Song Call- The Postal Service, "The District"

Smeared black ink
your palms are sweaty
And I'm barely listening
to last demands
I'm staring at the asphalt wondering
what's buried underneath
Where I am
Where I am

I'll wear my badge
a vinyl sticker with big block letters
adherent to my chest
That tells your new friends
I am a visitor here
I am not permanent
And the only thing keeping me dry is
Where I am
Where I am
Where I am

You seem so out of context
in this gaudy apartment complex
A stranger with your door key
explaining that I am just visiting
And I am finally seeing
Why I was the one worth leaving
Why I was the one worth leaving

D.C. sleeps alone tonight

Where I am
Where I am
Where I am

You seem so so out of context
in this gaudy apartment complex
A stranger with your door key
explaining that I am just visiting
And I am finally seing
Why I was the one worth leaving
Why I was the one worth leaving

Where I am
Where I am
Where I am

The district sleeps alone tonight
after the bars turn out their lights
And send the autos swerving
into the loneliest evening
And I am finally seeing
Why I was the one worth leaving
Why I was the one worth leaving
Why I was the one worth leaving
Why I was the one worth leaving
- The Postal Service, "The District"

This is a Stella song, and a Bren song too, a little bit, and Sharecht probably wants her fair share of anything having to do with the city.

...Yeah. So. Shaivhen is divided into six districts- Redmark, Candlemark, Eastmark, Southmark, Temple, and Harbor. Candlemark is the northernmost district, Redmark is in the center, Harbor and the Akvarian Ocean are to the west, and Temple sort of sits around and to the west of Redmark like a weirdly shaped tumor. East and Southmark are, obviously, to the east and south.

Candlemark is sometimes called the Old City, because the oldest stretches of the catacombs exist beneath it. The original palace and royal family were located there, but they were destroyed in the early Third Era. Sections of the palace walls- it was originally a fort- still stand, and the area marked off by these crumbling bits of ruin is called Suicide City. It's located at the very center of the district, and at some point, Parliament filled in the missing bits of walls to make a penitentiary compound of sorts.

If Candlemark is a vicious, inoperable tumor on the face of the city, Suicide City is a necrotizing, gangrenous blot on Candlemark. It's not a nice place.

Sharecht is a mongrel bird-type Malestri, something like a cross between a heron and a shrike. Her animal form is a heron, but she has the instincts of a shrike. She's a rather vicious and deranged serial killer. A very young Harbard, with the help of the Assassins' Guild, captured her and put her in Candlemark some ten or fifteen years before the start of the story. Everyone wanted her dead, but the Shrive intervened.

Dekar is going to make the mistake of thinking he can control her; Sharecht is going to make the mistake of thinking she can control Foxbird (thus allowing me to write creepy, predatory, and homoerotic bondage scenes that reference the rape scene in Man of La Mancha). And Harbard is going to be convinced he made the mistake of letting her live- which, considering that she leads an army of criminals into the rest of the city on Dekar's order at some point, is a fairly accurate assessment.

She has a great deal of influence in Candlemark; she's been the reigning queen of Suicide City for years, and rumor has it she knows her way around the Old City catacombs, and can travel through them with impunity. The Old City catacombs are home to a number of undead covens- but they also house the remains of the Al Rothcar Library and Siegfried Al Rothcar's tomb. (Ziggy was the last surviving member of the royal family. He went on to become an Avatar of The White Lady and was one of the heroes of the Third Era. He was also a huge dork, but that's another story entirely.) Sharecht knows the ruins fairly well, and the covens don't mess with her- she always has an escort of Shrive rats when she goes underground, and the rats are twice as nasty as the cats.

Sharecht is crazy, but she's also fiercely devoted to the concept of the city; she is, essentially, exactly the sort of creature the other Malestri wanted to create when they sent their children to Shaivhen, Tarmish, and Akvaia. Aside from the crazy part. She sees herself as Aya DeLavrey's counterpart; the only reason she agrees to work with Dekar is for the chance to attain power in the respectable areas of the city. She has ambitions- it's just that up until Dekar comes along, her only ways of furthering these ambitions have involved sharp objects and internal organs and the removal of the latter with the former. Dekar offers her legitimacy and, more than anything else, that's something she wants.

But, again, she's crazy. Totally batshit and antisocial. And she's a bird, so she really, really likes shiny things. Foxbird, to her, is amazingly shiny.

(Malestri can crossbreed between species; the resultant offspring will only have one animal form- usually the mother's. This still often leads to children feeling dissociated from their animal forms; it was for this reason only mongrels were sent into the cities. The other Malestri hoped that this dissociation would make them more comfortable in their human forms, allowing them to move more freely in the cities.)

She's somewhere in her mid to late thirties- she's actually the oldest displaced Malestri experiment in Shaivhen. She's got curly blonde hair and yellow eyes in human form; she stands nearly six feet tall and has double jointed knees and elbows. In animal form, she's a great blue heron, and stands about three feet tall with a seven foot wingspan. Her beak is very, very sharp.

Silverlock, of course, adores her and wants to keep her as a pet- he's always wanted his own pet psychopath to play with. Blaine gets along with her fairly well; they occasionally commiserate over the difficulties of swallowing things whole. He can't spend too much time around her, though; herons eat snakes. Foxbird, of course, thinks Sharecht is a crazy bitch, and wishes she could meet a Malestri whose primary goal didn't involve getting into her pants. Harbard is conflicted; Sharecht is the closest thing to an alpha female he's ever encountered, but she's also a crazy serial killer.

She's a wild card, I suppose, but she ends up helping Blaine and Co when Dekar takes the tower.

Eventually, when they're all much older (and possibly after Foxbird makes it clear that she's not sleeping with either of them, because, ahahaha, Foxbird/The Lieutenant, OTP 4eva), Foxbird, Harbard, and Sharecht go off in search of their families. What they find up in the northern forests that border on Ikatia is another story entirely.

...I really ought to come up with a name for the lieutenant. But that's all anyone ever calls him, including Foxbird. Possibly Blaine uses his real name, but that's just because Blaine likes feeling smugly superior about being a better person than those around him. (He's such a delicious hypocrite and a horrible priest and I love him so. I also really need to get on that "Snakes on a Blaine!" picture that's been in my head for a while recently.)