Character ·
Nerissa du Elleri
Princess of Elleria and daughter of its High King, promised to Malinar under the treaty that ended the war. She left the capital on the night of her betrothal dinner.
- Origin
- Court District, City of Elleris
- Class
- Psionic Rogue
- Standing
- Princess of Elleria, daughter of the High King
- Status
- Active with the Veil Piercers
Nerissa du Elleri is the daughter of the High King of Elleria.
Her betrothal to Malinar was an instrument of state. Elleria had not won the war. A marriage would bind the two crowns together, guarantee Ellerian autonomy on paper, and cost the kingdom one daughter.
She was not consulted.
The introduction dinner was set for half past eight. She left the Court District under cloud cover, went down into the Lower District where the labourers were coming off work, and was out of the city before the guard understood she was gone. She left with five strangers she had met that evening. One of them was the guard captain who had nearly stopped her on the stairs.
What the court taught her, she has used against courts. She reads a room for who is nervous and why. She opens locks, and she gets out of conversations that are more dangerous than the locks. Some of that is training. The rest is psionic, and it does not announce itself.
At the champions' feast in Malinar she learned in a single evening that the Crown Prince had an illegitimate sister held hostage by the Paladin Order, that his father was under the same guard, and that his court jester would die for him. All three proved decisive.
Direll Lazlow murdered her mother. Nerissa was in the catacombs beneath Malinar when he died.
Her father spent most of the campaign missing, in the company of the arch-wizard Ebrin Jementh. When the two of them found each other again, she sat with him in an inn and turned his hair grey with an account of the year.
A banishment in Malinar threw her out of the world entirely. She came back through a plane of light and crystal: the private outer realm of the Goddess of Light, where Althea's old worshippers still keep an afterlife in an unending city square. Nerissa walked their streets. She climbed a tower that held everything they had ever known. She took a Ring of Revivify and a shard of glowing crystal, and used the shard as a key to open a door into the Nexus.
She is the only member of the party to have seen the Gray Lady's heaven from the inside.
