From the elusive Dhoro clan, Yugen isn’t used to the company of others and is more like some kind of ghost story than an actual known person. Did you see him out of the corner of your eye? Spot him somewhere in the horizon? Must be your eyes playing tricks on you...
Stormblood is almost here and with it, I am sure, a moment of glory for RPers of Othardians. I have my very own Xaela who I’m planning to bring out in early Stormblood, as he leaves the far corners of the Azim Steppe to encounter the rest of the world. Maybe you’d like your character to meet him? :o
Kharadai, an approximately 18-year-old boy raised in a branch of the Dhoro tribe, will arrive on the scene probably speaking only bizarre, archaic Xaelic and none of the common tongue. But he seeks contact with the “Southern People” of Doma and beyond out of an intense curiosity about the world, aetherology and natural history, and a desire to learn everything.
We of course won’t know exactly where and what the available in-game RP settings are until the MSQ takes us there. But assuming the Azim Steppes will be a location ripe for Xaela tribe RP and/or a peaceful point of contact between the steppe Xaela and the rest of the world, I would be interested in making contact with anyone who might like to encounter Kharadai on his journey south and have their character provide advice, protection, and companionship (even if temporarily) so he doesn’t get eaten by Garleans. While I imagine non-isolationist steppe Xaela would fall into such a role the most naturally, anyone interested could potentially work as long as you don’t mind language barriers at first.
More about me, Kharadai, and what I’m looking for (or not):
I’m in EST and usually play evenings but I have very wide availability, especially if we schedule beforehand.
My natural tendency is towards low-powered slice-of-life RP, but I try to be adaptable and accomodating to my RP partner’s likes and preferences. I like being able to facilitate other people’s character development and stories.
My RP style is probably closest to “single-para heavy RP” but I think of myself as laid-back, adaptable, non-judgmental, so don’t be shy if you’re a beginner roleplayer or a non-native English speaker.
I am very over 18 and do not mind dark or sexual themes in roleplay... but I’m not usually that interested in them. I’m not looking for romantic or sexual relationships for Kharadai. Gender and sexuality talk, though, could be interesting.
Kharadai can do basic cooking, sewing, wool-spinning, hide-cleaning, and campsite maintenance tasks, and he’d be willing to work for food and shelter along the way to wherever he’s going.
Kharadai also has some knowledge of his tribe’s idiosyncratic thaumaturgy and shamanistic divination/healing, but he’s not a very strong fighter. Fightin’ Things RP wouldn’t be a good fit, but healer RP, maybe.
He wants to learn everything, so meeting mage, scholar, and lore teachers is probably in his future, but this may not happen right away because of language barriers.
He could conceivably join a well-suited FC, but I’d need to get to know you first in order to feel comfortable, and as Kharadai is one of my many alts, you’d have to be comfortable with me splitting my focus.
Linkshells would be loved!
Kharadai’s main incarnation is on Balmung, but I am happy to RP over Discord or Tumblr as well, and when/if he reaches Eorzea I could roll doppelgangers of him on other servers.
Drop me a line if you’re interested. :3 Once I get through MSQ, I’ll probably be wandering around on him IC in the Azim Stepppes, as well, so if you see me out in the world with an RP tag up, say hi!
At the top of a hill, from the crest of which the camp's edge can be only just be seen, stands a boy who should not exist.
Many, many generations past, the children of the Creators lived upon the steppe, beneath the Eternal Blue Sky. Their lives were not always peaceful and never easy; at times, they quarreled with each other, or the rain would not come, and young and old died by hunger, dagger, or disease. But they lived. The sun shone upon the grass, and the beasts of the steppe grazed upon it, and the people reaped their milk and meat in the way the Creators had taught them. Thus were they nourished by the land for countless turns, summer after winter, generation after generation, in harmony and obeisance to the Earth.
Then one day, the scouts brought word of wonders they had seen in the south, beyond the steppe and the range of the children of the Creators. Whispers swiftly spread among all tribes of this far-off, fertile land, where strangers, the Southern People, lived fat and indolent lives on the easy bounty. The children of the Creators, who had never known such luxuries as the Southern People enjoyed even existed, were filled with astonishment, then resentment, then greed. They looked at themselves, their bodies tough and strong from their years on the steppe, at the Southern People, weak and puny, and wondered: why should they obey the dictates of Creators and accept such hard and meager lives when they, with their swift horses and keen archers, could take what these undeserving Southern People had? The whispers continued, and the tribes' blood was inflamed with wrath and desire, and soon the horde descended on the south, slaughtering the weaklings and taking their riches for their own.
The children of the Creators had never before enjoyed such overabundance. They not only gorged themselves on food and wine but rolled in perfumes and wrapped themselves up in silks. They even covered themselves in jade and shiny silver, useless ornaments that they had never wanted on the steppe. They were happy -- and yet their greed, far from being sated, only grew. What else, they wondered, could they plunder from the south? What new delights and pleasures could await? They raided more and more, making the Southern People their slaves, burning their homes and killing their families. And their wealth and greed grew and grew in step together; soon nothing was more important to them than increase of their plunder, and they forgot compassion and hospitality, respect for the spirits, harmony with the Earth.
Soon they even forgot thrift, and endurance, and self-denial, all the things that had once made them leaner and stronger than the Southern People. And the Southern People grew angrier and angrier each year. The persecution of the raiders had calloused their soft flesh; their shared sufferings made their bonds of brotherhood grow strong. And then, one summer, when the sun was at its zenith, at last they had enough. While the children of the Creators revelled and feasted drunkenly, the Southern People surrounded them, then set upon them. The slaughter once visited on the children and elderly of the Southern People was returned. The ground ran with blood, and barely one of each family was able to escape, and fewer survived their wounds to struggle back to the steppes.
Those who returned soon realized that they had forgotten the teachings of the Creators, and, naked and starving, many more died. But, slowly and painfully, the few survivors remembered what they could and learned anew what they could not. They remembered how to hunt and how to herd, how to shelter from summer heat and feed the flock through winter cold. They lived -- not with the luxury of the fertile south, but they lived.
They remembered, and their children remembered, with some difficulty. But their grandchildren began to forget, and by the time their great-grandchildren had grown into women and men, again the whispers began to spread across the tribes. The south, once ravaged, had blossomed again, and was said to burst with even greater riches. The young people talked not only of jade and silver but of diamonds and gold, and of how the Southern People had grown soft again, while the children of the Creators were strong. Greed and bloodlust burned in their hearts, and the joyous chorus went up, crying for a new and wonderful war.
Only one tent was quiet; in it, a mother and father mourned. The other tribes cheered at the thought of the prosperity to come -- but the mother and father knew that theirs would be no true prosperity, but an evil medicine that would bring only suffering, again and again and again. And so as the warriors swung into their saddles and turned their horses south, the mother and father rolled up their tent, gathered their herd, and turned away, into the deepest part of the steppe. There, they and their children hunted and herded, suffered the storms and the snows, starved and lost, and lived, as the Creators had long-ago taught, in harmony with the Earth. And when the other tribes returned from the south, bloodied and battered and begging for succor, they would no more speak with them, and turned away.
That is why we live the way we do, away from the other tribes. We keep the old ways, carrying only what we need. Our bodies are thick and strong, but our arrows are for the hunt, and our horses are for herding. We defend ourselves, but we do not murder and plunder, for greed is a hunger that deepens when fed. We honor our ancestors, the spirits, and the Creators, and we live and die between the Earth and the Sky. So it is for all who are truly one of us.
That is what they said.
Many, many winters past, under a black sky that thundered without rain, the Dark Stranger came. Some thought they should have killed her, this infiltrator from the Outside; more thought she should at least have been expelled and left behind, in obedience to the laws of ancient custom. But she appealed to them -- threatened them -- offered handfuls of iron rings, strong colored thread, hunting knives made of what she called steel -- put a hand to her belly and begged. It was the shaman's decision that allowed her to remain, and the rest obeyed, although they were uneasy.
For three moons' nights she slept outside the tents, in the saddle of her black horse. In the day she stood apart or disappeared into the hills to hunt, bringing back a marmot or a gazelle. When one of the men remarked that no woman he'd ever known could shoot a bird out of the air, she went with the hunters the next day to do exactly that; they murmured about the ease with which she pulled back her giant bow and the distance from which she could loose a deadly arrow, not all in complimentary tones. When the day shortened and her body swelled, she sat with the women spinning wool around the fire, and they stared at her jet-dark arms and their covering of scars. From then she slept inside, and they shared with her their food and drink, and they answered her questions, when she spoke -- but would not question or touch her.
She gave birth on a sunless noon, the sky once more black and roaring. No one would come within; she tied the infant's cord herself and wrapped it in her shirt. She nursed it a few moons, sitting astride her horse, eyes on the distant horizon. Then, at the frost, she left. The child was left behind.
None of the women wanted it; it was the shaman who picked him up, carrying him tucked inside his jacket as he drove his own small herd. On mare's milk the child grew withered and limp, and he ought surely to have died once, twice, on many nights. He lived, small and sickly, and cried only softly, when he had breath. From a weak and tiny baby came a weak and tiny youth, dull-eyed and sedate, who when outside would never run and play but sit, silent, on a mound of earth, staring at the grass and the clouds or looking into the distance.
For boys to learn to shoot and wrestle they had to be bold, strong, and bright, full of the blood and vigor of life. He could not run without making himself sick, and airag made him sicker. He was left behind with the women and sheep. His hands were small and nimble enough to cook and to sew -- but more often he burned or mangled what he tended, for his mind and eyes were elsewhere. They'd fix his mistakes with a sigh, remembering that he was good for nothing, this child whom they never should have allowed, a child who shouldn't exist.
"You're different," the shaman would tell him, "and special. You come from hardship, through hardship. And beyond hardship is great destiny. My ancestor made me aware of it, bade me protect and guide you until you are ready. On the reverse of weakness is power, power you must ready yourself to receive."
He shivered instead through a dozen illnesses, receiving nothing but a great dollop of blood on the dawn of his eleventh spring.
That summer when the Dhoro met, the shaman took the boy with him when he traveled between tents, speaking to the families of the ill and afflicted. He helped his mentor into his regalia, then sat quietly to the side, tearing off sprigs of dried thyme to add to the fire. He observed as the shaman pounded his drum and spun, whirled till the glinting mirrors on his robes flashed like lightning or a fall of meteors, and thrummed and screamed in combat with the malignant spirits. He watched the frightened family cry and cling to each other, then gasp in amazement as their ailing mother sat upright. Then he stood and aided the man who, on return from his flight, felt unsteady, and observed the thanks of the family, not only spoken in words but counted out in goods. Then on to the next tent to make diagnoses and dispense advice, to speak blessings or shamanize when appropriate.
At the end of one treatment, when the two had left the tent, the shaman turned to him and asked, "Could you feel it, when the soaring-demon surrendered and took flight and the oppression lifted? Your sensitivity to the spiritual is very strong. Tell me, did you notice the turning point and feel it go?"
He felt nothing.
Their relationship continued, winter after summer after winter after summer. Among their families at their camp, at the greeting of one camp by another, and at the great meets, he followed along and assisted, observing. He smelled a great deal of smoke, burning herbs, and juniper, and he heard many songs, chants, and wails, and the myriad intrigues and tragedies of their clients' families. And the listened hard for spirits and demons, the murmurings of ancestors below and beings above -- but he heard nothing.
His sensitivity was strong -- to the wind, the sky, and the grass. He knew, before the shaman told him, when they passed over an underground river, from the tingling in his feet and the plants he saw growing around them. He watched a family of foxes the rest of the camp never knew denned beside them and knew, from the fluttering of the birds, the very day they had moved on. He knew the iron zud was upon them before it was explained to him what one was, and he knew which animals would first die. Sometimes, in certain places, when he was very quiet and still, he thought he could feel the earth breathing, sometimes deeply, sometimes shallowly, sometimes as if in a peaceful or restless sleep.
He knew the myriad insects and animals, flowers and clouds, rocks and winds, more than his language had named. But whenever his mentor listed for him the types of demons and devils, the names of the heavenly beings, the attributes of the White Old Man or the Very Old Grandmother, he didn't understand.
"It is lore I learned from my master and from the ancestors who have visited me," the shaman said. "When you become a shamaness, your ancestor will teach you the names of the demons and spirits and how to conquer them."
But he knew that would never happen because a boy could not become a shamaness.
In his fifteenth summer, he felt it, long before they stepped into the client's tent. The presence hung like a heavy cloud over the residence, an oppressive miasma, as if the air had been twisted into a thousand invisible threads and knotted into a thick, obstructive blanket.
The shaman did his work, threatened the demon with his staff and dagger, spun to a stop and prayed with the family. The ill girl raised her head and smiled at him, full of hope -- and it was true that the air in the tent had become lighter.
The boy alone kept his eyes on the shadows in the tent, shoulders tense, frowning.
"You should give libation to the cairn at the river-crossing this summer to ensure it does not take offense once again," his mentor advised them.
That won't be enough, the boy thought.
And she did die before summer arrived.
"Sometimes the opposing spirit is more powerful than those I can muster," his mentor said, when he dared to ask.
But how do you know it is that? How can you be content with such an answer and move on? How much -- how little -- do you really understand?
He needed to understand.
He began to watch the shamanizing with doubled attention. He visited the cairns himself, standing with his bare feet on the earth and staring at them, searching. He left the tent one night to climb up the slope to a burial site, a place the shaman had warned him to never set foot, lest the ancestors take offense. He lay among the rocks and bones; he kicked one off the mountainside. There was no evil there, no twisted air and shuddering earth -- not like the plains they sometimes crossed that smelled like ancient, dried-up blood.
The shaman named demons and spirits and ancestors confidently; the boy lay on his back and looked up at the stars and tried to count how many of them had no names.
A plague swept through; he should have been stricken, but he wasn't. Instead, the camp's newest-born daughter went limp in his arms, drowned, as he tried to revive her.
"The old ways are hard to live by."
He cursed the old ways.
Many, many nights later, the boy who stands at the top of the hill looks down at the sheath in his hands. He pulls the knife from it, twists it in his hands -- sees in it his blurry reflection.
Steel.
He looks up at the sky full of stars; he looks back at the distant shape of the camp.
He looks forward -- towards the south.
On his back is the staff of the shaman, one that he was told could only be his when he at last became a shamaness. He has held it before, taken it out into the darkness for years, and practiced the dance of fire; with no ancestor, no possession, no initiation, he bent it to his will nevertheless. Another law of ancient custom he defied, to be added to the list of dozens, hundreds.
But the ancient customs are not his, just as the ancestors are not his, just as the Dhoro are not his. The old ways are not good enough for him. The ancient understanding, the wisdom of ages, the teachings of the Creators -- none of them are good enough for him.
This tiny corner of the steppe, where they hide from the vastness of the world, fearful of the unknown, is not enough.
It’s been awhile and I’ve been away from the game for.. hooo... four months? Three? I can’t remember. Aran has been away setting the field with the Moirae in Othard during my absence and it’s there he will remain until Stormblood comes about, most likely. I’ll probably be writing blurbs about that in my spare time. But!
Meet Kodisaran ‘Kodi’ Dhoro! My newest addition to the team! She’s a Xaela from the Steppes with ties to black magic which she does her best to keep on the DL for obvious witch-hunty reasons.
She likes books more than people, and people more than the crippling loneliness of sitting cooped up in a room by herself all day. So she typically does her studying and research in loud, busy taverns with a glass of wine or six.
Her [WIP] blog can be found at @kodisaran.tumblr.com!
Old screenie, but this is actually one of my favourite shots of Tabudai.
I took the picture on top of a cliff in Central Thanalan, so I like to imagine this happens the split second before a giant ant or something rushes him right off the edge.
