The Arkwright family is known first for their artistry, and second for their--for lack of a better word--interesting phenotype. All of them are built to run, lean and leggy with well-muscled shoulders and straight faces that evoke some vague idea of the sporthorse. All of them have eyes like wolfsbane, blue-violet and striking. All of them have crests of long, colorful feathers in place of their manes and wings .

Hugo himself has a dark face framed in feathers, broken up only by a thick white snip and a streak of orange on his chin. His legs are the same deep black, only fading into the freckled blue-brown of the rest of his coat toward the elbows and hip--except for the vibrant peach of his hoooves, especially stark against his dark ankles.

Hugo's tail is a dusty blonde that fades to yellow like autumn wheat and cropped straight and short at hock-length.

As with every Arkwright, Hugo's mane is not a mane at all, but a crest of flashy feathers, heavy enough to bend with the wing but pliant enough to keep from breaking because of it. Hugo's are a bright orange, slightly lighter at the root, with black tips. The large, blatant feathers of his crest fade to smaller but no less bright orange ones that frame his face and creep their way down the nape of his neck. These feathers are hard and stiff, and all of them are iridescent in the right light.

These same brilliant orange flecks pepper the coverts of his wings, where the roan of his body blends into the dizzying black and white of his primary and secondary feathers. Hugo's wing colors follow the same pattern as a hoopoe bird's: black and white barring from his body to the wrist, and then black with a thick white line across all the primary feathers toward the wingtip.

creative, meticulous, gregarious, brilliant, hard-working, confident
competitive, distant, resentful, facetious

Hugo is a genius, a prodigy, and that is a lot to put on a child. Too much, even. The Arkwright family has been employed by the Halcyon unit for eight generations and they say Hugo is the best of them all: the finest tooled leather, the most balanced blades, each meticulously crafted item inspected and tweaked and inspected again until it is perfect.

Work like that, his oldest brother would say with resentment, comes at a price. Hugo would agree, though he could not be persuaded to say so without first downing a few too many drinks.

His friends might describe him as a hurricane of a man, the kind who fills any room he enters, not because he's particularly large or audacious but because he is full of some indescribable presence that eats empty air like a vacuum and leaves it looking used and empty once he's gone. He is the type to laugh loudly and sing louder, often while he works, filling the Terrastellan evening with music and conversation and life. He is the type to greet a person with a solid clap on the back, a tight hug, and a secret handshake.

Few people have seen Hugo at rest, when he isn't hammering away at a dagger or meticulously tooling a leather bag. Fewer people still have seen him with no walls or safeguards, no too-bright smile or loud singing - he uses it as a buffer, you know, to keep the world at arm's reach because his is too full of puzzles and forges and the desperate desire to create. Those that do often don't see it for long: Hugo might walk into a room and sigh, or close his eyes for a little too long, or drink one too many drinks and comment on how he is so, so tired, how he has some bone-deep burnout at odds with his purpose, but the next breath it is as if it never happened.

Of course, as with most things, it didn't used to be like this. Hugo has always been distant, more focused on his work than anything else, but the cool hands of fatigue had only bloomed in the face of conflict, filling the cracks left behind by--well, something. Something Hugo doesn't touch. Something Hugo pours into the forge and out with his daggers, delivering wrapped bundle after wrapped bundle, deliberately avoiding the eyes of the troops.

The first thing Hugo made with his own hands was a year into training. The knife isn’t pretty, or particularly well-made, but he had finally been able to hammer something out of a repurposed cauldron that at least looked like a knife, as well as carving a simple handle out of wood and wrapping that wood in leather, tooled with the Arkwright family crest. He had showed it to his uncle Rickard, who looked it over for a long moment – years, to young Hugo – before handing it back, tousling his hair, and saying, “This is perfect.” Hugo has been chasing that feeling, the pure, childlike pride in his work, ever since. And every day, it seems further and further away. His stitches are pristine, sure, and his new knives, his spears, his swords are perfectly balanced and elegantly made, but the act is automatic, and whatever childish joy he once felt in crafting them is invisible through the fog. Uncle Rickard was the Halcyon unit’s Maker, seventh in a line of artisans of Arkwright descent, crafting everything from buckles to armor to bedsheets in return for a yearly pension, a home in the barracks, and (suggested only in hushed whispers, between cupped hands) private lessons from the Commander herself – a title that went in turn to Hugo, both because he was clearly the next man for the job, and because none of his for older or one younger siblings wanted it. At just three when he was given position, Hugo is the youngest Maker since the second, who took over for her father after he died young, under mysterious circumstances. This is the first of what the Arkwright family refers to as “The Accidents” with tense smiled and hurried speech. The second is Alfonse Arkwright, the fourth Maker, throwing scalding water at a particularly disrespectful bunch of troops – an action that was not so much an “accident” as it was an assault. The third–and most relevant–was a calm and otherwise inconspicuous night, with crickets chirping and children doing as children would, romping and wrestling. They had always loved pretending to be in the air force, when their wings were little and their dreams were big. It was not their fault that someone stepped on and subsequently dislocated Hugo’s right wing, and it was not their fault that they had been too scared to do anything but swear each other to secrecy, even as Hugo tried to dam his tears and sneak in and out of the house with nobody seeing. By the time his mother heard him groaning in his sleep and rushed him to the closest medic she could, it was too late to do more than reset it and hope for the best. Too much scar tissue, they had said, and ligaments like warm rubber, sagging and useless. Hugo remembers crying loud and crying hard. And somewhere, as if across an ocean of grief and pain, “He won’t fly, that’s for sure.”

Tool bags: Hugo wears an assortment of toolbags, some large and some small, suspended from three different thick leather straps laid over his back, buckled around his waist and chest with brass. Hammer: Hugo's weapon his his blocky, nordic-style forging hammer with a 14" handle and a roughly 2lb head.