Player: Rob
Species: Khoravar (Elf-Blooded)
Class: Cleric (Tempest Domain)
Background: Acolyte
Alignment: Lawful Good
Cleric of Kord · Novitiate of Stormward Academy
“I may not be the storm’s fist, but I will be its voice. If I cannot be the thunder, I will be the word that follows.”
Appearance
From Rob’s character sheet art: lean, with dusky violet-grey skin, pointed ears and a close-trimmed black beard; black hair swept back and tied, with a streak of green. Dark layered vestments of black leather banded in bronze, a high wrapped collar, a rust-red sash and tall laced boots. He carries a long dark staff crowned with a green crystal.
Origins
Thalan Lightflower barely remembers the moment his old life ended, only the feeling of salty wind and color. His earliest memory is of his mother sitting on a weathered rock along a blue shoreline, brush in hand, laughing softly as she tried to capture the movement of waves that refused to be still. He remembers the smell of oil paints, the way she tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear, and how she told him that storms were just Kord reminding the world it was alive. Everything before and after that moment is a murky mixture of unknown voices, faces without context, and comfortably worn furniture.
By the time Thalan was brought to the Stormward Academy at eight years old, he was quiet, observant, and already carrying a sense of displacement he couldn’t name. The instructors noted his heritage immediately as a Khoravar with the sharp features of elven blood, but lacking the effortless grace they expected. He tried to make up for it the only way he knew how: effort.
He prayed harder. Trained longer, until his hands shook. Kord, after all, valued strength not just of body, but of will.
Still, his body never quite answered the call the way he hoped. He grew stronger, yes, but only to the level of a well-trained soldier. Not the towering, storm-forged champion he imagined Kord favored. Among the other initiates, his effort rarely produced results.
Bubba
That’s where Robert He’vee (Bubba) came in. Bubba was everything Thalan wasn’t: fluid, instinctive, frustratingly calm. Where Thalan strained, Bubba moved. Their sparring matches became a fixture of Thalan’s early teens: predictable in outcome, always intense. Bubba would disarm him, trip him, or pin him with an almost casual efficiency. Bubba never mocked him. Never gloated. If anything, he seemed to respect Thalan’s refusal to quit.
But respect didn’t change reality. Bubba advanced to higher combat tiers, and Thalan remained with the first forms. Soon, he only remembered Bubba’s complaints that the cider was not as good as back home, never realizing that for Thalan and the other orphans, there was no home to miss.
The redirection came quietly. A conversation with instructors. A shift in schedule. Fewer hours in the sparring ring, more in scripture, history, and divine theory. If Thalan lacked the overwhelming physical presence of Kord’s ideal champions, perhaps he could embody something else: endurance, insight, devotion. For Thalan, it felt like failure.
Ravena
Ravena Rivers kept him from becoming one.
Ravena arrived at the Academy, a storm in human form. Loud, confident, utterly certain that Kord had a purpose for her, and she intended to meet it head-on.
Three years older, she took Thalan under her wing with little ceremony and even less permission. She dragged him out of his own head.
Bubba taught him how to lose with dignity; Ravena taught him how to live with conviction. She sparred with him less delicately, laughed louder than anyone else in the halls, and treated Thalan’s doubts not as weaknesses, but as challenges to be overcome.
“You think Kord only cares about who hits hardest?” she once told him, after knocking him flat on his back. “He cares who gets back up.”
For several years, she was his anchor, training partner, drinking companion (once they could get away with it), and the only person he felt truly saw him. Then she took her vows.
Ravena didn’t hesitate. She became a paladin of Kord with the same intensity she brought to everything else, and then she was gone, sent out into the wider world to test her strength against it.
Her letters were infrequent, chaotic, and unmistakably hers.
Thal, fought a stone giant for water rights two days past. He won’t be seeing or peeing straight for weeks. Should have seen his face.
Thal, get yourself a good sword, a shield, and some mail and get out in the world. Stop hiding in the cells of the academy.
Thalan read each one until the ink felt worn thin. In her absence, the Academy felt smaller. Quieter. Safe, in a way that began to feel suffocating.
Novitiate
By the time Thalan earned his novitiate as one of the first clerics raised entirely within Stormward’s walls, his path was clear, at least on paper. He would serve Kord not as the loudest thunder, but as the steady roll of the storm. Not the first strike, but the one that follows through.
He came to understand something that once felt like a compromise: strength wasn’t singular. Kord was not just the crash of battle, but the courage to face it. Not just victory, but the will to strive. Understanding it and believing it were different things.
Thalan still feels the absence of something unproven in himself.
And then there’s the paintings. The mountains around Stormward Academy are beautiful in a harsh, imposing way. He’s painted them dozens of times: stormlight breaking across jagged peaks, clouds rolling low and heavy, lightning caught mid-strike. But none of them feel right. They’re not the sea. They don’t move the way that memory does.
Now, with Ravena’s words echoing in his mind and his training finally complete, Thalan stands on the edge of something unfamiliar: choice. The wider world calls, not just as a duty, but as a question.
Can he carry Kord’s storm beyond the safety of the Academy? Can he find the strength he’s spent his life chasing?
And somewhere out there, beyond mountains and battlefields, beyond thunder and prayer, is the shoreline he barely remembers.
The Fallen Star
Session 1: The Baronet’s Commission
Thalan gave away his own lift ticket and Elunia’s to a pilgrim couple whose child had to be born on holy ground. He walked the tower stair and paid a water-seller ten gold to give water to the pilgrims behind him. At the foot of the stair he argued Kord against Gruumsh with a giant orc priest, hit him in the jaw, and let the orc’s answer glance off him: “Looks like Kord has proven his valour over Gruumsh. Have a nice day.” In the Baronet’s study he reached out with Kord’s sense and found nothing undead in the room, Greta included. He also recognised the green rod from temple lore: it is a source of power that kills those who overuse it, and it belongs to no single god. He loaded his spirit-wolf with water, talked the Baronet into lending two camels, and left his spare gold at the Guild hall. When the orc came back with an ambush, Thalan owned up to having caused it, then broke one man’s nose, struck another down with a thunderclap, and set a third alight.
Attendance Log
- Session 1 Recap - The Baronet’s Commission 2026-09-30