Shaylorelle was an Ashtivan priestess who served Sheşrun Abbey and led several attempts to rise up against the imperial occupation there. She was a skilled martial artist and staff-maker who drew her inner strength from an intense connection to the tundra she was raised and trained in. Though she never taught her formally, her lessons to others, personal form practice, and the few explanations she indulged her formed the basis of the reconstruction of the Mirellor fighting style that Lux and Cepheid created.
Sureshina was another resident devotee at the Abbey, raised by the same forest-dwelling healer as her sister Shaylorelle. Mentored by Kinelebesh, she worked as her assistant and intended to take up her post someday. Sureshina was also one of the last to be trained in the arts of the Ashtivan death-priestesses, who served the community as combination hospice nurses, funeral directors, and spiritual mediums.
Liorasha, though old when Lux met her, was the youngest of the abbey’s last devotees. She was revered as a masterful artist, musician, and storyteller, and as such played a key role in the abbey’s routines and rituals. Although she and her sisters were all very occupied with fighting to keep their world and culture alive, she notably made time to be a friend to Lux when she was little, and a lot of Lux’s more positive memories of the abbey, whether she realizes it or not, involve her.
Kinelebesh was the last oracle of Sheşrun Abbey. Like most oracles in the Mirellor province, she was blind, having sustained progressive vision loss after working all her life on the abbey’s famous prophetic and narrative tapestries. This, local legend held, was a sign that her soul had been entirely stitched into cloth, where it would live forever and, through the power of the patterns and sigils it formed, could receive knowledge from many unseen realms. When Lux was a very young child, Kinelebesh tried to entrust what she could of the tradition of priestesshood she had been trained in to what she knew might be the last survivor of their dying local culture. There’s only so much you can actually teach a three year old about a highly complex and abstract system of beliefs and rituals, but she had a few tricks up her sleeve.
[Image: a posed group shot of four Ashtivans--humanoid aliens with warm-grey skin and dark hair and softly glowing lights in the middle of their foreheads. All are fairly elderly and wearing ornate robes with bell sleeves and tight sashes at the waists. The first three from the left have their hair up in elaborate styles; the last, who is seated, wears hers down, long, and wild.]