#alhaja khalesh

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Alhaja Khalesh is gorgeous. Have I mentioned this?

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I was digging through my videogame screenshots folder and was reminded of how beautiful this scene was.

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Alhaja

B A S I C S

full name:Alhaja Khalesh

gender:female

sexuality:pansexual

pronouns:she/her

O T H E R S

family:because she's part of the Krytan side of the Khalesh family she somany family members

birthplace:Divinity's Reach

job: lapsedjeweler, current wandering elementalist working for the Pact

phobias:she's developed a fear of being Awakened by Joko and forced to turnagainst her friends

guilty pleasures:her love of sexy romance novels (and her sudden kink for Balthazar)

M O R A L S

moralityalignment?: neutral good

sins -lust/greed/gluttony/sloth/pride/envy/wrath

virtues –chastity/charity/diligence/humility/kindness/patience/justice

T H I S - O R - TH A T

introvert/extrovert:

organized/disorganized:

closeminded/open-minded:

calm/anxious:

disagreeable/agreeable:

cautious/reckless:

patient/impatient:

outspoken/reserved:

leader/follower:

empathetic/unemphatic:

optimistic/pessimistic:

traditional/modern:

hard-working/lazy:

R E L A T I O N SH I P S

otp:

ot3:

brotp:

notp:

(ain't got nothin'here 'cause I don't ship her with any canon chars or anyone's OCs yetdue to not developing RP relations enough)

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Alhaja is gorgeous.

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So I decided to name Alhaja’s mounts after the Sunspear virtues.

The virtues are:  valor, humility, honor, honesty, justice, compassion, sacrifice, loyalty. 

Raptor = Valor =  Ashhe

Skimmer = Compassion =  Virzuk 

Jackal = Loyalty =  Zaklem

Springer = Humility =  Giwebo

Griffon = Justice = Limwe

(For anyone curious, the 3 names of virtues unused... Honor = Golsah ; Honesty =  Gundayo ; Sacrifice = Yasfahr)

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Pictures of Alhaja’s face!

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Here are some Alhaja outfits!

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Alhaja Khalesh

Name: Alhaja Khalesh

In-Game: Alhaja Khalesh

Age: 25 (as of 1325 AE)

Species: Human (Elonian descent)

Class: Elementalist

Affiliations: Order of Whispers, Pact

Appearance:  Alhaja is a strikingly beautiful woman. She has red hair that falls in soft waves to between her shoulders and breasts, and she resents that it won’t stay well in traditional braids. Her eyes are a golden shade, and she keeps her brows perfectly groomed and lines her eyes with kohl. She takes pride in artfully applying cosmetics like kohl, blush, and lipstick when she’s in a town, but will go without when on the move. Her hands are slim and long-fingered, her legs long and slender, and she’s ample in the breasts department. Her skin is a rich medium brown color, although she often wishes it was darker.

Alhaja’s favorite colors to wear are red and gold. She likes to wear traditional Elonian dress, at least as it’s been passed on over the expatriate generations. Old books from the prime of Elona show elementalists favoring exposing arms, belly, and legs, wearing artfully draped fabric to reveal as much as conceal, so that’s what she’s accustomed herself to wearing. She does enjoy the attention she gets wearing it. She’s also often found wearing jewelry (earring, bracelets, pendants, chokers, armbands) that she’s made herself.

Personality: Alhaja’s personality is best summed up as “crusader”. She’s out to go places and fulfill her dreams, and the Six help anyone who gets in her way. To others she can come across as stuck up, a spitfire, or a stubborn idiot. She also has a streak of adventurousness that can too easily shade into recklessness.

Alhaja is a devout believer in the Six despite their absence. She’s extremely dedicated to Kormir specifically thanks to her family’s close tie to the Spearmarshal pre-Ascension. She has a special connection to the elements of fire and earth.

She’s the kind of person who dreams of glory, of having a hero’s name, spoken around Tyria. All her life she’s had dreams of returning to her ancestral homeland of Elona, saving it from Palawa Joko, and joining a rebuilt Order of the Sunspears. Her insistence that she has a broader destiny than serving in her family’s trading company puts her at odds with her family It’s something she claims doesn’t bother her, but secretly it does.

History: Alhaja is part of the Khalesh family, a noble line originally from the wealthy province of Vabbi before they settled into Kryta to start a second outpost of mercantile empire. Her parents are both Kryta-born Elonians, but her grandmother is from the last group of refugees to come over from Elona. Alhaja grew up on stories of Elona - both now as it is under Joko, and as it was during the time of the Sunspears, when her family was truly well off. It sparked the reverence for her roots her parents hoped for, but also kindled a desire to go out there and see it for herself, to become a hero and not just hear about them.

As a child, Alhaja began having visions of Elona, visions she was convinced meant she was intended for a great destiny.  Alhaja’s family has always wanted her to stay home in Divinity’s Reach, pursue her aptitude for jewelry-making, be a good productive merchant family member, and most critically, marry a good Elonian. They only considered her aptitude for elemental magic good because it was useful for crafting. Unfortunately for them, Alhaja had no interest in getting married, and no interest in staying home and being safe when there’s Elona out there to go save. In her late teens, Alhaja’s appeal to a Priestess of Kormir earned her the freedom to get training for her elementalist powers and temporarily defer their matchmaking attempts.

She spent a year helping around Shaemoor and neighboring grounds on an unofficial basis, then got inducted into the Order of Whispers like her family always has been. She did some missions for them, usually paired with an agent better suited to the Whispers’ style while she served as a distraction.

When the Pact was formed, she joined up with it over her parents’ very vocal objections, and was peripherally involved in the efforts in Orr. She was more heavily involved in the events surrounding rediscovering Tarir and combating Mordremoth. Now that the search for Balthazar is on and they’re going to the Crystal Desert, nothing can pull her away from service. Here’s her chance to rescue Elona and live up to her dreams of glory. Nothing will get in her way. Not even a god.

RP Availability: Anything! She’s gorgeous and single, open for flings, friendships, professional contacts and camaraderie, or even a rival or two. Want to interact with her because of her affiliation with the Whispers or the Pact? Because of her strong ties to Divinity’s Reach’s Elonian expatriates? Up for being someone she brings home to her parents as a date to thwart the next round of matchmaking? Hit me up with an idea.

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A picture of Alhaja, who I just wrote about. I was trying to go for the most Elonian-inspired gear I could, and most of the Elonian elementalist sets from GW1 had crop tops and skirts that poofed out to the sides and showed the legs.

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Alhaja’s Faith

This is a story about Alhaja Khalesh, one of my GW2 characters.

Alhaja Khalesh stands on a spear of rock and surveys the land spreading out before her. It has been a dark featureless mass during the night. As the sun crests the horizon, golden light spills across the land below. It shifts to reveal that it is not a boring plain, but a long expanse of sand and stone, varied in coloration and expression in a way that many people may not expect of the desert.

She turns to her left to see the city on the horizon with its with high towers and spires, radiant in the dawn's splendor with light reflecting off of the golden domes so brightly the eyes hurt to look at it, as though a second sun is there. This is the Kodash Bazaar, largest marketplace in Vabbi and center of trade, wealth, and of course, power. It is where her family is from. Now that the sun is up, a musical song begins ringing from its walls, the sound of Lyssa's priests and priestesses invoking the dawn rites.

This is Elona. Land of the Golden Sun.

As the realization comes, it all goes dark, and then she wakes up in her own bed. She is in Divinity's Reach, the heart of Kryta. But her heart is still in Elona and her eyes are still full of the afterimage of the gilded city.

Alhaja had never been to Elona, the land of her ancestors. Yet she knew this is what she saw in her dream. Though she doesn't ever know when it shows: if this is the Elona of the past, or if this is Elona as it is now. Contact has been cut off for so long that no one knows what Elona looks like right now. The Order of Whispers has some contacts with their parent order to know about how Elona is, and rumors are some operatives have slipped over, but no one in her family has ever been.

Alhaja had always had her Elona dreams. The exact nature of them can vary. Sometimes, it's historical dreams of battles in Elonian history – from the times of the Primeval Kings to the fights against Abbadon's minions. But usually, they carry no meaning. She goes to sleep, and wakes up in the dreamscape in a part of Elona that she can walk around and explore. She's walked through the Kodash Bazaar, the Gardens of Seborhin, Kamadan, and the Fortress of Jahai, learning their streets and seeing the lives of their people. She's hiked the wilderness to rediscover ruins like the First City of Fahranur, or to see sunrises and sunsets over plains she's never walked in life.

She used to tell people about the dreams, when she was a girl. Visions of Elona were cool, right? She couldn't imagine where she was getting this knowledge from, so it must be from a god. Given the family history, and their possession of family journals and artifacts touched by Kormir Herself, she'd assumed they were Kormir-sent.

It turned out that telling folks wasn't really a good plan. Everyone thought she was crazy. Her parents were concerned enough to take her to some of Divinity's Reach's best (most expensive) healers to get her checked over for delusions. Had she been cursed? Mesmer-tricked? Was she delusional because of an illness? The healers told her parents she was fine and just making things up for attention. Or, at best, she was having the normal creative dreams of any child and was just claiming she was Gods-touched.

Her siblings didn't believe her, either. And the rest of the family – the aunts and uncles and cousins and all the other innumerable part of a started whispering insults or pity about her. So by the time she was 10, Alhaja stopped telling anyone but Fadhira. Fadhira faked interest really well and it was nice to get the words out, even to an insincere audience.

When she was 14, she'd gone to a Priestess of Kormir and confessed that she thought she was seeing visions of Elona, and that they were sent by Kormir. The Priestess had been intrigued by her claim and had been willing to listen to her describe her visions in detail. Unlike anyone else that Alhaja had told, was the priestess was willing to research her claims further before judging them false. So she'd found old maps of Elona and writings about battles, and held them in her hands while Alhaja described anything she'd seen about the topic.

The testing had revealed that Alhaja had a surprising amount of accuracy in her description of places, though the ones of past events were less accurate. The priestess hadn't ever asked her for details about Kormir's history, and she'd always wondered why. After all, shouldn't a priestess of Kormir want to know about Her mortal life? But at the same time, she understood that her family's collection of journals by Sunspears who had walked with Kormir into Torment itself might be a reason to not ask – that was a way she could have learned those details, wheras there were few maps and histories of battle in her family, and so those would be more likely to come out of her dreams.

In the end, the priestess had not given her full-hearted support to Alhaja's claims, as the young woman had hoped. Her response had been more measured in nature. The woman had said that it seemed as though Alhaja had an accurate amount of knowledge, and may well have been experiencing retroactive dreams of areas or events. But there was no indication that these were divine visions from any of the Six. The priestess had finally provided the distraught teen with a piece of advice that Alhaja had originally rejected, but found she was taking to heart more and more these days.

“In the end, does it matter if your visions are from the Gods or not? If they are true, or they are not. Seeking to find if they are true has brought you this far. And you will continue to seek the truth of them, will you not?”

Alhaja had agreed that she intended to keep finding out about her visions. “I'll go all the way to Elona and prove that I've seen it,” she'd told the priestess.

“Then you are doing Kormir's Will in the world, my dear, whether or not She has set you on this path or if you have chosen it in your heart,” said the priestess. “May your heart ever burn with the fires of your quest.”

“Even when everyone tells me I'm wrong?”

“It is easy to seek something when nothing is in your way, but harder to look for truth though many may oppose you. Always remember, there is no higher virtue than the search for truth.”

That had been told to her over ten years ago, and Alhaja still remembered it. It wasn't the only good advice she'd gotten from the woman, either. She'd gotten advice about first crushes, about friendships, all the other innumerable little concerns of a teenager's life, and she'd never been made to feel stupid for asking about any of it. Even though the priestess probably had more important people and concerns to think about.

The other memorable incident she remembered was when she'd had a fight with her family over the direction her life would take at 17. They'd gotten her training in controlling her magic and learning useful abilities, but hey wanted her to join the trading business. She wanted to serve the people and go on adventures, like the Sunspears had done; but Fadhira had enrolled in the guard already and she had been allowed because she was descended from the Istani branch on her father's side. Her parents wanted Alhaja in the trading side because she was double-Vabbian, and any protest that she wanted to be an elementalist or an adventurer or a guard was ignored.

(It sounded very stupid when Alhaja explained it to people outside of the Khalesh family, but there was a strict hierarchy of bloodline within them. There was a tendency to racially generalize any species as the same, but it wasn't true. There was at least one type of sub-grouping per species. She knew Charr cared about if they were Iron or Blood Legion, even though to her they were just Charr. The decrease in humanity's prominence should have led them all to unify as human, but humans cared about their continent of origin.

Some groups, like her circle of Elonian expatriates, took it even farther. They preferred Elonian descent to Canthan or Tyrian, but within the group it mattered which province your family came from, and if you had Sunspear lineage or not. Alhaja' and Fadhira's mother was Vabbian, wealthy descendant of one of the last Great Princes. Alhaja's father was Vabbian as well. So merchanting was in her blood, they told her, and that's what they were going to do. But Fadhira's father – lover of Alhaja's parents – was Istani and Sunspear to boot, so she got a pass.)

It was the unfairness of this grouping that had sent her to. Feeling torn about what to do, she'd asked about joining the priests' order. Alhaja dreamed of Elona, of desert sand and stone under the hot sun, and of striding far and wide across the continent and later the world. It was a dream she couldn't achieve as a stay-at-home merchant, and it was less likely to be achieved as a priest (although they did get to travel to smaller settlements). But if she had to clip her dreams for some other life path, she didn't want it to be becoming an aspect of familial legacy – she could live it with being her faith.

But the priestess had shaken her head and told her that she would not take the young woman's petition. Furthermore, that she would recommend against it if another asked her opinion. Alhaja would be joining to run away from her familial obligations first, and not because of her genuine faith, and that was an unacceptable way to go to the service of the gods. When Alhaja protested that she knew she'd be happy in Kormir's service, the priestess said that she had a sense of how it would go. Alhaja would be happy at first, and then chafe to go out and be free again.

“The quest in your heart will not be denied or quieted by obedience,” the priestess had told her, face somber under the eye-mask. “Not to your family, and not even to the Gods.”

“I want everything I do to be in Kormir's service,” Alhaja had said. Wasn't that the point of existing? Of her quest?

“Do you remember how I told you to do that?”

“Of course. The highest virtue is seeking the truth and this is how I serve Kormir. But would I not seek truth as her acolyte?” Alhaja had pressed.

“You would seek it better in the world as you wish,” the priestess had said.

“That's what I think. But my parents don't think so,” Alhaja had said with a sigh. Maybe she could join the circus…

“I believe one day you will come to be an acolyte in Her service,” the priestess said. “But I do not think the time is now. I sense that you must follow the quest in your heart, and then build your devotion to her in the hearth that remains.”

With that enigmatic comment, the priestess had left for services, and Alhaja had slunk home. The next morning, the priestess called on her parents right after dawn. Alhaja had considered eavesdropping before thinking of the shame she would feel when the priestess caught her at it, and so she stayed in her room, staring into the rising sun, and praying to Kormir with all her heart. Two hours later, she was summoned to the family room and told that she would be allowed to become an elementalist and follow her own path.

(She never knew what argument was used to convince them. Her priestess wouldn't tell her, and neither would her parents. She was so grateful for the success that it didn't matter how. Being told she could follow her heart was unchaining, liberating.)

The priestess was dead now, and Alhaja couldn't reach out to her for advice anymore. She knew other priests of the Six but no one had been such a comforting, serene presence as that one. The priestess could have pushed her off as a foolish girl, like the healers and her family. She could have told Alhaja that it was the word of her God in hopes of getting the family to donate more to her abbey. She could have tried to get her parents to surrender Alhaja as a new acolyte. She didn't have to befriend her and encourage her to follow her quest and seek the truth in her heart. But she had.

And what did Alhaja have to show for it? Sometimes she felt like she was still a 13-year-old with dreams no one believed. She had a job free of her family, an enrollment in the Order of Whispers, and she had the freedom to pursue her quest to find the truth of Elona – if she had time outside of paid work or Whispers duty. She'd hoped working with the Order would be her ticket to the homeland, especially with her family's name, but she wasn't noticed enough to have the ear of anyone who might be able to aid her in that. Sometimes it felt like she was just in stasis, a holding pattern. Was this all there was to life? If this was what she was going to have, maybe she could just join the priesthood.

But the priestess, normally so rational and not given to flights of fancy, had sounded convinced that there was more for her to do. Maybe she'd had some vision of her own, a contact with Her that told her to fight for Alhaja. Or maybe she'd abandoned reason for a moment for faith and intuition of her own to reach that conclusion. (Kormir's realms were knowledge and truth, but not all knowledge was achieved at the end of rational thought; some truths could only be felt in the end – that was faith.)

Alhaja would continue putting her faith in the Gods, and continue serving Kormir by seeking out opportunities to pursue her quest. She would make it to Elona one day, and find the truths of it and compare it with her dreams and her heart. She just had to hold fast to her faith to sustain her – even when will and spirit failed.

But by the Six, she hoped it was soon!

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Here’s my GW2 brigade as it stands right now!

1.) Alhaja Khalesh, Elementalist

2.) Aelia Sunseeker, Ranger

3.) Ishev, Guardian

4.) Khai Teiza, Necromancer (Ritualist in headcanon)

5.) Capella, Mesmer

6.) Valena Sunslayer, Revenant

7.) Nyctavi, Thief

And one day there’ll be an Engineer to join them.

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More dollmaker fun! This is Alhaja Khalesh, my Elementalist OC from Guild Wars 2. The necklace, earrings, and belt she made herself. The dress is tailored to her by her cousin.

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This is one of the armor designs for Alhaja that I consider canon. It’s designed to be as Elonian inspired as I can be - that top reminds me of something Vabbian with the gems and inlay, and the pants remind me of either the Istani or Sunspear set, I think.

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Meet my GW2 ladies!

Khai Teiza, a lady of Canthan descent. Most people in Tyria would call her a Necromancer, but others who know about Canthan magic might recognize some of her work as that of a Ritualist. This is because the spirit of her ancestor, the lady Veire, speaks to her, passing on info from the Mists...

Alhaja Khalesh, descended from an Elonian dervish. The elements have sung to her since she was a child. She has an honorable family tradition stretching all the way back to Vabbi. Her family wanted her to join in the trader business, but she knows she has a greater destiny out in Tyria...

Fadhira Khalesh is half-sister to Alhaja, and she comes from Istani sailor stock and a line of Sunspears on the other side. A Guardian who knows elements of Paragon teachings. She serves the Seraph now as she would have served the Sunspears in Elona, but the time may come when that changes...

Capella, a mesmer of Ascalonian descent. She was orphaned as a child and took to haunting the temples. She found the artifacts of another Ascalonian mesmer from the times of the Searing and took the scepter and the name for herself, deciding to master magic and conjure illusions so she would never be lonely...

Aelia Sunseeker, a Charr from the Iron Legion. She is a Ranger who specializes in the bow and her preferred Aelia boasts a sharp mind, but rather than be the innovative tinkerer expected from Iron, Her goal is to set her paws on every region of Tyria and see over every horizon...