Mariya Belmore

Introduction - Lady Mariya Belmore, the Clarion Call, is a commander brilliant beyond her years, driven by the desire to escape her vaunted mother's shadow and fix the honor of House Belmore upon the pages of history. Highly religious and painfully un-sentimental, her off-putting demeanor conceals a sharply pointed mind and a sense for intrigue and statecraft to accompany her talents at the general's helm.

Appearance and Character
Willowy and tall, with beautifully carved, statuesque features of porcelain pale. Her gold-flecked hazel eyes glitter with an acidic, calculating light, and her silvery hair is tied back into a painfully severe bun that complements her narrow face as best as that style could come close to 'complementing' anything. The impression one immediately gets is of prettiness like a marble bust that's been smashed in by its own artist, carefully and exquisitely ruined.

Her voice is soft yet biting at times, with the peculiar sort of absent-minded tone that indicates her only rarely wholly paying attention to someone else. Mariya often seems out in her own dream world, toying with details beyond the mundanities of conversation -- though if one catches her attention, Mariya's full focus is quite disconcerting.

Commonly, she wears a pair of silver-rimmed glasses perched upon her elegant nose or pushed into her white hairline, though Mariya sees perfectly well without them, and seems to only need them for reading and consulting maps.

Timeline
394 AC: As the Great Famine faded, Simeon and Rosalind finally bore a child – Mariya Belmore, with her father’s dark hazel eyes and her mother’s silvery hair. Time would tell whether this latest Belmore daughter would live up to her mother and aunt’s formidable reputations; for once, Rosalind Belmore took time away from her work to help raise her child… though that ended just the next year.

404 AC: During the depths of the Scarlet Winter, after three-and-ten years of marriage, Simeon Egen succumbs to a consumptive sickness brought on by the deathly weather, despite the efforts of Maester Harrion himself and whatever educated men of the Vale Rosalind could lay hands upon. Mariya is left with only her mother to raise her, and at but ten years old, is pushed into the study of military strategy and arms.

408 AC: For her high treason against the Crown, Rosalind Belmore is executed after delivering a dramatic set of last words before the court of King's Landing, entitled "Speech from the King's Landing Traitor's Trial". Mariya maintains a personal copy of her mother's final defiant words, along with the perfectly preserved last letter she received.

409 AC: As a result, Mariya now succeeds the seat of House Belmore, and begins a swift consolidation of power with a ruthless drive that seems wholly out of place for a girl of four-and-ten. However, the reality is that Mariya did not allow hersel to grieve, but rather turned all that energy into pure, seething determination to accomplish her goals. To prove herself worthy of the Belmore legacy.

411 AC: Mariya administrates the House and its lands as her mother did at first, but soon begins implementing rather more unorthodox changes, opening personal freedoms for certain classes of vassals while curtailing others, seemingly seeking to carefully design her society in microcosm while maintaining her tithe and duties to the Crown. The experiment proved surprisingly effective, though Mariya left it at some minor adjustments, either unwilling to tinker too much with the human profit motive or simply running out of knowledge a girl of six-and-ten can possess.

411 AC: During this time, Mariya also shadows the generals of the Vale on their expeditions to combat the Mountain Clans, taking her same experimental approach to warfare as she held with social sciences. The style she created ended up being absolutely unique, practiced during the Clansmen raids on Strongsong with disturbing effectiveness during 412 AC. However, the true test of hee commanding ability would not come until two years after her first set of small, outlying victories.

414 AC: Mariya had been carefully watching and steering the raiding patterns of the scattered Clansmen within Belmore lands for some time, and now came the time to finally strike. Armed with the knowledge of the psychology and tactics of her soon-to-be victims, Mariya Belmore struck swiftly, luring the Clansmen into a trap by the river running near her holdings and tearing them apart between the river and her forces.

The first line was a shock of heavy cavalry out of the trees, interrupting the Clansmen on their way to the lure and crushing them beneath the bulk and swift drive of the knights and their mounts. As the Clansmen turned to respond to the sudden charge, a volley of arrows sprang out of the forest, pinning the Mountain Clansmen between a line of archers hidden in the undergrowth, the river behind them, and the knights who had split to either side and were hemming them in to create a larger, less divided target for the archers.

In the end, it was a brutal, no-quarter-accepted massacre, the Clansmen shot to arrow-riddled pincushions as they finally broke and sought to flee across the river, until the fast-flowing waters were choked with floating bodies and red with their blood.

Reportedly, Mariya Belmore laughed upon being told of that grisly success, before deeming it "well enough, for now." However it stood, the Clansmen would not trespass too deeply within Belmore lands until the fragile peace after the slaughter at the Mirror Lake, when such trespassing stopped altogether.

418 AC: A scant few moons away from her twenty-fourth nameday, the respected young Lady of a grand house of the Vale, Mariya Belmore stands at the precipice of a new age signaled with the Tourney at Summerhall and the word of the King in the Mountain. And with all her characteristic cold neutrality, she shall meet the future as it comes, army-map and raven in hand.

Recent Events
To be updated as they come.

Family
Lady Rosalind Belmore, mother, deceased

Simeon Egen, father, deceased

Household Members / NPC's
Master of Arms Elias Wydman

Maester Harrion