Кая Затейница

When she was young, Kaja, heiress of Doeurtine Barony in southeast Kaerok, was told by her doting parents that there was nothing she could not achieve. There was only one kind of thing Kaja absolutely was not allowed to become: an embarrassment and disgrace to Doeurtine. But, it seemed, that was the one and only thing she wanted to be most of all. From the moment she began to speak straight through her violently turbulent teenage years, she questioned and criticized every aspect of her cushioned existence. Tutors, priests, councilors, drillmasters, and her beleaguered parents alike all tried to mold her, and each failed. She mocked Lumayan ritual, and scorned the knights and footmen of her family’s armies, calling them dogs of the state and arbitrary oppressors. She found scholarship crushingly dull, and magic little more than a gimmick. Her short-tempered, gloomy, cutting attitude earned her the name Kaja the Wry, and other, cruder ones, besides. Her parents finally told her she should cease her rebellious and petulant ways or have the title of court jester.

Kaja felt oddly comfortable receiving this ultimatum. Gripped with a passion she had never felt before, she worked in secret with the blacksmiths and seamstresses of the manor to make a grand costume for herself. Part knightly armor, part jongleur getup, part lady’s dress, and part macabre death-mask, she saw it as a pastiche of all the Banner Lords’ overblown, egotistic excesses. She debuted her creation unannounced, interrupting lesser lords petitioning her parents in their great hall. She captured the attention of everyone with her high, clear, commanding voice, improvised dance, table-stomping acrobatics, and the splattering of a melon with her fool’s-head bauble. Her shameless display was so effortlessly compelling that no one interrupted her. After a while, some of the noble plaintiffs grew genuinely entertained by her antics, forgetting the awkwardness of her unwarranted intrusion. It crescendoed with a thorough excoriation of her parents, in which she quoted from the Dwarf Fodbor the Bard’s notorious ‘uses for a scroll roller’ monologue. When she delivered the final punchline, one of the assembled nobles finally let out an unrestrained laugh, and Kaja beamed.

The baron rose from his seat, at last finding his tongue, and bellowed that Kaja would be exiled from the barony if she did not immediately apologize. She raged that she had finally accomplished something worthwhile, found meaning and purpose. Crying out again and again that she had really and truly gotten a laugh, she rushed over to a nearby courtier. Unable or unwilling to attack her parents, she displaced her resentment onto him. Kaja beat him savagely before being tackled and dragged off by several guards, and giggled all the way to the dungeons. But after she was shoved into a cell and sternly warned to behave, the household scrambled to contain the repercussions of her scandalous actions and lost focus on her. She played up her apparent madness and pretended to be crazed with lust, luring the lone guardsman left behind to mind her into her cell. She strangled him and retrieved her bloodstained scepter, which had been confiscated. Then she fled her estate, throwing her future away with nihilistic glee, and would thereafter let sheer whimsy be her guide through life.

After some days of wandering, Kaja came upon a crossroads close to Kaerok Castle. Arriving at the same time as her was the hulking misfit Timit the Fool, and when she realized that two vagabonds in jester outfits had randomly crossed paths, she broke into hysterical laughter. Timit laughed too, and so began a legendary, infamous partnership in crime, comedy, and chaos. They both wanted nothing but to thumb their noses at society at large, and neither cared any longer who got hurt in the process. With Kaja’s knowledge of high society and Timit’s massive presence, they terrorized the wealthy and powerful with random, pointless acts of destruction and vandalism.

One of their first escapades was toppling a new and expensive equestrian statue set up by one Lord Jurius Vasquon. As Timit cracked the horse’s legs one by one, Kaja stood on top of the bronze Vasquon’s head with perfect balance. When Vasquon’s troops came to apprehend the two, they fought together like madmen, misdirecting and humiliating their opponents with noisemakers and flourishes of confetti before delivering fatal blows. From there, their antics only increased in savagery and ambition. It wasn’t long before Kaja’s resentment turned murderous, and minor nobles were found dead having been killed in creatively gruesome ways: trussed up with their own intestines, gibbeted on their own walls alongside common criminals, or force-fed gold coins and then disemboweled and left to die watching their riches spill forth covered in blood and bile. Baron Doeurtine can only sweat and stew, hoping Kaja does not turn to patricide.