Veyra Vipère

⚜️ Lady Veyra Vipère

“The Golden Serpent”
Daughter of Rhael Vipère II and Veyra Maulden · Sister of Lucien IV, Eliseth, and Variel Vipère
Consort of Kaedric Rongeur · Mother of the Rongeur-Vipère Line

Born 586 PR, Embermoor Keep, Tudor Empire
Titles: Lady of Embermoor, Mistress of the Council of Thorns, Envoy of Dinkawal, Wife of Kaedric Rongeur
Faith: Drevrena — Goddess of Night, Dreams, and Shadows
Sigil (personal): A black serpent coiled around a golden rose, crowned with a single sapphire eye.
Motto: “A smile is the finest poison.”

Birth of the Serpent’s Daughter (586–595 PR)

Veyra was born beneath the chiming of alchemical bells in the laboratories of Embermoor Keep, fourth child of Rhael Vipère II, the poison-lord of Tudor’s western marshes, and Lady Veyra Maulden, a scholar of Dinkawal.
Her siblings—Lucien, Eliseth, and Variel—grew into brilliance, but even among them, little Veyra was different.

She inherited her mother’s elven blood, giving her a half-elven grace rare in the Vipère line: tall, fair-skinned, eyes of deep ocean blue, and long dark brown hair that shimmered gold in lamplight. Her father adored her, calling her “my quiet toxin.”

By age ten, she could identify sixty poisons by scent alone.
By twelve, she brewed her first antidote — and secretly reversed it, creating a venom that induced honesty before death.
When her mother died of black fever, Veyra was the one who mixed the medicine that failed to save her — some whispered intentionally.

Her brother Lucien would later say:

“Even as a child, she never wept. She learned early that truth was slower and crueller than poison.”

The Flower of the Marsh (595–605 PR)

Veyra was educated at the Alchemic Collegium of Blarget, under tutors loyal to her father’s Council of Thorns.
There she studied diplomacy, courtly charm, and the art of the slow word — conversation as weapon.
Her beauty and composure earned her suitors from noble houses across the Tudor Empire, but she refused all.

Instead, she served as an emissary to Dinkawal, negotiating narcotic and reagent trade between House Vipère and House Rongeur’s Guild of the Red Docks — Kael Rongeur’s domain at the time.

It was there she met her elder cousin’s son, Merthin Rongeur, a solemn, calculating youth already building his empire in Leadenport. She recognized in him the same ruthless logic that guided her brother Lucien.

But her eyes soon fell on Kaedric Rongeur, Merthin’s son — a man of fire and sea, equal parts predator and poet.

The Golden and the Iron (606–615 PR)

Their attraction began as political — Kaedric admired her knowledge of naval toxins, she coveted his power over the western ports.
Yet in their clandestine meetings amid Dinkawal’s moor-fog, commerce became chemistry.

They met in secrecy for years, exchanging coded letters written in invisible ink of Vipère make, read only when brushed with sea-salt flame.
She called him “my tide of iron,” and he called her “my golden serpent.”

Together they planned to merge their houses through alliance, not decree.
In 615 PR, they conceived a child — the first trueborn link of Rongeur and Vipère blood.
When the truth reached Lucien IV, he chose silence rather than scandal, saying privately:

“If poison and ash choose to mingle, better they do so where I can watch the reaction.”

The child’s birth was hidden; some records claim she was fostered among the Greybranch mercenaries, raised nameless until the pact was safe to reveal.

Marriage in Shadow and Gold (620 PR)

In 620 PR, amid the chaos of Emperor Bastien Tudor’s assassination, Kaedric Rongeur and Veyra Vipère married at Leadenport in a ceremony attended only by the two houses’ closest kin and the priests of Drevrena.
The union was announced publicly weeks later — a rare marriage that bound the sea to the swamp, the anchor to the serpent.

Veyra arrived at the ceremony wearing yellow and black noble dress embroidered with golden filigree, her pale skin and deep blue eyes radiant beneath the torchlight.
Gold jewellery coiled about her neck and wrists, shaped like intertwined serpents biting their own tails — a symbol of eternity and duplicity alike.

The vow she spoke is still quoted among Drevrenic acolytes:

“My venom for your blade, my shadow for your storm.
Together we shall outlive gods.”

The Mistress of the Council

After the wedding, Veyra returned to Embermoor as Lucien IV’s delegate in Leadenport, managing the Vipère share of trade under the newly formed Silent Compact between the two families.
She restructured the Council of Thorns, placing her own agents in every coastal city.

Her influence grew swiftly:

• She supplied alchemical poisons and antidotes to the Rongeur fleets, controlling both disease and discipline.
• She established the Marshlight Correspondence, a spy network that used alchemically scented wax to encode messages.
• She became Kaedric’s chief strategist, ensuring the Corsair Fleet’s logistics ran through Vipère chemists.

It was said that in Leadenport’s markets, her perfume arrived a week before her ships did.
Where Kaedric commanded the waves, Veyra commanded the whispers.

They ruled together as equals — and occasionally, rivals.
Theirs was a marriage of passion and calculation: she saw beyond the moment, he acted upon it.
Together they forged an alliance that the Emperor himself could not unravel.

The Birth of the Golden Line

Veyra publicly acknowledged her firstborn daughter, Ysella Rongeur, a half-elven child of haunting beauty and quiet cunning.
Ysella was raised between Embermoor and Leadenport — tutored in both alchemy and naval warfare.
Her birth unified the line of Ash and Venom permanently.

Veyra continued her work as ambassador and spy, often vanishing for months into the moors of Dinkawal, where she was rumoured to meet with her brother Lucien IV in the shadow halls beneath Embermoor Keep.

She became the unspoken matriarch of both houses’ union: the “Bridge of Venom.”
Letters between Lucien and Merthin suggest she mediated their disputes and prevented open rivalry between Leadenport and Embermoor.