Kalindra: Dark one from the sea
"Lar...ia..vi..en...La..ri..a...vi...en...La...ria...vien..."
Kali woke from her nightmares and listened to sounds of her sleeping party. She dared not open her eyes or give any sign of wakefulness and resisted the urge to touch her left shoulder blade. Too many of her group did not require sleep and she could not afford to let on about the turmoil ever constant within her. She forced her breathing to remain even and her muscles to relax. The picture of peaceful sleep even though her mind raced and her fingers stretched toward the hilt of her sword. She longed to leave the party but knew she needed the experience of battle and despite her desires she knew she had become wrapped up in some bigger plot.
From that first moment when this party of wayward adventurers had met the man Dar, a horse master and a mercenary, she had seen the opportunity for world and battle experience. A cleric, a warlock, a dragonborn paladin, a pair of wizards, a rogue, a pair of rangers, a warden; they would be her chance for vengeance.
She'd stolen her mother's bronze dragon scale armour and her father's long sword from Dar and followed the adventurers. Posing as the bastard half-elf child of Dar, a role she had played for a decade, she joined the group and begun her quest.
The New Alliance suspected nothing, trusting her story instantly. She proved herself in battle and that was enough for them. No questions of her past were needed; the guise of bastard better than any magical cloak or mind altering spells. She could move through the world without suspicion, hone her skills, and hunt; always hunt.
She breathed a silent prayer for courage to her war god Kord than listened to the sounds of the sleeping city.
The silence here was so different from that of the wilderness she had spent the past decade living in and yet it instilled a sense of peace in her she had not felt for a very long time. The bustle of the crowds and noise of the market reminded her strongly of her childhood home. The home she would never again know. Pain rose within her for the world she had been born into and lost, for the little girl with pigtails whose innocence had been washed away, and for the people who had been decimated in a burning city.
She would not let tears fall or a whimper escape. She funnelled that pain into the anger and bloodlust that would drive her actions in the coming battles. Without that fuelling her, she would not be able to manage. There was little left that kept her going these days; she needed all the pain of her past to keep her going.
With a force of will Kali slipped back into tortured sleep.