Family:
Alrynth [her son]
Danya [her clone]
Meredith [her mother]
Pyotr [her brother]
House Myrys [the rest]
Daughter of Houses Myrys and Sawall, Rynnaen spent the first ten years of her life on shadowEarth, utterly unaware of her Chaotic heritage. (Normally, that would be Chaosian, but in Rynnaen's case, Chaotic is probably more appropriate.)
Around Rynnaen's tenth birthday, Meredith, her mother, brought the girl to Sawall, told her not to tell anybody whose daughter she was, and more or less utterly disappeared. Years later, Rynnaen learned that this abandonment was so that Meredith could go to work restoring House Myrys, to which Rynnaen was heir, but at the time, all Rynna knew was that she was something of a stranger in a very strange land. Unable to explain who she was, she became extraordinarily shy, unwilling to talk to anybody at all, and spent a great deal of time hiding from the rest of the household.
Initially, she had contact with her Uncle Despil, who began to teach her sorcery, but then, much like Meredith, he suddenly disappeared without an explanation, leaving the girl even more alone. She existed, more or less a shadow, for two or three years, once having a confrontation with Dara, Lady of Sawall, who threatened to throw Rynna out, as she had no explanation for who she was or what she was doing in Sawall.
It was not long after this that Rynnaen met Indexus ti'Sawall, House assassin, practitioner of Ars Aesthetica, and adopted son of Dara. He befriended the young teenager, and began teaching her the sorcery of Ars Aesthetica. They became friends, and a year or two later, Indexus had the bad taste to announce that he had fallen in love with the now-fourteen-year-old Rynnaen.
At the same time, Meredith fell in love with Rynnaen's nephew, Mirth, who is some years her elder. Rynnaen felt this to be possibly in even worse taste than Indexus falling in love with her, and an enormous fight ensued between mother and daughter. Between fury with Meredith and general panic that the House assassin was in love with her, Rynnaen fled to fifteenth-century Calais, France, to live with her older sister, Elayne, Mirth's mother.
Five years passed in Calais. Rynnaen saw her mother only once or twice in that time, and Indexus not at all. Upon her eventual return to Chaos, Rynnaen learned a multitude of things about herself and what her mother planned for her -- including that she had been genetically engineered, built to be the perfect Heir to Myrys, and, in fact, that she was Heir to a House she knew little and cared less about; to Rynnaen's mind, she was, and is, Sawall. Even worse, Rynnaen's grasp of political situations was non-existant; Meredith's gene manipulation had not produced a child of ambition, and Rynnaen proved pathologically disinterested in politics. For the next several years, Meredith and Rynnaen did not hold a civilized conversation, but rather fought bitterly each time they met.
The crux of those fights came, perhaps, one night in the World's End Bar, when mother and daughter drew on each other, with Meredith making a blatent threat to slice open Rynnaen's throat. Rynna, rather than backing down as Meredith expected, leaned into the blade, furious enough to cut her own throat to thwart her mother's plans. They came, narrowly, to an agreement which killed neither, and while they have fought often since, it has been perhaps a trifle more careful.
In the meantime: Rynnaen once again met -- sought out, in fact -- Indexus, who now called himself Aldrayeth, and who still loved her. She fell in love with him, and they moved to Allansia, Aldrayeth's birth-shadow. Their plans to be wed were ended when Aldrayeth, long since uncertain of his place in the world, chose to walk the Broken Pattern in hopes of becoming more 'real', and instead, died.
Rynnaen, bitter and angry, blamed Dara, Aldrayeth's adoptive mother, for his uncertainty of his sense of self, and ultimately, for his death. Rage settled down in her, and she made a vow to avenge Aldrayeth with Dara's death -- a vow set aside, but not forgotten, when she discovered she was pregnant.
Unable to deal with her grief, a pregnancy, and her mother, Rynnaen spoke briefly at Aldrayeth's funeral, and then calmly stepped off the edge of the world in Allansia, falling to her apparent death. Only she, and Aldrayeth, knew of the shadowpath that wound its way around the bottom of Allansia. She travled the shadowpath away, and shapeshifted, taking the form of her favorite X-Man, Ororo Munroe, for more than a year, until her son, Alrynth, was born.
After Alrynth's birth, Rynna returned to Chaos, and lived rather quietly for a few years, mostly in Allansia, though sometimes she visited Myrys. She dated, briefly, a Chaosian man named Ryder, an artist whose mein was the opposite of hers; where she was pale, he was dark, and they made a stunning couple, visually. Their relationship was one of keeping each other just a trifle off guard, to see what would happen; Ryder 'won', when he asked Rynnaen to marry him, and she hesitated rather than replying snappily either yea or nay. She liked him a great deal, though she didn't love him, and she did seriously consider wedding him. However, she said no, and they grew apart after that.
At dinner with a friend of hers, Rynna met, and was invited on a date by, Corwin of Amber. She thought he was charming and delightful, and Meredith had an apopleptic fit, which was not helped at all when a few months later, Rynnaen began dating Martin of Amber. Unlike Corwin, whom Rynna at least knew was an Amberite of some importance, she had no idea Martin was of Amber, much less a Prince of Amber, until Meredith made it painfully clear that Rynnaen was not to see him ever again, socially or otherwise.
With her usual skill in obeying Meredith, Rynna dated Martin seriously for an extended period of time, a relationship which was overall probably good for her.
Martin brought them, impulsively one afternoon, to Barsoom, the desert Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs' imagination, and there, they found themselves suddenly thrust into a play in production, as characters they knew nothing about. Martin became Lord Brass, and Rynnaen, Lady Gold, lovers, and in a war for their lives against Obsidian, an enigmatic and wholly evil tyrant.
A boy came into the story, nameless, and in time Rynnaen seemed to recognize the child, a shadow-son not of her own blood, but perhaps of the shadow Gold whom she had replaced, and ofB Brass whom Martin had replaced. Barsoom's prophecies claimed the boy was essential in the defeat of Obsidian, and too that Rynnaen's presence would certainly doom Barsoom to the world to Obsidian's rule.
Rynnaen was not about to be left out of the showdown, however, and went to her sister Elayne to ask for help. Elayne, a master shapeshifter, agreed to change Rynnaen so drastically that not only her physical self was impossible to recognize, but even her mental signature was changed beyond recognition. Unfortunately, Elayne had recently been in the shape of a succubus, and when she made the shift, Rynnaen ended up with the body of a woman called Rachel, small and hard and angry, and the dominant personality of a fourteenth-century French peasant, named Daniel, who had recently been lunch for Elayne's succubus self.
Thus guised, she made her way to Mars, but too late. Obsidian died, but so did the boy, and Martin was badly wounded, blinded. Rachel/Rynnaen, with Daniel's personality in charge, disappeared for a short while, exploring the world he'd been lead into, but in time, Rynnaen was able to re-assert her personality long enough to find Elayne and be purged of Daniel's personality -- or so she thought.
Her own body and personality in charge, she went to visit Martin, to check on him. They talked, and Martin told her that he was in love with her.
That was, coincidentally, the last time she saw him for a decade.
Eventually, the wayward daughter of Myrys actually swore allegiance to the House, a triumph for Meredith, and an aquiesance for Rynnaen.
Rynna returned to Earth, there to not only raise Alrynth, but also to start going to college for degrees in Computer Science and Literature. To support herself and her son, she started modelling, a task not too difficult for a 6' blonde with no body fat.
Seven or eight years later, in Chaos, she met a striking young man who introduced himself as "J", and who started calling her "Ten". Rynnaen, being nothing if not overdramatic and fond of Bond movies, ran with it, started calling J "Old Man", and fell into his spy games with proper flair. His Shadow, a 1963 Earth, requires regular rescuing from Aliens Of Doom, so Rynnaen spent some of her spare time helping out in that venue.
J, whose full name proved to be Jayson, got it into his head to walk the Pattern, an idea Rynnaen really, intensely disapproved of. Idiotically, because she knew J was falling in love with her, she ordered him to come back to her, and to encourage him, slept with him.
A significant part of Rynnaen truly did not believe Jayson would return from walking the Pattern. When he did, showing up naked in her home in his demonform, she became absurdly angry, unintentionally resenting his return when Aldrayeth had not returned. They parted badly.
Only days before Jayson's return from walking the Pattern, Martin also re-entered Rynnaen's life, still in love with her. Rynnaen, wary of her last romantic encounter, chose brutal truth, telling Martin that though she was very fond of him, she did not love him, nor had she been in love with anyone at all since Aldrayeth. Martin acknowledged this, but still hoped to build a relationship, hoping that Rynnaen might grow to love him. This is a common theme with the men in Rynnaen's life, and none yet has had his hopes fulfilled.
Plague came to Chaos in the form of Typhoid Rac; after an unfortunate incident with a potato bin, Rynnaen in fact contracted the plague, unbeknownst to herself. Its form was random shapeshifting; after a hellacious headache, Rynnaen woke up incredibly weak and uncertain, only to discover considerably later that she had inexplicably produced a clone via the shapeshifting plauge. Danya joined House Myrys with more enthusiasm than Rynnaen had ever shown for its politics or machinations.
The family expanded in other ways; a sister she has only met twice, named Maelin, was made Heir to the House after Rynnaen made it quite clear she was uninterested in the position. A brother, Piotr, was discovered unexpectedly in New York; Meredith and Gwenn produced a half-sister called Mariel, and Rynnaen eventually met Danya, the brother born of her own body.
Not long before Jayson and Martin reappeared, Rynnaen asked to be released from her oath to Myrys, which Meredith, much to Rynna's surprise, did immediately and without fuss. Only later did Rynnaen learn that along with the release, Meredith handed over Allansia, Alrynth's hereditary lands, to Hendrake. 'Livid' begins, vaguely, to describe Rynna's reaction.
For a time, Rynnaen then associated with a band of mercenaries run by Eldrik of Chaos, but with Eldrik's death, the mercenaries disbanded. Undirected, Rynna drifted between Chaos and Earth, eventually settling in Allansia after Alrynth left for college.
