‘Aries’
(formerly Arian Atheev’a)
Arian was the only child of Enhbur Atheev’a, a wealthy and respected duke of the land. She was born on the fourteenth of April in the city of Bastari, where she was tutored strictly in academics from the ripe age of five years-old.
Arian spent her adolescence attending formal royal assemblies, meeting with other families of nobility and being taught the ways of etiquette, history, geography, music and philosophy, at which she surpassed all in her league. She was a beautiful girl, referred to by her associates as “Enhbur’s Beautiful Fledgling”. Arian was well known for being a quiet, rare beauty with a love for all things and a smile that could brighten the cloudiest day.
Her training in the arcane began when she was sixteen. Various wizards among the nobles had told the Duke that his daughter emanated a sparkling magical talent and that she would, if trained, make an admirable sorceress. In effect, Arian’s parents admitted her to the local school of magic, where she trained heavily for a number of years - presenting just the magical talent the affluent wizards were referring to.
By seventeen, Arian fell in love with the commander of the Noble Guard, Lian Enth-ther, and, with the Duke’s permission, agreed to marry him but a year after they had met. Her father planned the opulent wedding for months; it was to be held aboard a pleasure boat known as The White Star, far out into the Western Sea, the very location he and his wife had uttered their vowels. The whole city was in anticipation of the wedding, much of its people waving goodbye to the bride-to-be as she set sail into the West.
The three-day journey into the ocean (as was tradition) ran smoothly, with almost 400 nobles, friends, associates and servants aboard. On the fateful day of the wedding, however, Arian’s life changed dramatically, and not in the sense that she had anticipated. Only hours before the ceremony, as all of the passengers (the bride and groom included) had readied themselves for the reception, an unexpected collision with a sharp, submerged bank of rocks resulted in The White Star taking on an enormous amount of water. Within moments, it became apparent that the ship was to sink, and rapidly.
The ship’s sinking was something the designers of the pleasure boat had never anticipated, so very few lifeboats had been supplied. In the frenzied panic to hurry the nobles (particularly the bride and groom) onto the lifeboats, the ship began to buckle and turn, a fire breaking out on its north side. The goings on aboard The White Star thereafter are unknown, though there were thought to have been no survivors - the Duke, Duchess, his daughter, Arian, and her fiancé were all reported to have died in the freezing waters of the Western Sea.
This claim was almost true; all of the passengers had perished, but one - Arian. In the struggle and confusion of the ship’s sinking, as the boat’s very structure began to crack and separate, Arian had been cast into the ocean. Wearing only her beloved wedding dress, she had clambered onto a piece of floating rubble and fallen unconscious from the exertion of the scarring tragedy.
Several hours later, by which time almost all of the passengers had perished, a pirate ship, captained by the famous Aslarr Silverboot, sailed past the sight of a beautiful, silver-haired bride on the verge of death, floating through the ocean. His crew, eager for a female presence onboard, had ushered him to allow her onboard. As she was carted on deck, Aslarr was stunned by Arian’s resemblance to his daughter, who had tragically passed away thirty years beforehand. Denying his crew the indulgence of raping the unconscious woman, the captain took her in and nursed her to health.
When she awoke, Silverboot discovered that the woman had no memory of how she had come to be floating adrift in the middle of the freezing ocean, nor did she have any recollection of where she was born, who her parents were or even her own name. The pirate, a usually brutal and harsh man who sorely missed his beloved daughter, lied to Arian, telling her that she was his daughter and that she had fallen overboard and was merely suffering from amnesia due to the shock.
Arian’s new father renamed her Aries and educated her in the way of the pirate. Being a trained wizard himself, he discovered that Aries seemed to retain an extraordinary level of knowledge of the arcane - assumedly remaining from her past life. He continued her training in magic and watched the once stranded woman become more and more ruthless and learned by the day.
Many years passed and Aries (Arian) became a pirate worthy of her father’s name. Though Silverboot had absolute authority, the crew knew not to upset the beautiful yet fearsome “daughter” of their captain.
Ten years after her wedding day, Silverboot, on his deathbed, told Aries of her true nature and that he was not her true father. Experiencing a mixture of confusion and anger, Aries stormed from the room, leaving Silverboot to die alone. Instantaneously inheriting his ship, his crew and his riches, Aries was left free to run the ship how she pleased.
Aries now spends much of her time considering her past and desperately attempting to remember her origin. She has a harsh rule over her ship and is known to be quick-tempered, manipulative and merciless, everything her adopted father was. And yet, on very rare occasions, Aries’ crew would catch a short glimpse of a different woman within their captain, a warmer, almost charming individual (the receding personality of Arian).
