Description
Thalara Vess is a paradox made flesh—beautiful and terrible in equal measure. Her face bears the elegance of elven nobility, yet her expression is forever touched by something unsettling, as though she is listening to a voice no one else can hear. Her features are graceful, her posture regal, but her eyes… her eyes are wrong. They gleam with too much depth, like dark water that reflects nothing back.
Her hair, pale as ivory silk, cascades around a face both serene and haunted. When she smiles, it is a gesture that never reaches her gaze. In moonlight, her beauty is ethereal; in firelight, it becomes monstrous.
Personality
Thalara is a woman of deep yearning and deeper discontent. She was once patient, gentle, even kind—but something in her heart always ached for more than the quiet grace expected of her. To those who knew her before her fall, she seemed like a dreamer trapped in a gilded cage.
When she met Malrith Kelbirn, that longing found direction—and ruin. He offered her meaning beyond the stillness of court life, purpose in the form of worship, and love wrapped in revelation. Her devotion to him became an obsession, and through him she discovered the forbidden allure of Taelkor’s creed: that destruction was merely the purest form of truth.
Now, her mind dances on the edge between devotion and delirium. She speaks with the calm of a prophet and the cruelty of a blade. To some, she is a saint of the Black Star; to others, a murderer whose heart was consumed long before her flesh followed.
Background
Born into a lesser branch of the Vess line, Thalara was married young to Serath Vess, a decorated captain of Vel Enweir’s northern forces. Their union was respectable, even tender at times, but never happy. Thalara moved through her life as one moves through ritual—dutiful, silent, half-asleep.
It was during her husband’s postings in Balandel that fate intervened. There, she met Malrith Kelbirn, a half-elf emissary from distant Lusteris, visiting under the guise of trade and diplomacy. In truth, his mission was darker: the quiet rekindling of the Order of the Black Star. To Thalara, he was not a heretic but a revelation—someone who saw her hunger, her emptiness, and called it sacred.
The two met in secret for months, hidden by shadow and pretense. When at last Malrith’s work in the city was complete and he prepared to depart, Thalara refused to be left behind. One night, she poisoned her husband’s wine, kissed his brow as he died, and walked away from her home without a word.
Those who searched for her found only rumors: a woman seen traveling north beneath a moonless sky, her eyes alight with black fire; whispers of a noble’s wife reborn as the Banshee Princess, consort of the Starborn.
To this day, the House of Vess does not speak her name aloud. Yet among the cults of Taelkor, her name is whispered in reverence—Thalara the Faithless, Thalara the Awakened.