t let things stand in her way, no matter what they are.

History
The story of Ellone the Golden begins in the Hosttower of the Arcane Brotherhood in Luskan, with the archmage Edorand the Saffron and his favored slave, Anandra.

Perhaps it’s fairer to say the story begins on the lesser-traveled roads just south of Rasheman, where bandits struck down Anandra’s family – the men at least – and took the women and children for sale. First she was sold to nearby Thay, until they tired of her. After that, she was shipped to Mulhorand to be used as her masters there wished. From there she was even sold to the drow of the Underdark, though she remains grateful that an Arcane Brother, skimming the dark market for interesting goods, set eye upon her and found her to his liking. Technically slavery is illegal along the Sword Coast, but Luskan has always had ways around that.

Read the bylaws for “imported indentured servitude”.

As Edorand the Saffron’s personal bodyslave, Anandra’s duties included keeping her master’s chambers orderly and clean, his laboratory organized, and his bed warm. The lattermost duty eventually resulted in a swollen belly, to which point Edorand was not initially pleased. The audacity of a slave allowing his seed to take root!

And then Ellone was actually born. Edorand looked into her infant face and saw his own eyes looking up at him, full of intelligence and potential, and his mood changed. His bodyslave might have delivered him his legacy in place of a bastard embarrassment. So, as Ellone grew, Edorand continually challenged her, socially and intellectually, and found her intelligence to be equal to his own, if not superior. Despite Luskan’s patriarchal culture, Edorand saw in his daughter not a girl, but his successor. Her unrivaled magical aptitude for her age, her ability to far and away surpass the boys of her so-called peer group, her ability to absorb knowledge so well she could correct her instructors when they went awry in their teaching…

No female is allowed a place in Luskan that is not wife, whore, or slave, not that any of these roles is much different from any other. Edorand, however, forcibly made room for Ellone in the Hosttower, whereupon she took up the mantle of “the Golden” in the Brotherhood of Colors. Edorand also elevated Anandra from slave to wife, her reward for creating such valuable offspring. And for her part, Anandra is well pleased with this new status, for Edorand is as kind a master as she has ever had and to be his wife is more respect than she has ever been afforded. It has made Edorand no friends in the Hosttower, however, as the position of wife to the Saffron was intended for political gain for the daughter of an Arcane Brother or one of the Five Admirals, not a common slave. Edorand made a dangerous political statement in elevating Anandra, citing her as, “having proven herself capable of providing quality offspring, which I doubt these thin-blooded, close-bred wilting daisies are capable of repeating.”

As for the story of Ellone herself, she has been told all her life by nearly every man in her life (excluding her father) that a woman has no place unraveling the mysteries of the Weave. It’s a man’s place, it’s a man’s world, find a husband and know your place, c&^%. Ellone inherited her father’s pride along with his face, however, and she is every bit as stubborn. She refuses to be relegated to Luskan’s idea of a woman’s place. And it was such stubbornness that guided her specialization of magic.

Annoyed as she has always been by the Arcane Brotherhood, Ellone has never been naive enough to think that a narrow worldview on gender politics has made the Colored Brothers anything less than masters at the arcane arts. They are the best at what they do. They are experts to challenge and rival the infamous Red Wizards of Thay, the Greycloaks of Evereska, the Many-Starred Cloaks of Neverwinter. Because they are unpleasant does not make them stupid or unskilled, merely obstinant and obnoxious. In order to earn their respect, whether by impressing them or terrifying them, Ellone would have to master something they had never done before. And of all the schools of magic, only one remained untrodden, uncharted territory: Wild Magic.

Yes, wild magic is chaos. It is pure chaos. But it is not infinitely chaotic. It ebbs and flows like the tide. And if she could master – truly master – wild magic and do something greatly significant, they’d have to take her seriously regardless of her sex. Which is where she began her adventure many years ago, waking up in the dungeons of Waterdeep and being accused of murder.

The pay she and the other accused received for false imprisonment more than covered the purchase of a tavern they called the Wayward Blade. Heroes met, heroics done, a companion drew ire and was malignantly impregnated with the child of an evil god, which Ellone volunteered to take unto herself, using the same transference spell that had been used to target her friend Kaeliel in the first place to free him of his fate. Incidentally the usage of so many transference spells caused a wild surge that was not Ellone’s doing and Ellone ended up pregnant with twins, the second child a manifestation of magic. She named them Issair and Madae after the twins of yore, hoping her children would wear the names better.

Perhaps she doomed them instead. Issair, at least.

Her god-child grew with unnatural speed and intelligence, and preternatural evil that no amount of counter-parenting could undo. Issair went on to follow the voice of his father in his head, chasing domination and conquest.

Ellone and her party killed the father of her second pregnancy, a son she named Karrid. Half black dragon, this one, after the would-be lord of the lands charmed her into an encounter she would not have consented to. She nearly died, but she had the head of a black dragon on the table at her wedding to her drow companion Chakos. And, finally, a partner in life to help her raise her children, even the problematic ones.

They had twin girls, Ginafae and Avrae, together. By this time, their party’s adventures had earned them a mountain fortress in the lands surrounding Waterdeep, flung a little far from the Wayward Blade where they’d started. It was enough space for Ellone to raise her children…and the grandchildren that Issair sent her way.

She swore she would kill Issair’s father. Oh, she’d sworn that long ago, but there was nothing like every new abandoned grandchild showing up on her doorstep to renew that vow and push her bloodthirst to its most creative.

Ellone used the spell Limited Wish to alter a humble cantrip, preparing for the day when she would get to face off against the god Zanbos.

Eventually, her un-spelled wish did seem to come true. Issair came home. Crying. Humbled. Zanbos had punished him too hard and lost his loyalty. Crushed him, and his lover, apparently, underfoot. Ellone could despise everything Issair had ever done, but she could never hate her son, and welcomed him home with open arms and a broken heart.

And then it was time. Ellone and Issair gathered what allies they could and baited Zanbos, making the god angry enough that he would attack on the Solstice, when the barriers between worlds would be weak enough for a god to barge on through to the Prime Material…hopefully forgetting he would be at half strength on the mortal plane. The plan worked perfectly. Ellone stopped time. Wielded her magic to devastating effect, beating Zanbos nearly half to death (and turning herself annoyingly silver in the process) before the battle had even begun. Their allies tore Zanbos apart. And Ellone cast the final spell, the humble cantrip Potato, although in this instance when cast at a god, it became The Golden’s Godbane Potato Variant, unleashing a mighty smite on Zanbos that blew his unholy head off.

She had established herself and the House of the Golden in the Brotherhood of Colors before, but with the death of a god at her hand, who even in Luskan could doubt her now? As it turns out, most everyone.

Still a wild mage. See also, here now. At least her white dragon familiar, Yeridajniosjuth, has managed to make the journey with her. Although he’s more of a dragon and less of a familiar now. Seems like Chakos will be needing the will that Ellone left behind in case of death or mysterious disappearance.

Powers and Abilities
Epic Level Wizard – Ellone the Golden is a master wizard, one of the most powerful wizards Faerun had ever seen before she was slurped up to Teragaia. There is no school of magic from which she is forbidden from casting.

WILD SURGE! – Ellone the Golden may be a master wizard, but she’s also a wild mage, which means her magic may not always do what it’s told. It may do something wildly different, and Ellone may have control over that and she may not. She may also have some degree of control over the Illogical Field, given its similarity to wild magic.

Elder Knows Best – A wild mage in her thirties must be deferred to as an expert in her field if she is still alive. In her forties, a master. Ellone is in her sixties and more besides. An experienced adventurer, mother, and grandmother, she almost certainly has advice whether it’s wanted or not.