People - Ilya

Ilya became a cleric of the Father of the Gods when her poor health rendered her unsuitable for mining, or indeed living underground at all. The dwarven people of the town of Aspendale share the responsibilities for raising and teaching their children, and with a gradually declining birthrate the wellbeing of young Dwarves is taken very seriously. The community carefully placed Ilya in a position where her health would not be compromised.

Ilya was in general a calm, sensible cleric, solid in her belief in both the needfulness of law and the ultimate good. Her skills seemed appropriate for a life of negotiating minor disputes and healing in her community, but as an adolescent a quite startling quality emerged.

Much to her surprise, Ilya found herself vastly stronger than other Dwarves, even while her health refused to improve. She gradually became a battle cleric despite herself, and finds the strength of her hammer arm useful when she cannot mediate an arguement.

Ilya has difficulties breathing when the air is polluted or sparse, as it often is in mines and around forges. As a cleric, her condition is less noticable than it might be, though she does tend to become fatigued more easily even on normal days than other Dwarves. She is somewhat frustrated by this and regards her infirmity as something which makes her possibly not quite as Dwarvish as her kin.

Ilya has the grey eyes and hair of her clan, with the same brown-tinged granite coloured skin that might have served her ancestors as camoflage. She wears her long sideburns and hair in a series of intricate cornrows, as is traditional, to indicate her status and achievements, and has chosen to decorate them with clear glass beads.

For a Dwarf, she is quite tall, and rather slender, her musculature being sleek for her kind. To Human eyes, this is barely noticable, but Ilya feels occassionally a little awkwardly tall amongst other Dwarves. Ilya's clerical vestments are her armour and weapons, as befits a battle priest. When not officiating, she tends to wear utalitarian dark grey clothes, as the Aspendale Dwarves are not a colourful group.

Ilya has a rather wry sense of humour somewhat out of place in a dwarven cleric, although she tends to let this show more amongst her non-dwarven friends so as not to draw censure. Belief-wise, Ilya is a Rock Tender, and so used to dealing with people face to face rather then from a platform of supposed clerical knowledge.

Early on as an adventurer, Ilya found the actual tomb of Clan'ghddn, which - as the God was considered to have never been alive and Dwarven, but rather an elemental force - shocked her deeply. Her surprise was compounded when the God spoke to her, calling her His child and told her to carry this message forward, that He had been mortal and had risen to His current state of glory.

Currently, Ilya is considered a dangerous heretic and, while sure in herself of her beliefs (direct communication with her God was religious ecstasy), is rather uncertain of exactly how to go about informing the rest of her entire church that they have it all a bit wrong...

A fun fact about Ilya is that she has been shot twice in the back by party members rolling critical failures and that she has a tendancy to roll critical successes while riding horses. She's not sure which scares her more.