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Message: <blockquote data-quote="loxmyth" data-source="post: 1015040" data-attributes="member: 1255">Okay, last was my attempt at the Eclipse, this is an idea for a Lunar:Ahnk Rah Meen, Thousand-Stripes-That-Bleed-HereThe desert can be a hard, cruel place.  Closer to the Elemental Pole of Fire than any other place in Creation, it is home to desolation, hardship and arid, dry sand.  But life can thrive there, if it knows how.  Ahnk Rah Meen knew how, born into the ranks of the Delzahn hordes who still knew the Way.  Like his peers, he delighted in the raids of caravans that plied the ways between the southern cities of the Threshold and derided his soft city-dwelling cousins.  Ahnk owned his own blade and had been given his own horse, and life was good.However, one moment of mistake can change all that came before, and Ahnk's lot was no different.  During a raid outside Gem, he was knocked from his horse, and knocked unconscious.  His capturers did not kill him, no; he was given a fate worse than death and enslaved.  Being owned as property does not sit well with the Way, however.  He attacked his handlers, ignored their orders, resisted time and again.  But the handlers were used to dealing with "barbarians"; liberal beatings, starvings, and torture were all methods they found unsavoury, but necessary.  In the end Ahnk Rah Meen was tamed, but not without the cost of the taming ravaging his body.  Every inch of his body was covered in scars left by many a lashing, and he had become deathly thin, and he could only walk at a shuffle because his legs had been so mangled and ruined that it pained him to move any faster.  After extensive blows to his head, he found that he was not quite as witty as he used to be, and often found it impossible to think for too long or hard.But his face still carried the noble bearing of a khan in it, with his deep brown eyes and hawkish nose and coffee brown skin, which attracted a Dragonblood of House Cynis to choose him for a night's dalliances.  The depravities she visited upon him the night she took him into her bedchamber will not be spoken of except to mention how fatal they were.  Filled with wounds and dying from a loss of blood he was dumped down a sand dune and left for dead.  A less tenacious man would have given up and expired right then.  But though stupid and lame, tenacity was still one of his qualities.He crawled for a long time, trying to find his way back to the nomadic flocks of his people, the light of a swollen moon his only guide.  It was then that he noticed behind him the pale shape of the Dune woman crawling towards him with a rictus smile on her thin lips and a crazed glare in her silver eyes.  He should have given up then; the Dune People did not travel alone, and in his weakened state he would be easy prey.  But he would not give up so.  She launched herself on him, a dagger made of human bone aiming for his throat.  But he protected himself with his arms, still powerful, and knocked the weapon from her grip.  They struggled there on top of a sandy dune by the silvery light of the moon for what seemed an Age; and suddenly the fight was over when he hugged the woman close and crushed her spine with the last of his strength.As he lay there breathing heavily, his life's blood spilling into the sands, the dead woman turned her head to look at him.  "Quite impressive," she said, and kissed him on the lips.  In that moment he felt pain flood him, a searing pain, which receded as the albino woman pushed off of him and stood.  "Now rise, my child, and live a second life.  You are mine now."  Then she turned, and was gone.And as he sat up right, Meen could feel the strength returning to his body.  Now I hunt again, he told himself, marvelling at his broken body made whole again.  Now he could ride the stallions of his people again, and hunt the desert for foods and he could follow the Way.  But for some reason, he could only think of Gem.</blockquote>

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