Character Profiles: Cresta and Ahn Aristille

Name: Cresta Aristille

Age: 22

Race: Hylian

Gender: Female

Personality: In her shop, Cresta is most often the owner who deals with and takes orders from customers due to her approachable, sociable, and friendly demeanor. She's also patient and has a mostly soft-boiling temper, so she gets along with mostly everyone and rarely has aggressive outbursts. And she's a bit of an adventurous dreamer in her head. She would never leave the practicality of her real-world business without good reason, but she's always wondered what it would be like to travel and meet strange people.

Appearance: Although standing on the shorter side at 5'1", Cresta's muscular build makes her a force to be reckoned with. It comes with the work, which she's very fond of, so she's never been particularly self-conscious about how masculine her body looks. She does purposely try to compensate in other ways though, keeping long hair, always wearing earrings in her lobes, and dressing more feminine at times when not burning the late night oil at the forge. Her hair is strawberry blonde and a bit on the curly side, matching with her freckles and bright hazel eyes.

History: Ahn and Cresta were born the bastard children to one of Hyrule’s most powerful lords. Their mother was a young servant girl in the castle who was impressed into her lord’s chambers and shortly after became pregnant with the twins. As this man was known for killing any bastard he sired, their mother enlisted the help of the head of staff to hide her pregnancy from him until the baby could be born and negotiated to have her sister take and shelter the child at her home in East Bridge until it was safe. However, she didn’t know she was pregnant with twins.

Cresta was the first born and was taken away from her mother and sister immediately after birth and raised by her aunt. To hide her identity and ensure her a stable, independent life, Cresta was passed off as a little boy when she became old enough for an apprenticeship. Her master, a blacksmith and armorer in town, remained blissfully unaware of his apprentice’s sex until well into her years as a young woman. By then, he saw no point in tossing her out because she never showed any slack due to her gender and did good work. Admittedly, he had also developed a soft spot for the girl which only grew more doting and adoring once he began to think of her as his own daughter.

A few years ago, she set out to do her own  in Golden Crossing with a fellow apprentice. They’re quickly gaining a reputation for their work, but Cresta’s gender is often times as much a hindrance to her business as it is a commodity.

She and her twin Ahn have never met.

Weapon: A smith’s hammer

Other: Cresta is an accomplished tool smith and armorer. Her companion in business focuses primarily on weapon smithing.

Name: Ahnaliss “Ahn” Aristille

Age: 22

Race: Hylian

Gender: Female

Personality: Despite having a very kind and carefree role model in her knight, Sir Moren, Ahn has grown up quite serious in nature. Male members of the honor guard with often joke and gamble when they're at home in Geddon, and normally jest at her expense for the fact that she never seems to relax. But she is rather determined to prove herself capable at any cost, even if it means never dropping her guard. She has very few friends because her seriousness makes her also seem aloof, but to those she has, she is very loyal. She tries to be affectionate as well to make those close to her understand how much they mean to her, but it normal comes across awkwardly which makes her clam up.

Appearance: Surrounded by burly knights in heavy armor almost all the time, Ahn looks severely out of place. She is only about 5'1" with wispy strawberry blonde hair, hazel eyes and freckles. But beneath her armor is a body petite in nature but toned with muscle from years of training in the knight's arts. She normally wears her armor, designed specially to fit her smaller frame and woman's body, but when off-duty or on leisure days, Ahn pointedly wears practical clothing with a feminine cut to assert herself as a woman refusing to any longer pretend she is a man.

History: Ahn and Cresta were born the bastard children to one of Hyrule’s most powerful lords. Their mother was a young servant girl in the castle who was impressed into her lord’s chambers and shortly after became pregnant with the twins. As this man was known for killing any bastard he sired, their mother enlisted the help of the head of staff to hide her pregnancy from him until the baby could be born and negotiated to have her sister take and shelter the child at her home in East Bridge until it was safe. However, she didn’t know she was pregnant with twins.

Ahn was the second twin born. Panicking to save the child left behind, Ahn's mother gave herself little time to recover before running away from the estate with her. Infection set in quickly and the young mother barely made it to a small village before fever took her. An old woman took pity on the infant and raised her as her own.

This old woman had already raised two sons and a daughter and watched her daughter suffer long in a loveless marriage before hanging herself in her misery. She feared to send this baby girl down the same path, so she chose to raise her with the public identity of a boy.

When Ahn was old enough, she enlisted into service as a knight's page. Although it didn’t take her knight, Sir Moren, more than a couple years to realize Ahn was a girl, he let her keep up the charade until the day she decided it no longer mattered.

Ahn only waited until the day she was named a squire before revealing her secret. Many other knights demanded Sir Moren release her from his service, but the old knight had nothing to say and only treated Ahn like nothing had changed. Bullying from the other squires came more frequently after that, and when she came of age for knighthood, she was refused supposedly on the basis of her unknown lineage. However, her skills were no mystery by then and she was quickly taken into the service of the Lord Vykinn as part of his honor guard.

She and her twin Cresta have never met.

Weapon: One-handed longsword.

Other: Ahn isn't very used to her birth name since it was hardly used until she was in her teens. She also gets a kestrel emblazoned on every blade and breastplate she has made because the mother she can't remember was named Kestrel, according to the woman who adopted her.