Aeralis Veilsong - Twilight Domain Cleric
“Rest now. If anything comes hunting your dreams, it will have to pass through mine first.”
Name: Aeralis Veilsong
Race: High Elf
Role/Class: Cleric Level 9 (Twilight Domain)
Appearance: Aeralis Veilsong carries twilight with her like a cloak. Tall and poised, she has the long, graceful lines of a high elf, but the tired softness around her eyes speaks of countless nights spent waking beside the beds of strangers. Her skin is a pale moonlit gold, almost luminous in dim light. Her hair falls in a straight silver curtain to her mid-back, usually half-bound with a simple ribbon so it doesn’t trail in ritual incense; loose strands escape to frame her sharp, elegant features. Her eyes are deep violet, ringed with faint, star-like flecks that catch even the smallest light.
She wears dark indigo and dusk-purple vestments over fine chain, cut close for movement, with silver thread tracing crescent moons, falling stars, and stylized eye motifs along hems and sleeves. A short, hooded mantle of soft gray hangs from her shoulders, the cloth subtly shot through with reflective threads that shimmer like faint starlight when she moves. Her holy symbol—a small, circular medallion bearing a crescent cradling a field of tiny stars—rests against her chest on a silver chain. At her side hangs a slender, silver-capped mace; her shield, when she bears it, is a round disc painted in gradients of twilight, from near-black at the edges to pale blue at the center.
Backstory
Aeralis was born into a high elven enclave that prized brilliance, ambition, and achievements that could be displayed at councils and festivals. She was respectable enough—a capable student of theology and arcane lore—but never quite as dazzling as her peers. Her one unusual trait appeared in childhood: she had a knack for calming nightmares. Siblings and cousins who woke screaming would quiet when she took their hand, their breathing easing as she hummed soft, wordless melodies and whispered little prayers to the night.
As she grew older, she noticed more than just bad dreams. Some sleepers were restless in a way that felt… wrong. Their shadows twitched on the wall when their bodies lay still; cold drafts brushed their faces in sealed rooms. Aeralis began to sense faint presences at the edges of lamplight—blurred shapes that leaned over beds, feeding on fear. When she tried to describe them, elders dismissed her concerns as metaphor or overtaxed nerves.
Refusing to ignore what she had seen, she left the comfort of her enclave to seek out orders and traditions that treated night not as an empty span between days, but as a realm with its own inhabitants and laws. She found a small twilight cloister on the outskirts of the Ardent Woods, where clerics walked between dusk and dawn tending to travelers, hunters, and those who couldn’t find peace in sleep. There, she learned to shape divine power into soft radiance that soothed the fearful and seared the things that lurked just beyond mortal perception.
Eventually, Aeralis was entrusted with her own shrine: a moonlit sanctuary deep within the Ardent Woods, near paths that connected Moonbeam Village, the Whispering Grove, and other dream-touched places. Travelers wracked by nightmares, wardens plagued by visions, and villagers afraid to sleep find their way to her—sometimes led by rumors, sometimes by dreams. Aeralis tends to them with herbs, hymns, and magic… and when something follows her visitors from the dark, she hunts it back into whatever hollow it crawled out of.
Lately, the nightmares have grown stranger and more synchronized: different people dreaming of the same clearing, the same shadowed figure at its edge. Aeralis feels the balance tipping—something is learning to step more boldly into the border between dream and waking. She knows she can’t face that alone.
