Saila Windward - Paladin & Smuggler Hunter
“Storms don’t ask permission. Neither do smugglers. That’s why I sleep in my boots.”
Name: Saila Windward
Race: Human
Role/Class: Smuggler Hunter/ Paladin Level 8
Appearance: Saila Windward looks like she belongs on a storm-battered deck, not in a forest trade town—but the sea never quite left her. She’s tall and solidly built, with a sailor’s corded muscle and the relaxed balance of someone used to a shifting floor. Her skin is sun-browned and wind-scarred, a faint white line running from her left temple through one eyebrow—a souvenir from a splintered mast. Her black hair is shaved close on one side and worn long on the other, usually braided and wrapped in a length of faded blue cloth. Her eyes are a sharp gray-blue, constantly measuring exits, windows, and hand positions.
Her armor is a hybrid of shipboard practicality and paladin regalia: well-fitted half plate etched with simple wave patterns along the edges, strapped to allow climbing and quick movement. A dark teal cloak, weather-stained at the hem, hangs from one shoulder, pinned with a simple symbol of a stylized wave breaking around a compass rose. She carries a well-kept cutlass at her hip and a round, iron-banded shield slung across her back, its face painted with a spiral of white spray against blue. Bits of worn rope, brass rings, and tiny carved driftwood tokens decorate her belt—a personal talisman chain of ships, crews, and ports she’s outlived.
Backstory
Saila grew up in a coastal town on the Shattered Coast where the sea decided whether you ate well or barely at all. Her family ran a small, stubbornly honest shipping outfit—too small to bully others, too principled to play the smuggling and piracy games that richer captains used to pad their coffers. As a deckhand and, later, first mate, Saila watched again and again as “clever” captains lied on their manifests, took on hidden cargo, and “lost” a few crates to pirates that never seemed to attack anyone else.
The breaking point came when a storm rolled in fast and hard. Her ship, overloaded with illegal gunpowder hidden by a partner she’d trusted, caught a stray spark during the chaos. The explosion shattered the mainmast and sent half the crew into the sea. Saila survived by inches, dragged onto a wave-lashed shard of hull. When she finally washed ashore days later, she swore two oaths: one to the open waters that had spared her, and one against those who used honest harbors as masks for ruin.
She eventually found her way to an order of paladins who honored the freedom and danger of the open sea—sworn to hunt pirates, smugglers, and those who abused trade routes to spread misery. They taught her to bind that storm-born fury to discipline, to channel the sea’s relentless motion into divine power. For years she served as a shipboard bodyguard and investigator for reputable captains, ferreting out smuggling rings and saboteurs.
When word reached her order that a prosperous forest trade town had become a favored stop for river craft and caravans with oddly “clean” records—and oddly frequent disappearances elsewhere—Saila volunteered to go inland. Now she works as a contracted bodyguard for visiting dignitaries and high-value caravans, using that position as cover while she quietly maps out a smuggling network she’s sure is using the town’s hospitality and reputation as camouflage. She suspects it reaches from riverboats to wagons to backroom counting-houses… and she’s running out of patience.
