Nyla Wickenway

Deep in the north Dragon Claw Mountains, the desperate and hungry cries of a newborn child were the only sounds that pierced the air of the small gnome village that night. The normally joyous sounds accompanying this new arrival were nowhere to be heard, as the news that the tiny girl’s mother had bid her final farewell reached the large crowd of friends, family, and neighbors waiting outside the door of the Wickenway home.

A grief-stricken Brodybale, the young girl’s father, soon took his daughter and left the village he had called home for over 80 years, leaving through the mountain pass for the large metropolis of Gearston where his elder sister, Nimue, lived and worked for the good part of a century. Nimue was a bit of an eccentric in her lifestyle, choosing not only to work in the Gearston Institute Library, the largest library to be owned and operated by Gnomes, but to live there among the books as well. When Brodybale and his daughter arrived, they became a living part of the library just as Nimue was. And the young girl grew there, running, playing, and exploring amongst the tomes. She soaked up knowledge like a Dream Sponge, reading book after book, swinging from one subject to the next and devouring each word like a Halfling with cake.

Unlike most gnomes who were showered with names upon their birth, the she had but one for the first 12 years of her life: Beryl, named after the deep green mineral that the gnomes in her father’s home village cut and shaped into perfect emeralds. It was a name that never quite resonated with her and one that, she noted, seemed to bring her father pain. It wasn’t until she found an old book of her mother’s that her father had brought with him that she had ever felt connected to a name. It was a compendium of different Gnome tales, stories of bravery and adventure that made her long for views beyond the cave of the city. In the center of the book was a story about a young female Gnome who used her brains over brawn to overcome enemies and challenges. She reminded Beryl of herself, but more significantly, she imagined that was what her mother would have been like: kind, intelligent, brave. From then on, she went by the name Nyla, to pay tribute to her favorite hero, Nyla Hawk, and the mother she had never met.

It was years later that the bookworm who longed for adventure recognized her calling. Nyla was not just fixated on reading, but on learning in general. She would often leave the library to chat with the artisans, engineers, woodworkers, blacksmiths, anyone with expertise in any field that she could glean a semblance of information from. One day, while she chatted excitedly with a Priestess of the Temple of Mishakal, the world seemed to stop around her. The water that poured out of the fountain in the center of the bright sanctuary froze in midstream, the tiny droplets of water hovering above the surface. The marble statue of the goddess herself seemed to bore into Nyla’s soul with her smooth white eyes. And as if she had not thought she was suffering from sudden-onset insanity before, the lips of the statue began to move and a sweet voice like the strum of a harp echoed through the room. The goddess implored Nyla with the hypnotic melody of her voice to explore the world, to learn all she could, to spread the light of Mishakal’s love and knowledge to all those she encountered. Nyla was overcome with the sincerity of the request, and felt the weight and importance of being chosen. She spent a year in training with the clerics and priests of Mishakal before she did indeed set out to explore the world with the power of her goddess behind her, the double coils of her holy symbol emblazoned on her shield. She had known there was more to the world than even her big city had to offer. And it couldn’t have come at a better time; the library was running out of books for her to read.