Noellin

Noellin

Also known as	The Matroness of Tears
Pronouns	she/her
Origin	Jaknia
Role	Matron of the Desert Diamond
Status	Alive

Noellin is the matron of the Desert Diamond, a renowned Jaknian house that - by 1541 - is famous for two trades at once: pleasure, and murder. To the world she is a strong but gracious woman, dangerous yet charming. Few suspect the cold and sadistic heart beneath the mask.

Biography

Noellin was the youngest of three daughters of middling Jaknian spice-merchants - wealthy enough to show it off, never wealthy enough to stop counting every coin. She was never loved: a quiet, strange infant, plainer at the family trade and the family charm than either sister. From the age of seven she began to torture small creatures, savoring how a living thing behaves when pieces are taken from it. Her mother discovered this only when Noellin was twelve and the “creature” was one of the household’s enslaved children - and her mother’s fury was not at the cruelty, but at the cost of replacing a slave.

When the War of Horrors wrecked the spice trade, the family fell into heavy debt, and Noellin found herself sold in the Night Bazaar to a tall, dark woman named Desmera. The years that followed in the bazaar’s pleasure-house were hard ones, and she learned to wear a mask - to be something she had never been. When she at last killed a violent client and fled, the act gave her an idea: she had heard of an ancient crime order that used dance and revealing dress to draw close to its marks and end them. If she could kill a man by accident, what might she do with training?

Ten years later she founded her own house, the Desert Diamond, whose girls and boys are schooled in both the arts of the dance and the arts of the kill. It became one of Jaknia’s best-known establishments for either service. For all her success, a hollow ache remains in her that nothing fills.

Personality

Noellin is sadistic and emotionally hollow, but hides it flawlessly behind the warmth her trade demanded of her for years. She is fiercely driven, a workaholic who will forgo sleep and stomach unpleasant tasks rather than miss an opportunity. She trusts herself above all and dislikes taking orders, though she will submit to authority when it serves her. Her buried traumas surface in occasional fits of rage that make her act rashly - and though she is clever enough to manage the fallout, such moments always cost her more than she would like.

See Also

• Jaknia · The Scarlet Embrace (the dance-assassin order her house echoes)