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The eldest daughter of a lesser line of the principal house of Thrax, Cassima never expected to be in line for anything. Her father was about as foreign to the ways of the Mourning Isles as it was possible for a man to be: the younger son of a Northern march, inclined to study, whose hobby was mathematics and logical proofs. Yet he brought with him wealth for the House and the knowledge of what to do with that wealth, and was embraced by the family as an odd, but useful, addition to the line. Still, he had no sons, and that was an unending frustration for Cassima's mother, who wanted nothing more than a prince to push into the line of fire, that is, the line of duty that are the internecine politics of a major house. Cassima loved her father more than anything in the world, and so she grew up at his knee. Books and learning were their special time together, when she was free of the nursery and could sit with him in his study, and while there were not insignificant tensions between he and his wife Alyona Thrax, with his daughter he could sit and think and talk -- frequently well over her head, but in deepest earnest. So it was that she grew up a daddy's girl with a most untraditional father in a traditional house, and there's nothing that breeds true like nerdery. Cassima focused on learning everything that she could about literally everything, but especially the running and management of a house, the running and management of an army, the logistics and the inglorious; it's easy to pay attention to maths when they're maths based on people's lives, the food and clothing and gear and everything that is desperately needed in a world where it might be more fun to pay heed to the more glorious questions of war. Cassima's father died when she was still young, but his death only served to fire her determination to embrace all that he was and had been. There has always been a strong tradition of Thrax economists, lawyers, and managers, so Cassima found that although she felt the pangs of outsiderhood because she learned these things at her father's knee rather than her mother's, she was not an iconoclast, and found herself uniquely situated among her sister women -- vehemently traditional in her interests, vehemently nontraditional in her outlook, she fit in with neither the old guard of grandmothers with their finely manicured fingers twisted around the purse strings nor the new guard of young women reaching for the progressive outreach that she saw growing in many of the vassal houses to Thrax. Alone in a crowd, an outsider among insiders, she developed her self-sufficiency along with her personal brilliance, and learned to obscure and shroud her basic, fundamental loneliness in a traditionally nerdy way: humor. As an adult, she finds Thrax on a precipice of change and arrives in the capital with a certainty that her fundamentals are those that her family will desperately need. She has reached out to join the scholars and economists and thinkers of Arx to drive herself into new connections and new friendships that might help her build anew and learn and grow.

Whether her cloud of dark curls falls long and loose in a tumble to the midst of her back or is carefully confined into twists and braids, is remains her most dramatic feature: knotty, full-bodied, silky black, it is a riot of curls, an untamed monstrosity of curls, or a delight of curls, depending on how much effort Cassima has been wiling to undergo in what feels like an endless war with her sometimes glorious hair. Her skin is a warm, light brown, smooth and without visible blemish. Her frame is slight, cleanly angled and youthful, her curves modest. Her lips are full, almost too full for her face, beneath the soft snub of her nose. Her eyes are a deep green, dark and framed by an intense profusion of black eyelashes. Her eyebrows are thick and dark, but nicely shaped, lending expressiveness to eyes that already express much.

The social whirl is not where Cassima shines most. That isn't to say that she is incapable of communicating, but she tends towards a wry, quirky sort of humor that does not always make it easy for her. She has a bit of a tendency to withhold where she should reach out and to overshare when she should remain restrained, the kind of social awkwardness that develops from a childhood spent too much in books and too little in the companionship of other children. Yet her warmth and her loyalty are deep wells, and once tapped, should never run dry. Pragmatic and inclined to simple, honest, and occasionally self-deprecating self-assessment, there is never a risk that her arrogance would chase off anyone -- except perhaps in one area and that is the area of scholarship. Yet in this one area that Cassima does not second-guess herself, her excellence is real. A clever writer, witty jokester, ready humorist and boon companion once those initial layers of uncertainty and awkwardness have been surpassed, Cassima is anchored to reality by her grounded nature and tries not to be overly troubled by her essential layers deep human loneliness, because doesn't everyone have that? She loves to watch people and imagine their stories for herself. She enjoys complicated problem solving and mathematics. She is fascinated by questions of philosophy and politics.