13 Sectors [[SHRIKE]]

Notes & Credits

(official reference sheet coming soon) Shrike is constantly vibrating or twitching, as if she's had far too much coffee(to use a comparison). She's very attentive to the land around her, and incredibly territorial to what little land she can call her own before she gets chased out. Her emotions are rather incapable of being hidden, even if her mood is usually coupled up with twitchy, manic laughter. Shrike, despite seeming like she should be incapable of focus, is in fact very focused on whatever she feels needs her attention at the moment, and that's where her freaky intensity comes in to scare other wilaks, mostly the more timid ones. She's utterly fearless, which isn't always a good thing, and very loud-mouthed. Loves to taunt other wilaks until she has an excuse to attack. Mate/Partner of Cardinal(@DragonKB) Shrike was born and raised in Sector 6. Her family came from a long line of sages within the Sector, and Shrike was, similarly, raised to follow in their footsteps. Follow she did, despite how well she was wired physically to become a guard or knight, or at least, she followed best as she could. Shrike was born with a case of mania, and the thing she took an unreasonable obsession to was impaling someone as a method of torture and execution. She always made time out of her day to attend public or private executions if they were done in this way, to the point where most of the other sages began to notice. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with taking an unhealthy interest in something, it's when you start doing it to entertain yourself that it becomes a problem. Shrike still did her sage duties, but did her best to have lots of free time for creeping out to the edges of the nearby Sectors, mostly so that she could hunt what little prey wandered closer to Sector 6. Her habit of impaling creatures started here, when she'd stab a thin ice spike from Sector 6 through the prey she caught so that she could store it in this way. From there, Shrike began to store these animals out under the snow where they wouldn't rot, an a few sages stumbled across these caches. They grew worried about how these habits would develop as she grew older, and made an attempt to confront her. Shrike, in her constantly twitchy way, told them that it was just a thing for food storage, nothing more. It was around this time when Shrike met another wilak, the thief Cardinal, and took an intense interest in him. The two became friends after a short while, and began to become more than that a longer while after that. Both found some amount of charm in the other, evidently, and between trying to hunt down exotic food, Shrike would spend time with Cardinal, listening to him talk about his escapades with theft and plans for the future which would, she'd later discover, include the reason he got banished: faking a rank. She might have been distracted from her practices around Cardinal, but, regardless, she took the opportunity when she ended up too close to a sneak attack from another Sector. Shrike got attacked by another wilak during the beginnings of a war, and got scratched up before she took off into the air. The other wilak started to go after her but, using the strength that would have been well-suited for someone pursuing a career in fighting, Shrike dove back down and picked the smaller wilak off the ground. She hoisted it to a smaller ice spire, and dropped it. The attacker was impaled, and died not long after. Shrike barely felt guilty, and in fact, enjoyed it out of a purely curious manner. Nobody had the identity of the wilak who had left the attacker's corpse on an ice spike, but the other sages had a suspicion that it was Shrike, since she'd been impaling her food on spikes for some time now. It was after another sage pressed her too far about it that Shrike got in the trouble needed to banish her. She killed the sage in a similar way, though with a smaller ice spike that she could stab through the sage instead of having to haul it up into the air. Obviously, there were witnesses to this. Shrike, rather than risk death for murder, fled the premises of Sector 6 into the more uncharted lands of the icy wasteland. She spent some time alone, growing more and more upset that she had nobody she could spend time with and shake off her excessive energy with, before she re-discovered Cardinal. Banished as well, Cardinal had been more formally banished from the Sector, and even bore the banished's markings. The pair remain sticking together to this day, and do tend to wander in and out of the edges of Sector 6 and other Sectors, not afraid to create chaos and a general feeling of anger or uncertainty among other wilaks that they antagonize, or, in Shrike's case, kill when she gets the chance.