Liberty

• Three-Time Overall Sornieth Core-Diving Champion, Intermediate Novice Division
• Search and Rescue

Liberty, everyone who knew her could agree, was a dead-end punk.

She was always restless and reckless, never satisfied when standing still; a regular adrenaline junkie. No one was surprised when she grew up and, in an admirable attempt to be responsible, chose to leave the Starfall Isles in favor of the Cloudsong Priesthood Religious Studies Program. She had always been clever; she'd been accepted to the program easily and wanted very much to make it work.

She lasted three months.

It wasn't that she slacked off; but she was no mage, and didn't have the patience for the kind of spirituality she was being taught. Her connection to the wind was wild; in her heart wind was synonymous with freedom, exhilaration, a rush of danger and delirious joy. She was never meant to be a priestess, and she dropped out quickly.

For years, she wandered. She knew what she was good at, if not quite what she was looking for. She tried her hand briefly as a courier but lacked the courtesy and patience for the job; so when she ended up near the Crescendo, something lit up in her eyes. She dyed her flight feathers black, painted racing stripes along her flanks, and within a year was the most promising core-diver in the region. It was an insane pastime--racers would start at a floating platform in the eye of the storm, dive into it, and complete two circuits through the eye wall; first against the wind, then with it, dodging unpredictable air currents and deadly shrapnel. It was ludicrously dangerous. It was completely pointless. It made her blood sing.

Inevitably, she was injured in a race. It was serious but not life-threatening; still, a concussion and a wing broken in three places put her out for the season. Recovering from the injury gave her time to get to thinking, as well as to get bored. A series of chance encounters landed her a job with a Sornieth-wide nonprofit search-and-rescue called Changing Winds, and for the first time Liberty realized that there wasn't just something she was good at; there was something she was meant to do.

Liberty is on-call at all hours, and loves every minute of it. Her precise, powerful flying skills put her on the front lines in high-stakes rescue missions; core-diving experience honed her ability to pick out anomalies from a distance, making her invaluable as recon in a wide search. An indomitable spirit is just as valuable; Liberty never hesitates, and that surety saves precious seconds in an emergency. But her specialty is with hatchlings. Her cheerful, unconcerned manner keeps them calm in dangerous circumstances, and when the immediate danger is past they tend to feel safer with her because she never talks down to them.

She's listed as a youth mentor with the Changing Winds search-and-rescue corps, and every year leads group counseling sessions and a recovery camp for hatchlings affected by natural disasters. Since coming to settle at the Reach--which is a story in itself--Adecia has offered up the run of the territory to Liberty's little ones.