seraphine

Redwoodclan

tall and longhaired tortoiseshell molly with mid white and warm hazel eyes

    Though she is built with long and slender angles, Seraphine looks not fragile nor feeble anymore. She is deep-chested, with a small waist and long legs. While most cats should have reached their adult size by her age, her growth has been stunted so that she only stands at 12 inches (30 cm) tall. Gaining much needed muscle and weight, she rounds off at just over 9 pounds (4 kg). She just needs another couple moons or so to reach her full stance, expected to be a towering 14 inches or so tall.

    Her coat is dense and long, with an oddly soft texture. She has a bushy tail and tufts on her ear tips, almost like a squirrel. The colors are mottled with those of a forest fire at night, black with dashes of vibrant reds and gingers. She has some white splashed across her undersides, as well as a distinctive ginger line splitting her face—almost like someone had slashed a single claw straight down it and left a wide scar behind.

    Seraphine has moon-wide eyes that are hazel in color. That being, usually a coppery brown with yellow-green centers but sometimes they appear more solid green. Her voice is beginning to mature from its soft youthfulness to a bassy, warm tone. She moves with a quick yet deerlike step, and her paws are silent against most surfaces. The sloppiness in her gait has been replaced with grace, as she has gained more control over her limbs by now. She smells of a combination of charred wood and bitter herb, almost like a walking forest fire.

     There is a small scar under her chin from falling on some rocks, but it isn't very visible. She also has a nasty notch taken out of her left ear from an encounter with a ghostly rogue.

+ amiable, genuine, spirited
     Young and filled to the brim with charming optimism, Seraphine is a very friendly sweetheart. She will try to make friends with just about any cat, even if they don't seem too happy to be chatting with such a ray of blatant innocence. This aspect of her personality makes her very easy to get along with. Another thing that is a victim of her youth is how authentic she is. She'll say what she's thinking, when she thinks it, and doesn't see the use of telling a lie. Sera values honesty and facts too, making her curious and eager to try new things.
    Lastly but not leastly, Seraphine has a lot of spirit. She has not been downtrodden by the world, despite many of her life's shortcomings, and remains a lively and bubbly character. This is also accompanied by a stubborn streak and a healthy dose of enthusiasm. This stubbornness is volatile though, as she is still very impressionable. Her personality will likely take to change as she grows older and more mature.

- fanciful, soft, irrational
    However much she values truth, that doesn't mean Seraphine is that into reality. She has the personality of a daydreamer and an overactive imagination. You can often find her staring off thinking up elaborate stories and schemes. She has a knack for it, with just her mother for company she needed to do something to keep herself occupied. Contrary to many of the older rogues, there is a softness about Seraphine. She is gentle and tolerant, and will let herself be walked over without knowing that she's being taken advantage of. This also means she isn't fully equipped for the harsh rules cats outside the clans need to live by.
    Building off of her whimsical daydreams, Seraphine isn't always fully seated into reality. Many of the things she does are illogical, not exactly having a solid reason other than she thinks she should try this or do that. Recklessness also plagues her, as she hasn't been taught the virtue of patience yet, and is full of energy. Trouble always seems to make its way over to her, no matter what she tries.

loves: Pranks, cuddles, crunchy leaves, seeing lots of new things.
likes: Big, fluffy cats! And getting to eat whatever she wants.
dislikes: Leafbare, Starclan, tripping and falling.
hates: She doesn't hate much, maybe being lied to.
secrets: Seraphine holds no secrets in her heart.
fears: Being all alone for the rest of her life.
dreams: To find her father and make lots of friends. Also find more out about the clans.

    Born at the beginning of a harsh leafbare, it was a wonder that little Seraphine survived her first few moons. Her siblings did not, all dying before Sera even opened her eyes. Nurtured by a caring ex-Redwoodclan mother named Russetwing, she was taught how to hunt as soon as she was able. This was long before she would have been deemed old enough by clan terms, but her weakening mother needed her help to catch enough prey for them both.

    Along with clan variations on tactics such as hunting and fighting, she was taught about Starclan. Her mother said she had left her clan long before Seraphine was born, and never elaborated, but that was enough of an explanation for her little angel. Sera was told that the clans were blinded by love for ancestors that did not return that love. They would be smarter, they wouldn't rely on other forces—they would forge their own destinies together. As mother and daughter.

    Sera started to ask more about other cats after the pair had met a strange rogue and her mother had scared them away. After a lot of needling, her mother began to reveal things about her father. She spoke of a kind rogue tom who looked just like his daughter. Russetwing said that maybe she would see him someday, when she was bigger and stronger. Seraphine couldn't wait to meet him, if he was as grand as the stories were.

    With no siblings and no cats to interact with other than her mother, she yearned for a connection that she didn't know existed. Especially as Russetwing's health had been waning ever since leafbare ended, she could never play with her daughter and only seemed to hunt and sleep. Seraphine one day found her mother dead in a pool of blood, and was too shocked to notice the marks of teeth at her throat. The young cat ran, as far and as fast as her legs could take her. It never occurred to her that maybe it wasn't her mother's sickness that killed her. Maybe Russetwing had more skeletons in her closet than her naive daughter knew of.

    Seraphine would likely never find out that all she took as truth was entirely woven from lies, and set out to find that fairytale father who Russetwing always spoke of. As it turns out, finding him would be a fool's errand, for her other parent wasn't a rogue. Russetwing had left the clan much more recently than she had implied, fleeing not long before her kits were due. The clan never figured out why exactly she had left, and assumed the heavily pregnant queen to be dead due to the brutal leafbare. Though they had searched for her, they found not a trace.

    Her mate would know the truth. Russetwing had discovered them being unfaithful with another cat, and that was the cause of her desertion. With her bright temper and being raised in a clan that valued loyalty above all, she cursed her mate and ran. She had no one else but them, and even they had betrayed her. In those dark nights following, she vaguely remembers an outsider tom with a smooth voice who offered her kindness and helped her deliver her kits. He vanished the morning after, leaving a freshly caught squirrel by her side. This would be the cat Russetwing told of to her daughter moons later, her supposed rogue father. And she was now a new mother of three surviving kittens.

    Russetwing very quickly realized that her judgement had been clouded when she decided to flee Redwoodclan. She knew it was foolish to leave her clan before leafbare—especially as she was expecting a litter. But she also knew she didn't want to go back. So she made the hard decision to leave two of her children at the Redwoodclan border after being sure a patrol was nearby to find them. But she couldn't bid them all farewell... she kept her strongest child, named her Seraphine, and vowed that she would teach her to survive outside of a clan. Self reliance, and that the only cat you could ever really trust was yourself.

    Her mother seems to have failed, as Seraphine has yet to learn that lesson.