Cleric (Trickery Domain)
Tabaxi
North River Eye (River) was born in the high reaches of the Draspine Mountains, to the Stone Shadow tabaxi clan. She grew up listening to the tales told by old Whiskers, who had traveled beyond the mountains to the cities of D’Hara in his younger days, and was set on following in his footsteps and becoming what her people called a “Story Wanderer”. These are tabaxi who leave the mountains and wander the “civilized world”, collecting stories and generally learning what is going on outside their homeland. They eventually return to their clans, sharing what they have learned and preparing their people for encounters with outsiders.
Story Wanderers, along with hunters and others in a leadership position in the clan, are required to undergo a ceremony called “proving their years”. This involves hunting and killing with their bare hands and teeth an animal whose soul the Mountain Speakers (the mystics of the clan), have bound to the soul of the one undergoing the trial.
River wandered D’Hara, listening to stories and finding interesting trinkets. Sometimes those trinkets belonged to someone, and she developed a habit of pickpocketing them, examining them, and then returning them to their owners under the ruse of finding it after they had dropped or otherwise lost it. At first, she was sometimes paid to steal, but she found out pretty quickly that The Deep (the organized crime syndicate that ran the crime scene in the big cities of D’Hara) frowned on independent operators, so she reserved her talents for when she really needed the money, or was offered something that she just couldn’t pass up.
After exploring the smaller towns and cities for a while, she found herself in Bayport. One day while wandering through the market, she noticed a drinking flask on the belt of a man dressed in a fine quality but nondescript suit of clothes. The flask looked to be of silver or platinum, and had a black stone set into it that she swore had some sort of glowing aura around it. Deciding to get a closer look, she started casually stalking the man until a ruckus caused by a drunkard tripping and knocking over a display of smoke potions gave her the chance to lift the flask, and she nonchalantly walked away with it and ducked into a nearby sheltered corner to look at it.
After examining and admiring it, she walked back out into the market to surreptitiously give it back to its owner. However, she was nonplussed to find that the man was nowhere in sight. She casually scoured the area, but couldn’t find him. Deciding that she’d keep an eye out for him, she spent another few hours wandering the city, and then headed back to the inn where she was staying to catch a nap before spending the evening in the bar.
She walked into her room, closed the door, turned… and the owner of the flask was sitting in a corner chair, waiting for her. She had no idea how he’d known she was the one who had his flask or how he knew where to find her, but she immediately knew that she was in over her head. She quickly tried to turn to open the door and leave… and discovered that she couldn’t move. She could only watch as he got up from the chair, walked over to her, put his hands on her shoulders, and said “Well, my furry thief, let’s see what you make of this.” With that, her world went dark.
Afterward, she was never sure how long she’d been gone. She was a disembodied entity tied to a comet rocketing through the infinite planes. She didn’t remember everything she saw, just some flashes of either indescribable beauty or utter horror. When she finally came back to consciousness, she was lying next to a campfire in a wooded glen far from civilization, with her “host” cooking a meal over the fire.
And thus was she inducted into the Order of Anord the Wanderer, and learned the lesson that it was a bad idea to pickpocket gods. The flask was bait that they trolled with to see what they would catch. If they hooked something they fancied, they kept it; otherwise, the flask would return to them on its own.
“They?” Yes, no one knows what their gender is. They never appeared to River twice in the same form, so she didn’t know if they were male, female, both, or neither.
She had never thought of being a cleric, and indeed tabaxi clerics are very rare, but when given the choice of either that or being abandoned in a backwater plane somewhere, she made peace with the idea. She met the party in Saltmarsh not long afterward and started traveling with them, with Anord visiting and speaking with her at times and teaching her new spells and abilities. However, after having a vision while passing through The Ways of her people starving, she decided that she had to return to her people and try to help them and/or getting them out to where there was help available, and left the party at the Grey Citadel. Anord was not happy with her over this, and when she refused their demand to go back, they stripped their power from her and she was no longer a cleric.
