( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Jules' thought hits her like an arrow in the back, swift and piercing: cute guy I like him I like him.

Sydney raises her brows, glancing over her shoulder at the girl behind her; Jules catches her eye and blushes, ducking her head and mumbling a very emphatic crap under her breath.

It's unusual for Jules' thoughts to hit her with any sort of urgency, especially enough to pierce through Sydney's normal, subconscious defenses; like everything else she does, Jules thinks quietly, unobtrusively, though her mind is strong and organized enough that Sydney can pick up full sentences from her on most occasions.

Which is why she's saying crap now, sending Sydney a baleful look as she clutches her empty tray, held in front of her chest almost like a shield. "Syd, please don't."

It's too late; Sydney is grinning from ear to ear, turning away from the food to scan the dining room. "Which one is he? Come on, tell me."

"I can't. Please," she begs, lifting up her tray to cover her red face, so that all Sydney can see is her dark bangs and the top of her head.

"Come on, Jules, don't you trust me?" Sydney says, batting her eyelashes innocently. "So you like someone, big deal. I want to see if he's as cute as you think he is."

Jules mutters darkly under her breath, so that Sydney has to strain to catch her thoughts, something about how she's going to die if he finds out and she'll take Sydney with her and it's Ren from some of her classes and he's coming this way help help.

"He is cute," Sydney says appreciatively, by way of reply, and Jules shushes her wildly, very nearly beating her with her tray.

"Syd." She sounds desperate and her ears are starting to turn red; Sydney takes this as her opportunity to shove Jules into Ren just as he's passing by, disguising it by pretending she almost spilled coffee on herself. His books are knocked from his hands as Jules careens into him, and she nearly topples over; he catches her around the arm with a Blade's reflexes, steadying her, while Sydney watches the entire thing with undisguised amusement.

"Sorry—I'm so sorry!" Jules is saying, but her thoughts are rushing furiously at Sydney, a constant, highly specific mantra of I'm going to kill you I'm going to kill you.

Sydney murmurs insincere oh nos and my bads as she pours herself a coffee, then decides to treat herself by adding a little extra cream and sugar.

.

.

.

"I'm really going to kill you," Jules says again, once they're sitting across from each other at the table. Sydney thinks the other girl's glare is pretty adorable.

"It wasn't that bad."

"You pushed me right into him!" she hisses, never actually loud enough to turn heads around them.

Sydney decides to switch tactics; she shrugs her shoulders. "Seriously, Jules, how do you expect to get anywhere with someone if he doesn't even know you exist?"

"I don't know!" she insists, but Sydney only stares her down until she deflates, stabbing mournfully at her food. Jules' moments of pique were few, far between, and very fleeting, and Sydney always found it much easier to wait it out than try to argue.

"You could just try to talk to him, you know," Sydney says, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"I can't do that." Jules sounds somewhere between horrified and miserable, her shoulders sagging.

"It's really easy, actually. You just go up to him and say hi, maybe tell him you'd like to hang out sometime..."

"What if he doesn't like me?"

"Who wouldn't like you, seriously," Sydney says, rolling her eyes. She jabs the business end of her fork in Jules' direction, ignoring the other girl's pained expression. "You're cute, you're really cool—you're not a huge bitch like Ryan, and look how many guys she can get. Seriously, something's wrong with him if he doesn't like you."

Jules is quiet, lips twitching into a shy smile as she digests this; then she heaves a sigh, looking away. "Fine, maybe I can talk to him... maybe."

"It's better than mooning over him from afar, trust me."

"It's not mooning. It's..." She looks skyward, groping around for the right word. "Consideration?"

"Well, consider breaking yourself off a piece of that," Sydney says decisively, enjoying the way that Jules turns a little red, even as she laughs and bites her bottom lip like she's trying to contain it.

"Thanks, Syd."

It’s dark out. Sydney knows that they shouldn’t be walking alone, two seemingly defenseless girls in a shadowy alley off of Wilshire Boulevard. She’d probably even be scared, if they really were defenseless.

Still, she’s definitely blaming Ryan for this. If Sydney shakes her head at danger, then Ryan laughs in its face.

Sure enough, Sydney senses them long before she sees them, a pop of white noise at the fringe of her consciousness, and just before Ryan hears them: a group of men, young men by the way they laugh and jostle each other, walking in their direction. They’re still a couple blocks away, mere dark silhouettes, and they haven’t noticed the girls in their path yet, or Sydney is sure she would feel the sudden, laser-guided focus of their thoughts towards them.

“Ry.” Sydney shoots the other girl a look that saves her the trouble of saying in her head: can we not?

Ryan only grins.

Usually, they’re left alone. Sydney doesn’t have such a low opinion of the male species that she goes around expecting to be harassed, like Ryan does.

Tonight, however, when their path intersects with the group of men, Sydney feels all of that mental focus threaten to swallow them as the men spread out in an instinctual circle around them. A threatening circle.

After all, what could two girls hope to do against five men?

Reading the minds of men with the temerity to attack her usually leaves a bad taste in her mouth, so she rarely lets herself suffer through it, especially when it’s always the same, arrogant crap. There’s no way for her to hear groupthink, anyway, and even the most innocent individual thoughts can turn deadly under peer pressure.

“Hey, ladies, you going somewhere tonight?”

Ryan steps abruptly towards the speaker, hands balled into fists at her sides, while the group shifts menacingly and snickers. Sydney sighs.

“Somewhere that’s not your business, asshole,” Ryan says, tipping her chin up defiantly. She might look disdainful, but Sydney feels an undercurrent of enjoyment in the other girl; Ryan liked to pick fights, and she liked justifiable fights the best.

The snickering stops.

“What did you say to me, bitch?” the same man says, and Sydney feels the ring of men close a little more tightly around them. There’s surprise in his voice, mixed in with the affront, and in the minds of every man surrounding them; it’s likely no woman has ever spoken back to them the way Ryan has.

“Ryan,” Sydney warns. At least be gentle with them, she adds, and directs the thought so that it jabs itself purposefully into Ryan’s thick head. Her fists tighten at her sides so that the knuckles show white, and Sydney knows she’s heard.

“You heard me,” she says, moving even closer to the man, so abruptly that he nearly takes a step backwards, away from her, before checking himself. He wasn’t expecting to be challenged, to become the one threatened instead, and he falters for a split second before his bemused anger returns, quick and reckless.

“Listen, bitch—” He grabs for Ryan’s wrist, but she moves too quickly for him to have any hope of catching her; she seizes his arm instead, pulling his momentum towards her, then jabs the heel of her free hand straight up into his nose. It breaks with a sickening crunch, but Sydney is relieved to know that Ryan listened and held back, even if only a little; she has enough strength to jam the bones into his brain.

He staggers and crumples to the dirty pavement, and his friends seem to take a collective step back, cowed.

“What the fuck?!” he yells, tears streaming down his cheeks as he clutches his bloody nose. “What the fuck is wrong with you, you—”

“Do you feel better about yourself now, huh?” Ryan is nearly standing over him, her voice edging into shrill, and Sydney reels for a moment against the rage surging off her in waves. “Do you feel cool? Do you feel powerful, like a man? Does it make you feel good to pick on people weaker than you, shitstain?”

The rest of the men, Sydney knows, are too shocked—and scared—to intervene on behalf of their friend. Ryan doesn’t paint a very imposing picture, too short and skinny and decidedly feminine to look like she packs much of a punch, and they were looking for easy prey, just like they’d found all the times before.

“Well, you picked on the wrong bitch tonight,” she hisses, eyes wide and wild, then kicks him viciously in the gut, with enough force to push him onto his back; he wheezes and struggles to scramble away from her, still on hands and knees, and Sydney gets her first good look at his broken nose, mashed horribly against his face, stark red with blood and imminent bruising.

“You crazy bitch!” He finds his voice again when he’s out of her range, scrambling to his feet, nearly bent double. She lunges towards him, just as a threat, and he almost falls over again in his rush to get away.

“The rest of you want to try me out?” she taunts, arms spread, but by now the group of men is starting to recover, stepping cautiously away from her, the circle around them widening and falling apart. One of them helps steady the man she’d punched.

“Ry.” I think you made your point. Sydney puts a hand on her shoulder, tugging her imploringly away from the men, and is relieved when she exhales, a hiss of breath that rattles between her teeth, and complies.

They walk away in silence, leaving the group behind to recuperate, while Ryan shifts her shoulders restlessly and flexes her fingers; Sydney recognizes the bit-by-bit release of her anger, without having to read her mind. Sydney’s mouth twists into a wry smile.

“You know, he was probably really attached that nose,” she says mildly.

“I could’ve broken his dick instead,” Ryan hisses stormily, crossing her arms over her chest, and Sydney laughs, mostly at the pouting jut of Ryan’s bottom lip.

“He’s probably even more attached to his dick.”

Ryan scowls and stomps through the alley a little harder and insists, “I just hate assholes like that!” but Sydney just keeps laughing and pulling her best friend along.

Juliette "Jules" Hamby
f
17/18
senior at w/e adacemy
seer (prophet)

medium brown hair, mostly straight, parted in the middle, blunt bangs across her forehead
gray eyes
5'3

very shy and introverted
rarely speaks to people unless they speak to her first
prefers to curl up with a good book versus going out and partying
has few friends
polite, soft-spoken, thoughtful, can appear demure and distant to others
slow to open up to people, but once she's comfortable with someone she's very lively and teasing
her sense of humor is wry and self-deprecating
even though she keeps mostly to herself, she always tries to find the best in others and is willing to give the benefit of the doubt
doesn't always stand up for herself, shies away from confrontation
however, she gets much more offended on another's behalf than she ever does on her own

tension (jayden&cadence)--
He doesn't see it very often, her thinking face: lips turned down, brows slightly furrowed, her gaze distant. She's very still, hands clasped together in her lap, and almost deathly quiet, so that Jayden can't decide whether he's hesitant to destroy her calm or eager to disturb her, to remind himself that she's still here, with him, and not a specter he's made up in his head.

All he knows is that the first time he really noticed that expression, she'd followed it with a smile and asked him if he could blow the building's power for her, for just a few minutes tomorrow.

He knew better than to ask questions, even though nothing seemed to come of it. It was during the middle of the night, when everything was dark anyway, and she'd never said a word about it to him afterwards except trust me.

He trusted her when she asked him to unlock a few doors in the laboratory wing, then when she needed a camera turned off in the cafeteria. He trusted her when she slid a chip into his palm one morning, then asked him to make up a name, any name he wanted, to replace the one already on the chip.

She'd never asked for the chip back, and he didn't ask questions about that either.

He tried to trust her when she was confined to her room for thirty days, after she'd been caught just outside the compound, standing out in the open with her hands already behind her head. Trying to escape.

He also tried not to let it show, the first time he saw her in a month. But she'd only smiled at his scowl and said, "Like I'd ever leave without you."

After that, he ended up seeing a lot of her thinking face. While they were eating lunch, during class, when they were all sitting in front of the television at night. He'd catch her eyes sometimes, and she would blink at him like she was coming out of a trance, before leaning her head against his shoulder and making him blush.

"What are you plotting, Cady?" he'd asked one night, while she sat on his bed painting her nails.

"Who? Me?" She batted her eyelashes innocently, making him frown.

"Don't do that."

Immediately, her expression softened in a way that made him want to blush again, though he wasn't really sure why. It was so unlike her thinking face that he wondered why he doubted her at all.

"I told you I wouldn't leave without you, right?" she said gently. "Promise."

A few days later, she broke them all out of the Program.

Ailin wakes in her husband's arms for the first time in her life; she thinks, a little sleepily, that this is a feeling she could get used to. Warm contentment fills her entire body and brings an unbidden, devastating smile to her face that she buries in Souza's chest.

He stirs then, and tightens the arm claiming her waist, though it's impossible to drag her closer. When she chances a look up at him, she finds that he's smiling too, still blinking the sleep out of his eyes.

His gaze catches hers, and Ailin feels her smile widen and a blush creep up her face and a happiness that resounds with every rapid beat of her heart. She presses her face into his chest again.

"Good morning," he says, a low rumble that echoes in her ear.

"Good morning." Her voice is muffled against his skin. She remembers the feel of this skin under her fingers, the slant of his lips against hers, the way his mouth seemed to consume her, and it's a long moment before she can meet his eyes again.

"I don't want to get up," she murmurs. His fingers comb lightly through her hair, and it seems to Ailin that the entire world spins around his gentle touch.

"How fortunate," he says, quiet and amused. "Neither do I."

Using the hand in her hair, he tips her head back and pulls her in for a kiss, slow and almost-chaste at first, until she wraps her arms around his neck and deepens it. He chuckles softly against her lips, a low, warm sound that sends shivers down her spine, and shifts to pin her down on the bed with the weight of his body.

"Souza—"

"I never tire of that," he interrupts, nipping lightly at her collarbone, so that she squirms underneath him and sighs through her smile.

"Souza," she repeats, more than a little breathlessly, and she's rewarded by the drag of his teeth down the column of her neck and a heavy hand at the jut of her hipbone. She says it again as she curls her fingers in his hair and pulls, and again as his hand dips into the space between her thighs, and they don't get up for a very long time.

The capital comes into view far more quickly than Shakir is comfortable with, the spires and curved roofs of his home city suddenly jutting out of the desert hills. He has never looked upon the capital with great relief, especially after so much time in his beloved desert, but now he finds himself loath of the sight, clutching Sihai a little more tightly against his chest. It feels as though he's been rudely woken from a pleasant dream.

"Shakir," she murmurs, so faintly he almost loses her voice on the wind. "I should change horses."

There had been no question, this time, that she would ride on the same horse he did, first in the saddle with her back against his chest. He'd kept one arm around her waist the entire journey, as if she was light enough to float away if he ever let her go, and occasionally buried his nose in her simply braided hair.

He knows she has a point, that it wouldn't seem right if they rode into the city seated together, but something like awful finality sinks to the pit of his stomach and he hesitates, his horse lurching to a stop beneath him.

"Shakir," she repeats, even more softly than before, and he dismounts with deliberation, reaching his arms out to her so that he can lift her from the saddle. Her expression is as smooth as glass as he lowers her to the ground, but her eyes reflect an odd shine in the low afternoon sunlight.

"I'll tell my brother," he says suddenly, on impulse, only aware of the foolish hopefulness of his words until they're already out of his mouth. But maybe Mada could—

"No," she says, so gently it's all he can do to hold her face in his cupped hands, palms resting against the line of her jaw. "There's nothing—"

"I'll talk to your brother, see if I can..." he tries again, fiercely, but she only shakes her head sadly, as if resigned. He feels anger well up inside him, hot and raw, for the Sihai that gives up so calmly, for the childhood that taught her how to do it, for the situation now that forces her into it.

"My brother cares nothing for my happiness," she says. "I'm too useful as a provision in this treaty for him to give me up so easily." Her gaze falls downwards, to the sand beneath their feet, and he almost thinks she's about to cry; but she hasn't cried in months, he knows, and she doesn't now. "I'm just another possession of Wuxia's to be used for his gain."

"We'll go away, then," he insists, taking her shoulders in his hands. He would be wracked with guilt, leaving his brother behind to clean up his mess, but he could bear it, maybe, if he had Sihai by his side.

She shakes her head again, lifting her eyes to meet his; there's a funny little smile on her lips, wan as the crescent moon and utterly foreign to him. "Shihan would only say that you had stolen me away, and demand recompense from your father and brother."

Shakir hasn't felt such helplessness since he was a boy, since before he'd learned to ride and hold his head high in spite of everything. There's nothing he can say to argue; Sihai, it seems, had figured all this out long before he did, and her brutal pragmatism takes the wind from his sails and leaves a deep ache in its place, a fresh hurt on top of so many others.

It's then she wraps her arms around him and pulls in close, and he has nothing left to do but hold her tightly and pray that this isn't the last time. There is still time, he tells himself, and many more nights for them to spend together before the end.

"I love you," he murmurs into her hair, and she stiffens in his arms and pulls back.

"Don't say that," she says forcefully, her mouth turned down in a frown that makes him smile and trace her lips with his thumb. Uncertainty flickers so quickly across her face that he's sure he would've mistaken it for ire just a fortnight ago, but she doesn't flinch away from his touch.

"I get to win this one," he says, not without a hint of amusement, grateful when all she does purse her lips and turn away. Without thinking, he grabs her wrist and drags her in for a kiss, the last kiss he might have from her in a while, there under the warm desert sun of his true home, miles outside the capital.

They don't say anything else as he helps her into the saddle of her mare, his hand lingering on her dusty ankle a moment too long as she blinks rapidly and seems to gather herself. He hadn't noticed before, the stark contrast between the Sihai he has known and the princess others see, but he notices it now: the impassivity settles over her face like a mask, so perfectly matched to her features.

The ache in his chest only worsens, and he nearly staggers with it.

With a heavy heart, he remounts his stallion and leads them back to the capital, to civilization and waking life.

“Leave us. I need to speak privately with my daughter.”

Her mother is livid. She doesn’t frown or purse her lips, doesn’t scowl or ball her hands into fists; instead, Sihai can tell by the coldness in her eyes, how she keeps her sleeves over her fingers, to hide how they clench together.

The servants leave hastily, knowing better than to dawdle when consort Xuhana is displeased. They can read the woman too, but at least they have the security of knowing her anger isn’t directed at any of them.

She found out about Jian. Sihai doesn’t know how she knows, who told her or how she discovered it, but precious little of that matters anymore. None of it.

Sihai stands unmoving in the center of the second consort’s parlor, head bowed, waiting quietly for her mother to check for eavesdroppers in the doorway, to run her hand down the side of the tapestry to hide them completely from view. Her headdress tinkles softly in the stillness; Sihai closes her eyes and imagines her mother turning her head towards her, her eyes narrowing and mouth twisting into an ugly scowl.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” she asks, barely above a hiss.

Sihai opens her eyes and stares at the carpet under her feet, tracing the intricate pattern of lotus flowers and dragons rampant; she thinks the design suits her mother.

She doesn’t speak.

“A nobleman’s son. A second son,” her mother continues, and the words sound like insults on her tongue. “Do you know your duty, Sihai? Your duty to Wuxia?”

“To marry well,” Sihai says finally, quietly, as if speaking them softly would take away their power. Tears burn behind her eyes, but she clutches her sleeves and wills them away; she already knows what her mother would say.

“To marry princes and kings,” her mother says, contempt in her every word, in every line of her body. “To make alliances for Wuxia. Powerful alliances. To make those princes and kings happy so that they look upon us kindly and open their doors in welcome even as we come to take their lands out from under them. And you. You waste your charms on a second son. Sihai.”

Sihai lifts her head, swallows down the thickness in her throat; she is not surprised to find that her mother’s expression has not changed since last she saw it. People had compared them often, had praised Sihai to be as great a beauty as her mother, but looking into her icy blue eyes—

She is not beautiful. She is worn, and cold, and desperate.

“Princes and kings do not want another man’s discards,” her mother says, and if Sihai did not know better, it would’ve almost sounded kindly. “Do you understand?”

Sihai doesn’t answer, defiant, her expression unchanging, unmoved—

Her mother slaps her hard across the face, so hard that Sihai feels her head jerk to the side and pain blossom from her cheek. The sound of it is loud, too loud, like a crack of thunder.

“Do you understand?” she repeats, and again Sihai doesn’t answer, doesn’t lift a hand to her throbbing cheek, refuses to react with anything other than the crease of her brow—

Her mother smacks her again, harder this time, with more strength than Sihai thought possible from her. Hot, frustrated tears threaten and then spill, and a raw, wounded noise escapes her lips; Sihai knows, in that moment, that she’d lost.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair. He had a kind smile, she thinks, and the most carefree laugh she’d ever heard in her life, and his bangs would always slip from his topknot and fall into his eyes in a way that made her heart race and he’d tell her she was pretty and hold her hand when no one was watching.

And her mother never knew any of it. For months and months of blissful rebellion, of shy glances and personal happiness.

“Mother—”

“He’s leaving for the western front this evening,” her mother says, almost flippantly, straightening her hanfu and sweeping her hair over her shoulder. “As a second son, his only real hope for distinction is in the military, after all. We will pray for his safe return.”

Sihai feels almost sick with betrayal, with anger, with horror for what her mother has done. She can only stare, open-mouthed, forgotten tears falling from her chin and wetting the carpet, as her mother turns away, in a rustle of fabric and muted footfalls.

“Do not cry, Sihai. It’s beneath you.”

“The fate of a princess is to be bartered and bought like a cow,” she says, not without the faintest taint of bitterness on her tongue, and stares unseeingly out of her window, into the starry night sky.

Shakir stirs behind her; she can hear the bedsheets rustle and whisper as he stands, and his arms encircle her waist a moment later, pulling her back against his chest. There’s something involuntary in how she finds herself sighing and relaxing against him, his bare skin warm through the thin fabric of her dressing gown.

“You’re much prettier than a cow, at least,” he says mildly, and she can see his impish smile in the inflection of his voice, without her having to turn and look at him.

Sihai scowls in a way most unbecoming of a princess. “Shakir.”

She feels his laugh rumble deep in his chest long before she hears it, and the sensation makes her shiver and subsequently tense as he pulls aside the collar of her dressing gown and presses gentle, open-mouthed kisses to the skin he exposes, until her shoulder is bare and the knotted belt around her waist loosens and threatens to unravel entirely.

“Shakir,” she says again, and tries to pull away; but his arms close more tightly around her waist and he chuckles again, low in her ear, and she can’t decide which one more thoroughly stops her.

“Do you regret it,” he says abruptly, lips moving against her skin, caught in the middle of another kiss, “that you were born a princess to be bought?”

She’s silent for a moment as the question churns through her thoughts, conscious only of the spill of his breath over her collarbone in intervals odd enough that she imagines he’s anxious for her answer. The knowledge warms her. If she regrets being a princess, then she regrets every path of her life that brought her to Saarinen, that brought her to Shakir—

“No,” she says finally, turning in the circle of his arms and reaching up to grasp his chin between her thumb and forefinger, tipping his head down towards her. His gaze is fierce. “But I regret that it couldn’t be you who—”

The sudden hot press of his mouth against hers silences her, his fingers raking through her hair and stealing the breath from her lungs. I regret that too, he doesn’t say. I would buy you a thousand times over, he doesn’t say either, but Sihai squeezes her eyes shut and hears it all the same.

He pulls her back to bed, where the high price of king’s daughters matters a little less, and she clutches him just a little more tightly until morning.

"Lady Sorceress--Lady Esmeline! An urgent message for you," the messenger calls, her breathless voice ringing in the cavernous hallway. Esmeline stops, turns, faintly aware of how Aren stops and turns in symphony, seamlessly shifting to put his body between her and the page.

It's more news of the war, she's sure. Urgent messages were her constant companion these days, with the High Enchanter off to the front and she left behind to tend to the more mundane affairs of state--what she could tend of it, anyway, which mostly included babysitting the council.

She waits as Aren takes the folded slip of paper from the bowing messenger, glancing down briefly at the royal seal before handing it to her.

"Thank you," she murmurs, already breaking the seal with her thumb and opening the letter. In her periphery, she sees the messenger bow again and turn away, her job complete.

This message is short. Esmeline reads it quickly.

"The High Enchanter is dead," she says softly, as if to herself. It feels as though her voice is coming from a different person, a distant place. "The war is over."

Her entire body feels numb with shock. It doesn't seem possible, that her ruler, her mentor, her friend, more father than her own father at times--that he would be gone.

And she would be the new High Enchantress. Not in thirty years, after old age had taken him and she had nothing left to learn of the art of running a country. Now. The realization settles on her shoulders and in the pit of her stomach and between the air in her lungs.

Blindly, without thinking, she reaches a hand out towards Aren, until his warm fingers curl around hers, a gentle tug of sensation. The touch, the strength of his grip, seems to pull her back to herself but in the wrong way, as if her skin can't quite contain her, can't contain the hollow ache in her chest, the tears that burn hot at the corners of her eyes. She wills them away on instinct, calling wordlessly on Sarume, and so her cheeks remain stubbornly dry even as her breath catches like a sob in her throat.

"My lady." Aren's voice is tight, and she can't bring herself to look up at him. Sarume's name is like a chant in her head.

"What am I going to do?" she whispers, the question heavy on her tongue. As usual, Aren doesn't give her an answer when she already knows it.

She takes a deep breath.

"The council will be coming soon. They'll have heard by now," she finds herself saying, surprised by the evenness of her own voice, and slowly draws her hand out of his. They're still in the hallway, she still has work to do, more than ever--

She sways with her first step, as though she was a child first learning to walk, and realizes his hand is brushing the small of her back, to steady her. She feels anything but steady.

"Let's go."

Coriander ????????? (i'm working on it)
aka Cor or Cori (his mama uses Cori)
mid-20s
professional wiseass
and he's professional as fuck tbh
but really a professional hustler
(mostly) closet sorcerer of the wind (he'll tell you it's actually the element........... of surprise)
illegitimate son of some noble idk

5'11
medium brown hair
average build, slim, built more for speed than strength
blue eyes

the biggest smartass ever
would rather talk his way out of a bad situation than fight
though he'll fight if he has to
but first he'll run away
cocky douche
expert ladykiller (they're easier)
depraved bisexual
was actually sponsored for quite a while by his father, in lieu of any sort of paternal affection
his stepmother didn't take too kindly to it, however
nevertheless, he survived long enough to make it to the magic academy or w/e, only to graduate with a degree in Bitter Bitch for a wide variety of reasons that mostly compacted into disgust for an empire that would always stare down its nose at him
the only viable career choice for him after that was the military or public service
chose to be a card shark instead
kind of sucked at it for a while before he mastered the trick of using his wind magic to cheat
has cheated quite a few powerful people and guilds out of some beaucoup bucks and that's the story of all about how his life got twist turned upside down
needless to say he has some powerful enemies
but he endures like a cockroach after nuclear holocaust
like a typical pragmatist/closet idealist, he won't cheat anyone who doesn't "deserve" it, and he'll stand up in his own weird way for people who can't protect themselves