Post by Egotistic on Oct 21, 2023 14:32:25 GMT -6
Snakejaw
ThistleClan
a tall torbie-and-white she-cat w/ amber eyes.
warrior
female | she-cat
19 moons
Appearance
A life of scarcity has left Snakejaw irreparably thin. Compared to her stout and short-legged peers, Snakejaw is rangy and gangling, composed primarily of long and angular lines, sharp edges, and bony borders. Perhaps had her start to life been kinder, she might even have filled that lanky frame, but as it was not, she remains rakishly thin, but not unpleasantly so.
Though she is not broad, she is lean and hard-muscled, each step accentuated by the subtle ripple of sinew. Her coat is short, clung tight to her thin frame, and bears the black and red tabby patches indicative of a torbie. White breaks the fur at the throat, paws, and underbelly. Her face is dominated by a patch of red-tabby fur just there upon her forehead and two rich amber eyes. Her tail is oddly bent, though she boasts no abnormalities beyond it.
Though she is not broad, she is lean and hard-muscled, each step accentuated by the subtle ripple of sinew. Her coat is short, clung tight to her thin frame, and bears the black and red tabby patches indicative of a torbie. White breaks the fur at the throat, paws, and underbelly. Her face is dominated by a patch of red-tabby fur just there upon her forehead and two rich amber eyes. Her tail is oddly bent, though she boasts no abnormalities beyond it.
Personality
Positive Traits: altruistic, audacious, intelligent, witty, methodical.
Neutral Traits: headstrong, sardonic, repressed, protective, persevering.
Negative Traits: impersonal, envious, arrogant, artificial, selfish, scornful.
A contradiction borne from circumstance, Snakejaw’s start to life was not one steeped in warm embraces and milk-filled dreams but tumultuous transitions and cold reprimands. Under her uncle’s tutelage, Snakejaw grew detached and impersonal, more inclined to focus her attention on outcomes than the process of reaching them. She is incredibly prideful in her achievements and is not above boasting, nor does she deny having an artificially tuned moral compass, tending to be more worried about the consequences of certain actions than the action itself.
Due to her uncle’s own perception of Clan life and those who partook in it, Snakejaw maintains a biased and somewhat mean-spirited opinion of cats in and outside of her Clan—an irony as she is as scornful of them as she is envious of the connections such a life offers them. This, however, being rooted in ignorance rather than experienced slights, is as artificial as her own altruism and poorly disguises her own jealousies surrounding the normal lives her clanmates were allowed to lead.
Among her peers, Snakejaw displays a certain amount of social ineptitude. She struggles to understand how to connect with her peers beyond actions and in conversation, is notably blunt and eager to push forward a persona of self-assuredness in order to disguise any genuine vulnerabilities. In so doing, she interacts with most any who can endure her with a dry and cutting wit and cunning that has garnered her more enemies than honest companions. Coupled with her willfulness, she is not only a prickly endeavor but an arduous one, to boot.
Despite this, Snakejaw is disciplined and, in service, acts with incredible cunning and fearlessness. Her impartiality and methodical nature allow her to address less favorable tasks without qualms.
Basic Fear(s): being unwanted or deemed unworthy of love. to be too weak to defend those she cares for.
Basic Desire(s): to form meaningful connections with peers and gain notoriety within the Clan; establish herself as a warrior deserving of her uncle’s tutelage and respect.
Key Motivation(s): initially, snakejaw will desire notoriety as a skilled and mighty warrior, believing it to be the only way to sway others in her favor. with time, she will learn she truly longs to form strong and meaningful bonds with those around her; she is driven by an unspoken desire to express her feelings, to be loved, and to be needed.
History
Season 2022, New Leaf || (born prematurely, sibling, living mother, handed over to uncle) Whether from the war or sickness, it is unknown what chased Hawkspring to her nest so soon or what slight she had dealt the stars to grant her such meager and sickly young. Yet it was all her ancestors had spared her—a son born thin and small and a daughter meager and misshapen. It did not take much deliberation for her to decide which she favored. Though premature, the two, however, plagued by their lamentable health did not cease at her teat, and so she named them—Thornkit for the son whom she loved, and Snakekit to the daughter, still small and unsightly and oddly splay-legged. With their names came a choice, and as her milk grew scarce, she took the she-kit by the scruff and into the pine forest to be delivered at the feet of the only tom she knew who might want her. Crowfoot, they called him, her uncle and an outcast, yet the one who would raise her, nonetheless.
Season 2022, Green Leaf & Leaf Fall || (splay-legged, shade intro, healing, training young, pain during healing, shade sympathy, belief in starclan) In her uncle’s care, she did not want for anything. Food was offered readily, and shelter, however barren, was granted. She lived the bulk of her childhood in what remained of an old badger set, trying tender jaws on meat far too tough for her and growing stronger with each bite she forced down. Her uncle granted her few kindnesses. He did not lick the fur between her ears or tell her fond stories, but as she had never known such things even alongside her mother, she did not mind this. She did, however, begin to mind when the matter of her legs came into question. Sprawling useless things, those, and Crowfoot was quick to draw attention to them, so badly did they hinder her gait and make slow and dragging her pounces. A sickness that would need to be mended, he assured her, and so a cat was brought who poked and prodded and wrapped her limbs in flimsy splints.
Shadepool was his name, and he was the first from whom she knew kindness. He would soften the meat she ate and ease any hurts. He would grant her poppy seeds when night terrors plagued her and tell her stories of the stars. She learned of things that her uncle refused to teach her—plants, stars, and miracles—and she grew fond of such tellings, believing in them firmly despite her uncle’s disapproval. Yet it did not matter. In so bleak a den with such somber company, it was a much-needed respite that she indulged in eagerly.
As the moons wound on and the binding of her limbs set to straightening them, her uncle began to train her. In simple things at first. How to hide one’s sent and coat themselves with mud, how to plot ambushes in the undergrowth and scale the lofty pines. Then he taught her crueler things. Where to bite to end a battle quickly and where to claw if one’s jaws were too indisposed to do so. He taught her where to cut to draw blood and how to fight foes far larger and more cunning than she, drilling her from dusk until dawn until her body screamed from respite, and each night she came into her meager nest covered in ugly blots and bruises.
Yet she grew stronger nonetheless, and as she neared her fifth moon, her legs, however odd, unbowed themselves. Shadepool’s visits grew scarcer, her bruises less bountiful. By her fifth moon, one might even forget she ever had such ailments at all.
✦✦ Season 2022, Leaf Fall & Leaf Bare || (final battle, blizzard, first killing) At the approach of her sixth moon, Crowfoot would bring her to stand before ThistleClan’s newest leader. A tom dressed in sorrel furs. Stagstar, they called him, and he was more noble than any cat she had ever laid eyes upon. From him, she was granted the title of ‘paw, and when the matter of mentors arose, Crowfoot shouldered the task of training her further. Though dissuaded against it, he denied her a nest in the apprentice den, driving her back into the solitary life they shared with one another. Even then, Snakepaw remembered her silent longing to stay there among those strange and battle-scarred warriors, and how she was made to force it down despite her wishes. She never forgave her uncle for that, but then he scarcely seemed to care.
In the first moon of her training, the Great Battle unfolded, one which brought the wrath of RedwoodClan and ThistleClan down upon the rogues and LichenClan. Though they were not formally granted entry into the ranks that would rush their enemy’s shores, Crowfoot brought her to the battlefield, and together, they struck down those who fled, cutting them down and bleeding them dry upon the field. Snakepaw still remembers how the face of the dying haunted her when the fighting was done. A normal thing, her uncle had told her, but one she must harden her heart to. And so, harden it she did.
In the fighting’s recession, they withdrew again to their burrow. What stragglers they found, they killed, and when there were no more, they padded their larders for winter. It would be a hard winter, Crowfoot told her, and she believed him, so oppressive were those stone clouds and merciless the chill winds. They buried prey beneath the earth and stashed what leaves they knew in small dugs, yet nothing could have prepared them for the blizzard that swept the forest or the snowy waste it left in its wake.
In the chill, Crowfoot grew ill, and as food grew scarcer, he weakened, yielding his façade of strength to betray the age that weighed at his weary bones. Snakepaw nursed him as his health faltered. She fed him meat, or what of it he would allow her to feed him, waiting quietly for his recovery. Come spring, he did revive, though he never truly regained his strength, however much he denied otherwise.
✦✦ Season 2023, New Leaf + Green Leaf || (entire three months of the flood, uncle refuses to seek shelter with the clans, snakepaw attempts to nurse him to health, he dies, leaving her alone) As the snows melted into the earth and the forest revived, a veritable storm washed through the forest, borne on the backs of savage storm clouds. They heard it long before its first upending. Felt the weight of it in the air. And then that plunging thunder, the clatter of lightning, and the ceaseless hiss of rain. It did not take long for their burrow to flood, nor did it take long for the bog to break its bank or the creek to beat upon its shores.
With no heralds to warn them, they were forced from their nest and into the canopy to cling with sodden furs and peer down into a forest upended by the relentless press of flood water. In a day’s time, the pine forest was underwater, and as they waded back to that place they called home only to find it lost, they were forced at last to seek comfort in the camp. Yet upon arrival, they find the ravine flooded, deserted and themselves quite alone, to wander into those distant rogue lands and seek shelter there.
Only by luck did they uncover a cramp dug to press their sopping bodies, though it did little to ward any sickness, and it did not take long for Crowfoot’s waning health to worsen. With no herbs to ward off the sickness that plagued him, Snakepaw fed him the bloated corpses of storm-fallen creatures. She watched the fever burn beneath and scorch the vigor from him until he grew still and quiet and all the hardened cruelness left him. She begged him so that he might let her venture out to find their Clan, yet he denied her and shortly after passed away, speaking in those final moments of home, of his sister and another cat whose name she but scarcely knew. She would cling to those names long after his passing. The only inheritance he could leave.
✦✦ Season 2023, Green Leaf and Leaf Fall || (the forest is still flooded, the thistleclan cats have yet to return. snakejaw begins to crave company in her uncle's absence. devises a plan to prove her worth as a powerful fighter and find the Clan) In Crowfoot’s absence, Snakepaw’s life grew lonelier, more monotonous. She continued her training, walked the abandoned borders which her people had yet to return to. She caught wind of patrols and sheltered from them in passing, knowing not why her heart jumped in their presence or why shame chased her skulking steps. Yet as the heat grew and the water receded, she finally presented herself. She allowed herself to be taken to stand again before Stagstar, requesting her warrior title and announcing her uncle’s passing, receiving the title of Snakejaw, though she stood no vigil. By morning, she had fled again, back to the rogue lands and the dug where her uncle was since buried to stand a quiet watch there instead.
And so, her life fell again to its sameness. She walked borders which no one else deemed safe to wander. She culled what rogues there were, though there were few left. To those few she knew, she would share in their company until their insistence to return with them home grew too bothersome to bear, and she could no longer stomach them.
Only as the first chills of Leaf Bare settled and the certainty that she would not survive it did she begin to feel different, and the loneliness in her heart began to bite with sharper teeth. And so she began to devise a plan—a plan to grant her the right to return.
✦✦ Season 2023, Leaf Bare || With winter in full swing, the necessity for support increases, and Snakejaw’s effort to find an offering to grant her re-entry into ThistleClan’s ranks grows more desperate. While hunting down a fox pup, she finds herself interrupted and faced with the son of ThistleClan’s leader. His oddly timid nature intrigues her and inspires another possibility for her return, though she continues her efforts to conquer a beast worthy of granting her passage. In her efforts, she becomes gravely wounded and is forced yet again to seek aid.
Season 2022, Green Leaf & Leaf Fall || (splay-legged, shade intro, healing, training young, pain during healing, shade sympathy, belief in starclan) In her uncle’s care, she did not want for anything. Food was offered readily, and shelter, however barren, was granted. She lived the bulk of her childhood in what remained of an old badger set, trying tender jaws on meat far too tough for her and growing stronger with each bite she forced down. Her uncle granted her few kindnesses. He did not lick the fur between her ears or tell her fond stories, but as she had never known such things even alongside her mother, she did not mind this. She did, however, begin to mind when the matter of her legs came into question. Sprawling useless things, those, and Crowfoot was quick to draw attention to them, so badly did they hinder her gait and make slow and dragging her pounces. A sickness that would need to be mended, he assured her, and so a cat was brought who poked and prodded and wrapped her limbs in flimsy splints.
Shadepool was his name, and he was the first from whom she knew kindness. He would soften the meat she ate and ease any hurts. He would grant her poppy seeds when night terrors plagued her and tell her stories of the stars. She learned of things that her uncle refused to teach her—plants, stars, and miracles—and she grew fond of such tellings, believing in them firmly despite her uncle’s disapproval. Yet it did not matter. In so bleak a den with such somber company, it was a much-needed respite that she indulged in eagerly.
As the moons wound on and the binding of her limbs set to straightening them, her uncle began to train her. In simple things at first. How to hide one’s sent and coat themselves with mud, how to plot ambushes in the undergrowth and scale the lofty pines. Then he taught her crueler things. Where to bite to end a battle quickly and where to claw if one’s jaws were too indisposed to do so. He taught her where to cut to draw blood and how to fight foes far larger and more cunning than she, drilling her from dusk until dawn until her body screamed from respite, and each night she came into her meager nest covered in ugly blots and bruises.
Yet she grew stronger nonetheless, and as she neared her fifth moon, her legs, however odd, unbowed themselves. Shadepool’s visits grew scarcer, her bruises less bountiful. By her fifth moon, one might even forget she ever had such ailments at all.
✦✦ Season 2022, Leaf Fall & Leaf Bare || (final battle, blizzard, first killing) At the approach of her sixth moon, Crowfoot would bring her to stand before ThistleClan’s newest leader. A tom dressed in sorrel furs. Stagstar, they called him, and he was more noble than any cat she had ever laid eyes upon. From him, she was granted the title of ‘paw, and when the matter of mentors arose, Crowfoot shouldered the task of training her further. Though dissuaded against it, he denied her a nest in the apprentice den, driving her back into the solitary life they shared with one another. Even then, Snakepaw remembered her silent longing to stay there among those strange and battle-scarred warriors, and how she was made to force it down despite her wishes. She never forgave her uncle for that, but then he scarcely seemed to care.
In the first moon of her training, the Great Battle unfolded, one which brought the wrath of RedwoodClan and ThistleClan down upon the rogues and LichenClan. Though they were not formally granted entry into the ranks that would rush their enemy’s shores, Crowfoot brought her to the battlefield, and together, they struck down those who fled, cutting them down and bleeding them dry upon the field. Snakepaw still remembers how the face of the dying haunted her when the fighting was done. A normal thing, her uncle had told her, but one she must harden her heart to. And so, harden it she did.
In the fighting’s recession, they withdrew again to their burrow. What stragglers they found, they killed, and when there were no more, they padded their larders for winter. It would be a hard winter, Crowfoot told her, and she believed him, so oppressive were those stone clouds and merciless the chill winds. They buried prey beneath the earth and stashed what leaves they knew in small dugs, yet nothing could have prepared them for the blizzard that swept the forest or the snowy waste it left in its wake.
In the chill, Crowfoot grew ill, and as food grew scarcer, he weakened, yielding his façade of strength to betray the age that weighed at his weary bones. Snakepaw nursed him as his health faltered. She fed him meat, or what of it he would allow her to feed him, waiting quietly for his recovery. Come spring, he did revive, though he never truly regained his strength, however much he denied otherwise.
✦✦ Season 2023, New Leaf + Green Leaf || (entire three months of the flood, uncle refuses to seek shelter with the clans, snakepaw attempts to nurse him to health, he dies, leaving her alone) As the snows melted into the earth and the forest revived, a veritable storm washed through the forest, borne on the backs of savage storm clouds. They heard it long before its first upending. Felt the weight of it in the air. And then that plunging thunder, the clatter of lightning, and the ceaseless hiss of rain. It did not take long for their burrow to flood, nor did it take long for the bog to break its bank or the creek to beat upon its shores.
With no heralds to warn them, they were forced from their nest and into the canopy to cling with sodden furs and peer down into a forest upended by the relentless press of flood water. In a day’s time, the pine forest was underwater, and as they waded back to that place they called home only to find it lost, they were forced at last to seek comfort in the camp. Yet upon arrival, they find the ravine flooded, deserted and themselves quite alone, to wander into those distant rogue lands and seek shelter there.
Only by luck did they uncover a cramp dug to press their sopping bodies, though it did little to ward any sickness, and it did not take long for Crowfoot’s waning health to worsen. With no herbs to ward off the sickness that plagued him, Snakepaw fed him the bloated corpses of storm-fallen creatures. She watched the fever burn beneath and scorch the vigor from him until he grew still and quiet and all the hardened cruelness left him. She begged him so that he might let her venture out to find their Clan, yet he denied her and shortly after passed away, speaking in those final moments of home, of his sister and another cat whose name she but scarcely knew. She would cling to those names long after his passing. The only inheritance he could leave.
✦✦ Season 2023, Green Leaf and Leaf Fall || (the forest is still flooded, the thistleclan cats have yet to return. snakejaw begins to crave company in her uncle's absence. devises a plan to prove her worth as a powerful fighter and find the Clan) In Crowfoot’s absence, Snakepaw’s life grew lonelier, more monotonous. She continued her training, walked the abandoned borders which her people had yet to return to. She caught wind of patrols and sheltered from them in passing, knowing not why her heart jumped in their presence or why shame chased her skulking steps. Yet as the heat grew and the water receded, she finally presented herself. She allowed herself to be taken to stand again before Stagstar, requesting her warrior title and announcing her uncle’s passing, receiving the title of Snakejaw, though she stood no vigil. By morning, she had fled again, back to the rogue lands and the dug where her uncle was since buried to stand a quiet watch there instead.
And so, her life fell again to its sameness. She walked borders which no one else deemed safe to wander. She culled what rogues there were, though there were few left. To those few she knew, she would share in their company until their insistence to return with them home grew too bothersome to bear, and she could no longer stomach them.
Only as the first chills of Leaf Bare settled and the certainty that she would not survive it did she begin to feel different, and the loneliness in her heart began to bite with sharper teeth. And so she began to devise a plan—a plan to grant her the right to return.
✦✦ Season 2023, Leaf Bare || With winter in full swing, the necessity for support increases, and Snakejaw’s effort to find an offering to grant her re-entry into ThistleClan’s ranks grows more desperate. While hunting down a fox pup, she finds herself interrupted and faced with the son of ThistleClan’s leader. His oddly timid nature intrigues her and inspires another possibility for her return, though she continues her efforts to conquer a beast worthy of granting her passage. In her efforts, she becomes gravely wounded and is forced yet again to seek aid.
