#and yes she's gonna smooch lucanis

[telanana]

At first I wanted to keep my Rook's background pretty much the same as what's given in-game and then.... well...... I started reading codexes and things went about how they always go when the codexes start coming out lmao

Anyway, here's Florencia "Rook" de Riva, Viago's niece from one of his older exiled siblings. I'm still ironing out the details, but basically? Viago's extra strict with her because 1) he doesn't want anyone accusing him of playing favorites with blood relatives and 2) even though she's very, very far-removed from the line of succession, people expect even bastard children and grandchildren of royalty to be a cut above the rest.

Florencia, however, is absolutely not about any of that royalty shit. She's not interested in politics or being in a major leadership role (lol. lmao, even.) and her entire combat style is basically to smash it dead. Not the grace and finesse expected of a Crow, y'know? So, she's basically a perpetual disappointment as far as Crow leadership is concerned, especially Viago.

Then there's the whole thing with the Antaam. At that point, Viago's pretty much given up on making a true Crow out of her and sends her off with Varric to stop Solas. He calls it a contract mainly to keep her from being formally exiled like his siblings, just in case she needs to come home for some reason, but as far as he's concerned, this is a move to get her to explore other options besides being a Crow.

Being sent away was honestly a blow to her. Like, she knew she wasn't great at being a Crow and that Viago had really high expectations of her, but she really thought of the rest of the Crows as family. And now her family's kicked her out for doing what she thought was right at the time. She eventually opens up to Varric and Harding about it while they're on the road and Harding mentions something about rooks, birds that look a lot like crows but tend to stick together in flocks instead of being mostly solitary, which is where she picks up the nickname, "Rook."

And that's about all I've got lol. I have no idea if I'll ever actually write fic of her or maybe even bust out my tablet and start drawing again, but I wanted to share what I do have just bc I feel like it really fits nicely with the canon background without going too far off track, y'know?