Born in Lareh'thilln and living there ever since, Aethelliya has always been a rather emotionless child. Both her parents are tired, faded things wanting the best for their daughter but not knowing how to handle her correctly; they easily merged with the background (missing in action, if you will). She grew up secluded of her own choice in the family house, reading and learning and thinking and not quite thinking about her health. During those eighteen years in isolation, she took a particular liking to science and magic, everything from common evocation to the scarcely-known runesmithing-- she doesn't know how to use them, of course (or even where to start learning them). Unfortunately, the tradeoff for this extensive knowledge of the world was bad health and nonexistent social skills, apart from those traditionally extolled amidst high elven society. On the day of her 18th birthday, her parents thrust her into the tumultuous world of society in Haelun'or, the foreignness of which she failed to understand. How could gold be so insulting, how could elves turn in a heartbeat? How could excessive hate towards other races have a purpose other than wasting energy? From that day on, she regarded other beings with a neutral disinterest, thinking they were wasting their time on baseless fury and, more befuddlingly, happiness. (She would later learn this was only a coping mechanism to ignore things she didn't understand-- which gave her deep, deep anxiety--, but that idea always existed in the back of her mind.) By the age of nineteen, Aethelliya had decided to become the best elf she could be, which in her mind meant reasoning rationally and always speaking the truth; conflicts were easily avoided that way, she found. Her parents convinced her to cut ties with them, knowing they would never benefit her becoming more 'normal', so she moved out two months before her twentieth birthday. Needless to say, most in Lareh'thilln regard her with contempt for seeming so robotic. Fearing the city would only serve to make her closed-off, her family proposed on her 20th birthday an initiative to travel the world, gain more knowledge, and (most importantly in their eyes) destroy her cynicism of Almaris' inhabitants.
