I really do have applaud Ashley for making the choice to play, not just someone who worships one of the Shapers, but someone who worships a Shaper who is old enough to remember when they were alive. The core concept of Aramán as a setting is to explore a world in which mortals banded together to kill the gods, and where this was the correct, albeit consequential and weighty, decision to make. So to have one of the player characters be one of the Shapers' faithful who, based on her extensive arcane scarring, may have fought in their defense during the Shapers' War? Incredible decision, and one that as we can see from Vaelus's single scene in the first episode, gives Ashley's character a worldview which is directly at odds with the worldview of a lot of the other characters. (See: Thaisha's laughing scoff when Vaelus describes Sylvandri as "The Fallen Goddess of Life", and the general disdain with which Vaelus regards the world she's had to travel through to retrieve the Stone of Nightsong.)
I also really like that Vaelus's relationship with Sylvandri, from what little we know, seems to have been a positive one. Sylvandri's fierce love of the elves (of which Vaelus is one) is the reason they are nigh immortal in this setting. Sylvandri also made sure to prepare a paradisaical afterlife for those elves that did die and assigned a celestial to quickly ferry elven souls through the underworld so that they might reach it faster. When that celestial was slain, she bound that same magic to the Stone of Nightsong. Sylvandri's relationship to her followers seems to have been one where there was genuine love from both sides. So to have one of those followers be a protagonist in a story exploring a world where the general view on Sylvandri's death is that it was necessary and just is absolutely delicious from a narrative perspective, and I'm so glad it's the angle Ashley decided to explore.
