Cysiné

Cysiné was born into a small family who believed in a massive array of gods, each with their own separate domain. From a young age, her parents taught her everything they knew about their religion and the god they believed had blessed her specifically: Atlotr, the pigeon god of navigation. Her strange pelt and talent for remembering the land was a gift from Atlotr, they told her, and she should appreciate it.

Their methods of worship were based far more around fear than love. Cysiné’s family were wanderers who roamed every corner Myrkur nearly without stopping, and so they were constantly on the edge of danger from a thousand different sources. They believed that their survival was entirely dependent on the favor of their gods, and so they did everything within their power to show their devotion.

When she turned six months old, Cysiné was gifted with a pigeon mask made in Atlotr’s image and taught how to paint his sacred symbols on her pelt. She wore both the mask and the paint so religiously that it became almost like a second skin. She prayed to Atlotr every day, as her siblings and parents prayed to the gods that had blessed them: We are wholly dependent upon your favor, powerful one. Please keep me and my family alive.

But it seemed that for Cysiné, despite her best efforts, Atlotr turned her back on her. During their travels, a leg wound she had gotten while hunting became horribly infected. No combination of herbs or rest seemed to help it. The family slowed their travels so that she could recover, but, due to the numerous environmental hazards of Myrkur, were still forced to push endlessly on. It all came to a head one day when Cysiné collapsed from the infection that had now taken root in her blood.

Cysiné woke up days later. It was a shock. She shouldn’t have lived, but almost by a miracle, her fever had broke and she could walk — if only barely, as her wound was still healing. She would have appreciated the miracle more if she hadn’t been completely and utterly alone.

She stumbled around for what seemed like hours, calling desperately for her family. But it was no use. They’d abandoned her to die.

Cysiné would spend the next year following her family's old traveling routes, searching desperately for them -- but either because of sheer misfortune or because something worse had happened, she never found them. It was as if she'd passed out and they'd simply vanished into thin air. She would walk every day until she physically couldn't anymore, and then, as night fell, howl in hopes they called back. When her voice echoed back, she could at least comfort herself by pretending they were over the next horizon, calling back to her.

During this time, danger followed her tirelessly. She was constantly on the brink of starvation, barely managing to scrape by with enough food. The mutated creatures native to Myrkur were a threat she didn’t know how to deal with. When she found the corpse of a wolf one day, it felt like a gift. She didn't pause to notice the flowers strewn around it or to think about the morals of eating someone so close to her own kind. At this point, she was starving. It was the first good meal she'd had in months.

She didn’t even notice the rest of the pack surrounding her until it was too late.

The punishment that followed was swift and brutal. Cysiné, beaten and injured, was finally forced to accept that she couldn't survive on her own. She needed to find a pack. She resolved to join the next pack she happened across, learn as much about survival as she could from them, and then desert. If she left first, they couldn't leave her behind like her parents had done. It just so happened that the next pack she encountered was the Årelang, and the food and safety they promised was more than enough to convince her to take the Sluagh.

Cysiné didn't gracefully adjust to pack life so much as she clumsily stumbled into tolerating it. In some ways, her life as an Årelang member wasn't that much different from her time as a traveler. She had been granted the Raven totem, guaranteeing her path to becoming a Sagan, and chosen the explorer specialty without hesitation. This role meant that she could spend days or weeks roaming Myrkur just as she had been for her entire life and always have a haven to return to at the end of it. But she had a lot more newfound responsibilities than that.

As an official Årelang member, and one who was swiftly recognized as one of the more talented explorers, Cysiné would often be selected to take part in group quests. These were a lot to adjust to; oftentimes she would have to cooperate with a team she didn't know all that well in order to complete a task she had little experience with. They were also her first few forays into the world of socializing with canines that weren't her immediate family. The most memorable of these was a hunt. To Cysiné and her packmates, they were hunting a deer -- a fairly normal occurrence, even though the deer was rainbow. To the appropriately horrified Mångata pack, they had decided to attack the Hjórtr, a sacred creature that helped the magic throughout Myrkur flourish. It was this encounter that cemented Cysiné's fear and dislike of the Mångata, a distrust that would fester for years.

But this time wasn't all bad -- during an expedition, Cysiné would meet her first real friend among the Årelang. His name was Ezyl, and he was an explorer like her. His extroversion and disregard for danger helped pull her out of her shell possibly more than anything else she encountered, and she would meet three more close friends soon after in the wake of a Naaeta attack: Chuuya, who had been injured in a similar way to her, and Jasmin, the Elska assigned to treat all three of them. The group of four became fast friends.

A short time later, Cysiné met the Naaeta for the first time. All she thought she'd known about life and the dangers it held was overturned in an instant. Then -- and every time she encountered the Corrupted afterwards -- she watched her own packmates die and bleed in front of her, desperately trying to defeat an enemy that couldn't die or sustain any damage at all. Cysiné and her packmates were repeatedly beaten into the dirt; she wondered how long it would be before she died too. One eventful encounter with the Naaeta ended in her suffering a concussion while the pigeon mask she treasured so much was shattered. While Cysiné would repair it quickly enough, the short time in which her face was exposed and the vulnerability she felt during it shook her to her core. She would never forget the feeling of looking in a lake and seeing her own face for the first time in months.

Soon after, she learned the truth about the Hersirs -- specifically, that they were gods in mortal form. This fact did not inspire awe in Cysiné; instead, all she could feel was anger. Aelia and Jericho could have revealed their powers and stopped the Naaeta in their tracks at any time before they finally chose to, saving numerous lives in the process and scaring the Naaeta away from Myrkur. But they chose not to. Cysiné took her anger out on Jafari, who defended his leaders -- who he considered his grandparents -- fiercely. His explanations of there being a cycle of life that the Hersirs avoided interfering with fell on ears that refused to listen. The two got into an argument that nearly turned physical, and Cysiné turned from distrusting Mångata to actively avoiding them.

It was quickly becoming apparent to Cysiné that the religion she had spent her life following was a lie. Despite all her prayers and offerings to her gods, things never got better for her and her pack, and now she'd met two canines who also claimed to be gods but had actual inexplicable powers to back it up. She shelved her bodypaints and repainted her mask to resemble a raven instead of a pigeon, symbolically cutting herself off from the religion that had caused her so much pain.

Soon afterwards, a very welcome surprise greeted Cysiné on a patrol. It was her brother Teolu. She'd spent years thinking he was dead, but here he was in front of her, and he accepted the offer of joining Årelang even quicker than she had. A piece of her birth family was with her now. Grateful for the way her life had become much less lonely, Cysiné commissioned a set of four knives that she could use her powers to telepathically control, naming each of them after one of her new family members.

Due to a magical imbalance in the land, the packs had to journey to Sköpun. Cysiné was not prepared for the horrors that awaited her there. On an expedition in the chasm that split the land, she inhaled the Ginnarr Toxin -- a poisonous gas that drove her into madness for the next week. When she first faced the poison, there was no cure, and Cysiné was sure that she was going to die. The feeling of slowly losing her mind as she couldn't stop herself from dying, even with her vast knowledge of survival skills, is something that still haunts her. She also used her first strike on this expedition after being healed.

A year later, the packs had to travel to Skogsrå in order to cleanse the Curses' souls to make weapons to defeat Saruman with. When they returned, Saruman, along with an army of Naaeta, was already waiting for them at the Radaga. In the battle that ensued, Cysiné watched firsthand as the Naaeta -- and their Mother -- were vanquished.