Sorry everyone, I completely missed the post about this forum somehow, and was thinking that the game was fading due to the lack of replies on the interest forum. Anyway, I'm here now!<br/><br/>I am concerned that I am a bit out of my depth though, because I don't play MtG and so I'm only nominally familiar with this setting, primarily through what has been posted to this and the original interest thread and a bit of prowling around wikis (which, to be honest, much of the time made me more confused rather than less).<br/><br/>As such I've been stumbling hard on preparing my character's backstory. I'm used to being pretty solid on background and writing stuff that really fits, so this is a very awkward sensation for me. I do apologize if I'm way off in any of my assumptions about how-the-culture-works. I was looking for a way to make an animist-primitivist wandering monk with clumsy aspirations towards being a sort of sword-saint for her people. I welcome any criticism or suggestions! Please do make suggestions, particularly regarding the backstory.<br/><br/>Peh-Ma's Character Sheet (http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=511395)<br/><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Peh-Ma's Story</div><div class="spoiler_body">Peh-Ma would never have considered herself anyone special, bound neither for adventure nor destiny. Like most of the Temur Ainok, she was more prone to following her natural urges than the jackal-like members of some of the southern tribes. <br/><br/>In common with all those who lived their lives out in the Temur frontier, it would not have occurred to Peh-ma to place divisions between herself and nature. The Temur, with their highly animist and shamanist beliefs, saw themselves as a part of nature, not apart from it. She was one with her pack, a ragged hunting band of a few dozen Ainok -- family, by blood spilled if not always by blood born. They raided freely, doing battle with the Mardu or with other Ainok packs, although they had an understanding of sorts with the children of Yusova Dragonclaw, and were more likely to aid them in their raids against the Mardu than to do battle against them. Peh-Ma's life was a constant, uncomplicated struggle against the cold, and against hunger, both of which were counterbalanced by the warmth and cameraderie of her life in the pack.<br/><br/>And then her pack encountered Narset, and those who fled with her in her exile from the Ojutai. <br/><br/>The encounter was devastating for Peh-Ma's pack. With typical Ainok rashness, they attacked...And with typical Jeskai grace, they were almost all put down. Peh-Ma does not hold particular hatred for the Jeskai; the way of her people was the way of the bear who rages, and when such folk come to battle they are rarely taken prisoner. It is far easier to kill a berserker than to subdue one.<br/><br/>But while the Ainok are by nature bloodthirsty, and their battle methods are often driven by rage, they are guided by impulse.<br/><br/>In the first moments of battle, before she could become enraged at the loss of her fellow pack-members, Peh-Ma found herself distracted by the sheer flowing beauty of the motions of those who opposed her. They did not seem to fight so much as dance, and her confusion at this strange sight eclipsed her bloodlust. The Ainok knew dance (what people do not, who admire the fire and the wind that stirs it?) but while there were dances of the hunt and dances for the wind and dances for battle, Peh-Ma had never confused a dance for battle with the actual chaos of battle.<br/><br/>What distracted her was the lack of chaos here. The Ainok's opponents ebbed and flowed like ripples on a mountain lake. They absorbed the berserker charge and slipped away again -- often as not leaving the berserkers fallen still in the snow behind them.<br/><br/>There was a rhythm to it, Peh-Ma sensed, somehow as persistent as twilight drums, but like the best drummers, the alien warriors improvised around that rhythm rather than being bound to it.<br/><br/>For a brief few seconds, as Peh-Ma waded into the melee, she felt she understood that rhythm, and in a moment of curious impulse she let it guide her spear as she drove towards their leader. For a few moments she matched those who stood before her, twisting aside from a countering blow and spearing not where her opponent was, but rather where they were about to be.<br/><br/>Her spear bit once, then again, and just as Peh-Ma began to realize how few of her people still stood and the anger began to rise boiling within her, the leader of her opponents stepped forward with the grace of a soaring gull and came down upon Peh-Ma like the wind driving the snow down a mountain.<br/><br/>Peh-Ma awoke to warmth and the scent of unfamiliar tea. It took some time to find common ground in the trade-tongue, but her captors gradually made some things clear.<br/><br/>They were mad, of course.<br/><br/>They apologized for the deaths of her packmates. As if it were some accident that they had died in battle. How else should they die? Oh, true, some Ainok did grow old enough to realize that the hunt was no longer for them, and then they touched their children's heads and wandered into the snow to become one with it, but it was natural for the Temur Ainok to die in battle.<br/><br/>And then the true madness. Their leader, Narset, sought possible allies against the disciples of the dragons of the west...from who the strangers were fleeing. And then (it took some while for Peh-Ma to truly understand this, given the limits of their shared speech), they wanted to train those allies to do better in battle. This, Peh-Ma finally understood, was the dance. The dance which she had almost grasped the least part of, and which Narset had seen and spared her for.<br/><br/>There were three others of her pack still alive, all more injured than she. Peh-Ma spoke with them, their small numbers like a persistent wound in her belly. It was a hard decision, not because they could not decide (Ainok are nothing if not given to following impulses) but because they had such trouble understanding through the trade tongue what they were being offered.<br/><br/>Still, in time they agreed that four was too few for a pack, and if they were joining another pack with different dances, well, they would learn different dances.<br/><br/>How simple that sounded! And yet there was nothing simple about the Jeskai. While several of the others took their turn, it was Narset who most frequently trained them -- the Ainok were nothing if not frustrating, yet she needed allies and the canines had their own simplistic alliance with the great Khan of the north. Small steps, Narset may have reasoned.<br/><br/>Small steps were all it seemed she could achieve, many days. Peh-Ma was simultaneously the most promising and the most frustrating of the Ainok who the Jeskai had adopted. It was plain to her trainers that she could see the rhythm of their motions, that she could learn to fight gracefully, and that she did so with passion...But therein lay the problem. Like all of the Ainok, she was too impulsive. Time and again Narset told her to set aside impulse, to meditate and build walls between her nature and her instinct. She rebelled against it. Should she build walls between her paws and herself? Her ears and herself? How could she defy nature? How could Narset pretend that nature was separate or separable? How?<br/><br/>In the tongue of the Jeskai, which she was never able to make headway in, she was mockingly labeled The-Pup-Who-Questions.<br/><br/>She spent years trying, following, arguing, being given what were supposedly punishments but which she simply accepted (nature is what it is, what must be must be...why resent it?). She learned what she still thought of as the dance, the flow and sweep that echoed the wind and fire, but to the Jeskai, her mental training lacked. She would not discipline her mind, nor could she understand why they felt it was so important. Her few surviving packmates became more and more frustrated as the seasons passed -- they were not even learning the dance, and living among the mad was tiresome.<br/><br/>Eventually, her packmates convinced her, and Peh-Ma had her last argument with Narset. She did not expect to convince the teacher, but she and her people were determined. She certainly did not expect that Narset would offer parting gifts, food and weapons...Least of all did she expect to be permitted to keep her favorite training weapon, an immense old sword that only the larger among the Jeskai ever used, and most of them only as a tool to develop strength and control when using lighter blades. Peh-Ma liked its heft, liked the stability it gave her when she counterbalanced its swings.<br/><br/>Stability was a thing that was not valued among the Jeskai, Peh-Ma realized. They sought to destabilize their enemy. They spoke of instinct and trained themselves to fight like wind and fire, but they still thought in terms of control and were determined to ignore the implacable strengths of ice and stone. It was one of the last things she tried to explain to Narset, and once again the limits of the trade language halted them. Narset might have chosen to explain that the stability of stone and its denial of instinct was an element of the Ojutai who her people opposed, but she might not. It was hard to say, and Peh-Ma would only have argued (as before) that stone had its own instincts, its own nature. Words fell aimless as snowflakes between them, and meaning didn't bridge the chasm that the two women felt.<br/><br/>The Temur Ainok who had been of the Jeskai left, and were no longer of the Jeskai. Narset took the Jeskai east and south, and sought other allies. The tiny pack tried to find its way again, but they had lived to long among people who built walls in their hearts and minds, people who saw themselves as apart nature.<br/><br/>Four Ainok were hardly enough to be thought of as a pack, anyway. Hunting was thin. Any real battle was simple suicide. One fell, and another. Peh-Ma's last companion grew grey of fur and weak of eye. In time she touched Peh-Ma's forehead and announced that she was going for a walk in the snow.<br/><br/>The snow filled in her old friend's footprints. Peh-Ma was alone. No longer of the Jeskai, and now no longer of a pack. How could one Ainok be a pack?<br/><br/>Peh-Ma thought, and because she had little else to do, she danced. Her dance was rage at what was lost, and calm in the face of the inevitable. She danced the wind and the still dance of the cliff-face, waiting to fall.<br/><br/>But she did not fall. Prey came whether she called it or not. In truth, it was easier to feed one than four, particularly when three of the four had been so troubled of heart.<br/><br/>She danced, and she thought. Narset, she came to understand, was another source of war, but not war as the Temur practiced against the Mardu. Narset's war would come when the people of the Ojutai came to the Temur, seeking their wandering rebels. And the Temur would fall as easily as Peh-Ma's pack had, because they did not understand the war-dance of the Ojutai.<br/><br/>Peh-Ma thought.<br/><br/>Her dance was unlike the Ojutai, she reasoned, or Narset's followers would have been offended by it. It was unlike their way, the Jeskai way, because she did not try to harness her instincts, did not pretend that meditation was about self-mastery instead of self-understanding. It was surely inferior to the skilled dance Narset knew, but it was better than stumbling forward into battle without rhythm, as the Ainok often did in their bloodlust.<br/><br/>Peh-Ma danced her bloodlust. She would learn. Perhaps she would learn enough to teach others, and there would be enough of the Temur Ainok who learned to dance in harmony with the nature of the mountain and the avalanche that when the Ojutai came from the south, they would be driven back down the mountains.<br/><br/>She wandered, packless, barely tolerated as a madwoman...A madwoman strong enough to disarm and defeat most who thought to oppose her. She would need to learn much more, much more indeed, if she was going to be seen as a teacher rather than simply a lone, mad Ainok.<br/><br/>Perhaps she could become to the spirit of the dance what the Whisperers were to the spirits of the land.<br/><br/>Perhaps.</div></div>