Attributes

Abilities

Specialties

Virtues

Calculated Stats

Charms

Combos

Description and Background

Physical Description

On the off chance you can catch the young Twilight without her typical spell assortments up, she looks dramatically different, and human, or at least mostly. Her hair is mid shoulderlength - again, mostly - but ragged, as if it has never been cut, and only broken or torn off as it tangled inconveniently. Some of the knots look deliberate, woven around bits of carved wood and bone. The rest of her hair is a dense mat of black fiber, ropey and shaggy.

Her skin is a sun-kissed tan over a deep nutty brown, which could come either from the east or the south; no knowing from that where her parents came from on their ill fated trip (if, in fact, she traveled with her parents), and typically dirty, lashed with sap from vines, blood from her kills and her food, and dirt that clings to both as they dry sticky over her skin. Her long, jaggedly broken fingernails are caked under with dirt.

Even more than the dirt and dried filth, though, blood and mud have been painted deliberately onto her face in tribal symbols of her stalker pack, lending an alien and savage look to her.

Those same vines are bound around raw, stinking uncured hides, clawed and cut with bits of sharp stone from prey beasts to wrap around human tender, unStalkerly tender skin. The resulting garments are shapeless and bizarre, clinging to her long limbs in a haphazard manner, without any attempt at beauty or fashion; their purpose is solely utilitarian -- to lend her skin some of the toughness her siblings in the pack enjoy.

She is tall, and clearly lithe of foot and mind, moving through the jungle with all the grace of the light but dextrous predator she has always been. Her feet are usually bare, despite the hazards of the jungle floor, for ease in climbing and in running, and her toenails are in no better shape than her hands. Her gaze is fast and sure, and she moves from sudden motion to total stillness with the first sign of something to fight or flee; the stillness of the stalking predator racks up yet another point of uncanny -difference-.

Most of the time, however, she presents an even more inhuman face; wearing the spells Wood Dragon's Claw and Incomparable Body Arsenal, she is humanoid, but hardly seems human; though the same lumpy garments 'clothe' her, her skin is no longer tender, but hard, scaled iron. Black iron moves with the same jungle-hunting rigor; reptilian scales make her seem far more kin to her pack than she really is. Instead of hands, her iron arms end in gnarled claws, also iron scaled. Her face is still painted, in fresh blood, or white clay, or the two mixed, as is any skin uncovered by the no longer needed wrappings. Hooks and blades hang from joints and her tongue is long and barbed.

For what small reassurance it might be to one who discovers her hunting unexpectedly, at least she carries no visible weapons.

Background

Her name is a sibilant string of expressed consonants that -she- can not duplicate perfectly, hissed by her adoptive pack. To them, it means "Soft-skinned Bright Child." She dresses in animal skins wrapped roughly around her to protect her tender flesh from the thorns of the jungle creepers that the rest of the family ignores. She is their shaman, their thinker, their tactician, a gift of the jungles to them that they have protected well.

They are unawakened stalkers, proto-Dragon Kings without the gift of awakened minds and essences, and many, many months ago, they drove a pack of claw striders from a destroyed human caravan, claiming the kill for themselves.

Only not all the humans were dead. One human cub was found wrapped in the humans' false-skins in the back of a wagon, unharmed and bawling. The young ones wanted to eat it too, but their matriarch... smelled a strange kinship on the child, and claimed her as a cub of the pack. At that time, she bore a Destiny to awaken a sleeping Dragon-King to educate the stalkers.

The young Bright Child remembers now nothing of her life before the pack, nothing of human society or speech. Her life is hunting, protecting the pack's territory, and placating the gods and elemental spirits that throng in the jungle and the ruins.

Her pack lairs in an ancient, long defunct manse, the geomancy intact enough to cap the demesne and control the powerful essence that would warp the residents, but not intact enough to form a stable hearthstone or activate the old amenities.

As a child and teen, she learned hunting from her family and lore from the local little gods and elementals. They sought to make her into a shaman to intercede for her pack, teaching her the basics of thaumaturgy and communication with spirits. She speaks pidgin Old Realm from this long time communication, but is scarcely able to communicate with human speakers; the spirits who taught her had dealt with stalkers for a long, long time.

Once, a Dragon-blooded Scavenger Lord came to try to pilfer from the manse the stalkers laired in. With her pack, she hunted him down, captured him, and at the old, age-stained altar in the center of the courtyard, sacrificed his living beating heart to the Unconquered Sun, with the guidance of local spirits and the prompting of the old faded carvings and murals in the manse.

In that moment, Essence awoke within her, and she Exalted, consuming her Destiny in a greater one. Since then, with the help of the local gods and the hidden secrets of the manse, she has learned potent sorcery. She has strange dreams of the manse as it was in the days of Rathess' glory, and seeks to restore it, one precious component at a time. She learned to attune the manse, and can receive essence while within it, but there is still no intact hearthstone to lend her its power.

The young Twilight, around age 18 (though she has no proper count of her years), dresses in rough, uncured hides and bark, wrapped and tied crudely around her for mere protection of her tender skin. Her hair hangs, knotted and unkempt, down her back, tangled with crudely carved charms and beads. Mud or blood smears into rough tribal markings on her forehead. Among humans, she has neither name nor family, not any place; she is, so far as she knows, a strangely soft-skinned stalker.

Since she has learned sorcery, she spends most of her time with Wood Dragon's Claws and Incomparable Body Arsenal up, adding to the bizarre appearance she puts forth: Her skin is patterned with reptillian metal scales, and gnarled iron-coated claws replace her hands except for those few minutes she spends doing some kind of fine manipulation with them.

She is likely to meet a future Circle either with them invading her manse, or as she goes out to find another component for it. She will be suspicious, but not hostile, unless they reveal themselves to be Scavenger Lords who are set on pillaging her ruins, and are unable to be dissuaded by her posturings. She can be communicated with via her crude knowledge of Old Realm, but will pick up and be able to speak another relevant language swiftly. However, she finds civilized humans highly baffling, even if she is drawn into their world and seeks to imitate their ways.

Manse (and Guardian)

Fine; make me do the work. It was an Solar manse, once upon a time, and an Solar demesne now. Most of the surface buildings have crumbled, though murals still painted on the few walls that stand are 90% of the young Twilight's knowledge about Sol Invictus - and her inspiration for heart-sacrificing, which seems to be a reoccurring theme. Much of the crumbled stone has evaporated, its clutter unbecoming to the manse.

What remains, besides the intact walls, is a solid stone rise, with shallow channels laid out in geomantic patterns around the central altar; where the channels cross, there are shallow pools, which glitter as if paved with gold. On the rare days it is cloudy over the demesne itself, the pools glow gently with stored solar energy. No debris ever clutters these shallow pools, as very little that is not whole and intact can survive the light in this place.

The construction that remains is the underground storage chambers and what would have been barracks at one time, and it is there the pack laired, and on the sunny stone above that they warmed themselves after eating. There may be Interesting things in the back chambers, but none of the pack - including the young Twilight - cares much for such things. Fnord. It's certainly interesting to scavenger lords, or would be. If they could get past the pack of stalkers with an unusual grasp of logic. They don't trick easily.

Until recently, the manse was still - barely - intact enough to cap the demesne. At some point in the distant past, perhaps shortly before Rathess was completely lost to the jungles, someone applied enough of a patch job to prevent essence buildup and the explosion of the manse, but they were never able to finish the job.

The Exaltation of the young Twilight, combined with a ritual sacrifice of an Essence wielder, many centuries later, stirred enough Solar Essence in one spot to unravel the last of the Manse's structure and return it to a demesne, with no explosion more dramatic than the Exaltation.

Even before the stalkers laired there, however, a spirit had come to live there. A minor, solitary god even before the Usurpation, refused to accept the lack of -proof- for the suspicions of Sidereal complicity, and could no longer bear living in a Yu Shan which cheerfully housed murderers. Turning to Creation, it eventually found this quiet manse and found its unstable, stark solar beauty to be an excellent backdrop for meditation. Preferring to simply be left alone, it ignored the local 'populace' - stalkers having little to say - until a pack chose to lair directly under the manse. They kept random hours, picked the most -inconvenient- sunning spots, and stubbornly refused to pay attention to its requests for them to leave it alone in anything resembling a civilized tongue. The debris from their meals would litter the landscape beyond the cleansing powers of the manse's energy.

In the middle of this, the pack gained a new member - oh, that happened frequently anyhow, but this member was different - for all she behaved as much as possible as a young stalker, this member was human, and no matter how confused she and the stalkers might be, the spirit was capable of recognizing this fact. Humans do not need their intelligence awakened; they start with it. With great patience, the spirit made its wishes known to the little girl, teaching her to relay between the spirit world and the world of her pack. Never very personable, it still spent far more time with the child than it ever intended to over the next decade and a half, telling her occasionally, though it was never sure how much language she had actually picked up, of the glories of the first age, and the reasons for its own desolate hermitage.

It may have encouraged a certain heart ritual, perhaps still nursing its own grudge towards the dragonblooded - and it may have been under its tutelage that she developed the first seeds of sorcery. (Since she's eligible to have been a mortal sorcerer with Essence 5 as a starting character.)

(Some potential ties to certain Sidereals who may or may not affect her later?)

Earned XP

Spent XP