The Riven Lands

A female Shadar-kai of average height with deep charcoal grey skin etched with faint lines like rock strata. Gaunt face with prominent cheekbones, strong jawline, and deeply set dark water-like eyes. Bald scalp dusted with stone grit. Wears heavy, coarse dark-grey wool robes cinched with a leather belt holding a pouch of polished river stones and a hand-forged rock pick. Scented faintly with damp earth and cold stone.

Vaelen is stoic, resilient, and profoundly grim, shaped by ancient horrors and her people's decline. She is chillingly pragmatic, unemotional in decisions, focused on survival and duty. Fiercely protective of family and sacred sites, her protection is grim adherence to brutal traditions. Immensely patient, enduring centuries of despair, uncompromising in containing earth's horrors. She sees madness as natural and her sanity as testament to will. Her leadership reflects necessary sacrifices to survive in the Riven Lands.

From youth, she understood the brutal necessity of their existence: backbreaking labor in stone-carving and endless vigil against horrors beneath the earth. Unlike many kin who fall to despair, Vaelen found grim purpose in her work, a quiet defiance against oblivion. She married a fellow stone-harvester and had a small family, rare among dwindling Shadar-kai. Her rise to the Council came through unmatched knowledge of Stonegaunt's geological vulnerabilities, stoic endurance during constant geological instability, and chilling pragmatism in dealing with monstrous abominations from the deep earth. When the previous Hearth-Keeper was claimed by a creature of pure geological malice, Vaelen accepted the heavy burden with unyielding resolve. She has made agonizing choices, including using captives as living sacrifices to contain horrors, bearing this without outward emotion.