Username : Tuatha De
Timezone : ?
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Character Info
Name : Zachary Belukha / Kheidye
Age : 16 / 5
Gender : Male / Male
Appearance(s) : You wouldn’t really know that Zachary was half-Kievan to look at him. Not until you heard his last name, anyway. He’s inherited his father’s straight nose, striking profile, and blue-grey eyes, but his mother’s fair hair and pale complexion. That blond hair is usually worn a little long, though not quite long enough to tie back; while it is naturally straight, it’s also quite fine, and thus has a tendency to be wayward. Zachary’s quite tall, with long legs, but not particularly large. His broad shoulders hint at a potential for a solidly muscled build, were he to work at it, but for now that only manifests in the slightest hints of definition in his figure. A single thin scar, barely more than a faint white line, runs at a diagonal just above his left eye, bisecting the brow but not touching the eye itself. It could be considered a lucky escape – an inch lower and it would have been unfortunate indeed.
He prefers to dress, whenever possible, in an unobtrusive manner. Earth tones, more subdued blues and greys, rarely accents of wine red or black – not too many startling or bright colors. Thanks to his relatively well-to-do background, Zach does own some nice clothing for special occasions, though he tends to dress more casually for everyday occasions. He’s comfortable with his background and who he is, but he also isn’t inclined to flaunt it excessively, knowing that Jaradin has some students coming from poorer families.
As for Kheidye, Zachary has gotten used to seeing him; where once he could only catch glimpses of an abstract, shifting form out of the corner of his eye, now he is much more aware of his daemon. While Kheidye certainly shows no signs of preferring one animal over another, he tends to be mostly a single animal at a time now, with only faint features of another – a jackal with bat’s wings, for instance, or a monitor but the size of a lemur.
Personality : Zachary is most often seen with a slightly worried or puzzled frown. The half-Kievan boy is fairly bright and serious about his work, placing that work in higher priority than good relations with his fellow students. Not that he’s mean, or actively unsocial. He likes company – although he usually gravitates towards girls, as he is very strongly in denial regarding his feelings about other boys. Zachary does smile readily, when given reason, and his sense of humor is subdued rather than boisterous. He’s never had the kind of hyperactive, enthusiastic energy that some boys get. However, if he is pushed – he can be pushed a very long way and tolerate it with little fuss. But past a certain point, he will retaliate viciously, and with little warning. He’s got one of those personalities where certain things just set him off sometimes.
When Zachary is frustrated – and this happens more easily than most people think – he tends to internalize rather than express it for as long as possible. This comes mostly from an intractable desire to be seen as a reliable hard worker, not a complainer. Some small part of him, you see, is concerned. He knows that the trauma that forced his daemon’s emergence was no awful, life-altering horror, just his first experience of real terror. And he knows that despite five years with Kheidye, the daemon has yet to settle… and internally, he wonders if maybe there’s just something wrong with him. Like he’s not supposed to have a daemon at all, he doesn’t deserve one. And some day the teachers will figure this out, and boot him out of Jaradin College. He doesn’t think he could stand to be a disappointment.
As a result, Zachary tends to come off as the general good kid. He runs a rather delicate balance between idealism and cynicism; on the one hand, he still generally believes that the world is a good place, but on the other hand, he knows that people can be complete jackasses, and will take appropriate measures to look after himself. He’s quiet, he doesn’t start trouble or pick fights. He also tends to blame himself rather than blaming others when things go wrong. He is sincere in his goal – not to be popular, necessarily, but to be respected.
With all this in mind, it would shock most people if they could hear Kheidye talk. It’s not that he’s especially brash, or ostentatious. He shares Zachary’s dry wit and generally low-key personality. He’s just not at all shy about speaking his mind. With a quick, sharp tongue and a stubborn streak a mile wide, Kheidye is not one to be turned aside by anything. Even with Zachary, he will occasionally have moments of “tough love” – sometimes, you just NEED someone to tell you that you’re being stupid. In a kind way, of course. Better to know and fix it, right? He’s occasionally hard on his human, but also ferociously protective of Zachary and those nearest and dearest to him.
Oh, and it’s worth noting that the harder Zachary has to work to keep things internalized, the larger and more obnoxious Kheidye’s forms tend to be. On particularly stressful days, Zach has grown used to being stalked through the hallways of Jaradin College by a very large cassowary.
Keywords [5 Max]: attentive, withdrawn, diligent, critical, ambiguously gay
History : Domovoi Belukha could see Bad News on the horizon. When political dissenters in Kievan Rus started meeting with unfortunate ends, the former member of the bolyari took his opportunity to get the hell out of Dodge. At the time, passing airships were rare but not nonexistent in Muscovy. When one passed through, he surreptitiously begged (or perhaps bribed) his way on board. He soon proved to have a talent as a crewman, his military discipline and general good humor earning him the respect necessary to gain a permanent place. He abandoned most of his Kievan heritage, going so far as to try to mask his accent and going simply by Dom when in uncertain company.
Not long after, he fell in love with a moderately well-to-do daughter of a merchant, by the name of Elizabeth. Fortunately, her family was delighted by the romantic appeal of having an airman in the family, and they were married quickly. The modestly well-off couple had a daughter, Minerva, followed by Zachary a year later.
Zachary has only distant memories of his sister, because when he was very young, Minerva died of pneumonia. And not long after that, an emergency on board the airship called Dom back into active service and away from his grieving family for several months.
Perhaps it was a combination of these two factors, but Zachary’s mother did everything in her power to protect the son she had remaining. He spent the first ten years or so of his life… almost, well, sheltered. It helped that he was never the rambunctious type, and didn’t object to spending hours indoors with a new book of tales from exotic lands, or stormy afternoons at the piano with his mother as a tutor. His father was regularly gone for long stretches of time, but when he was home, it was always with some new story of wherever he’d visited and a few small, interesting trinkets as gifts. It was, overall, an idyllic life.
Of course, nothing can last forever in a perfect state. In this case, the downfall was pride. Children will be children, after all, and for some of the older boys, there was a certain appeal in taunting the younger ones. And Zachary, in his I-am-eleven-years-old-and-still-think-I-am-so-awesome way, fought back. It all came to a head after a careless comment that winter insulting his Kievan heritage, which Zachary decided he just wouldn’t take.
It started off as something harmless. A prank, a dare on the part of the older boys. One of those “if you’re so tough, then prove it” scenarios – they weren’t actually expecting him to take them up on it. It should have ended there, but thoughtlessness, bad timing, and bad luck converged to turn it into a nightmare. Zachary ended up lost in the woods after dark, bleeding and freezing in the bitter cold and utterly alone. It was his first brush with the alarming idea that he could be in real danger, and he did not know what to do.
He might well have frozen to death, confusion and rising panic further confounding his sense of direction until he reached the point of exhaustion. But suddenly there was a sound like paws rustling dry leaves just out of sight, and a sensation of something warm and soft brushing against him. And a small voice in his head told him, I know the way home. And if I know it, that means you know it. Just stay calm, and I’ll show you.
That was Kheidye, though it took him three years to learn the daemon’s name. Zachary did not precisely lie to his parents, but neither did he tell the whole truth about what had happened, and after seeing the soft magika glow, they did not press him. One would think that Kheidye would have taught Zach how to pick his battles, but really, the opposite was true. Zach after that grew quiet, mostly ignoring anyone who annoyed him, while it was Kheidye who was the indignant voice at the back of his head. His injury from that night left a small scar, only faintly noticeable.
Zachary continued his normal schooling for another four years, but by the time he was fifteen, Kheidye was getting to be less of a faint impression of a voice, and more of a constant animal companion, albeit still near-invisible to everyone else except as the slightest outlines of a glowing form. After some discussion, it was agreed that he would go to Jaradin College, at least for a while to see if it helped. He’s been at the College for about a year now.
