[hider=Calder]
Name: Calder
Age: 32
Gender: Male
Species: Minotaur
Kingdom of Origin: Wilderness.
 
Physical appearance:
 
Calder, unsurprisingly, is a big hoss. Standing at around 8’4, he’s certainly not lacking in the size department. He weighs an even 700 lbs and has been known to consume wildebeest for midnight snacks.
 
Calder, like most of his kind, is extremely muscular. His fur is a dark black while his skin is white (albeit deeply, deeply tanned-Calder has never worn a shirt a day in his life, and could be mistaken for a Navajo or Latin American based off his skin tone. Barring, ya know, the bull’s head.), with a litany of faded scars all over his chest. He does not have the “ripped” build of most male celebrities-instead, he has the quiet, bulked strength, muscles pushing out a thin layer of fat over his arms and chest. He eats too heartily to be ripped, but is by no means out of shape-Calder’s among the strongest of his species, and is capable of great physical abilities. Calder’s horns are set wide and darken as they reach their tips-a feature many a lady minotaur has praised him for. Calder’s eyes are dark, and he has rather lovely long eyelashes. Calder’s teeth are about as nice as you’d expect, and around his neck he often wears a bone necklace. Calder’s hands are big, easily larger than any humans, and his fingernails are chipped and his fingers pretty callused. Thick dark hair covers his forearms and chest. Calder walks slowly, with his head slightly hunched. One might occasionally find a songbird perched on his horns or shoulder, or the occasional flowers littering his fur. His legs are thick-you couldn’t hope to connect your hands around them-and powerful, considerably stronger than his arms as a result of supporting his heavy upper body his whole life. His hooves are tough and, while a bit scarred, undeniably durable.
 
Stretching up from his right hoof, there is a white, jagged line running up his fur. It branches off and coils off in some places, like an albino lightning scar. As it dances up his fur, along the side of his thigh, it reaches his waist. Once it touches flesh, it turns into a dark mark, not unlike blood poisoning. It is moving upwards towards his heart. (think this: https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=A0LEV7.fVcxUVlYAuGInnIlQ?p=lightning+scars&fr=&fr2=piv-web&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-001 )
 
 
 
 
Attire:
 
Calder isn’t super fond of clothes. However, he wears a simple leather kilt for the sake of decency, and while his hide is thick enough to resist most glancing blows, he also has armor that he wears more or less all the time. This is not at all up to the caliber of other nations’ armors, and is instead a hodgepodge assembly of various bones and pieces of armor from those that Calder has bested. Over his right shoulder is a curved bone plate of…some animal, gods only know what. Leather cords and some chain attach the various pieces together, with another similar (but noticeably smaller) plate covering his other shoulder, a thick leather breastplate hanging over his front, with criss-crossing chains covering his gut and back. A large rucksack is normally slung over his shoulder.
 
Personality:
 
Calder is an anomaly. In him rages the violence and simple strength of all Minotaur-he yearns for battle and opportunities to prove his strength over others. However, he is also far more nuanced than that. Calder craves something else-some deeper meaning, some philosophical intricacies that tribal life could not offer him. He tried fighting more. It was still there. He bested others and took their women for his own. It was still there. He ran for days on end and wrestled the strongest beasts in the Wilderness and it was still there.
 
Calder is an avid student of the arts. He is…abysmal…at music, literature (he is not entirely literate), and painting, but he is nonetheless interested. What little money he has he often spends on books to try and improve his reading abilities, and Calder carries a sketchbook and charcoal with him (these sketches are not considered good by anyone’s definition of the word, but carry a sort of honest beauty to them). Calder is also not very intelligent-however, he seeks to understand, and is very wise in his own way. Calder considers the world around him often, and is a good judge of character. He is easily deceived and slightly gullible, almost stupidly held to a code of honor, but he is a good soul. Calder enjoys helping others and greatly enjoys meeting people. He is not very skilled with rhetoric or speaking, and is not entirely good at picking up on social cues. His ravenous hunger also tends to alarm any who break bread with Calder. Calder’s not being the smartest leads to his slow mentality. Not mentally slow, but rather a slow pace of life. Calder is never in a rush. He will mull over the same verse of poetry for days on end, trying to figure out what it means, take his time travelling from one town to the next. He often pauses to think over his words before he says them, and continues to consider a topic of conversation long after it has changed.
 
Calder is a lover of animals. He, in fact, has an almost magical ability to interact with them. His child-at-heart nature seems to win over most creatures, and on his many journeys he has crossed paths with a great number of beasts, some of whom accompanied him a ways. Calder claims to be able to talk with them. Whether this means he is deluded into believing he can or is mentally close enough to them to be able to do so is anyone’s guess. Regardless, songbirds often find a welcome perch on Calder’s horns and can enjoy a respite from flight for many hours there.

Calder appreciates beauty. He finds this in the bloodrush of defeating one’s enemies, in the sunsets that he always takes time to watch, and in the curves of a nimble dryad. He is simple and plain. He is confident but also humble. Calder does not desire much in the world-he is rugged and capable of enduring harsh conditions with relative ease. Perhaps owing to his lesser intelligence, Calder is very difficult to dismay. His determination is remarkable, and it is extremely difficult to break his morale.
 
Upon learning of his condition, Calder’s outlook on life has greatly changed. Calder savors every moment. He takes time to watch every sunset. He always stops to talk with people. He contemplates issues a lot and looks to live life to the fullest before his time comes. Calder is at peace with the thought of death, and has a quiet, steady faith in whatever powers exist that all will be right when that time comes.
 
Hobbies/interests: Sketches and writing poetry. He is also teaching himself to read and analyze poetry with varying degrees of success. He loves hiking and observing nature, meeting new people, and generally taking in the world around him. Calder also keeps a diary. It is almost comically terse, and occasionally cryptic (although this is a possible unintentional side effect of his writing abilities).
 
Skills: He is hardy survivalist, tanner, and quite strong. Calder can locate food and get a fire going with very little difficulty. He is knowledgeable about a wide range of animal life and plant life and capable of applying all of his focus and energy towards a task at once. He is extremely stubborn and possesses great force of will. He’s relatively famous amongst minotaur, and can command respect if not obedience from most of them. He has traveled a great deal and is not only an experienced trekker but knows a bit about a lot of places and peoples. His understanding may be...limited...but Calder is certainly well-traveled, and can tell you a great many stories about a great many places. 
 
Backstory:
 
Calder’s life is a story of victories. He was born and became stronger than his brothers. He fought them and bested them. Then he fought his father and bested him. Then he fought his chieftain and bested him. Then he fought other chieftains. Then he fought great wild beasts. He bested them.
 
Calder is one of the more skilled Minotaurs in existence today. He is naturally strong, fierce, and a prime example of a warrior. He is simply good at warfare, at staying alert for days on end, at fighting on an empty stomach and bitter throat, at staying hopeful in the face of imminent death. Calder has weathered many battles and fought many adversaries. He has emerged with scars and stories but he has emerged.
 
Calder’s life, after about seventeen, became rather dull. There simply did not seem to be much for him to do. There was a lot of fighting, but Calder found he became tired of it. Never during the act-Calder relished it, the adrenaline rush, the feel of breaking someone-there is nothing quite like it. But at night when his mates had long since begun to snore and the weeping of those he had beaten quieted down Calder came to thinking, which is something Minotaurs did not do very often. Why was he here? Was he just going to fight until one day he died? Why were his people slaves? Why did humans do that to them? What was there to life beyond his tribe?

He asked his brothers these questions. They just said it was that way. He got the same answer from his father, his chieftain, the other chieftains. and, in their own way, he received the same answer from the beasts around him and the nature he delved into.
 
Calder, one day, packed his meager belongings and set off. He bid his family goodbye and went about his way. He traveled a great many miles. There was lots of fighting to be had-sometimes to get a meal, he would agree to serve as a bouncer for a bar, a mercenary for a brief while. Slavers tried to take him sometimes. They failed. Beasts tried to kill him sometimes. They failed too.
 
Calder grew in strength and in wisdom. He walked the earth for many years. He saw the colors of the sky dancing in the Northern Isles. He saw (and killed) a dragon in the Lonesome Valley. He saw many wondrous things. He ate. He drank. He walked some more. He is closer to finding what he is looking for, the minotaur equivalent of enlightenment, but he is not there yet.
 
Calder is now reaching the end of his life. Not that he is anywhere close to the end of his natural life span-Calder, in his travels, came across a remnant of Cyclopian society, an old piece of magic that had been left dormant for eons. He unwittingly activated it-a booby trap of sorts. He survived the encounter, but later noticed a strange mark on his hoof. Some months later, he noticed it had progressed up a ways, burning the fur white as it went. Sometimes at night Calder thought he could feel it creeping up along his veins, working its way towards his heart as he slept. He tried sleeping standing up but that did not help, and also it made his neck hurt. He talked with wizards. They did not know what to do. He talked with soldiers. They did not know what to do. He talked with-no, actually, he didn’t talk with dryads. He blushed and started stammering when he talked to them. He started having strange dreams. Violent dreams. Scary dreams. Calder did not like fear-he felt it only very rarely. He felt somehow that when the strange ancient magic made its way to his heart he would die.
 
For a while Calder panicked. He went feral. He drank himself into a stupor for nights on end and fought and fought and fought. It did not make him feel any better. He has since come to terms with it, and now only seeks to enjoy the remaining months he has left. He has noticed no deterioration of his physical abilities, but figures that he has roughly six months to a year left before it reaches his heart.
 
Family: Father, brothers, mother. All of whom he has bested. Several mates.  
 
 
Relationships:  
 
None. Calder is a wanderer.
 
Weaponry:
 
He primarily wields a flammenschwert variant of a zweihander which is about seven feet long. Many braids and bones strung to leather cords hang from the pommel-likely trophies of some kind. Calder has named it Sylvia. Years of experience and his supreme physical abilities let him wield this with considerable dexterity.
 
He has a war hammer that is about four feet long and is primarily used for carpentry work and disassembling human heads. He has named it Anastasia.
 
He has a small knife he uses for skinning and such. He has named it Delilah.
 
Calder also carries around a bag of primitive, minotaurian tribal cures. The efficacy of these is…strongly debatable.
 
He is also quite skilled with taking a length of chain and beating the fuck out of something with it. He finds it cathartic, and beautifully ironic given his species’ tendency to be taken as slaves.
 
Abilities:
 
They will be brought before Calder and they shall be broken. Calder is an experienced, seasoned warrior who possesses about two decades of combat training on top of raw physical ability. Calder, beyond that, does not have much he can offer. He is simple, both in his gifts and in his mindset. Calder will go and fight the Red Legion because that seems like a good thing to do. There is not much more to it. 

That being said, this is his one ability. A hammer may only be good for driving in nails, but it is really fucking good at driving in nails. Calder understands warfare on a great many levels, and approaches combat with both calm, fatalist acceptance and the fury and passion that drives his race. He is an absolute motherfucker to fight and, while he will likely be brought low by his curse before he can see Ignion burn, he will do his tribe proud before he does.
 
He has the barest of magical abilities that manifests in his affinity for animals. Calder can deal with animals very, very well, and loves them all dearly. This does not stop him from eating some of them.
 
Weaknesses:
 
Dryads. Also females of any kind. Also he’s terminally afflicted by a curse. Also he’s not very subtle. Also he’s really shitty with money. 
 
Companion:  Many, but few stay for extended periods of time.
 
Other: Polaris.
[/hider]