Information

[dreamofwings]

➤ Personality

• Eve is a rough and hard type of woman, and it shows through in a lot of things. Along with her style generally being more common work clothes (even when casually dressed, she's in trousers, boots, and a loose shirt), the way she walks and moves gives off a powerful feel to it, though there's a shocking amount of grace in those movements, too. Being a Pegasus Knight means she has a lot of training with that sort of thing, and she can follow along with movements if led a bit too because of it.
  
  
• She speaks like she walked straight out of a bar down by the docks. Her tone is rough and fierce, the sounds of her words often shortened or dropped outright. She's been compared (favorably) to a hawk both in movements and in sound, and it's not an unapt one, especially when she's put against softer, more pleasant-sounding people.
  
  
• Eve's opinion of herself is a weird mix of completely assured and very self-conscious.
  

  ➣ When it comes to the majority of the time/the world, she's completely confident in herself and who she is. Her rough ways, her strong body, the lack of anything really dainty, they're all stuff she's proud of. She's a soldier and a fighter, she has been one since she was very young, and she's worked her ass off all her life -- and nearly died quite a few times -- to get the well-deserved reputation of a powerful knight she has right now. She'll either match insult for insult, laugh it off, or just ignore the person and let it roll off her back. Many a sneering soldier has tried to insult her "womanliness", only to find Eve laughing roaringly in his face. The only time she rises to insults or lets them cloud her judgement are if they're about sensitive topics, such as her hometown or her close friends.
  
  ➣ However, all of this breaks down when it comes to high class events or people born fairly high. Eve has a very dim view of most nobles, and while she's polite out of necessity to them, she absolutely keeps a tall, icy wall between them and her. As such, any time she's intentionally dragged past that wall, she becomes very unsettled and unsure. Her confidence is never lost, of course, but she simply doesn't know how to deal with anything formal outside of military matters at all. She feels like she doesn't belong, and if she's forced to dress up, she'll get nearly dysmorphic because the "her" that's made fancy and who she really is don't match at all. What doesn't help is that she has to repress her accent and very common way of speaking, which means she has to carefully sound out her words, giving a lot of people the impression that something is wrong with her.

  
  
• Because of this, a lot of people assume Eve hates femininity and is against it, but that's simply not true. It is true that, overall, Eve tends to display more masculine traits; she prefers function over looks, she prefers to have weapons around at all times, she doesn't care much about being more than clean, and she's heavily muscled and rough rather than lither and thinner. But while most people see that as "male" and act accordingly, Eve doesn't. It's just how she, and some soldiers, are, whether they're men, women, or neither, and that inherently makes how she is not related to being a man at all. To her, the opposite is true: some men like to wear makeup, put on dresses, look like gorgeous, and that inherently makes feminine traits disconnected from being female. She doesn't reject "being female" any more than she rejects "being masculine"; both of them are who she is. The problem that arises is that Eve simply... doesn't really show the femininity in very obvious ways. She's caring, adoring, dotes on people she likes or kids, is happy to just lay around and relax, and even is fairly skilled at sewing, but because she rejects getting dolled up and going to fancy parties, a lot of these traits are missed. The fact of the matter is, Eve would be more than happy to get a bit dressed up, but the problem is in the "a bit" part. She's the type to wear flat shoes, simple dresses, her hair up, and pretty but simple earrings, and yet in most cases, that sort of stuff is overshadowed by far more fancier things... not to mention any of that being expensive in general, and since she rarely has chances or reasons to dress up -- even if she wants to -- she just sees it as a waste of money.
  
  
• That caring trait is a pretty well known part of her, though. Eve will absolutely dote on her mount, Hades, to the point that she's spent a whole day cleaning the pegasus up after a particularly nasty battle in a swampy area. She'll also gladly give her coat or cloak to people who are cold, regularly donates money to orphanages or beggars, even hires those beggars for simple, temporary work, and more so besides. For anyone she loves, in any way, she'll go however far she has to go in order to take care of them and make them happy.
  
  
• She's far more intelligent than some people seem to think. While she couldn't pass any book tests, put her in the field, in nearly any situation, and she'll either know what to do already or be able to learn what she should do. With hands-on stuff, in the field, she's a genius and a quick learner, and it's saved her life more than a few times. However, in any sort of school setting, or less hands-on stuff like learning math and science, she completely blanks.
  
  
• Her loyalty is nearly unbreakable. Once she's bonded to someone or swore an oath, she sticks to it through hell and high water... but not through morals. If the person she's serving is terrible, cruel, hateful, or doing awful things, Eve has no qualms defecting or working with others to bring them down -- but subtly. For high ranking people, you can't just fight them, and she's willing to hunker down and stay "loyal" for however long it takes to protect others or deseat them.
  

➤ Abilities

• Being a Pegasus Knight, Eve is used to fighting in the air from horseback, and used to all the control that needs to not get whiplash or fall off. She's also not the least bit scared of heights because of it, and knows how to safely navigate things like cliffsides out of that and practice.
  
  
• She hasn't neglected her ground combat, however. There's way too many times she might be forced to fight on foot, so she's made sure to heavily train in that as well, and even slipped in some hand to hand fighting to cover the base of being disarmed, too.
  
  
• She mixes using lances/spears and magical spells. The magic spells were a later addition to her armory, so she's not as good with them, but she's always manifested strong magic and sometimes uses lances that she can channel it through.
  
  
• Her partner Pegasus is a stallion named Hades. His fur is pitch black, with his mane and tail being a dark purple, and his eyes are a deep, blood-like red. While Eve leans towards lighter and paler colors in armor most times, or just leaves the leather its natural color, Hades look ensures that her arrival or swooping down is something that deeply intimidates foes.
  
  
• She has fairly good leadership skills, having led a mercenary troupe (the infamous Leinfar Mercenaries) most of her life. However, she's just fine following others if they match her morals and aren't pricks to her.
  
  
• She can sew fairly well. Not enough to make her own clothes, but being responsible for patching what she had and not having the money to buy new ones made her pick this up out of necessity.
  

➤ History

Eve was born in the small mining town of Leinfar, fairly close to the capital but still a few days travel off the road. She was an only child, her mother having died in childbirth, leaving her father and her aunt to raise her. Neither of them had any interest in a "prim princess", considering their very low status and poor nature, and so from the time she could walk and talk Eve was trained in physical aspects.

From her father, she learned how to mine, how to inspect shafts, how to read rocks to find the best ores. Once she was old enough for it to be safe, he began taking her with him on trips, even pushing her to dig for little bits at a time to start strengthening her. These gave her a sharp intuition about cave systems, on what she was taught and more, but it also developed in her a distaste for them. Eve knew, from early on, that she simply didn't want to be underground. As she was resting outside as her father dug away one day, the sight of a hawk diving through the air captured her heart, and from then on, her dreams were of it, of soaring through the clouds and the freedom the open sky could give. Unfortunately, though she knew of knights and pegasi, she was a poor mining girl, and that dream was all it would remain.

Yet even so, it haunted her. Not just the desire for the sky, but the awe she felt seeing the soldiers march, the gleaming armor, and the skill from when they would occasionally spar outside of town when marching past. One night, she broke down to her aunt, telling her about all of it, even though she expected to be scolded. And scolded she was... but far more lightly than she thought, with her aunt telling her to just focus on her father's teachings until her next birthday.

When it came, her aunt asked her if she still had that dream. When Eve answered yes, her aunt placed an old lance in her hand, then told her that she was to come with her every morning now instead. Her father was clearly unhappy, but the two of them had just as clearly talked this over, and from then on, Eve was put through the harshest training her -- to her surprise -- formerly military aunt could think of. She meant it out of love, to make sure that Eve wouldn't crack under pressure, exertion, or sneers, and Eve excelled in every aspect. Though rough at first, she was a hard worker at heart, and as the years passed, she developed more and more from a little mining girl into a skilled fighter.

Eventually, on her 18th birthday, her aunt and father presented her with a set of leather armor and a metal lance, both brand new, that they had saved up to buy for a long time. There was no feast, nor even more than a tiny cupcake, as all the money had gone to the equipment -- and to a small collection of funds for her to take with her -- but Eve didn't care. It was precisely what she wanted, and all three of them cried as they hugged each other tightly. That morning, Eve left Leinfar, intent on starting her life as a soldier.

[stuff about finding Hades, training, armies, etc. here]

Disillusioned by the nobles and frustrated with all the backhanded "compliments", Eve took a temporary leave from the army, intent on heading home. It had been a long while since she passed by, after all, and her family had stopped sending her letters, so clearly it was a pretty busy time. And as much as she hated the underground, maybe a bit of mining beside her dad would be comforting.

It wouldn't be a comfort she'd get. The lack of letters hadn't been from a busy time, but from a lack of anyone to write them, because the Leinfar she arrived to was nothing but a burnt-down husk of a ghost town. Only a handful of people still lived among the ruins, her aunt included; everyone else had been killed when a group of infamous bandits had sacked the town and set it aflame. In a fury, Eve rushed back to the city, demanding an audience with the king. This group had been one they had gotten multiple reports about, so why hadn't he done anything?! He could've prevented this!

And in an action that shattered Eve's faith in high-born completely... the king dismissed her, and her town, as "unimportant" compared to his petty little land wars and his army looting other countries. She wanted to scream at him, to punch him, to call him all kinds of names. And yet, for the first time in her life, Eve's anger didn't burn -- it froze. Her rage ran cold and deep, like the darkest part of the arctic ocean, and without a word she calmly unfastened the medal on her uniform, dropped it to the floor, and walked out.

She went to her friends in the kingdom and armies and told them of her experience and her plan. A handful followed her. The rest she left behind, just like the king, and spread her wings wide across the kingdom. Those who had been ignored, neglected, who had felt the brunt of the king's greed, she gathered, from a young girl whose parents had been lynced without a trial to her very own aunt. And with these people, she disappeared for two years.

But once those two years were up, the kingdom entered a bloody era.

Bodies of criminals and bandits began to turn up, either slaughtered on the dirt and left there for the vultures, or strung up high on display for those with more heinous crimes. Evangaline had returned under the name of "Blackfeather", and those ragtag, suffering, hungry people she took with her were no longer sickly commoners, but trained soldiers, with all the discipline that she had learned... and all the hatred burning in her own heart.

The name of the "Leinfar Mercenaries" spread, and spread fast.

It took scant half a year for the problem criminals the king dismissed to be finished, but by that point, it was far too late. The Leinfar Mercenaries were known as vicious fighters, yes, but also fair ones, upholding a moral code and treating the people who came to them as they had treated others, regardless of status or possessions. They also took only the payment one could afford to handle whatever problems the asker wanted. From the poor, it could be a day's work of gold, or even just a loaf of bread; from the rich, they had to pay an immense amount, or the mercenaries would just laugh them out of the camp.

Realizing that his people were turning to them rather than bother with him, the king first tried to stamp out the mercenaries. But whether by guile or force, his soldiers were repelled, and the civilians would passively promise to his face and stop talking openly... but behind his back, in the dark allies that even thieves were clearing out for innocent people -- some out of morals, some because the mercenaries paid them off -- they would turn to the mercenaries again. Seeing that throwing his weight wouldn't work, the king instead tried to bribe them -- which also failed. Finally, he went to meet them himself, and was shocked to see the very woman that had walked out on him sitting at the head of the caravan's ring, in a wooden "throne". She sneered at him, just as he had done her, and once the king was about to explode with rage, she dismissed him, citing the words he had told her right back at him.

He and his guards were none too gently thrown out of the ring.

[final bit about the king nearly dying/conflict, the Mercenaries starting to roam, etc.]