Blog Directory: Major Characters
Decided to assemble a tag directory for this blog for easy navigation. This’ll be split into four parts: this post, which will be pinned, a post of all the tags for minor characters, a post of the other tags used to organize this blog, and a post for old/no-longer-current tags and characters. All will be tagged #directory.
#f - Felix (male)
#r - Ruark (male)
#s - Shan (female)
#sk - Skaith (male, dragon)
Descriptions of the characters are under the read more:
Ruark: Male human mage in his mid-20s with a powerset centering on shadows, seeing past the veil, and talking to spirits. He’s a necromancer (in the old-fashioned sense of speaking to the dead, rather than reanimating corpses) and a priest of the god of death. Physically he’s a short (5’4) pale redhead and a wiry-bony kind of skinny, but his force of personality and presence more than make up for his size. Ruark’s greatest assets are his sharp mind and equally sharp tongue, followed closely by his strong will and sheer audacity. His ruthless pragmatism and wide petty streak are typically kept in check by a strong personal moral compass and genuine desire to do good in the world. He has a deep love for humanity, tempered by his frequent feeling that he’s surrounded by complete idiots. Ruark was raised in a semi-nomadic equestrian pastoral culture, but split with his birth family over their expectations of him and has settled down in a community belonging to a neighboring sedentary agricultural culture. He spends much of his time dealing with supernatural threats (primarily undead) in the surrounding lands and performing religious rites related to death for the community as needed. In his spare time, he likes to bake and to tinker with various methods and applications of magics. He and Shan are good childhood friends and currently live in the same broad community. He tolerates Felix, but dislikes Felix’s habit of concealing his true thoughts and feelings.
Shan: Female faery in her early 20s with a strong connection to nature. She’s a young faery who was raised among humans due to a family tragedy that wiped out their entire house, leaving only Felix and Shan as the survivors. Although she’s never felt she fully fits in, she loves her human community and would rather continue to live with them than returning to the faery realm. She possesses a naturally sweet, sunny disposition and a great deal of mostly harmless mischief, and has so far remained largely innocent of the evils of the world (primarily due to Felix’s efforts to protect her). Shan’s short stature (~5’3) and friendly, relaxed demeanor make her come off as relatively harmless, although the effect is undercut some by her lean, broad-shouldered build and the natural predatory grace in her movements. She and Felix look very much alike, despite the height difference - they share the same peachy-golden complexion, deep black hair, and inhuman green eyes with feline pupils. Their similarity runs much deeper than their appearance. Shan’s capacity to be a deadly hunter and vicious killer equals Felix’s, but she would rather stay gentle and non-threatening. Shan is very fond of children and of animals, and pays great attention to her garden. She feels a particular connection to the forests surrounding her home community and spends a lot of time relaxing, exploring, or hunting by herself in the wilderness. She has a magpie’s love for pretty and interesting things and sometimes indulges in a bit of theft to collect new trinkets. She’s close friends with Ruark and had an adolescent crush on him that went nowhere (to this day, he has no idea she was trying to flirt with him for years). Felix is in a sense her only family and she loves him deeply - although they’re cousins by blood (first cousins once removed), she considers him an older brother.
Felix: Male faery, around a century and a half old, although his mental age is roughly equivalent to human in their late-20s. He’s highly charming, very socially adept, and an incorrigible flirt - all traits he’s deliberately cultivated and honed over the course of his life. He was raised in the Seelie Court as a member of the landholding warrior gentry that make up the lowest tier of upper-crust fey society, with the expectation that he would uphold the image and reputation of his house and gain prestige as a knight. However, in his early adulthood, he was disowned and banished for reasons he keeps tight-lipped about. He left Seelie behind and joined the Unseelie Court. He spent the next half-century or so clawing his way up the social ladder, first as a mercenary fighter and then as a courtesan to the aristocracy, honing everything that could be an advantage and trying to discard the parts of himself that were inconvenient or ill-suited to the life he’d ended up in. Eventually he caught the eye of the Unseelie Queen, Maeve, who took him on as an agent under her personal command and primarily uses him as a spy within her court. His life has only relatively recently been disrupted again by needing to raise his baby cousin away from the eyes and control of the court that he serves. Felix is tall (6’5) and elegantly long-limbed, with a lean, lithe physique and a very pretty face. He’s vain about his appearance and prefers to initially come across as glamorous, flirty, and harmless. He hides his collection of battle scars under fine clothes, makeup, and a glamour of flawless soft skin. When charm is insufficient for the situation he finds himself in, he readily drops his mask to reveal the patient and experienced predator underneath. In combat he is a deadly opponent who only indulges in showmanship if he knows he can afford it. But this too is a facade. Felix allows very few people to see the vulnerable pieces of self that hide underneath everything he’s curated for the benefit of others, and has himself lost track of what about himself is real and what is a mask. Shan is perhaps the only one who always gets to see the best and most genuine of him. He helped to raise her from near-infancy, and would both die and kill for her. He considers Ruark to be something of an unfortunate package deal, given the childhood friendship between Shan and Ruark, and would be significantly more fond of Shan’s human friend if Ruark didn’t make a habit of needling him.
Shan and Felix are both a type of faery called a Cat Sidhe, which are shapeshifters who can take on the form of a large black cat. In their humanoid shape they retain a number of catlike instincts and traits, such as long retractable claws, feline eyes, and ability to fall from great heights and walk away mostly unscathed. They possess an innate prey drive and keen instincts honed for hunting and fighting. They also possess incredible powers of healing and regeneration, to the point that they have a literal nine lives - they can return from the dead nine times before their permanent death. Due to this combination of traits, they are considered perfectly suited for battle, and all Cat Sidhe clans train their members for combat from childhood.
Additionally, using a modern Western framework of sexual and gender identity, Ruark is aromantic asexual, Shan is pansexual, and Felix is bisexual (and nonbinary, although he uses he/him pronouns). In canon none of them have the same concepts of gender and sexuality as we do, since they’re in a fantasy setting.
