Name: Celestine Erebruz
Age: 16
Nationality: Andoran
Hair: Long and thick brown with a few light strands.
Eyes: A dark hazel, she often uses a mixture of dark and light makeup to bring them out more.
Skin: Skin is dark, and soft from oils.
Height: 5’5"
Voice: Celestine doesn’t speak much though when she does, she seems to have a problem doing so. Her voice is low and she pronounces words awkwardly—this is because she cannot hear.
Other: Her face is soft and friendly looking.
Personality: Celestine is curious about the world around her and always was as a child. She often ran out of the house by herself as young as four to go explore the woods. She wanted to grow up to travel and once when she was seven tried running away with a gleeman who visited her town. She is friendly but also shy, reluctant to talk to outsiders. She prefers learning of things on her own with little help from others and hates being restrained by anything. Celestine also spends a lot of free time reading and likes to buy books when she isn’t spending money on her appearance. She loves wearing light jewelry, craft making and sewing.
Character History[]
Celestine grew up in a very unique town on in Andor called Yvel, dead between Cairhien and Caemlyn. Her town, popular enough to have two inns, had a population of around a thousand people—and from this thousand nearly a seventh of the population is deaf. This was caused over many generations of inheriting the trait through several families stemming from a similar origin.
Celestine’s own father owns the town’s eastern inn, a two-story building; and she, him and her mother live in the house behind it. Born without the ability to hear the people and things around her, she had a fairly easy time growing up with the town’s fairly large non-hearing population, who had developed their own sign language to communicate. It was something of an isolated community within the town though enough people who could hear also learned the signing language. However, many of those who could not hear were much less likely to travel away for very long or at all, and so it also created a community where ‘everyone knows everyone else.’ It was very close knit.
Though Celestine of course loved her community, her sense of adventure mixed with an insatiable sense of curiosity drove her to explore as far and as much as she could. Combined with the two incidents mentioned above, she also spent nights sleeping in the forest with her close friends against her parents’ advisement and took excursions to nearby towns, and once at fifteen went to Caemlyn with her uncle, who was a merchant alongside a friend of his. Like Celestine, her mother and uncle are both deaf.
Celestine’s life would have continued normally in her town of Yvel if a couple of Aes Sedai had not come by to visit. The outsiders got a room in her father’s inn and Celestine wanted to know why they were there since they rented the room for at least a few days. Word finally got around the women were there “recruiting” girls to go to the White Tower, though one seemed interested in studying why so many people were deaf in the town.
Partly out of amusement and partly out of the desire to travel and learn more, Celestine and her friend went to be tested by this Aes Sedai. Though she understood Aes Sedai could do something called “channeling” and some girls could learn to do it, Celestine still didn’t quite understand the concept. However she went along anyway, and watched a small demonstration of what the women could do, of making lights and a few small phantom images of things, and walking on air. Fascinated as the other girls, she got in line—the Aes Sedai told her she could learn and would be taken to Tar Valon.
Eager to tell her parents the great news, she was also somewhat saddened by it as well. Her parents would not want her to leave and she understood she would have problems communicating outside the town. Of the girls chosen to go to the White Tower, she was the only one who knew signing. It was a somewhat lonely trip but, with the ability to read and write taught by her mother she and the Aes Sedai communicated as needed on paper provided by the outlandish woman.
Celestine looked forward to learning about other cultures and of traveling more than anything else. The channeling was just an added bonus. However, she had no idea what the life ahead of her would be like, and it would be more stressful than she could imagine.