"Harrowhark had pretty much cornered the market on wearing black and sneering. It comprised 100 percent of her personality. Gideon marveled that someone could live in the universe only seventeen years and yet wear black and sneer with such ancient self-assurance."
BASICS
NAME: Harrowhark ("Harrow")
GENDER: Female
PRONOUNS: She/her/hers
ORIENTATION: Homoromantic asexual
BIRTHDATE: Winter 2754
AGE: 23 as of Winter 2776
LOCATION: Fort Weyr
OCCUPATION: Healer Apprentice, Candidate
WING: N/A
APPEARANCE
EYES: Very dark brown
HAIR: Black; short
HEIGHT AND BUILD: 5'1", very thin
PLAY-BY: Harrowhark Nonagesimus (The Locked Tomb)
FULL APPEARANCE:
As strong as she is mentally, Harrowhark appears weak physically -- which is accurate. Despite having been at a crafthall for several turns, she still vaguely appears malnourished around the edges, due to her having no desire to or simply not thinking about eating rather than a true lack of resource. She is short at five foot one or so, with long waiflike limbs that she keeps covered as much as possible, clothing simple and black by preference. The only skin Harrow wants anyone to see is on her face, which means that when permissible she is also wearing gloves.
Harrow has high-arched eyebrows and round, slightly wide set apart very-dark-brown eyes that she accents with kohl. Her features are all very pointy, from the edge of her chin to her nose to the angles of her jaw. Her ears are pierced, two holes in each earlobe adorned with a wherrybone stud and a longer bone piece pierced into the upper cartilage.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY:
Harrowhark is extremely intelligent. She is remarkably fast on the uptake, learns well and retains huge amounts of information quickly. Because of this, she has a massive superiority complex, and thus her intelligence is pretty much the only thing she has going for her.
Harrow - because she has no friends, we can't say her friends call her Harrow, but we can say people do since a lot of the time her name is shortened to that by anyone who has to deal with her - is arrogant. She doesn't like most people, doesn't appear to care about being alone, is frequently found sneering at others who don't achieve as highly or as easily as she can. This becomes an issue in candidacy, because tasks of a physical nature are things she's currently quite bad at! But oh is she going to pretend she isn't struggling one bit.
Deep down, her arrogance is hiding a fact that she's afraid of being out of her element, uncomfortable with people to say the least (she is somewhat fearful of any type of interaction that is not working), and Weyr life is twisting her head around right good when she's new to it. But she is pretending to have acclimated and be expecting anything, because any vulnerability is something she immediately hides. It is important to her that people respect her, even perhaps look up to her for her skill (and her workaholicism, which she considers to be a good thing, but which is actually running her toward terrible burnout). No one can know that she is ever lonely, or that she ever thinks she may have taken too much on. Failure is not an option. She is also somewhat paranoid; not to a true diagnostic level, but Harrow has never known the ability to fully trust another human being even when there's no logical reason that she shouldn't do so.
On politics, well. Harrow clings to tradition in the same way that her parents do; it is for the sake of tradition itself, and for the protective veil of things not changing. Pern has worked fine the way things have been, hasn't it? (Please ignore the fact that this is absolutely not correct.) Maybe conflict over change itself is the problem here, and nothing really needs to change. Perhaps people just need to stop fighting about it. Her views on the leadership of the Weyrs are thus that they should be run by a Senior Weyrwoman and the rider of whomever catches her queen because that is how things always have been done. She was too young to understand Golre, but the way her parents taught her, this was one mad goldrider. If dragon hierarchies weren't supposed to exist, why would dragons even be so distinctly color-coded? Dragons must know how dragons are supposed to work.
As for how humans are supposed to work in relation to dragons - from what she's heard no one seems to have figured out the best methods yet. Not that that has anything to do with her either.
HISTORY
FAMILY: Priamhark, father; Pelleamena, mother
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: None
BIRTHPLACE: Drearburh Minehold, outside Telgar
HISTORY:
Harrowhark was finally born—to parents who had been desperately trying for a child for a good decade—just before the end of the Interval War and the beginning of the Pass. Her family lived in a small minehold, where her father was its Holder and very proud of the output. Her mother, Pelleamena, was nominally a journeyman Healer but only really worked when her services were absolutely needed to support the miners. Her listlessness had lifted somewhat when Harrowhark (named largely for her father, who was named largely for his mother, who was named largely for her father) was born and by the time Harrow was about six had started engaging with her Craft again. Harrow's parents were always distant, and while they seemed to be proud of her, whether or not they loved her was a question as good as any. It was almost as if they struggled to love her.
She was one of two true children in Drearburh; the other was a fosterling girl a year older than she, Gideon, who Priamhark had taken on for reasons Harrow could never comprehend, since she thought Gideon was terrible most of the time. Gideon felt the same way about Harrowhark, and they affectionately tormented each other throughout their childhood. Other kids might have played with each other, or to the same end: Harrow and Gideon were constantly trying to one-up each other and also frequently trying to injure each other, but the adults never let them come to any harm or even any real hurt. (The adults mostly assumed Gideon was nothing but trouble, and the Holder's daughter was an angel. Gideon actually had the more fun-loving personality, and Harrow was cooler and more indifferent to "fun," but Gideon goaded her into participating and Harrow secretly liked Gideon. Not that she'd ever tell her that. Gideon secretly liked Harrow, too, but told her to her face that she was an evil stick of an excuse for human.)
When Harrow was ten her father gave her a firelizard from his gold's clutch; the largest egg, likely not gold but hopefully either gold or bronze. It produced instead a large brown, but Harrow was delighted with him nonetheless and named him 'Condyle' after a word she'd liked on her mother's anatomical plates. That was around when her interest in bones began, having started to draw the plates over and over in a repetitive fashion until she was able to reproduce them, and until she knew everything about them. But she was only a child, and dreams of a craft were far away - she spent her time then showing off her precociousness by training Condyle. Mimicking the miners, she taught him to deliver and return messages, fetch small items and try to eat Gideon's hair. (Maybe the last one was not mimicking the miners.)
She'd been studying everything she could get her hands and eyes on about the human body as long as she could read, and longed to go learn at Healer Hall as soon as she knew there was such a place. But Priamhark really wanted Harrow to stay home and take over the minehold, as she was the only heir. This created a lot of tension, as Harrow actually raised her voice and fought back against her parents - something very against her nature, but she was desperate to take in additional knowledge,t o become something studious. She was raised with duty thought most important, but while she loved her home, she thought she could bring more to it as a Healer.
And eventually, she was allowed to go.
She thrived. She did well. At Healer Hall, Harrowhark still had no friends, but she was regarded as a very clever and talented apprentice, even if she was occasionally teased for things like forgetting to eat and not actually wanting to socialize. The other apprentices didn't bond with her or vice versa, but her superiors supported her, and she studied with great dedication. For three turns that was all there was to Harrowhark's life.
Then she was Searched by dragons from Fort Weyr, in the late summer of 2771. Just after a hatching, so it would be a wait. Time to get used to things.
She should likely not have accepted. But when she was asked—when she was actually wanted somewhere by someone, even if it was a dragon who she'd never met and may not meet again—she couldn't say no. Someone, somewhere, wanted her; thought she should be somewhere; wanted her to try something ... and there was that typical siren call of 'duty.' Duty to the dragons, duty to Pern.
So she said yes, no matter her career aspirations.
Giving candidacy and healer apprenticeship both 100% is literally impossible - there isn't enough time and there's no way for a single human to be in two places at once. This doesn't stop Harrowhark from thinking she's going to find a way to accomplish this anyway and not burn out horribly.
She's going to be wrong.
