❝ THE PAST LIES LIKE A NIGHTMARE UPON THE PRESENT. ❞
GENERAL INFO
NAME: Lysander Ashwin Rai GENDER/PRONOUNS: Gender-fluid; He/They DATE OF BIRTH: April 1st, 1990 PLACE OF BIRTH: Salem, Massachusetts CURRENT RESIDENCE: The Bronx OCCUPATION: Bouncer at Sinners FACE CLAIM: Avan Jogia
SUPERNATURAL INFO
SPECIES: Werewolf PACK POSITION: Beta
BIOGRAPHY
Trigger Warnings: Violence, Death, Abandonment, Suicidal Ideation, Self-Destructive Behavior
Lysander was born a witch, in Salem, Massachusetts, into the coven known as the Circle of the Reaping Star. Their coven saw the flaws and injustices in America, in both human and supernatural affairs, and sought to right the wrongs paved by centuries of mistakes. They worked from the shadows mostly, using their magic to aid protests and uprisings. Some called them activists, some called them anarchists, others called them much worse. They didn’t care how people perceived them, so long as they knew they were fighting for justice.
His mother, Lavanya, was their supreme. However, she never made that feel like a burden or pressure on him or his sister, Lola. She raised them in much the same way she lead their coven—with grace and compassion. Their whole lives they were taught that their purposes in life were theirs and theirs alone. She would not try to control them, only guide them as best she could. Lysander loved everything about his mother, but that was what made him aspire to be like her. The way she commanded respect was not by force, but by allowing it to come to her of its own accord. A dance of sorts. He delighted in the rhythm of it. Perhaps his highest aspiration of all was that the ancestors would choose him when the time came to be the next supreme, so he could truly follow in her footsteps.
Puberty and his powers hit at an early age and, the moment they did, he was determined to learn as much as he could as fast as he could. He followed Lavanya like a shadow and soaked up all he could learn from her. He stayed up late with Lola, drilling spells and working on his control over fire. Practicing magic became the most important thing in his life. By the time he was 10 he had mastered many of his main abilities and was beginning to learn astral projection. This seemingly quick progression came with a heavy set of dark circles beneath his eyes and at the sacrifice of more meals than he could count. Eventually his mother had to regulate his practice to ensure he wouldn’t burn out or die of sleep deprivation. Nevertheless, his progress was impressive, even after practices were restricted to a schedule. The whole coven fed his ego that surely one day he’d be chosen to reign as the supreme. This was all, of course, before the attack.
One night, in midst of the 2004 summer solstice, their coven was attacked by a pack of werewolves who had marked them as a threat to the natural division of supernatural beings. This pack decided to take it upon themselves to eradicate the coven. Or attempt to, at least. They had no idea what they were up against in threatening Lavanya and her kin. They fought hard and were able to ward off the attack with minimal casualties. Lysander, however, didn’t make it out so lucky. In his overzealous confidence in his power, he’d taken a frontline defense against them and got himself bitten. Writhing on the ground, the agony of the bite was nowhere near as painful as the knowledge of what it meant. Waiting to change or waiting to die, the fourteen year old wasn’t sure which would be worse. But he’d soon learn.
The bite ended up changing him, which left his mother with a horrible decision to make. He couldn’t stay with the coven. Even if they could figure out a cure for lycanthropy it would take them years to do so, maybe even decades. Lavanya knew well enough what happened to wolves without a pack. So she decided to send him away, off to a pack she trusted—The Nomads, lead by an old friend, Mila Petrova. Lysander begged her to let him stay or even kill him instead, but her mind was made up and once that happened it was impossible to change it. No matter how much his mother’s decision was driven by love, Lysander would never learn to shake the feeling of utter betrayal. Turning not only changed his body, it changed everything about him. The hopeful, passionate, loving boy he once was quickly turned bitter, nihilistic, and short-tempered.
Living with the Nomads overall wasn’t the worst, their lifestyle suited his dauntless personality, and Mila ensured they were all welcoming enough. He even made what he might call friends, if he was able to think of those sort of attachments anymore. However, as if to rub salt in his wounds, he was pushed to spend time with a boy who lived with the pack, but wasn’t one of them. The boy was a witch, a little more than a year younger than him, and struggling to come into his power. At first Lysander resented Eliot, the witch who didn’t seem at all interested in learning to hone his skills or in being a witch at all. If only they could trade places—the witch that wanted nothing more than to be a werewolf and the werewolf who wanted nothing more than to be a witch again. Oh the things he could do with the power Eliot so carelessly wasted. For a while, after he agreed to help train Eliot, he even believed he hated him.
Overtime, though, he began to see things differently. Eliot became his feeble tie back to magic and, in the process, became his new purpose when he felt like he’d lost everything. So, despite Eliot’s disinterest in learning magic, he poured all his energy into teaching him. He convinced himself it was the proximity to magic that kept him invested, but the truth was he grew to care for the boy—a fact that could probably only be extracted from him with telepathy or a lie detector test. But in a few short years Eliot was gone and a distantly familiar feeling struck Lysander. The sting of abandonment. And then, only a week later, as if the past was all flooding back in waves, their camp was ambushed.
Vampires came down on them with a fury and he watched so many of the people he swore not to care about die before his eyes. He could have done more, he knew, but instead he watched, hopeless, frozen, stuck dwelling about how much better his coven would have fared in this scenario. When the smoke cleared and the bodies were counted he discovered that Eliot had returned. The reunion was brief, he stayed only long enough to help avenge the fallen and then he was gone again, with him went the last of Lysander’s connection to witchcraft.
Lysander stayed with the Nomads for over a decade after, slowly losing all hope for any cure for lycanthropy, and trying (and failing) not to get too close to anyone else in the pack. Mila kept in contact with Eliot, offering Lysander the option to reach out as well, but he could never bring himself to. At least, not until Mila told him the latest stop in Eliot’s journey. New York City… a bustling hub of a whole plethora of beings supernatural and otherwise, with a powerful coven at its heart. Maybe there, he’d be able to find what he’d been looking for since the day he was turned—a cure.
