WIPRed Queen #123509
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Character Name ⇁ Sahar FaizalGender ⇁ MaleAge ⇁ 20Sexuality ⇁Crush ⇁ PM for development ideas.
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Appearance ⇁
Sahar is unassuming, in stature and in presence. His tussled, mahogany curls spill over his face and into his amber eyes. His skin is a golden brown, mottled by scars that can be connected together to create the constellation of who he is today - a broken child once, but no longer.
He stands slightly below average in height, muscled as an assassin but on the smaller boned side. His face is all sharp edges, consisting of a hooked nose, hooded eyes, furrowed brows, and thin lips.
Personality⇁
Where does it begin?Further back.Smoke curls and cauldron cloudsFurther still.A house in the hills,Further still.A tug on the universe.
Sahar was born already broken. The kind of child that peers through tear sodden lashes, out into a world distorted by their own sorrow. By the time he could walk - where else could he go? By the time he could talk - what more could he say? A child passed from the arms of a blood-soaked mother, to a hard-eyed smuggler, to a women with a needle, to a man in a suit. What more horrors were left in the world for him to see?
The young toddler had drunk it all in, the poison of the things his wide eyes saw. All the people had sharp smiles and pupils that glowed like the demons in his dreams. Every bruise sunk beneath his skin, into his blood and into his bones. The pain was his very marrow now. It was how he was built. It was the foundation for who he was.
Who he is.
Sahar FaizalA guess.Sahar FaizelDo you remember his name?Sahar FaizelI think this is what she said it was.I don't know. She was dying.Sahar FaizelWe'll call him that. It doesn't matter.Just write it down and sign there.
Sahar was born broken, but he took up the needle of his life in between his own fingers, and he threaded his own flesh back together.
It was painful.He never thought it wouldn't be.A part of him always knew.No one's coming for you.No one's looking for you.So he looked for himself, found the boy huddledin the dark corners of his own mindand rescued him.
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Sahar has eyes on the back of his head and the tip of his heart. Some call it intuition - a touch of the divine - but whatever it is, it's as unsettling as a door swinging shut in an empty house. Boiled down to it, however, this sixth sense of his comes down to his philosophy of mistrust. From the moment he shakes your hand, he's trying to figure out exactly when it will hold the knife that aims for his back.
Unsurprisingly, he's pretty pessimistic and certainly hard to get to know. If there was a chance for survival on his own, he'd throw down his cards and let the academy vanish on his horizon line. But lone wolves never last long. Solitude is an existence spent on your belly, low to the floor, trying to duck away from the blows of life. True strength comes in a pack, catching life in the teeth and shredding it. The truest strength, however, is knowing not to trust the pack. Because the smell of blood whips any mob into a frenzy - and one day, for certain, you'll be the one bleeding. Loyalty means nothing then. Loyalty means nothing now, if you watch close enough.
Sahar doesn't try to hide his vulnerability, the emotions that swirl within. Instead, he harnesses them, like flowers that bloom over a curling snake waiting in the shade. The things he feels are very real, but he uses them to manipulate others to his bidding
Suit⇁ HeartsRank⇁ Student
Strengths⇁
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Weaknesses⇁
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Likes⇁
Dislikes⇁
Weapon Choice⇁
Garrote wire, pulled taught and dangerous. Simple, a little ruthless. Certainly to the point - figuratively, of course.
Other⇁ Hearts
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Donny Fact Sheet!

Donny smelled of horse, apparently. To be fair, he'd never really thought about it before, just as he never really thought of smelling 'human' either. He was a human. He was also a horse. It was natural he would smell a bit like both at times, or one more than the other, depending on how long he'd spent in his alternate form. But after the third person complained, Donny wondered if it was offensive to smell like the thing one actually was in the Sandalio House. The noblewomen, milling around aimlessly like confused geese, had soaked themselves in aggressively fragrant rose perfumes that should've been classified as some sort of chemical weaponry - they certainly didn't smell human - but was he complaining?
No, because that would be rude. Like them. They were rude, and he was itching to get away from them.
Unfortunately, a combination of ill-fated events had led him to being cornered by a throng of ladies and gentlemen, all of them completely shrouded in a scent that was reminiscent of both cinnamon powder and the fiery pits of eternal suffering. His nostrils burned. It was hard to imagine anyone complaining about the pleasant must of horses when a monstrous perfume like that was in existence.
He pressed his hair against the back of the canvas tent and tried, tried his very best to squeeze between the one lady (who had taken it upon herself to interrogate him) and her gentlemen. The lady, with her low-cut frock and frizzy mass of brown curls tied up with jewels, caught on rather quickly to his plan and stepped in his way, preventing his third attempt at escape.
I should just leap over her.
It was a tempting thought. He could, no doubt. The tent ceilings were high enough. And while the woman before him was much more terrifying than a bull, at least she was short. It would be nothing to clear the air, up, up, over her head. He could probably clear the whole crowd of people too, if he tried, without grazing a single hair with the soles of his feet.
But no, that was apparently impolite too.
All these stupid, savage rules made his life unnecessarily difficult. He longed to do something stupid, something glorious, something to mess up the whole corset and doublet affair. But...Donny had to remind himself he was here to complete a mission (though he loathed to be) and so, sadly, he couldn't get banned from the premises just yet.
"So you were saying, Donny?" The Lady asked, even if she knew that Donny had been avoiding saying things. He'd been straight up ignoring her questions thus far, and commenting on the lovely beige and green color scheme instead. The mushy grass that tasted sour. The sound of metal clashing and people gasping around the jousting arena. But she was relentless, staring up at him with large, dull grey eyes, pinning him back with questions - all while keeping her nose curled in slight disgust. Her beau, his arm neatly tucked into hers, continued to glare at Donny all the while. "About your wife?" She prodded.
"My wife?" Donny gave her an incredulous look. "I don't have a wife."
"Now, we both know that's not true. I happen to know..."
"I have several."
"Excuse me?"
Donny started counting off on his fingers, ticking one after the other. "Seven? Or maybe it was eight. Honestly, I've forgotten. It's bad, I know. I should remember that sort of thing. My own wives. But you know us Farasi men. We only think about..." His mind went blank. "Muscles and stuff."
She'd already stopped listening, twisting the corners of her mouth down in that customary, scandalized fashion. "Eight wives? Really?"
Her beau's knuckles whitened around her arm.
Donny let his smile drop. Of course he didn't have eight wives - who could stand to live with that many people, all of them being reliant on you? Expecting things from you? Donny could barely keep himself alive and contented.
The noblewoman, however, didn't need to know that.
"Dead serious," he snapped. "Now, if you'll excuse me."
As the shock temporarily paralyzed her, Donny finally managed to push past. She started to surge after him, but luckily, the jealous man hanging onto her arm kept her back.
The hard part was over, then. Once free of her clutches, Donny deftly wove himself through the crowd, bumping into people and grumbling pleasantries until he'd found the opening of the tent. The fresh air tasted sweeter and cooler than he'd left it, and he longed to shift right there and take off at a gallop - to plow over few of the trussed up noble's while he was at it, before getting the hell outta this place.
That option, regrettably, was not on the table. And so, he sulkily ran his hands through his mane of hair and then trudged forward, not sure what to do himself. His sister had been vague about the whole "mission" thing, but quite explicit about what would happen if Donny didn't comply. So he was here. La-tee-da. But what now?
He meandered over to the current 'festivity'. Jousting. A vaguely interesting sport, though the layers of armor donned by the knights made it a great deal less interesting to watch. The men had lined up for another go of it, their lances poised at each other as they kicked up their mounts into a gallop. Off they went, the horses speeding up clumsily, with all of that awkward weight on their backs. Poor creatures.
His eyes drifted away, something shiny catching them, before they whipped back at the sound of a gurgling scream. He'd missed the action, but the result before him had the crowd in an uproar. One of the knights, tangled up between his horse's legs, was getting pounded like dough into the wet earth.
Donny clucked his tongue, but he didn't feel more than a twinge of sympathy. There was no honor in a sport like that, only copious amounts of stupidity and a waste of good time. If he had been the horse, he would've gone in for a second and third hit. Donny had never ridden an animal. Not once. He preferred to jump over them instead.

Donny, apparently, smelled like a horse - which was an appropriate observation of course, because he was currently a horse. Munching hay with several other creatures of the equine variety, none of them very good conversationalists, he was finally able to catch his breath. The other horses lacked his human brain capacity, of course, staring at him vacantly as joined them for a snack, accepting his presence rather quickly. They could sense something about him that was not to be trifled with. One of them had snapped teeth at him when he'd first arrived. He'd snapped back. Necks arched, ears going flat, they almost got into a bit of a scuffle - and then, suddenly, the argument had ended. The other horse had noticed the weird, non-horse/horse scent that Donny carried, and she had backed down rather quickly.
It was pleasant, to munch in peace. He supposed, at a gaudy event like this, it wasn't all that surprising to discover the hay was quality as well.

He had started out this festival as a human, in his defense. A well-dressed one, in fact, all trussed up in fine Farasi silks and gold strands woven into his ashy hair. He'd worn a top encrusted with jewels that cut above his mid drift, and wrapped his waist in a beaded and feathered sarong. He'd put on shoes. Actual shoes. Boots with toes and shiny buckles that came up just below his knees. They'd pinched. His sister had brought the whole outfit to him, and his feet had apparently had grown some since he'd first run away, after the wedding incident. She hadn't offered him another pair, just shrugged and went off, but not before warning him what would happen if he didn't obey his mother's orders. Not that the orders had been very clear. Rather, they were vague. Extremely vague. Donny didn't even know what he was supposed to be doing here.
Despite all the finery, Donny had still smelled like a horse. He didn't know how that was possible, what with the wafting, horrid smells in the air (and of course, the fact that he bathed himself before arriving at the festival). The noblewomen and men, milling around the grounds as aimlessly as confused geese, had soaked themselves in aggressively fragrant perfumes that should've been classified as some sort of chemical weaponry. Donny had gone nose blind to the world almost immediately, his nostrils on fire. How they could manage to smell anything over the sickly-sweet stench was beyond him.
Still, they'd noticed the horse smell, and several women wearing skirts that poofed out like miserable pastries had remarked upon it with a sniff of their powdered noses. Donny had gotten annoyed. He was a human. He was also a horse. It was natural he would smell a bit like both at times, or one more than the other, depending on how long he'd spent in his alternate form. But after the fifth person complained, Donny wondered if it was offensive to smell like the thing one actually was in the Sandalio House. And who were they to talk? Everyone who approached him was completely shrouded in a scent that was reminiscent of both cinnamon powder and the fiery pits of eternal suffering. His nostrils continued to burn. It was hard to imagine anyone complaining about the pleasant must of horses when a monstrous perfume like that was in existence.

So, as a way to avoid the smells of the people, and their rude comments, and their intrusive questions about the Farasi people - what were they like, was he married, why was he even here - Donny had promptly thrown his fine clothes into a pile where he'd hopefully find them later, gotten himself out of view, and shifted into a horse. No one bothered him after that, or complained about the smell. He'd backtracked to the tent city that was slowly cropping up just beyond the festival grounds. One commoner child had stopped to pat his nose, and it was the only pleasant human interaction he'd had all day.
Unfortunately, it was hard to content himself with staying still for long. Donny was itching for trouble. And itching because of flies. Why had he cut his tail short again? Hygiene? Well blast hygiene, it was useless to him now, anyways. The ground was mush, globbing up on his hooves. The air was permeating with the greasy fog of perfume and human sweat and red meat. The clouds hung low and the temperature was uncomfortable. His thin, silk-fine golden fur wasn't designed for insulation. Quite the opposite in fact. And while it clearly wasn't cold to the ladies whose low-cut corsets revealed more than they hid (not that he was complaining about that), it was cold to a desert man, born and bred as Donny was.
He finished his last mouthful of hay and slowly backed up from the other horses, who all watched him curiously, no doubt wondering how he was untethered when they were not. He nodded goodbye and broke away at a gallop. One of the commoners, thinking Donny to be of the domesticated sort of animal, chased after him briefly, but mostly people dodged out of the way, less concerned with other people's troubles than their own, and not in the mood to wrangle a horse who'd been tethered improperly.
He slowed down to a brisk trot, having cleared the tent city in its entirety and entered the festival ground yet again. Donny's ears swiveled at the sound of clashing metal, gasping crowds, and the high pitched squeal of a very unhappy horse. His head turned, just in time to see one of the jousting knights pounded into the wet earth like he was made of dough.
Donny didn't understand the crowds' reaction around him, surging forward, eyes wide and popping. Maybe the hay was addling his brain, but was this not the nature of sport? Maybe it was different here, but a competition without at least a little bloodshed was considered a failure by Farasi standards. He sighed, the air coming forcefully out of his nostrils, and then he dipped his head down, sniffing the marshy grass.

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Béni Solveig of the Riverstone House

WIP
Béni Solveig of the Riverstone House________________________
Solveig
"Soul-vai"______________________
Age:: Twenty-EightGender:: FemaleSexuality:: Hm.Role:: A member of the Béni
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Personality:
Picture in your head the most stubborn person you know. Imagine the planes of their face, the rigidness of their posture, the slight downturn at the corners of their mouth. Imagine the way they look when they dig their heels into the dirt, when they fold their arms over their chest, when they give you a steely glare and mouth the word, no.
Can you see them? Yes?Good.
Now rip up that image. Toss it away. You know why? Because Solveig is far more stubborn than any person you've ever met, and if you don't believe that then by god, she'll prove it to you. She was born stubborn. When the midwife said she was due, Solveig waited another week to come bursting into this world - and even when she did, the labor was a hard, long crawl. When ten-year old Solveig, along with all eight of her siblings, was poisoned by a vengeful aunt, Solveig lived simply because the doctor said she wouldn't. And when her father ordered her to marry a stuffy old noble named Om (and really, how could she a marry a man named Om?), she entered the Béni trials instead, and she won.
You can't force Solveig to do anything, it simply isn't possible.
The woman is no dainty flower, though one can probably guess that from the title of Béni sitting right in front of her name. She didn't come to be apart of a fierce cult of warriors without, well, being fierce. To be sure, there are a fair share of haughty women in the Béni who remain talented killers while also managing to avoid getting dirt under their nails, but Solveig isn't one of them. She's not exactly the type to wear satin gloves and wield delicately wrought rapiers. Rather, she likes to fight rabid and in the thick of it, bathing in the blood and the rush and sound of her own beating heart.
When getting to know her under normal circumstances, Solveig is fairly quiet and even a bit standoffish. She exudes the energy of someone quite established and contented with the life they lead - she's not exactly excited to make new friends or change things up for fear of upsetting the balance of happiness she's managed to carve out. The close relationships she does possess took years for her to form, forged and tested over the fires of battle again and again. Outside of the Béni, she has next no one: An empty Noble House that smells like musty books and tragedy. A mother who sits by the crackling fire and mumbles the names of children long gone. Heaps of family riches that sit in rooms, untouched. A never ending stream of distant relatives kissing up to her to try and get their hands on the family fortune.
Outside of the Béni, life is grey. It's oppressive. It reminds her just how tiny and mortal she really is. Inside the Béni, life is radiant. She has power. People don't pity her - they're in awe of her. Or at least, they were in awe again. Somehow, in this whirlwind of life, it's happened again. The gods or fate or whatever powers may be have conspired to take it all away from her a second time. She won't let them succeed.
First, they gutted her House - they took away her eight siblings, her father's humanity, her mother's mind, her own happiness and her peace. Solveig fought for it back. She won a new family, the Béni. She found new happiness, in Bellamy. Then, there was a minor fluke. An argument, that grew into something larger than it should have. Governed my her pride, Solveig refused to ride out on the next mission.

And what happens? The gods take it all away from her again.

One hundred and fifty-three empty saddles, each one like an arrow hitting her in the back. The news was overwhelming. One second, she was angrily scribbling letters to Bellamy, crumpling them up and tossing them over her shoulders as she tried, for one of the first times in her life, to draft a declaration of diplomacy. The next second, the door to her chamber creaking open. Words being spoken at her, washing over her, barely registering.
Missing? Impossible.When? Where? How?
And then, the endless spiral.
So, while under normal circumstances, Solveig is quiet and standoffish, those normal staples of her personality have been haphazardly shoved to the side. She isn't too enthusiastic to be working with an eccentric gang of mercenaries, commoners, and dusty bookworms, but she's been tirelessly begging the Queen to let her go and find the Béni. If this is the only way she's allowed to go, than so be it.
The woman is quite bad at communicating exactly what she's feeling. Stoicism was taught like gospel in her home - even more so after the deaths of her brothers and sisters - and so her way of processing negative emotions is often by drinking them away or turning to more violent means. Morally, her compass points in all sorts of strange directions. She cares little about politics or commoner complaints. The weak bend when strong wind blows - that's the nature of things. If she wants something you have, and you don't have the strength to even try to fend her off, you don't deserve to have it. Don't like it? Grab a sword and start training. That's her philosophy.
She has a great deal of respect for those who are willing to fight back, even those who fail. She doesn't humiliate her fellow warriors no matter what status they may be - and she's sponsored several other commoners besides Bellamy, though their success was limited. At her core, she isn't a bad person. In fact, when it gets down to the bone, she'd do anything for the people she loves, even if doing those things makes her a monster. As for who Solveig loves? Bellamy. The Béni. Her grief-maddened mother. In that order, though sometimes it changes from day to day.
She's not in the business of killing for the fame (in fact, she's rather annoyed by that part of it). The Warrior Cult first enticed her to join by offering her freedom. She arrived for that reason, but she stayed because of the camaraderie. The purpose it gave her. And then of course, she met Bellamy. Everyone has a weakness, and he has always been hers.
As far as quirks go, she's not immune. She has several oddities that most people don't have the privilege of knowing about - and if they do, they regret the knowledge.

The first time the woman met her beloved Bellamy was in the midst of a tavern brawl that she instigated. To be fair, It started when she punched his nose, then he wrestled her to the ground...she kicked him between the legs. they rolled straight out the door, down the steps, into the street, both snapping and snarling like animals until their ribs hurt, when finally, he surrendered with a laugh. The pair disentangled themselves - only for both of them to realize that their opponent was rather pleasing to the eye, and the rest is history.
Indeed, Solveig was instrumental in Bellamy's success, and when he rose to be one of the most prolific of the Béni, it was Solveig who was the least struck by envy. Sure, there was a little twinge of something, but nothing like the others felt, who saw Bellamy as their biggest threat. Solveig stood by him through it all - and what does she have to show for it?

Not much. Not much at all, really.
But anyways, that tragic love ballad is best saved for later...
Temperament wise, Solveig is fairly quiet and standoffish. She's not roguishly charming, nor does she make and keep friends well. Her nose is turned up at nobles and farmers alike - she values skill, not rank. The close relationships she has with others have all been forged over the fires of battle - shield brothers and sisters who respect her for both her prowess with a blade and the lengths she's willing to go to sacrifice for those she cares for. Outside of the Béni, she has no one. It's never really bothered her until now. Until they all vanished.