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About the RPer
Nestle
30
I have. Through the years I have played Gods, Queens, Herd-leaders and owned several games.
I love all the lore, both for the site and that which has been created for all the courts. I love the idea of creating a world within a world and discovering new cultures through IC writing. It really lets everyone's imagination shine through their words.
General Information
Isra
4 [Year 497 Winter]
She [she/her/hers]
Heterosexual
Thoroughbred X
15.1 hh
Appearance
http://image.ibb.co/hRBe6c/israheader.jpg
Isra is still learning this new body, the ways it is different and the ways it is familiar from the one the ocean-god took from her. She is not much taller, and the way she walks still feels the same: long legs that seem hesitant to even strike the ground. But now she is a rich dark bay, almost disappearing on a moonless night, and where once her hair was shorn it now cascades down her neck, black as a raven's wing.
Strangest of all is the horn, tapering to a fine point that she still sometimes catches out the corner of her vision. She is not sure she could ever use it, but she is grateful for it all the same. It's nothing more than another splash of black against all the darkness of her. When the moon is high enough it glitters like pyrite and flashes wickedly where it tapers to a sharp, deadly point.
The only beautiful part of her are the places where the ocean-god left his marks. On her belly there's a dusting of scales. In the right light they are ocean blue with flecks of glittering green that flash like iridescent fly wings. The scales fade out at her legs, swallowed up by the shadows that happily fill in all the sharp edges of her body.
Her eyes too were marked by him. Where they once were a soft, golden brown now they're all blinding, heartbreak blue. They blaze against the plainness of her face, flecked with gold when she gives one her rare smiles. It's the ocean you see in her gaze, a dark haunting sea that prophecies the way she will die in the end.
There is only one reminder left of the life she lived before, the one she tried so hard to end. On her left leg a brittle, rusted chain twists about the hollow birdlike bones of her. It's coasted in brine and in some places dried seaweed clings to the joints of the chains. When she moves the chain rattles and sings, a tolling bell-chime of misery and sadness. The sound it makes haunts her every step she takes.
Personality
Positive: Well-spoken, intelligent, clever, hopeful, survivalist, dreamer
Negative: depressed, jaded, distant, quiet, tragic
Isra is more tragic than anything else. She oozes out her sadness, her history and the way that the sky can't quite shine in the way it did before. There is always a cloud around her, a thickness of space and silence that follows her everywhere. Ever a slave (in her soul, where it counts) she sticks to the darkness, to the places where she is forgettable. More often than not when an eye lingers on her for too long or someone's lips tilt into a smile when they see her she runs, fading back into the quiet places where only dust thrives.
She has no idea how to live, not yet and so she lives in silent solitude. Rare are her smiles. Her voice is rusted with brine and misuse. Only the darkness hears her stories now, only the ever-night.
Cleverness is the only way she survives now, taking when she needs and buying when she can. It's a lonely life, this cold and bitter existence of her. But it's the only life she has and so she has forced herself to live it. There are still moments, when the silence is thick as oil and dangerous as quicksand,that she wants to forget it all-- forget she's lived at all.
On she goes day after day in her cycle of eating and sleeping in the dust and decay. She must be a ghost now, she often thinks, a ghost of things that could have been.
Some nights the stories are too great, festering as they do in her broken heart, and she has to whisper to dark nights. The dust scatters with her whispering tales of a world greater than her own (in the moonlight it looks like snowflakes of diamond dust) until the words run like rivers. Isra whispers, unending, until the words dry up and the end of the story leaves a bit of peace in the tundra of her soul
It's been months since she's shared a more than one story at a time with anyone more than the moon and she often avoids the sea when she can. The solitude has taken away some of the hope she had when she came to the Night Court in her new body of beginnings. For while her skin has forgotten all the brutality it's suffered her heart has not and her eyes still see the end over and over again.
Sadness, she often thinks, is the only thing she'll ever be. But there are moments when she survives, when she looks at monsters who smile an leer, that she thinks there is nothing than can end her. Her own sorrow and the sea could not end her nor could a dragon. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. She thinks the word perhaps and it sounds like hope in the words that run through her blood.
Perhaps she's learning that sadness and fear not the only emotion left for her to feel.
History
There's no happiness in the story of Isra. There's no greatness, no hint of prophecy written on her flesh. She has ever been nothing, only a whisper of skin and silk in the lonely darkness. The only thing beautiful about her are the stories that live in her head and sob past her brittle lips during the dawn (before the sun rises when there is no darker blackness).
Isra was born from a slave, a whore who's only jewels were chains and droplets of blood. She was tucked away in the far corners of the brothel, hidden from the violence in dark places where she could hear everything but see nothing. Baptized in the screams and bitter laments of slaves, Isra only knew respite from the hellish brutality of her life in her bright imagination.
Until she was three she would spend her hours whispering tales of heroes and villains and places where light always swallowed up the blackness. The slaves would sit around her in their quiet times and be lost in the grace of her worlds, forgetting if only for a brief time, that they would be better off dead. On she went like that, until the day she turned three.
Then her entire, tiny world fell apart.
Her communion into the brothel was cruel, brutal in a way that few other slaves had ever experienced. That night she was broken, a child made into a adult and shattered all at once. Her body was left battered and wrecked. She was more blood and bone than pure flesh in the morning. While the physical wounds of that night healed and faded her soul never recovered. Isra learned to hate her body, her life, her future and everything in between.
The only peace she had was on the night she would sneak out to the sea and whisper her stories to the sand and surf. During the day the tales would fester in her heart, boil in the blackness behind her closed eyelids as she suffered over and over and over again.
One night, barely a year into her new reality, she decided it was all to much and waded deep, deep into the sea. She thought they heavy weight of her chains and the cold, cold stone of her soul would drag her down, down, down where the world would be silent and blessedly dark. It was the first brave thing Isra had ever done, to welcome the brine into lungs and lips that had only know stories and screaming (so much screaming).
She never knew the primordial god of the sea was there, listening to her whisper beautiful fables night after night. Long ago had she given up on the gods and religions, to her they were cold and cruel and no better than those that bought her flesh over and over again.
But the sea god loved her, the broken woman-child that cooed to the waves until she feel asleep under the moonlight on the cold, hard sands. So when she welcomed death he denied her. He took her down to the darkest places of the sea-floor. There he coated her in his adoration. Her skin made of gold and blood and scars was ripped away. He made her brown (dark enough to be black in the right light) and gave her a horn to protect herself if her broken soul ever decided that it wanted to live, live, live.
Only a chain, rusted from the saltwater remained to remind Isra that she was born a slave. Sometimes, she thinks he only left it to remind her that it's to the sea she'll go in the end. The cerulean scales that lightly dust her belly never let her forget that parts of her soul are still not her own.
Once she was changed, coated in her new plain flesh, the sea washed her out to some strange shore. There boats waited, filled with gold and wares to be traded. Upon one of those boats she stowed away, curled in a dark corner with a wealth that belonged to someone else. There she once again had only her stories to keep her company as the seas took her far, far away.
That is how she found herself on the docks of the Night Court, plain and easy to overlook under the stars.
Since arriving Isra has learned that she actually wants to live, to be something more than sorrow and a soul that belongs to a slave. She was in the mountains when the dragon came to the pass and she still has a small burn scar above her tail from the incident. From there she ran to the Dawn Court, watching the others drink and dance. She wondered at the darkness in her heart, the sorrow that held her to the shadows and kept all her stories but one silent behind the cage of her teeth. That sadness drove her back to the night, back to all the dead and suffering that she left behind in her own fear.
Once she arrived she met a devil that rose with rage on the edges of a story she told him. He was red like blood but there was a certain glimmer in his eye that awoke something in-between the shattered fragments of her soul. She left him to his letters, wanting to forget his name and the fury that flickered like a tempest in the air around him. But he found her again, on the mountain-side in the night and together they buried bones and talked of rage that she imagined felt hollow in the end. Together it felt like they healed, forgave and remembered that there is more than sadness and justice and hate in the world.
And so when she heard the summons she followed the clarion call of the moon and felt something rise, like the sea that drowned in her, between her ribs and lungs. It felt like her heart and it for once it didn't feel cold and brittle enough to shatter over and over again.
Sovereign Questions
Isra is hopeful enough to rise above her own sadness and sorrow, to offer hope and a story if she sees others faltering as she has. She is clever enough to see what monsters hide behind the smiles of horses (she's bled enough to learn this better than most). Beneath it all she is more jaded and wise than the youth she wears might suggest. The world is what it is and while she doesn't seek to change it she has promised herself that she will survive and that the night she has made her home will survive as well.
Perhaps she's not as brave as a warrior or as sly as a politician, but she makes up for it all with empathy. There is no suffering she cannot understand. She will promise herself to lead with understanding and welcome in an era not only of surviving but of thriving. She's been lost, just as night lately has, for too long and her loneliness feels like a sin now. She knows how some of the current citizens feel and she's been tormented enough through her past to understand the rest. Isra hopes to heal them all along with herself and bury all the old pain, hate and sadness that might be left behind in the wake of the old regime leaving.
Isra would want to expand the market and use the merchants to spread the word that the Night Court is a place of healing, a place where the broken can come to escape their fears. She would hold celebrations not for the drinking but for the sharing of knowledge and to protect her borders from war though love and respect. She would have little tolerance for citizens that harm others, slavers and horses who take their pleasure from the unwilling. With the power to end suffering (she's never known power before) she would met out the justice that was denied to her when she suffered and bled as a slave.
She would love to start a safe-haven for the children of all of Novus. Where she can tell them stories, teach them how to survive hate and protect their innocence as long as she is able. All would be welcome to the haven despite any war or strife that might be going on between the courts. The children should not suffer for the sins of the parents. Isra believes they should be given every chance to rise above what every horror fate has given them.
Isra would also start a group made to protect nature, to prevent destruction both by the gods and horses who wield powers they are not ready for. Perhaps there is even a band of horses that have hidden, close to nature for ages that are waiting only to be discovered and welcomed into the new society of the Night Court.
Everyone's audition is amazing and it's so great to see all the personal growth happening for everyone. <3
