<br/><strong><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 24pt;">Ksulune Naravi, the Soulcatcher Wendigo</span></strong><br/><br/><em>"We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there - there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were - no, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of their not being inhuman."<br/><br/>-Joseph Conrad (HEART OF DARKNESS)</em><br/><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Quiet and Clever and Ruthless</div><div class="spoiler_body">The Rajtul have a culture, a way of life. It is perhaps not an ideal way, allowing only the smallest and most intrepid of settlements to survive and none to flourish, but it is a way, and the Rajtul are living. When you are so closely hounded by cannibal Wyld barbarians and their twice-ravenous ghosts, you tend to measure prosperity in deathless weeks - but there are those who dream of a greater scale. The elkman Muzzle Soaked Crimson broke from his fellows and their purported wisdom, gathering three villages' worth of Rajtul behind his charisma and grand vision of an inland settlement. A shining future. Ksulune was the principal voice convincing his family to follow Muzzle Soaked Crimson: he was the youngest child, adored and with a silver-tongued gift, and he had yearned to live like those in the great cities since he was old enough to accompany the trading ships to foreign docks, to marvel at high walls and the bustle of civilized culture. He poured all his fledgling art into the effort, dreaming of a world that would open to him like a flower, and so his family packed their things and joined the grand expedition. It chose the empty lands east of Dalanth Ganharva, and upon its arrival spent a long and industrious day raising shelter and palisades in preparation for the real work. The elkmen set wards of salt and bone.<br/><br/>And then someone went and ruined those wards after dark, and by the third night they were overrun.<br/><br/>Ksulune was very quiet and very clever and very ruthless. He had watched carefully: he knew a little of what the elkmen did that they claimed would protect the Rajtul. He knew where his neighbors kept their salt. And he knew that wolves among the herd target the weakest first, are driven wild by cries of pain and the smell of hot blood, and thought that perhaps the undead would be the same in their frenzied rush to devour the living. He was right, and he survived. His family were not so quiet or clever or ruthless - but they were brave. His mother and sisters fought to the end. His father fought almost as long, so that his begging was mercifully short.<br/><br/>After dawn had come, he crept from his hiding place and saw Muzzle Soaked Crimson and a few other elkmen gathered among the bodies. He darted forward, meaning to demand answers, to ask how they - the great warriors and mystics, the protectors of the quiet-minded Rajtul - could live when so many courageous people had died, but something stopped him short: laughter. He concealed himself and listened.<br/><br/>He did not learn all the details, only the broad strokes of the thing: some then, most later. That among the councils of the elkmen were occasional proposals for variants of sacred rites, new interpretations of traditions...that success in such cultural endeavors was a mark of high status, and failure brought the shame of the heretic. That for those shamed, there were sometimes other avenues along which validation could be sought. Heresy became blasphemy. Blasphemy became malevolence. And a door was opened that should not have been, an unthinkable deal struck. The souls of his people would be as slaves, and their betrayers elevated. The betrayers who he had charmed his family into trusting.<br/><br/>Ksulune was very quiet and very clever and very ruthless. Only two of the elkmen survived the day, including Muzzle Soaked Crimson himself, fleeing into the approaching dusk and their waiting allies, leaving the youth and his dripping knife alone to be devoured. He remembers waiting calmly in the dusk, thinking over and over again of his cowardice, his obsessive survival urge. Whether he was sure there was nothing he could have done. Whether there was a difference between the elkman, who had seen the Rajtul butchered for one kind of gain, and Ksulune, who had seen them butchered for another in the form of his own life. He remembers how the knife felt in his hands. How afraid he was. How he told himself over and over, this time I will be brave. I will be a warrior to the end. When I face my family again, shackled as they are shackled, I will have no shame in my eyes.<br/><br/>His courage broke as the last light left the sky, and he ran, ran as fast and as far as he could, ran until his lungs burned and his legs gave out and he lay shuddering and steaming in the snow, hearing the distant hunting howls of the cannibal ghosts, the weeping of their new-bound Rajtul slaves. He almost did not notice the delicate footfalls of the teodozjia until it was upon him, looking down with its expressionless jade face. <em>Pathetic,</em> it said. <em>To dream. To burn with life and terror. Do you not know what it is that draws the dead to the living? That burns away the living until even the best-kept of them join the dead? There is much I could have taught you, in another life. A scripture to extinguish your dreaming heart, so that no madmen could win it, no ghost drink from the chalice of it...or at least how not to be such a miserable coward. But that would have been another life. You have only this one, and little enough left of that - and good riddance. What a mess you have made of it.<br/><br/>But I wonder, quiet child, clever child, child with the hunter's heart - I wonder what you might do differently, if I had another life to give you.</em><br/><br/>Five days later, Ksulune built a great cairn for all the human dead of his village; the building took near a month, and in that time he weathered increasingly fierce raids by the outraged undead. He learned what frustrated them, what they feared, and what drove them near berserk with rage. He defiled them as his people had been defiled. By its end there was only one beastman left to find, and he had learned of something more, a source for their wickedness: the Shining Path, the black religion of Oblivion, whose tenets Muzzle Soaked Crimson had become fascinated by some years earlier in the process of banishing a Labyrinth-touched ghost. He remembers the shock of taking fresh questions to Hell, being answered with some vague intimation of the scope of the horror that had taken all from him. He remembers contemplating that scope. He remembers thinking, <em>good.</em><br/><br/>He remembers thinking, <em>I don't want to stop.</em></div></div><br/><br/><strong>Caste:</strong>Scourge of the All-Hunger Blossom<br/><strong>Concept:</strong>Mad-eyed reaver-witch<br/><strong>Motivation:</strong>Tear out the throat of the Bishop of the Chalcedony Thurible<br/><strong>Urge:</strong><em>Metagaoiyn (The Urge to Devour)</em><br/><br/><strong>FLAW - CIVILITY</strong><br/><br/>Etiquette, courtesy, integrity, honor...the ideals he once believed separated man from monster, ideals he has had time and time again to sacrifice upon the altar of black necessity. It was never his culture. The Rajtul are civil, but they are not particularly civilized. No, these were the ideals of his unrealized dream, the things he learned from city recruiters and the rare books of philosophy he cajoled his sisters into finding for him. Now little is left but their trappings, their basest expression not as fundamental truths but as party favors and gala masques - and they have taken on an intoxicating, fetishistic appeal to the Soulcatcher. Whatever he does in the dark, he cannot stand for his image to be stained, cannot resist a ploy upon his "better nature." It doesn't help him. But like a cancer of the mind, it can't simply be hacked out.<br/><br/><strong>Theme Song:</strong>Human, by Daughter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbCeyb9okac) | Destroyer, by The Birthday Massacre (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q82r7uP27BI)<br/><br/>Character Sheet (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ypmb5ytEpyy7KPDXTe8AbR5iywpazZHLom0vvToslN0/edit?usp=sharing)