Random Character Spotlight
name: Tayrin Amarkand
alias: Blaine Torkehav (there ought to be some sort of crazy umlaut thingy there, but I dun know how to make one)
story: The Hunter's Sea (previously known as Foxbird)
age during story: 29
Tayrin, or rather Blaine, since no one but the Guildmaster knows who he used to be, was a Guild brat. Assassin's guild, that is. Both his parents were assassins, his mother specializing in sharp and pointy death, his father in blunt and heavy death. Everyone expected young Tayrin to follow in his parents footsteps...and he tried, he really did. But he was more inclined to hurt himself with the many weapons of death, pain, and destruction the Guild tried to train him with. It wasn't that he was clumsy; on the contrary, he had a dancer's grace. But if you gave him a knife, he'd accidentally slit his wrist. The only the he could be safely left alone with was a staff, and even then he'd manage to break his toes if you didn't watch him carefully. But he was fast, and stealthy, and intelligent. His parents gave up on him and he gladly left the Guild with their blessing and decided that since he'd been born on the wrong side of the law, he might as well stay there.

He became a thief. And, surprise, surprise, he was good at it. It did wonders for his self-esteem; not that he'd ever been teased for his inability to use weapons by the other children living in the Guild- his parents were too well respected and well known for that. But Tayrin was his own worst critic, so he'd been a rather quiet and depressed child with the assassins. As a thief, though, he was the opposite, and often took crazy risks and still manage to pull things off. He was living up to his reputation for being immortal up until he tried to burgle the house of a mage- one trapped chest later, and he found himself bleeding to death in an alley outside the house.

He would have died, but as luck would have it, one of his old year-mates from the assassin's guild was passing by after having hit his mark- he took Tayrin back to the assassin's guild and they healed him as best they could. He recovered, but the left side of his face was horribly scarred- the whole left side of his body, actually. The magic that had hit him had done more than injure him, though; to his horror, he found that he'd had some throwback latent healing ability that was now manifesting itself rather painfully. He nearly went insane the first week after his abilities appeared.

And, to make matters worse, his parents had been assimilated by the Guildmaster and were as good as dead, betrayed by their comrades. (The Assassin's Guild isn't just a singular little group of death-dealers; they're a whole fricken' society living under the city. The Guildmaster has had its job for longer than the city has stood; it just goes from body to body as the old ones wear out.) The plus side to this was that there were now two Guildmasters, even though they were actually the same person, and Tayrin would have a place in the Guild as a healer- assassins can always use more people to put them back together.

Gone was the overconfident Tayrin; enter Blaine, the angsty healer. Or, that's what he would have been, had it not been for Foxbird and the Shrive. The Shrive are magical creatures that usually take the form of cats; they speak telepathically with pictures and feelings, and they have a bunch of nifty abilities that make them quite useful. They're also highly intelligent and they play favorites. The entire population of Shrivecats decided that they really liked Blaine, and he suddenly had a retinue of magical creatures following him around at all times. It helped his ego, at any rate, though the Shrive did tend to make sarcastic comments at him constantly.

Foxbird is his adopted daughter- she isn't human, and no one really knows what she is- the Shrive found her and brought her to the Guild when Blaine had just started seriously considereing spending the rest of his life sulking. He got stuck raising her. Fortunately, she matured rather quickly, and they have less of a father-daughter relationship than a best friends sort of thing going. Foxy became a well-paid, highly skilled assassin, and she doesn't hesitate to smack Blaine over the head when he's being too whiny.

And for a while he had a pretty good thing going, between the Shrive, Foxy, and his not unsubstantial healing skill. Of course, he was rather painfully shy around crowds, and he had an irrational paranoia around strangers, and his self-esteem tended to fluctuate dangerously, but aside from that, he was fine. And then he met Silverlock, and things got a bit more complicated.

By the time the story starts, (skipping through several years of angst, sex, screaming, bitch-slapping, and crying), Blaine and Silverlock are something of an established couple within the Guild (which has over a thousand members in the Rothcar branch alone), to the delight of everyone who never believed that Silverlock would stop being a slut. And Blaine acquires a healthy self-esteem and some common sense (finally). And when it finally seems that he's not going to break down and start angsting again, assassins start disappearing mysteriously and reappearing in small pieces elsewhere, and then Silverlock goes out on a mission, and all that comes back are his hands and a pile of mangled flesh and bones.

Needless to say, things sort of go downhill from there.
* * *
I really, really like Blaine, which is probably why I make him so annoying and do such horrible things to him. (I like making my characters cry- I'm such a horrible sadist.) And the details of the Guild, the Shrive, and his relationship with Silverlock are all rather complicated- the little snippet I wrote is from long before the story actually starts, but might end up in some sort of flashback sequence. Blaine isn't the main character for The Hunter's Sea; that Foxbird, but you wouldn't be able to tell from the way I've written things, would you? Heh.