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Madeleine was a third daughter of huntsmen who served the Graysons. She grew up surrounded by forests, running and dancing in the lushness of the green world around her. She loved the outside world, and the endless sky, and the pouring rain -- quite a lot of the pouring rain, really, somehow. The first time she saw the sea, she was 11, and she fell madly in love with it. It would be years before she saw it again, but it was like a hole in her heart. When she was 15, her parents came to Arx as part of a party of other serving people, and Madeleine came with them. She spent a lot of time on the beach, and fell madly in love with a young Thrax knight who also walked that beach. It was not a love story that ended well for a number of reasons, and her parents ended up getting in trouble with their liege for being poor chaperones. It was not until Madeleine was 19, and an adult, and an apprentice seamstress under her own power, that she made her way back to the city. She tried to join several different ships as a crewman only to discover that she did not know the first thing about being a sailor; she managed to get one post, but lost it after a harrowing month-long journey that brought her right back where she started, considerably more bruised and feeling much more useless than when she started. She turned to the Faith, and it really became her center and helped her to become grounded. Yet she never lost her love of the outdoors or the natural world, and while a loving and slightly dizzy priest of the Pantheon became her persona, she grew a grounded and centered inner keel within herself the more she relied upon Mangata. She became elevated to Mangata's Archlectorship with the retirement of her aged predecessor, and walked serenely forward onto the beach of life, prepared for whatever would come.

Madeleine looks like summer. Her eyes are the morning: a soft gray dawn, hinted with the blue of the sky. Her hair is the noon, wheat gold and falling long and straight around her shoulders. Her laughter is the evening, low and warm in the velvet richness of her smoky voice. Voluptuously shaped, Madeleine has an earthy fullness to her body that is sometimes masked by her preference for flowy veils and flaring robes. Her feet are bare when she can get away with it, soles thickly callused. Crows feet walk beside her eyes, along her mouth. There's something about her that suggests she ought to be wearing flowers, even if she isn't.

Warm and peaceful, Madeleine likes best to go with the flow. She wants everyone to get along and she's not above taking extreme measures to try to make that happen. Extreme measures can range from really aggressive muffin tactics to literally locking enemies in a room together and seeing whether they come out friends or if one of them is dead at the end of the day. She has it in her to be a really Machiavellian grandmother, except that her children are the flock, the Faithful, and her grandchildren are basically everybody outside the flock. That said, she can come off as flighty, abstracted, or just plain odd. She loves to be outside, to feel the sun on her face and the surf on her feet. She hates to be cooped up. She loves freedom and openness and whole-heartedly embracing life. She also has a low taste for shocking people.