Character: Veron Blacktear [hider=My Hider] https://ucarecdn.com/d3bfd128-8b27-485e-ada2-d2731a39284c/-/crop/858x858/217,0/-/preview/-/progressive/yes/-/format/auto/-/scale_crop/900x900/ [/hider] [center]Music OOC[/center] [hider=My Hider] [center][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPhvN0ra-bY[/youtube][/center] [/hider] [center][b]The Mad Rat[/b][/center] They called them vermin. Rats. For the Verm were birthed from the Great Rat. There was a great history lesson in there somewhere, but history was lost to time, a pale echo that no one cared to hear anymore. No one would listen even if the tales were echoed. Perhaps that was the lesson. Indifference. Ignorance. In the end, the truth was the lie, right? Only the lie was true. History was written by the winner anyway. That was the phrase. So even if the Last Rat spoke, and someone listened, there was never any certainty that whatever dripped from his lips was true or false to begin with, for he himself was neither true or false. He simply…was. Like others of his kind, like so many of any kind, he was born in the womb. His Broodmother, some nameless creature, had given him into his clan. It did have a name, for broods and clans were groups and groups mattered. Individuals were less important. Only…this one had to disagree…and so he was banished from brood and clan, from cave and realm, from nest and home. Some called him vermin. He wasn’t much different from the rest of his kindred, only in the context of many he was vermin in the sense of being a beast, a beast in the sense of being cruel, wicked, some ghastly, sadistic, destructive thing. He was Verm. He was Rat. Yet he was greater than his brothers and sisters, the lesser versions of their species, for he was Veshkei. He made his own clan to his name, and his clan had rats with names, but they were nameless to him, forgotten and forsaken. Only one remained. Only one ever truly mattered. Only his name. [i]Only me… [/i]He remembered as he blinked in naked shadow, where darkness had swallowed the light, where one eye was right, and one eye was wrong. [i]I never forgot… [/i]He recalled his name, the only name worth its weight when it came to surviving the end times. It was the first name and the last name, for he was the first and the last. He was Veron Blacktear. And his was a name that the denizens of Lagrimosa had come to fear before their land was ripped root after root, and the remnant of a dead civilization was spat out, bathed in the blood of his enemies, reborn in the afterbirth of a broken universe. The Mad Rat, they called him, and maybe he was half-mad. Could he be blamed? As he gazed skyward, laying on his back in grass, naked, save for a lonely eyepatch, he wondered. His right eye was open, unblinking, once an orb black all over, obsidian, like the Verm, like his kind. Yet, amid his endeavor to survive, to escape, he had…changed. He was something different today. He retained his tail and his horns, his skin was grey, yet it had no fur, and his face was more like a man’s than a rat’s. His right eye was still black in pupil, yet silver in iris, and white in sclera. As for the other, well, that was forever hidden. Some said his left eye was as red as blood, striped like a cat’s, and shined with malice. [i]Some said.[/i] A voice in his head said. [i]I say…get up, Veron Blacktear…[/i] And so he did, but not for naught. He listened as much as he watched, and heard music, melody, strings of harp, and it had heart. He heard birds chirp, critters creep, smelled trees and beasts, blood and wood, but it was the music that had taken him in, so he followed it, and there he stood. [i]There.[/i] The creature by the lake, the musician, was no tiny thing. In his naked flesh, Veron stood seven feet tall, courtesy of his Shkei species, but what was she? His curiosity danced into the breeze like the notes from her strings, and one would have to forgive him. The creature before him was a woman who still had her head, whereas Veron had left behind a gravesite filled with the heads of men and women and children of which he had reaped in order to simply…be. [color=8493ca] “You play that well,”[/color] said the rat to the spider. His deep voice came from a safe distance away, but whatever the power of either creature, well, distance and how much it mattered remained to be seen. [color=8493ca]“You are arachnid.”[/color] He stated the obvious. [color=8493ca]“Unless my eye has been deceived by some spell.”[/color] @Spooder Girl