Right I uh...okay first crack at it. This is my first time (uguu~) so while I sorta have a general grasp of a lot of the theory stuff I've never actually put it into practice.
...So help and thoughts would be super appreciated basically, is what I'm saying. <<
Edit:
>Start writing
>See
@EarthScorpion's write-up
>Swear viciously and start rewriting
Concept: Struggling Alt-Rock Frontman
Seeming: Darkling
Kith: Nightsinger (from Winter Masques)
Mikhail hated his home town. This small, dying place in the heart of the Rustbelt. A boomtown once upon a time, now wasting away and decaying. Here an office block that nobody has the money to tear down, now so much crumbling concrete and filthy glass. Here a row of foreclosed homes between empty, overgrown lots. The kind of place that placed so much reverence on family, on hearth and home, even as the community itself drew farther apart. Even as the people grew colder to each other and ugly things festered in the dark.
But then, it was an ugly place.
But he was going to get out. He was so much smarter. So much cleverer. So much more
sensitive than all the other miserable people in this small, dying place. He was going to get out, going to be Someone Important in an actual city. The shy, softspoken but secretly brilliant, loners end up running the world, isn't that how it's supposed to go? So he convinced himself that he loved science (he didn't) and that he was talented at math (he hated it). He told himself that community college was just the first step-stone on his path out. So, when he found a private garden between ruined buildings, a single red-leafed tree surrounded by stone benched, he told no one. It was to be his place, his secret spot where he would plan the conquest of his circumstance.
And, because he was a good person, he always obeyed the rusted, faded sign pinned to the fence. That noted the garden's hours as strictly from noon to seven.
Until he didn't. And the crows that gathered in the boughs of that bloodied tree carried him, struggling and screaming, into the dark.
He remembers a machine the size of a city, dead and broken beneath a bleeding sun. He remembers rust-red metal, rust-red leaves, and rust-red puddles of tacky blood. He remembers the dead piled high in open, empty rail-streets. Plants twining, growing through the city's corpse. He remembers the horned thing, the titan with a stag's fleshless face, the giant on the crumbling throne.
He remembers the men-who-were-crows, the crows-who-were-men.
They taught him how to eat the tongues of the dead, the accumulated lost of Arcadian wars. Taught him how to pluck out their eyes and savor their secrets. Taught him how to mock the Huntsmen and trapworms with raucous, hoarse, tones yet to sing in a lovely voice as they flocked 'round their master's head. He remembers teaching other crows in turn, murmuring to frightened, shivering, fledglings in the night. Their feathers not even in yet. Telling them to eat, before the Huntsmen found them.
He remembers the forest burning. Cyclopean gears grinding. He remembers fleeing as it all fell to chaos. A panicked bit of black, winging its way through the dark.
Mikhail still has his youth but he's a little older now. A little thinner, almost fragile looking. He has a habit for pills and fine, white, powder; just enough to get him to sleep and wake him up again. He buys his medicine from the Winter Court with secrets and rumors. He does his best not to think about what use the Winter King puts his payment to and tells himself he has no choice, it's not as if his own Autumn liege is willing to help.
Mikhail isn't so proud anymore, but he still sings. In dingy divebars and abandoned warehouses. The band backing him's pretty bad but everyone agrees:
Mikhail has an amazing voice.
Now he wears the Mantle of The Winter Court with pride, he is all hard lines and angles, cold and composed in nearly all situations. Only when looking into his eyes does one realize the lengths he is willing to go to, when it comes to protect the Winter Court he has started to view as his "true home".
For his eyes are cold as steel in the winter.
Winter Court legbreaker eh?
/me glances at his character concept
well
