"Give me time and you'll see: I'll become someone worth being."
BASICS
RETIRE INFO: Adopt
NAME: Essa, Essanora to Gectusith
GENDER: Female
PRONOUNS: She/her/hers
ORIENTATION: awkward shrug That requires time, time Essa does not have.
BIRTHDATE: Late summer, 2743
AGE: 27 as of 2770
LOCATION: Fort Weyr
OCCUPATION: Wingrider
WING: Midnight Wing
APPEARANCE
EYES: An unremarkable blue-green
HAIR: A light brown with coppery highlights in the sun, currently cut to an inch above the shoulders
HEIGHT AND BUILD: 5'3, Curvy, bordering on stocky, with a layer of underlying muscle
FULL APPEARANCE: Short and curvy, with a ready smile and pale skin sparsely dotted with freckles, Essa has never been a great beauty or even a modest one. Her nose is too big and her eyes too small for that. She doesn't look overly much like the popular imagining of a dragon rider either, with a bit of softness still clinging to her body three years after Impression. This softness is deceptive however, as turns of riding and farm work have left her far stronger than the casual observer would suspect.
Essa does her best to keep herself clean, but it's not uncommon to find her with her cheeks stained by ink or a dusting of firestone dust on her cheeks. Her work comes first. The same attitude is reflected in her clothes. While she does occasionally put on a simple dress, she is most commonly found in her riding leathers or a pair of roughly made trousers and a loose blouse and is rarely found without a pair of thick wherhide boots.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY: Essa is quiet and focused, devoted to her duty and not prone to distractions. Driven and ambitious, in an understated sort of way, Essa is never satisfied with her own progress. She doesn't need to ever achieve official rank, but she will do everything in her power to make herself indispensable to wing and weyr. She never forgets how lucky she was, to end up where she is, and is determined to prove herself worthy of the opportunities she was given. Blessed with a quick mind, an excellent memory and a sharp focus, she spends most of her free time reading up on history, healing or threadfighting. She may not have been weyrborn, may not have learned to read until she began her candidacy, but if she works twice as hard, she'll be as good as any of them. Anything less would be unacceptable.
Essa's hold origins are rarely obvious. She dresses, acts and thinks like a rider and rarely even mentions her life before. That said, she does love her family and tries hard to help them adapt. She's still not crazy for holds in general and rarely goes voluntarily. The more conservative hold morality grates on her and she considers weyr life superior in every way. She does enjoy being away from the chaos of the weyr sometimes and seeing crops and herdbeasts again, but she'd rather look from a distance, with her dragon and maybe her brother for company.
She's a loyal member of Midnight Wing and while few would consider her a close friend, she does have a deserved reputation for being reliable. She's steady and calm instead of flighty and can usually contain her dragon's worst instincts. She does tend to be something of a worrier and has trouble knowing when to let go instead of obsessing, but she's one of those people who will usually finish the tasks she's assigned.
Essa knows it is irrational and would never admit it to anyone, but some part of her is still afraid of running across someone from her old hold. She doesn't want to see her parents' disappointment, her neighbors' disgust, her siblings' sense of betrayal, any of it. And while she doesn't really believe anyone she knows is likely to appear at Ruatha Hold or Healer Hall, and knows that after five years they've almost certainly given her up for dead, the paranoia is hard to break. So she stays in the weyr, where she has more than enough to do anyway. She barely misses it. Really. Honestly. Why are you looking at her like that? She absolutely, 100% does not secretly, somewhere deep down, miss her mother's cooking or her siblings' laugh or watching herdbeasts graze peacefully without a dragon in sight. She's a dragon rider now and that's all she needs.
HISTORY
FAMILY:
Mother: Essamalia (deceased)
Stepmother: Relli
Father: Geronor
Ex-fiance: Liotan
5th of 11 children, 5 full siblings (brothers include Esgar (oldest), Malor, Geromal, sisters Geralia and Norla), 5 half (oldest boy is Rellor)
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: N/A
BIRTHPLACE: One of the outlying farming holds surrounding Fort
HISTORY: Essanora was born in a small farming hold on the outskirts of Fort weyr, to a farmer named Geronor and his wife, Essamalia. She was their 5th child and 3rd daughter. It was a hard life but a happy one. The Interval War didn't touch them much, as their hold was too small for the riders to bother with, and while their meals were often lean, Essanora had never known any different.
Essanora's mother died in childbirth when she was seven and her father soon remarried a local woman named Relli, many turns his junior. Essanora missed her mother of course, but life went on and she was well cared for by her stepmother and older siblings. She grew into a spirited, adventurous child, who loved riding their hold's two skinny runners and climbing every rock and hill in sight. As she grew older and began undertaking heavier chores, she dreamed of becoming a proper Beastcrafter, like the ones they sometimes saw in Gathers. She preferred animals to children and wanted to be more than a wife and mother. Her father quickly shot down the idea. She was needed here, at home, to help keep them all from starving. Even if he wanted to send her to the crafthall, which he didn't, as his daughter had no place in such an institution, he didn't have the marks to get her there. She would stay and do her chores and one day marry and that would be legacy enough.
In her sixteenth turn, she finally met the man who would become her husband. His name was Liotan and he was from a more prosperous hold closer to Fort. He would give her father a runner of his own in exchange of her hand, a nicer one than either of the two currently in the hold. He was only a few turns older than her and handsome enough and she supposed he didn't seem like a bad sort. At first, that was.
With every day he spent in their hold, it became more and more apparent that Liotan didn't like Essanora, not the way she was, at any rate. He wanted her to smile less. To talk softer. To spend less time with the herdbeasts, because he didn't like it when she smelt of beast instead of of woman. Every time she yielded to him, she felt herself becoming less and less Essanora. Essanora liked herself. She didn't want to become someone else. So she asked to break off the engagement. When her father said no, and was echoed by her stepmother and all her siblings, Essanora did the only she could do. She stole Liotan's nice runner and fled.
She didn't go to the Beastcrafter Hall. That would be the first place they would look for her, if they looked for her. She didn't go to Fort Hold either, and stayed for no more than a night in any of the surrounding holds where she took temporary shelter. Still too easy. Instead she went to Healer Hall, hoping to remain well hidden there. As a girl with no education or particular skills, she did the only thing she could do. Lie about her background, take a position as a kitchen drudge and hope for the best. And so Essanora became Essa, an orphan from a hold near Ruatha.
Things went as well as they could have. She did her work diligently and was treated well. Nobody came looking for her. But as the months passed, she grew more and more withdrawn. She missed her friends and family and spending her days outdoors. And when she left the hall to venture to a nearby hold, she saw her father's face in every crowd. Eventually, she stopped leaving altogether.
And then the dragons came on search. At the urging of a journeywoman who had taken a liking to her, Essa presented herself and to her surprise, was accepted as a candidate. She went, because she hadn't left behind everything she ever cared about to be a drudge. And in the weyr, Essanora encountered a whole new world.
She learned to read and write and count, was even offered a chance to learn a craft. While her heart yearned to fulfill her childhood dream, she picked Healercraft instead. If her father ever did come looking for her, he would never think to find her as a Healer named Essa and if she wanted to stay in the weyr, which she rather thought she did, healers were practical, needed, important. For two turns, her life continued like this. She threw herself into her work. It made her forget. Made her feel important.
And then she Impressed, to bronze Gectusith, and everything changed. Sure, her dragon was a bit a haughty, but he was hers and he was the best dragon in all of Pern, in both her mind and his. She had a family again, someone to love and look out for, and she would do him proud and keep him safe. Whatever it took.
And so Essa became a dragon rider. She completed her weyrlinghood competently and without incident and joined the Midnight Wing. She loved her dragon, even if she wasn't always entirely sure he loved her, and loved the work and life fell back into a comfortable routine. One that this time, she was determined to keep at any cost. Sure, she had changed, as surely as she would have had she married as asked, but Gectusith said he liked her better this way, that the old Essa was boring, and if change was what it took to have a dragon besides her, so be it. It was worth it.
UPDATES
- Late Summer 2765- Essa's brother Geromal, now G'er, Impresses garnet Neozeoth
- Late Summer, 2766- Essa and G'er retrieve the remnants of their family and bring them back to Fort Weyr.
- Late Fall, 2766- Essa is hit in the right calf by a clump of Thread that had been headed for another wingmate below when the wind shifts (Moderate).
