Apostolos fled the court immediately, dodging a few assassins on his way to openly join the rebellion as a healer during the civil war. But when Garlemald invaded he left the fight, prioritizing getting his daughter as far away from the empire’s clutches as possible. He helped guide a band of refugees across the border into Gridania to plead for sanctuary, but they were rejected by the Elementals. Though Apostolos himself was offered a place within the conjurer’s guild, he was already wracked with guilt for leaving the rebellion behind, and could not stomach serving the forest that had rejected his countrymen.  

Their search for sanctuary brought them all the way to the high walls of Ul'dah… and no further. Though his skills would have been quite marketable inside the city walls, Apostolos refused to abandon those who had survived the journey this far only to be turned away at the gates. Thia grew up in Stonesthrow, amidst the ramshackle shanties and tumbling dust. Already quiet, distant, and prone to long bouts of dissociation, Alethia became more and more laconic as her Ala Mhigan accent earned her jeers and mockery. Her greatest joys were in her father’s lessons - magic, history, geography, arithmetic, astronomy. The world viewed through his eyes seemed so much brighter than the dirt, blood, and coin of the roads that led to Ul'dah.

She spent most of her childhood attempting to be as invisible and unobtrusive as possible, but eventually her father’s lessons and her endless, volatile well of aether grabbed the attention of the Thaumaturge’s Guild. When she received an offer of sponsorship, her father strongly encouraged her to take the room, board, and access to more books than she had ever seen in her life. She made few friends there, and her long silences only lengthened, but the well of knowledge and the new outlet for her flares of aether more than made up for the mockery and isolation.

Apostolos died during an altercation with some Brass Blades shortly before Alethia finished her studies at the Arrzaneth Ossuary. The judge ruled that her father--a teetotal, spartan-living community healer and peacekeeper--had drunkenly assaulted the officers. The fact that his belongings were ransacked and any valuable potions or tinctures had gone missing was apparently of no consequence.

Thia left without a word, without ever officially graduating, and submitted her application to the Adventurer’s Guild. She wanted to help, as he had. An unmoored, unwanted, unknown creature of sand and dust. 

 2.) What major allegiances does your character have? Are they with the Scions through and through, or do they have different or additional priorities?

Thia is confused by any organization that offers her a membership, assuming they have low standards, bad taste, or odd priorities. She initially assumed the Scions were very elaborate pranksters. However, they were the first people to offer her answers about the fluctuations of her aether, the nature of the Echo, and the wider threats facing Ul'dah, Eorzea, and beyond. She quickly became quite fond of them in her own quiet way, though her lack of Sharlayan training and formal education made her feel she had little to contribute other than fireworks at first.

Aside from the Scions, Alethia had very few other organizational allegiances prior to the events at Baelsar’s Wall. Ul'dah was the most familiar, which mostly made its sins sharper in her mind. If she is loyal to anyone there, it is General Aldynn, not the Flames or the Sultanate (and certainly not the Monetarists and their Brass Blades). 

Thia’s relationship with the Ala Mhigan Resistance is strained, confusing, and bittersweet. To many in Little Ala Mhigo and Rhalgr’s Reach, she represents the pampered, mewling cowards who abandoned the homeland to beg for scraps from the Sultana’s table. Still others--complete strangers--offer her stories of both her parents; some heroic, some mundane, but all sharp knives between her ribs. To honor the mother she never knew and the father ravaged by guilt, she threw everything she had into the liberation of their homeland. 

7.) Does your character have thoughts of settling down some day? Is it in the region they came from, or somewhere they visited in their travels? Or are they a forever wanderer?

Thia’s wanderlust and desire to go where she is most useful are really just smokescreens for her all-encompassing sense that she does not belong anywhere. This has only gotten more pronounced as various city states clamor for her presence and assistance where they previously closed the door on Ala Mhigans. Life in Ul'dah is honestly more jarring, now, from her vantage point among the Scions. Her treatment there is so far removed from her young life as a refugee that she finds it by turns disorienting, amusing, and infuriating. 

Gyr Abania is both familiar and alien, the fairytale land of her father’s bedtime stories and the ruined remnants of a home that will not claim her. Everything smells faintly of the spices that always perfumed her father’s alchemy; the textile patterns match the faded threads of his most treasured, weathered clothing; the music thrums and the rebels dance to the same tunes that broke out around the fires of Stonesthrow… but above all of it, a relentless voice echoes in Thia’s mind: “I will suckle on the souls of the hopeless and liberate the homeland they no longer deserve.”

No matter where she goes, Thia is eventually overwhelmed by feelings of, “I am not of this place; my name is foreign on their lips; I am unwanted here; I am a trespasser.”  Displacement is baked into her understanding of herself. 

8.) What is your character’s favorite place— to visit, or to stay in?

Despite its bittersweetness, Thia loves the Temple of the Fist, and will scale the walls of the Reach at all hours to walk the halls where her mother lived, trained, loved, and died. She would not admit it, but part of her hopes to some day receive an Echo vision of the brave and unflinching woman she cannot remember.

She is also fascinated by the Sunken City of Skalla, and has made several more exploratory expeditions there to study, catalog, and contain threats to resistance members seeking to redistribute the Mad King’s trove.

More recently, she became very fond of the Bookman’s Shelves and the Bureau of the Architect - one for its association with a certain person, and the other for how it clarified many things she never understood about herself. 

11.) What’s your character’s family like (found, blood, or both)? Are they still in contact?

Thia has no surviving blood relatives, but she does have very close family friends who may as well be aunts and a cousin. Aledis was a sworn sister to Myrrhine in the Fists of Rhalgr, and remained close with Apostolos in the fallout of Ala Mhigo’s downfall. Her daughter, Valle, is the closest thing Thia has to a sibling. Thia is very protective of her, and content to sit and listen in warm silence as Valle enumerates new theories for an entire rainbow of new carbuncle varieties.