shtuff

Oh, man, Blogger has an autosave function now. My life is golden.

I need...to get off my ass and stop being emotionally/mentally paralyzed. I can't afford paralysis right now- I won't be able to afford it for the next few months, possibly years. I'm not sure how to deal with this.

Anyway, that's not why I'm posting. I'm posting because I've got crap in my head that needs excising, so here goes: early Fourth Era Silverlock, in a nutshell! Sort of.

Silverlock gets really attached to people he cares about. Part of this is just the way he was conditioned- the best way to keep slaves from rebelling was to make them part of the family, and he considered his fellows at the House his family. The House Mother and House Steward were his parents; the other slaves were his brothers and sisters. And he was happy growing up with them, and he loved them all dearly. (The rest of it is the way his magick works and the way his soul interacts with the world around him, but more on that later.)

Hundreds of years later, he wouldn't trade his magick for anything- but when Gannet Sorlin took him away from the House as his apprentice, Silverlock seriously considered suicide, rather than leave his family.

He was fairly miserable as Gannet's apprentice. They lived on the edges of Candlemark, where it borders Eastmark- it's not the nicest of neighborhoods, and at the time, he didn't really know anything about life outside of the upperclass. Sorlin, recognizing this, put severe restrictions on his movements, so as to prevent him from getting knifed in an alley.

The first castings he learned were defensive ones- he wasn't permitted to leave the house until he could construct a solid energy shield as a reflex. (Gannet was an asshole, but he wasn't stupid, and he wasn't about to waste a potential leechmage. Third class mages were incredibly rare, and having an apprentice was a mark of status among the leechmage community.) It took him the better part of a year to manage this, of course- and during that year, he wasn't permitted past the threshold of the front door.

Eventually, Gannet lets him wander about on his own, but for a while, he isn't allowed past the borders of the street they live on. (I have the name written down somewhere, but I can't recall it at the moment.) He spends a lot of time sitting on the front steps, writing letters to Aya. By this point, she hasn't spoken to him in years, and has more or less given up on him for dead. She hasn't met Nick and Liall yet, but she's joined the army and moved off of the DeLavrey estates.

(They meet when she's fifteen, and one of her mother's cast-offs hires Silverlock as an escort to one of Ninaya's parties. She's a rebellious teenager, he's representative of a million things her mother hates- and, to their respective surprises, they actually like each other. [The man who buys him for the evening is High Prince Ostrek Rehoren of Murundcar; Os is the reason Silverlock can curse fluently in High Murundic.])

They keep in contact through letters, since she can't get away from her duties with the army, and he's not allowed to wander on his own. (When he's a slave, Silverlock is incredibly obedient. Mouthy, yes, but obedient.) At some point, when he's sitting on the steps, writing a letter to her, one of the neighborhood kids wanders over and starts being annoying. Her name is Andra.

Gannet spends most of his time working at one of the universities, which means he's gone for most of the day. He'd give Silverlock some sort of task or assignment to complete, but otherwise, Silverlock would be left to his own devices, such as they were.

Andra is your standard six-year-old street urchin, but she doesn't throw rocks at him like several of the other street urchins do- she's just curious, because he sits on the steps every day, writing, and when the others do throw rocks, the rocks just bounce away.

He teaches her to read; she's a sweet kid, and bright for her age, and her mother works all day, so she's lonely. He can kind of relate. This is when he starts using the name "Silverlock," rather than his House name. (It was "Estri," which is Shrivish for "prince." Aya still occasionally calls him that, when she's feeling sentimental.) He'll say he chose that name because it was indicative of the person he'd become as a mage (the streak in his hair manifested when Gannet broke his magick), but it's actually just a nickname the kids on his street gave him. It's also the name Andra's mother uses for him, and he was a bit in love with her for quite a while.

Once Gannet is assured that he can take care of himself, he starts wandering the streets at night. He gets into a decent number of fights, but manages to stay alive. People learn to respect him after a while. He runs into a street-dance fight and convinces a few gang members to teach him the basics of street fighting and street dancing. Magick is all well and good, but one of the first things he learned at the House was to be comfortable with his body, and to use it to the full limits of its capabilities.

He takes to street dancing like a fish to water, and having an outlet for his physical energy (besides, y'know, having sex with Andra's mother [who totally has a name, I swear]) actually helps him concentrate better in his mage studies. He's a very physical person, even without his magick; he tends to touch people when talking to them, and he's very physically affectionate with people he considers friends. Sleeping around is an extension of this; sex is just another gesture of respect or regard, but not a particularly valuable one. It doesn't mean anything more than a friendly handshake, and it takes him a very long time before he finally understands that most people don't- or can't- feel the same way.

He's a remarkably sensitive empath, and he's had very thorough psychological training, but he's still occasionally clueless when it comes to dealing with people. (He figures things out for the most part by the time he joins the Guild, but he still has a number of gaps in his concept of "normal" human interaction.)

He becomes an active member of his neighborhood, and even though the local gangs don't completely accept him as one of their own, he still gets his own place in their hierarchy. He stops being miserable once he's got a group to belong to; the one thing discovering his empathy truly underscores is his need for people. It's as much an energy thing as it is an emotional thing; his own personal aether reserves are quite small, and if he isn't leeching energy from other people, he gets exhausted fairly easily.

He meets Vanick and Liall a few months before they die; he and Nick hate each other on sight because Nick has some very old fashioned notions of propriety, and Silverlock has dealth with traditionalist Akvarians in the past. He and Liall get along just fine, though, and they both half-jokingly lament the fact that Aya is terminally monogamous. (I've had Nick trying to explain Akvarian views on adultery and homosexuality, but the whole subject makes him amazingly uncomfortable. Liall has done a lot to break him of his more offensively bigoted ideas, but some things are too ingrained for her to fix.)

For all that they never see each other, he and Aya remain close friends; this meeting is the last one they'll have before he joins the Guild and her mother dies.