"I won't fail them."
BASICS
RETIRE INFO: Adopt
NAME: Sayla, born Artesia
GENDER: Female
PRONOUNS: She/her/hers
ORIENTATION: Taken, thank you very much for asking
BIRTHDATE: Early Winter 2747
AGE: 22 as of Early Spring 2769
LOCATION: High Reaches Weyr
OCCUPATION: Dragonrider, apprentice healer
WING: Healer's
APPEARANCE
EYES: Blue
HAIR: Blonde, worn short
HEIGHT AND BUILD: 5'6, slender
PLAY-BY: Sayla Mass, Gundam
FULL APPEARANCE: Sayla is a lovely young woman, with refined features, clear blue eyes and light blonde hair cut into a short bob for convenience. She usually dresses in typical rider style, riding leathers or the sort of comfortable clothes that could be worn under riding leathers, although she does own a few more elaborate dresses for hatchings and gathers. Her demeanor is typically composed and professional. Her voice still contains hints of a Bitran accent, particularly when she's tired or has had a glass or two of wine.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY: Sayla is, at first glance, a quiet girl occupied by her duties. She wants to be a good rider and healer and when she is in the infirmary or on the training grounds, focuses fully on being the best she can. She does her best to remain composed and professional, offering kindness to wingmates and patients when she can.
Which isn't to say Sayla is the perfect healer. As hard as she tries to suppress her feelings while at work, she still has them. And if someone is getting in the way of keeping her riders alive? Or not pulling their own weight? She won't hesitate to chew them out and pull them back in line, regardless of whether or not it's her place to take charge. She takes losses hard and often personally. Although she still has not completed her training, due to candidacy and riding taking priority over her apprenticeship, she will overstep when she thinks she knows best. Her patients are her responsibility and if anything goes wrong because she waited too long and didn't do enough...She doesn't think she could live with that. Even if she causes more harm by intervening than she would have by waiting, at least she's doing something, shard-it, instead of sitting back and watching them bleed. Her distaste for inaction can make her impetuous and compromise her judgment.
Sayla's weyrmate and friends see a softer side to Sayla when she's off-duty. Life can't be all work and it's important to take time to relax. Sayla cares very much about her friends, and particularly Amuro, and is happy to steal what moments she can to be with them. She tries as hard to be a good friend and weyrmate as a healer and rider and is for the most part kind, although she's still not afraid to tell the ones she loves that they're being hard-headed and need to change course. They are her people, after all, and it wouldn't be a kindness to let them make a big mistake because she was too afraid of hurting their feelings. She is very close with Sacroth and tries to take care of him as much as he insists on taking care of her and to make sure no one takes advantage of his kindness.
Sayla rarely goes by Artesia, although she now acknowledges her past. She has been Sayla most of her life. It was the name under which she became a healer and a rider. Sayla is the woman she spent turns working to become and make worthy. Artesia was a stranger with a different life, whose mantle Sayla would have no interest in assuming, even if she could. She prefers being able to fall in love instead of marrying for political advantage and to pursue the purpose she chose for herself instead of being confined the role of a lady holder.
HISTORY
FAMILY:
Birth Mother: Lord Bronte
Birth Father: Lady Lisette
Brother: Char of Bronze Rewloolath (Born Casval)
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: Amuro of Brown Casvath
BIRTHPLACE: Bitra Hold
HISTORY: Artesia was born to a life of privilege, the second child and first daughter of the lord and lady of Bitra hold. She spent her early childhood happy and pampered under the watchful eyes of her parents, their drudges and her doting older brother. Her peaceful existence was shattered when enemy riders attacked Bitra. Casval grabbed her and fled. But she fell off Casval's runner during their escape and found herself lost, alone and confused in the middle of nowhere. She didn't know what had happened or why- only that there'd been dragonfire and screaming and that Casval had always kept her safe before.
Artesia didn't know where she was or where to go, so she simply waited where she was, hoping Casval would come back for her. She was still there when the sun rose and a passing trader caravan found her. When they asked Artesia her name, she didn't give it. Surely Casval wouldn't have run if there wasn't good reason for running. Instead, she made something up and claimed it as her own- Sayla. She liked the sound of that.
As Sayla refused to say who she was, if her family lived or where she came from, the traders had no way of bringing her home. Instead, they brought her to a nearby cothold. The people there agreed to take her in. The cothold was small and poor. Its children received only basic harper lessons from an elderly journeyman who had lived there as long as anybody could remember. He soon realized that unlike the other residents of her cothold, Sayla could already read and write and agreed to care for her himself until she reached apprenticing age.
Sayla's memories of Bitra faded, although she never forgot her real name or where she truly came from. She never spoke of it, even as she grew older and came to trust her new family. After all, she still didn't know why Casval had taken her away, that long ago night, and she was happy. If the truth came out, everything would change. And maybe it made her a coward, but she was afraid of what that might mean.
Within a few turns, Sayla was old enough to apprentice. The harper instructed her to choose a useful craft to learn. Sayla chose Healing. Her cothold had long made do with traveling journeymen and what first aid they knew. She could make their lives better by learning more and bringing her knowledge home to them.
Life didn't turn out that way. Sayla did indeed apprentice at Healer Hall. She studied hard and learned well. She even struck up a friendship with a child from the nearby weyr, a young smith named Amuro. But on one of her visits to him, when she was seventeen, a dragon told her she had the potential to be a rider herself.
At first, Sayla wasn't sure. She enjoyed her work as a Healer and was good at it. If she became a rider, she wouldn't be able to return and help the cothold that had taken her in. But being a rider was also a noble calling. Pern needed protectors and if she had the potential to be one of them, how could she, in good conscience, refuse?
It didn't hurt that Amuro was a candidate too. She didn't know what it was but there was just something about him...
Sayla agreed to stand. Not long after, a precious little blue named Sacroth chose her for her own, calling her by a name she had never thought she'd hear again, one she had tried to bury deep down but on some level had never stopped considering her own. Artesia. He announced it to all the weyr and just like that, the truth was out. Sayla got to see her brother again and learn that Casval too had found a new life, under a new name, with a dragon to call his own.
Sayla trained as a weyrling and cared for her dragon. When Sacroth was old enough, Sayla went home to meet the parents who had given them up as lost, because they were still her family and should know what had become of her. She spent more and more time with Amuro until she had no choice but to admit even to herself that she was in love with him. When she graduated, she decided to move to High Reaches, away from the chaos of Serapheth's flights and the violence of Fort's newest set of hatchlings. Amuro came with her and the pair became weyrmates in truth.
Sayla joined the Healer's wing, where there was sadly never a shortage of opportunities to hone her craft. Some days, she wondered if she'd chosen wrong, when the new ways proved to offer no more hope of peace than the old, a weyr where the leadership of golds had been replaced not by equality, but by mistrust and hatred. But she was part of a wing, there were people relying on her and Sayla had a life there with her dragon, her weyrmate and her duties. For better or for worse, High Reaches had become home and Sayla had left enough of those behind already. She would stay and do what little she could to make it better.
