Persona Profile: Ayona (Inactive)

Writer: Jane

Name: Ayona
Age: 83
Birthday: m12 d17
Rank: Master Mason
Location: Dolphin Cove Weyr
Craft: Mason
Craft Rank: Master

Physical Description of Persona:
At 74 Ayona is more wiry than slim. Her straight black hair is mostly dark grey now and cut short so it need not be tied back to keep it from obscuring her vision. Her dark brown eyes haven't changed over the Turns, but she now wears lenses for fine work. Ayona appreciates that she has remained in good health without giving herself credit for her continued high levels of activity. The few injuries she has suffered in her craft life have been minor and all healed well though she is aware that her back is slowly becoming less flexible.

Emotional Description of Persona:
Being an only child for many Turns, then regarded as special for her fast progression in her craft has made Ayona very sure of herself - in the first half of her life perhaps unappealingly so. At 30, after her move North, she was angry and bitter, and not above taking her feelings out on anybody who got near. At 74 her self-confidence remains but her mood has mellowed. She herself acknowledges that she is a better team member and leader now than she has ever been. People are becoming more important to her than they once were and she has learned to accept that not all people (especially not all women) share her consuming passion to pursue a craft.

History of Persona:
Ayona is Southern Continent born and, though she spent much of her adult life working from the Northern Mining Hall, she still regards the South as her home.

Born to a mason specialist family, Ayona was only one of two children of her crafter parents. When her younger brother was born she was already apprenticed but that didn't make her any less fond of the boy who was thirteen Turns her junior.

Ayona was a remarkably clever and capable apprentice, quickly making senior apprentice and then journeywoman. Her quick progression fired her ambition and she studied for mastery to the exclusion of everything but her relationship with her little brother whom she adored. More than a little smug when she was confirmed as a master mason at the minimum age of 30, she and her apprentice brother celebrated. Their elderly parents were dead and she regarded herself as much a mother as sister to Denayon.

Within months Ayona's world changed forever. The most virulent yet of the Southern plagues arrived and the ban against taking women into the crafts was enacted. Ayona's disagreement with the edict was vocal and heartfelt; for her troubles she was told that women had been spared the plague to have children for Pern, not to argue against those in authority. Deciding that staying on at the Hall tacitly condoned the craft ban to which she remained vehemently opposed, Ayona left her brother behind and moved to the Northern Continent.

Although the decision of the craftmasters had angered her, the worst of it in Ayona's mind was that her voice as a master ranked crafter had counted for less than nothing. Almost with the promulgation of the ban, women had lost all they had gained in the thousand Turns since the near-legendary Ninth Pass. She was angry and bitter as she started her new life in the North, and determined that one day she would return home.

She did. In her sixties she began to visit the Minecraft Hall at Garnet Valley again in the wake of her brother's late-in-life marriage and the birth of his first child. While not entirely welcome, even the most conservative of the new generation of miners and masons would not prevent her visiting her family.

At the same time the draconic population of the Weyrholds was growing and Weyrholds were being reopened in the caverns that they had long since abandoned. In the process of reopening there was work for masons and Ayona found herself moving from Weyr to Weyr, working as part of (and often the leader of) the masoncrafters who were hired to help. She wouldn't have said that she initially believed in the return of the Red Star, but after Turns of watching draconic population soar she was willing to be convinced.

Once Thread re-appeared and draconic instinct was proved right, her own instincts drove her South again. In a Pass, in the first Pass in 1200 Turns, she felt that people needed to be close to their family, and Denayon was all she had. As a working mason she was still unwelcome at the Hall and so she compromised and settled at Dolphin Cove Weyr. Sadly Denayon died after a brief illness at the end of the first Turn of the Pass.

Family and Friends
Denayon, 9, Master mason - Deceased (Brother)

Approved: March 4th 2007
Last updated: November 28th 2007

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Persona Profile: Ayona (Inactive)