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Cadenza Velenosa, eldest of a lesser line of Velenosa princes and princesses, was not a very good Lycene. As a child, she did not take to her political lessons. She was frank, forthright to the point of tactlessness, and had a knack for taking exactly the wrong point from her teachers and running away with it out of sheer stubbornness. Iron will in a nine year old can be difficult to deal with, particularly an active nine year old with a seemingly endless ability to get into things. Her father was a Zaffria, and while on a trip to visit relatives at Crowned Hill, their party was attacked by an Abandoned raiding party, and Cadenza learned a lesson about heroic recklessness: that is, that if you're going to hero recklessly, you have to pick your moment, and preferably, be older than eleven. She came away from the fight half an orphan; her mother died fighting in defense of her father, and her father brutally injured defending Cadenza, and it was a lesson she never forgot. As an adult, she remembered what she'd learned about timing, but she never let it hold her back. She sailed forth with her cousin Antonio and learned the ropes, and then set forth all the further, sailing through the Mourning Isles. Allegedly she was seeking a potential alliance with House Thrax, a potential match for one of the young princes, but she slipped loose the leash and sailed still further, disappearing off the map for awhile. She turned up again far afield in Arvum on a wild adventure where she either rescued or was rescued by Lou Grayson, or maybe it was mutual. It was neither the first nor the last time that Cadenza mysteriously made herself vanish only to reappear again later with tales of dramatic nonsense and half-truths. When Lady Aislin launched her Society of Explorers, Cadenza was only not an early adopter because she was spending a month trapped in the basement of a ruined temple to Gild in the hinterlands of the Oathlands, living on an unfortunate diet of roast rat and buried roots while she tried to work out a series of absurdly confusing puzzles that would have made a lot more sense if you could remember all Thirteen gods. During the Silent War, Cadenza would have fought for the Lyceum gladly, but instead, she had accidentally gotten herself temporarily sold as a prisoner of one piratical group of Abandoned to another, following the loss of her ship to a raid. She only escaped by dumb luck and someone else's stray arrow fortuitously striking the gut of the guy who held her chain. So it was that, in trying to make her way back to Arx, speaking a mangled polyglot of several Abandoned languages badly, she has only turned up again on the shore of Southport honestly confused about how she'd arrived, with a fresh scar on her neck from someone trying to kill her for no reason she could explain, and the worst part is she had no good story to show for it.

Clad in nothing but her streaming hair, Cadenza's lean, muscular body would be a story blended of scars and sensuality, but few are so fortunate as to know that. Her sartorial tastes are deeply practical, muting the fullness of her not insignificant curves and permitting her as much freedom to move as possible. Her hair is black as midnight, and though, loose, it falls in a cascading cloud to her shoulder-blades, it is usually braided and bound. Her features are fine, delicate, with high, thinly dark eyebrows, and high, narrowly angled cheekbones. Her eyes are a brilliant, intense blue, large and framed by a dense thickness of eyelashes. Her skin is dusky gold, her lips dusky rose and full and soft beneath her fine straight nose.

Cadenza Velenosa is an Adventurer with a capital A, a capital A for alacrity, abandon, audacity, or maybe just awesome. There's some measure of arrogance there, too, of course; but it's not like she doesn't have the public cachet to back that up. She is, after all, a Princess of the Lyceum, and with her sense of timing, she has a measure of patience, a measure of composure, of control -- or maybe has learned to fake composure by raw force of will. It's true that she never saw a swash she didn't want to buckle. Life has gifted her with not so much caution -- who has the time? -- but a sense of timing keyed to a self-preservatory instinct, so that her ambition and her lust for life drive her, but do not rule her. She doesn't charge headlong into trouble; she calculates precise angles of trouble and /then/ sidles obliquely into it, instead. One of nature's gamblers, Cadenza would probably have to admit, if pressed, that she finds risk to be a seductive lure in and of itself.