Sylvia Ashwood

Lady Sylvia Dawnblade is a Paladin and Knight of the Silver Hand. She is currently serving as a Knight of The Citrine Eagle, and holds the title Viscount of Ashwood.

Appearance
Sylvia is crowned with a thick head of honey blonde hair long enough to dip just below her shoulders. With the exception of a few styled locks in the front, she wears her hair tied around back in a ponytail. She has a diamond-shaped face with brown eyes and fair skin, and every muscle in her face is expressive. Whether smiling, frowning, laughing, or sighing – there’s no such thing as a subtle gesture.

Early Life
Sylvia was born in the year -1 L.C. to a Cade and a Marissa, two peasants from Stratholme. In the grand scheme of things (as well as the not-so-grand) neither person was particularly remarkable, except for perhaps one respect; they were very poor. Sylvia lived in the slums of the city inside of a building hardly any bigger than a closet. Alongside her two parents, she shared this humble space with six siblings. She was the youngest of the bunch and always got the short end of the stick, so at a very young age Sylvia had to learn to survive on her own.

She gained a reputation; one that likened her more to a rat than a little girl. She would scamper through alleyways wearing mud-ridden rags and smelling nearly as bad as she looked. To top it off, she was even caught fishing through her neighbors pantries more than once. The merchant square harbored no love for her either. A sight of the girl surely meant a juicy apple or citrus had gone missing and was never to be seen again. She really did earn that reputation of hers.

At a young age Sylvia committed herself to the idea of becoming a Knight. Every Knight she had ever seen walked about in shining armor with a horse and a fat purse, and it didn’t seem so hard to do what they did. Still, she hadn’t the faintest idea of where to start. An idea crossed her mind; make her way to the library, as someone had told her that their long distant cousin had a friend who told them that they became a Knight by following the teachings of a book! After several incidents of being chased out of the library (after defacing a book and being called a mud-ridden hooligan), she was granted a boon. A priestess of Alonsus Chapel took Sylvia under her wing.

She was tutored in the ways writing, reading and worship and attended every church service for several years until she could recite half of the sermons. At the age of twelve (11 L.C.), Sylvia walked out of a sermon and saw a Knight returning from a recent battlefield. She ran to this Knight, a man by the name of Sir Adams, and dropped to her knees before his horse. She looked at him with pleading eyes, reciting prayer after prayer in an effort to impress him. It did, and he took her to his home where she was cleaned up and where they conversed. Afterwards, he named the girl his squire. She was no long just on the path of becoming a Knight, but a Paladin.

Squire of the Second War
Sylvia became a squire almost immediately following the Alliance victory in the Second War. It was a dangerous time for someone so young to be out in the world; but this trial by fire forced her to learn quickly. She learned about martial combat with just about every weapon one can think of. She learned about hunting and herbs, and which were safe to eat while on the go. She learned about faith, and how important it can be when the night is darkest. She didn’t escape from these trials unscathed; Sir Adams fell early on in her career, and over the course of her squirehood she gained a new mentor three separate times (and not by choice). At age seventeen, she nearly needed a fourth.

It was an ominous night with an odd stillness in the air, but these sorts of things are always more obvious in retrospect. In the moment it was easy to miss the signs; easy to miss the lack of birds chirping and how oddly perfect it seemed for a campsite. Nevertheless, that’s where they made camp. It was a prison convoy transporting recently captured Orcs to the various internment camps spread throughout Lordaeron, one led by her mentor Sir Covingston. And so many of the people in the convoy went to sleep, Sylvia included.

When the screaming started, it almost seemed like a bad dream. It wasn’t until the sound of bones snapping and metal being crush joined into the orchestra that many really realized what was happening. The convoy was being raided by a band of Orcs and Trolls. Sylvia drew her blade, and climbed from her tend where she saw the slaughter. The dead were everywhere, and Covingston was nowhere to be found. She took her blade, and she ducked and dove through the battle doing what she could. Time was a blur, and she was fighting. She took hits, being grazed by the Orcish axes and even taking an arrow to the abdomen, but still she fought. The night passed, and the dawn of a new day came. Sylvia was alive, alongside many men and women of the convoy. The grass was littered with bodies, be it Orc, Troll, or Human. As the sun rose, it glinted off the bloodied Sylvia’s blade. She became known as ‘the Dawnblade’ and was celebrated for her bravery that night.

Paladin of a Fallen Kingdom
On Sylvia's 18th birthday (17 L.C.), Sir Marcus Covingston sponsored her entry into the Order of the Silver Hand. A ceremony took place in Alonsus Chapel, where Sylvia was formally dubbed as 'Dame Sylvia the Dawnblade'. At this point, her name was written to the Annals of the Silver Hand; she was officially both a Knight and a part of the Order. For Sylvia, this was more than just a Knighting. Finally she had proof that she was more than just a street rat from the slums of Stratholme; instead she was a Knight of Lordaeron and a skilled warrior of the Holy Light, and nobody could dispute that.

In the years that followed, Sylvia served the Silver Hand in every capacity she could manage. She acted as a teacher, as a healer, as a diplomat and as a soldier. Chief amongst those tasks, however, was her role as Heavy Cavalry in the Alliance's cavalry brigades. During most of the reconstruction period she traveled across nearly every northern kingdom. With special attention paid to Strom and the nearby Dwarven lands of the Hinterlands and Loch Modan, Sylvia and her cavalry unit spent most of its time chasing down hiding Orcs and breaking remaining any and all remaining Orcish holdouts.

In late 23 L.C. the first rumors of a deadly plague began to surface. Confined to the northernmost reaches of the Kingdom, very few in the nobility were overly concerned. Disease was nothing new in the human kingdoms and nobody could even prove the plague existed, much less it's rumored severity. To top things off, both the nobility and the Silver Hand was distracted by the new up and coming Orc Warchief and his aggressive movements. Sylvia was of the same mind as many of her peers; after all, no disease could possibly present as great a danger as a reformed Orcish Horde.

This made things all things all the more shocking when news of Arthas's struggle in Hearthglen reached the Silver Hand. Lord Uther acted quickly, sounding the alarm and near immediately setting off to reinforce the Prince. Sylvia was one of the riders who joined the Lightbringer's host, and she was among those who all but annihilated the Scourge force beneath a thundering cavalry charge. After the battle was over, she remained behind on orders to safeguard the province until royal troops could arrive to relieve her.

Viscount Ashwood When news of The Culling of Stratholme came, Sylvia didn't waste a moment. She mounted a horse and rode to see the aftermath. She spent all of a day walking the burning city streets, but when night set she said her goodbyes. The Silver Hand had been disbanded, but she couldn't let that stand between her and her job. She traveled one town to the next, only to discover it had been annihilated by either the plague of the plague's victims. Occasionally should would luck out and find a small group or the remnants of a village who were still holding out, and she'd do all she could to help them; oftentimes that meant struggling to convince them to escape to the south.

It wasn't only peasants she encountered either. While on her path, she came across a chance encounter; an Earl and his family who were the sole survivors of a once bustling city. She treated them to a meal, offering up her limited and meager supplies to the desperate group, and she camped alongside them overnight. Come daybreak, the Earl approached her and asked her to escort them to the south. At first Sylvia politely refused them, claiming that there were other survivors who still needed her help, but the Earl quickly became desperate and wore her down. Sylvia agreed to help them escape, and despite several very close calls (including one where Sylvia herself was gravely injured), they managed to make the slow and arduous journey towards the Dwarven lands.

The Earl offered Sylvia more permanent lodgings in his Stormwind properties, which she refused. She told him she intended to go north once more, because that was her home. After he realized he was unlikely to convince her otherwise, named her Viscountess of Ashwood as "someone so dedicated to their home deserves a small part of it". The land was once a fairly prosperous agrarian community with three massive farms taking up the majority of the space, as well as a fifteen hundred strong village at its center and a relatively luxurious manor at the height of it all. Despite that it was only a short distance from Stratholme itself, and had already fallen victim to the ceaseless raids of the dead. When Sylvia returned to the Plaguelands, she took the time to visit Ashwood. She didn't stay long, it would be many years before that place could be inhabited again.

The New Alliance
As time went on, the Plaguelands became more and more dangerous. Where once one would often come across a barricaded village or convoy of civilians fleeing south there were now only ravaged villages and packs of ghouls. It wasn’t entirely barren, though; Hearthglen had escaped the onslaught of the Scourge and remained as a bastion of Paladin activity under Taelan Fordring. Sylvia made her way there, working alongside former comrades and other refugees to keep the place a living enclave in a land of death. With increasing frequency, travelers would come along with news about a “New Alliance” led by the Grand Marshal that was making its way north from the very southern reaches of Lordaeron. Sylvia still held out hopes that the dead could be driven and the land made clean again, and so she set out from Hearthglen to find Garithos and his armies.

She arrived in the camp of Lord Garithos just under two weeks prior to the reclamation of Dalaran. The army was capable, and it was showing promise. As far as Sylvia was concerned, morale was high and the chance of making headway into the heart of Lordaeron was not insignificant. When Dalaran was retaken, Sylvia no longer had any doubts. She left to defend the southern flank with the bulk of the army, and she fought with the genuine belief that this was to be the beginning of her Kingdom’s rebirth. Unfortunately for her, the Third War was a time where such beliefs came to die.

They were successful in fending off the Scourge counter attacks, and despite the treason and costly rebellion of the elves (now widely talked about amongst the ranks), the armies of the New Alliance had begun their march around the Lordamere Lake and to the Capital City. Things quickly started to fall apart when the news of Garithos’s pack began to spread. A splinter faction of the Undead had offered help in retaking the city, and somehow Garithos had agreed. Dissent spread quickly, and Sylvia was one of the louder ones. Along with a considerable portion of the army, Sylvia abandoned the Grand Marshall and refused to align with the Undead. Later, when returning to Hearthglen, she learned how wise her choice had actually been; Garithos had been betrayed, and the New Alliance had been wiped out overnight.

The Scarlet Crusade
At this time, Hearthglen was under the protection of Taelan Fordring. Over the next several months, Hearthglen became progressively more of a bastion for a new organization called the Scarlet Crusade. Though somewhat fanatical, the organization was led by Saidan Dathrohan, someone Sylvia greatly admired and respected, and she pledged herself to their cause.

As a veteran of the Silver Hand, Sylvia became one of their Knight-Lieutenants. She would often be found training newcomers in the virtues of the Light, and would occasionally lead small expeditions out into the Plaguelands where they would hunt small bastions of Scourge or Forsaken. Occasionally small holdouts of various races would be found, and those of the Horde would be treated as mercilessly as the were the dead. Despite this, as the years went on and the Crusade grew more fanatical Sylvia was outed as one of the more merciful Crusaders. While she would never object to any form of persecution or torture against those she saw as walking corpses, she would frequently let the living carry on their business with minimal hassle.

Things continued on like this for several years, and Sylvia turned a blind eye to the increasing fanaticism. This was the remnants of her Kingdom, the remnants of the Silver Hand. Anything that was being done was necessary. She kept her eyes turned, or at least tried to. At a certain point, Sylvia knew that effort was in vain. The Crusade had lost its way, and shortly after the fall of Naxxramas, she broke ties with the Scarlets and joined forces with the Argent Dawn at Light’s Hope Chapel.

The Argent Dawn
While considered one of the more lenient and moral-bound officers of the Scarlet Crusade, Sylvia often found herself in disagreement with many of the Argent Dawn’s members. She utterly refused to work alongside members of the Horde, and frequently criticized what she saw as carelessness amongst the members. Publicly the Dawn made sure to keep its members quiet about these sorts of things, but even then Sylvia was quite vocal to the point she was reprimanded several times. She felt openly that these new members of the Dawn would be its downfall because they’d be unwilling to do what needed to be done. This philosophy quickly brought her closer to one of the Dawn’s sub-factions, the Brotherhood of the Light.

She was never formally inducted into the Brotherhood, but where many of the Argent Dawn’s soldiers went to fight in Outland, she remained in the Plaguelands. She’d frequently be amongst the first to volunteer to bolster their forces on the more daring hit and run missions, and her experience as a cavalryman would come in handy when speed was required as much as prowess on the field. This routine filled her time during the invasion of Outland, and over the course of the year she managed to rack up quite the impressive number of cultist kills.

Light's Hope & The Crusade
[this section is a work in progress!]