Lady Kenna is the young daughter of House Condon, and current lady in waiting to Lady Kyra Manderly, of White Harbor. She has been in service to Kyra for a year now.

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Appearance And Character Edit

Kenna is a pretty girl, with a slender figure from near-constant starvation, and light brown hair. Her eyes are dark, her features angular, and she spends vast amounts of time on her appearance. She has an obsession with perfection, and has skewed expectations of herself when it comes to her looks.

Kenna is a damaged girl, with multiple things wrong with her, though she keeps this hidden very well from others. She is sly and cunning and very manipulative, a fantastic and very convincing liar. She is charismatic and bubbly, talkative and friendly, and uses this to make people believe her lies, or do her bidding through sympathy or manipulation. She has hallucinations, hears voices, and builds elaborate fantasies, and often cannot differentiate between fantasy and reality. She is a wonderful liar because she commits whole-heartedly to the fantasies she creates, and completely spirals when her lies crumble around her. She will usually then resort to tears and more lies as to why she did what she did, and use peoples sympathies to get out of the messes she creates.

Biography Edit

Kenna was born in 79AC, to Lord and Lady Condon. Her brother came two years before her, and the two of them had a fairly normal upbringing, though Kenna was subjected to conditioning and abuse as a child, by her mother. Kenna's brother Alyn was not the focus of the abuse, being a boy, but Lady Aranna had issues of the mind, to put it lightly, and Kenna was often the point of focus of it all.

Lady Aranna heard voices speak to her, something that only began to emerge after Kenna was born. At first it was very minor, things that were put down to conscience, though it got worse and worse in the coming years. Lady Aranna was convinced that Kenna was the cause of the voices, and that she was special. Kenna was going to be Queen someday, she was going to do great things, save people, unite nations, forge dynasties and create history. Kenna was going to be the most beautiful woman the world had ever seen, men would start wars for her, they would destitute themselves to have her, and they would give lasting glory to House Condon because of Kenna.

Thus, Kenna's life began first with extreme doting, with her first seven years being utterly spoiled and being told she was special, and beautiful, and she was going to be something amazing. She barely learned to read and write, and was forgiven by her mother for it, as it wasn't going to matter when she was a Queen, she would have a sea of servants to do it for her. She attended lessons minimally, and certain character traits such as mercy and kindness were not taught to Kenna. Instead the focus was entirely on perfection - how to speak prettily and how to stand up straight, curtsy perfectly, and how to dress and do her hair. Lady Aranna would spend vast amounts of time in making sure that Kenna looked the part of a highborn princess at all times - the voices told her that at any time, without warning, Kenna's future would change drastically.

When Kenna had just passed her eighth nameday, the voices in her mother's head began to change; or perhaps the lady did herself, it is difficult to say. Either way, Kenna's mother one morning looked at her sharply, and told her to stop eating. She was getting too fat, and no one was going to love her if she was fat. She needed to be perfect. She was stunned, and stopped eating, and was even more surprised when her mother told her she was not to eat for the rest of the day. Kenna spent the day in tears, wondering what she had done wrong, while her mother flew into a rage and shrieked intermittently about all she was doing to make her life perfect, and she repaid her mother by getting fat. Kenna was confused; she could see all her ribs when she was unclothed, her stomach was concave, and she was still growing, besides. It was not enough. Over the years, Kenna was intermittently starved for days on end by her mother, as the voices in her mind would occasionally remind her that 'their' daughter was not going to be perfect if she ate food.

Months later, Kenna's mother began to beat her fairly regularly, after her malnutrition became so great that her hair began to fall out. Lady Arrana again would hit her and scream loudly that she was working so hard to make Kenna perfect, and Kenna was so ungrateful as to repay her by being ugly. To ensure she wasn't eating, her mother would lock her in her room, often for days, and only let her out when the rage had died away and she was presented with a new dress or a new mirror, or Kenna's mother wished to do more lessons in perfection.

It was shortly afterward that the voices then noticed that Kenna had no real skills, either. Her mother flew into rage after rage after rage, when it was found that Kenna was not a naturally gifted painter, or writer, or rider, or archer, or singer. She could not sew, or do embroidery, or any of the other things that her mother demanded of her, because she had never been taught how. So, when she was twelve, and over the next several years, rigorous lessons began in all of them, and the punishments would be meted out when she did not perform perfectly, according to Lady Arrana's timeline - usually a few days or weeks, not nearly enough time to learn to sing or dance perfectly.

Eventually, Lord Condon stepped in. But not nearly soon enough. He had steered clear of it all throughout the years, as the progression into madness was gradual, unnoticed at first, and Aranna would lie often, and teach Kenna to do the same. Kenna was conditioned to cover for her mother, and would do so to avoid further punishments. Her father's focus had been his own lands, and his son and heir, though after a long time he could ignore his mad wife no longer. Kenna's lessons with her mother were ceased, and Aranna ordered to leave Kenna alone. Lord Condon began to keep a closer eye on his daughter for her own safety, and for the first time in a decade, Kenna felt a moment of peace.

Until the voices changed again.

Lady Aranna by now was completely mad, and her voices no longer told her that Kenna was going to be the most perfect human being in the world. In fact, they had stopped speaking reason at all, and were simply swirling through the woman's mind, pulling at her sanity and taunting her. Kenna's mother would sway from screaming rages to catatonic staring for days on end, and there was very little in between these two states, but when she was between extremes, the focus was still Kenna.

Aranna was now convinced that Kenna was the cause of her voices. And she wanted them to stop.

Kenna was now locked away in her room again, this time by her father, to help keep his daughter safe. Her own mother would try to attack her, screaming at her to make the voices stop, and Lord Condon knew that he could not have them both together in the same house any longer. Convinced that Kenna would wind up as the wife of some lowly to middling merchant at best (being the daughter of a house little better than landed knights), or at worst end up dead at the hands of her mother, the lord then reached out to White Harbor and Winterfell, asking to have his daughter taken in as a Lady in Waiting. He agreed to the first response he got, which came from White Harbor in the small, curling print of Lady Kyra Manderly, accepting the request. Kenna departed for New Castle the very next day, with word from her father not to tell anyone about the reasons why she had to leave home. Conditioned to lie, Kenna had nodded, and left home with mixed feelings, knowing that it may well be forever.

All through this time, Kenna would survive the solitude and punishments by making elaborate fantasies for herself. The boredom in her rooms while locked away would be spent thinking of all the things she would do when the dashing man came along to save her, to rescue her and make her his Lady, and spoil her with all the things her mother had promised her before her mind broke. Kenna had grown used to stealing food to eat, to lying her way around things she didn't wish to talk about, to convincing servants and guards at her house to do things for her, and not tell anyone. She was the pretty and misunderstood girl who has had a tough life, they all knew it, and her loving attitude and friendly ways were enough to make people do what she wanted.

White Harbor, And The Dashing Saviour Edit

Kenna arrived in White Harbor just in time to take service to Kyra Manderly, who had just had a baby to her new husband, Warrick. As the carriage arrived in the courtyard, bearing the young Condon girl, only eighteen years old at the time, her eyes fell upon the most handsome man she had ever seen in her life. It was Warrick Manderly himself, come to greet her personally and ensure she was going to settle in well. He had apologized, said that his wife Kyra had only borne their son a few days ago, and was still on bed rest, therefore unable to greet Kenna herself, and he was simply stepping into that void. He gushed proudly about his newborn son as he led her into the castle and spoke of the beauty and intelligence of his love, Kyra, as he showed Kenna to her small but lavish suite of rooms, just down the hall from Warrick and Kyra's, to ensure she was close if Kyra needed her for anything, but Kenna was barely listening. All she saw was Warrick's handsome face and strong build, his charming smile, and decided that he was perfect. She had fantasized about being saved by a dashing and handsome and rich lord, and at the end of her journey, here one was. He was going to save her, he was going to marry her and be with her and they were going to be happy together, forever. She knew that he was happily married, and in love, but that was only a small obstacle to Kenna. She needed to find a way to make him love her instead, and then it would all work out.

Kenna has now been in service to Kyra for almost a year, and has been nothing but helpful and kind, good company for her lady, and mostly well behaved. She believes that if she pays attention and observes, eventually her moment will come, and she and Warrick will be together, at last. Kenna is more than happy to bide her time, and fantasizes in the meantime about the life she will have with the man she loves. In the meantime, she obsesses over being perfect, for Warrick.

And that obsession, the picture of perfection, the perfect image that Kenna must become, is in the form of Kyra Manderly.

Family Edit