Kahlia Pavus

Kahlia Pavus

STAND YOUR GROUND, THE DAWN WILL COME

Kahlia has two older brothers, and is the only girl in her family. She was born into the Pavus branch family. Her older brother Donnell was in the Qarinus Circle for three years before Kahlia and Jarvis were born, Donall's magical ability making itself known at the age of five. Kahlia and Jarvis, being twins, were very close as young children. They were given to whet nurses at only a few months of age, and as such they were not very close to their parents. They were even studying together, once they reached the age of five. Nobody was worried when they didn't manifest any magical talent at the same age as their older brother had, since it was more common for magic to make itself known during adolescence.

The twins studied magical theory together, and Jarvis became very interested in magical theory. He wanted to know how magic worked, and why it worked the way it did. Kahlia, on the other hand, became interested in building things. She was constantly building little trinkets out of bits of things she found around the family estate. She enjoyed making things move without magic, and she found her magical theory lessons to be tedious. Jarvis found her little toys fun, and together they liked to rig up little booby traps around their portion of the estate. This SERIOUSLY ticked off a number of the staff and servants, but their parents did nothing to discourage this behavior. Their caretakers were the ones who taught them that their little booby traps were dangerous to the other people in the estate. They agreed to stop booby trapping the estate, and the staff and servants became happier again.

Then, when the twins were eight, things changed. They had started setting traps for each other, to test who was better, and Jarvis got caught off-guard by one that Kahlia had set for him. The entire area around him was frozen over, including the bushes and part of the tree. That very day, Kahlia found her best friend torn away from her and put in the Qarinus Circle. Her new caretaker, a woman named Lissa, noticed a change in her. Kahlia stopped setting her little traps around the estate and focused more on her studies.

She kept up with her studies for years, but her tenth nameday came and went and she still hadn't shown any magical talent. Her mother then ordered harsher treatment of her from her tutors. One in particular was exceptionally cruel. He bound her wrists to a bar, then tied her ankles together so she couldn't fight back. He began striking her across the back, repeatedly, multiple days per week. He rarely left enough time between beatings for her to even begin to heal. Her caretaker discovered this the first week, and Lissa desperately pleaded with Kahlia's mother to order the man to stop. But her mother wouldn't hear it. Lissa was given an ultimatum. She could stay on as Kahlia's caretaker, but she would be required to keep her protests to herself from that day on. The next time Lissa protested would be her last day working there, Kahlia's mother declared. And so Lissa stayed quiet about Kahlia's cruel tutor, though she was as kind as she could be to the poor girl. Lissa, who had been raised in Val Royeaux, began teaching Kahlia the basic talents of the rogue. Kahlia trained in secret to master the art of dual-wielding daggers, and using a bow. Lissa had been a bard in Orlais, but Kahlia didn't always have the energy to practice on the days when she'd been beaten by her tutor. But these training sessions made her stronger.

These cruel beatings went on for nearly three years. She was thirteen, almost fourteen, when her tutor left her where she was after a particularly intense lashing. He left her there while he went to eat, and she sat there on the floor, her blood soaking the wood, all night. Her caretaker found her the next morning, and Kahlia was suffering not only from blood loss, but a serious infection. She was bedridden for over a month from the infection, and it took another long month before she was strong enough to walk on her own again. At this point, the tutor was finally dismissed, and Kahlia was determined to resume the training Lissa had been teaching her the last three years.

She re-learned the basics at a slower pace than she had before, after spending nearly two full months bedridden. She was eighteen when she finally reached the same level she had been at before falling ill. She and her twin had been growing apart from the day he was moved into the Qarinus Circle, and by this point they had not spoken in months. This was about six years after the Battle of Denerim.

Two years later, at twenty, Lissa found someone who could teach Kahlia to build more things than just the little traps she and Jarvis had built as kids. This woman, an Artificer, trained her to build deadlier traps and other marvels of engineering. With her new tutor, Kahlia began harnessing her joy of building things by making things to help the staff. She still sparred with Lissa, and practiced her archery skills, of course.

She was twenty-four when she was told that the main family's heir was going to Orlais to represent Tevinter in the Exalted Council, meeting to decide the fate of the Inquisition that had saved all of Thedas by sealing the hole in the sky and killing Corypheus. She convinced her mother to allow her to go as her cousin's bodyguard. This was given the okay, and she was off to the Winter Palace, finally out of Tevinter.

The Inquisition was made to be a peace-keeping force under Divine Victoria, and Dorian received a letter. Magister Halward was dead, and Dorian was his successor. Just before they made to return to Tevinter, Kahlia asked if she could remain Dorian's personal bodyguard. He agreed, and so she had a reason to never return to her parents' estate.

That was when the assassination attempts began. Thanks to her training, Kahlia was able to prevent most of the attempts, and the ones she didn't detect were botched for other reasons. She was injured during one such attempt, about a year after the events at the Exalted Council, caught off-guard without her armor. After dispatching the assassin, Dorian used healing spells and ended up seeing the scars that crisscrossed over her back. When he admitted to his part in healing her, she confessed to him about the cruel tutor she'd dealt with as a child, when her mother was determined for her to be a mage.

Once she confessed this to him, she felt as if they were growing closer. She didn't worry about keeping anything from him anymore. And she hadn't felt like that with anyone since her twin had been sent to the Circle. Dorian started working with Maevris Tilani and together they gathered a number of forward-thinking Magisters. The worst of the assassination attempts began around the time the Qunari attacks began increasing. Eventually, Dorian decided that it would be safer for himself and his mother somewhere outside Tevinter, and voiced to Kahlia his idea to return to Skyhold. Kahlia agreed that Skyhold would be safer, and she would go with him to their first stop, Orlais.


- she knows how to make tea without stripweed

- Kahlia tends to get overexcited when she sees a new marvel of engineering. She'll spend a few minutes lost in her own world before she comes back to herself. She gets very embarrassed when this happens in front of anyone she doesn't know.

[b]MEAGAN TANDY[/b] as [i]Kahlia Pavus[/i]