Approved by Tawny

THE CANDIDATE
Name: Seytev
Age: 17
Gender: Male
Rank: Dragon Candidate
Appearance: The kindest thing to say about Seytev right now is that he has a lot of potential to be good-looking when he grows into himself. Unfortunately, as it stands, he is nowhere near done growing into himself, and only time will tell whether or not any of that potential is realized.

He is tall for a boy his age, already over six feet, but it’s all height rather than substance right now; Seytev is about a hundred percent limbs and sharp edges. His build implies that he’ll be huge someday – broad shoulders, large hands and feet – but right now, he’s mostly working on building any sort of mass, much less muscle mass. He’s skinny for someone as big as he is. And as it stands, he’s at that awkward teen stage where he looks like he’s entirely made of elbows and knees. He’s predictably clumsy. Hopefully, he’ll grow out of it over the next few years, since he’s so far been a late bloomer, but there’s really no telling.

In terms of complexion, he’s light-skinned and fair-haired, tends to burn in the sun, and both blushes and bruises at the slightest provocation. Neither of these are indicators of constitution – he’ll take on anyone who says it means he can’t fight – but they do conspire to make him seem a bit more delicate than he is. His face doesn’t help that: his eyes are enormous and light grey, ringed thickly with dark lashes, and he has a full, feminine mouth. The presence of a sharply square jawline and distinctly beaky nose that’s been broken at least once does nothing to diminish the strangely-delicate air he gives off. He hates this.

Personality: Seytev is a little guy - or at least a guy who thinks of himself as a little guy - with a lot to prove, and he's determined not to let anyone get the better of him.

He loves people - loves people. Seytev is in many ways an unrelenting optimist. He believes, first and foremost, in the essential good of everyone. It's not naive - he grew up in poverty-stricken Nabol and lost both his parents, he's perfectly aware of how messed up the world is - but it is idealistic. Seytev really believes that given the opportunity, most people want to do good. It's both a blessing - he finds it easy to make friends because he's not often suspicious of motives - and a curse - the same thing that makes it easy for him to take a liking to someone means he frequently puts himself out there to get burned. It's easy to take advantage of him, and he's something of a blind follower when it comes to authority: earn his trust (impassioned speeches about changing the world are a fast track to his heart) and he'll even follow suicide orders without questioning them. He doesn't much like questioning people - it's much more straightforward to believe everyone's motives are as pure as his.

He's quick to encourage others and is something of a cheerleader among his friends - Seytev's the guy who'll always be at your side or your back, keeping an eye on you. Once he's decided he's friends with someone, he's with them through thick and thin. He'd follow his close friends straight into Thread if they asked him to - and he tries to inspire others to do the same. Loyalty is important to Seytev; along with a sense of personal responsibility and honor, it's probably the most important quality he can think of in a person. His honor code in general is very black and white: dragonriders are good guys, Thread is bad, fighting Thread and stopping crime is the ultimate goal of the Weyr, and therefore it should be his ultimate goal, and anyone standing in the way of that goal is probably bad. Not necessarily evil, but bad. And Seytev's not going to let the bad guys win. This is true whether the bad guys are Thread, murderers, or other Candidates - especially other Candidates who pick on the smaller or weaker kids.

He despises bullies and doesn't think twice about throwing himself into a fight to stand up for what he believes in. He has almost no regard for his personal safety - probably a good thing in someone destined to put his life on the line every day, but not exactly a good thing when he's still small and delicate and has a tendency to throw himself into fights with people much bigger than him anyway - and does not quit. Seytev doesn't know how to back down from a fight: once he gets started, he has to be physically separated from whoever he's on with, and don't expect him to just walk away after that. Seytev's from Nabol - he's got blood feud in his soul - and he doesn't forget those who wronged him. It's not that he holds petty grudges, since he's usually pretty willing to forgive when he perceives apologies as genuine, but until he considers business finished, he'll itch for a fight. And business isn't finished until it's finished. Adults separating him from whoever he was fighting doesn't count - that's not finished, that's interrupted.

He considers the Weyr his home, but he's also tied inexorably to Nabol, and doesn't like hearing people speak out against it. It might be a dung heap ruined by the Civil War, but shardit, it's his home, and Seytev loves it! There's a certain degree of pride he takes in his heritage and his position, because foremost among Seytev's deepest desires is a need to belong. Finding a place for himself is important - Seytev is rank-driven and routine-driven, preferring to be given orders. He thrives in the structure of the Weyr in that respect, even if he occasionally struggles under orders. He's a hard worker and determined to make things work, but he can also be stubborn and a bit of a jackass - when he's decided he wants something, Seytev is pretty pigheaded, particularly if what he wants is more information. He doesn't like being kept in the dark and loses his temper quickly if he feels he was misused or lied to. Dishonesty, even mild dishonesty, rankles him because it falls outside his honor code.

He wants, above all else, to be in one of the top wings someday, not only because he wants to be useful, but also because he likes the idea of being a hero. It's romantic, there are poems and Harper-songs written about it, and there's something enchanting about the noble cause of the dragonrider. But as romantic as he might be in the back of his mind, he's somewhat more practical on the outside. He'll fight and fight and fight and push himself to the limits to try and prove he's worth something, but he's also very aware of everything he's been given so far. He's not one for ungratefulness, and even if he might be a little disappointed (or a lot heartbroken) if he never makes it to Second Wing or finds himself aged out of Candidacy, he'd still be thankful for every minute he had in the Weyr. Realistically - and he has considered the possibility - he'd stay on as a wher Candidate and work just as hard to prove himself there.

History: Seytev was a sickly child from the start. Born to Yostev, a Hold Guard at Nabol, and Seyra, a midwife and informal worker in the Hold’s infirmary, he was a blessing to his parents that quickly became a burden; babies who didn’t grow quickly were frequently casualties of time and nature, and though Seyra and Yostev were committed to keeping Seytev from dying, they didn’t hang too many of their hopes on his survival past a turn.

He proved them wrong, though, passing his first birthday, and then his second, and though he never thrived, he certainly managed to stay alive. But he was always small, with a nasty tendency to catch colds and other sicknesses when the weather got cold, and he was coddled ferociously by Seyra. He accompanied her to the infirmary more days than not, since the crèche wanted nothing to do with a child who might infect the other children, and at least in the infirmary she could keep him properly quarantined. By the time he was five, the colds were less debilitating, though, and while he was still small for his age, he could at least be left safely with the crèche. It was a weight off his parents’ shoulders that lasted about two turns.

Civil war came to Nabol when he was seven. Seytev’s father was among the men rallied by Herald and marched on Ruatha, and though his death at the battle of Stony Brook Bridge made him a noble sacrifice among the people of Nabol, it also made him dead, and Seytev has yet to forgive the man for leaving like that. With so many Nabolese dead and the Hold itself thrown further into poverty than it had been before, and with her own husband gone, Seyra did what she could to make ends meet. She redoubled her work in the infirmary, working longer days and taking fewer rest hours, and stress and lack of sleep made her susceptible to her patients’ illnesses. When she caught a chest infection from a patient four turns after losing her husband, she couldn’t shake it.

She died when Seytev was eleven. He had no grandparents or family in the Hold to fall to. There was the crèche, of course, but it was…for children smaller than eleven, mostly. Seytev was, in theory, old enough that he could work, but his propensity to fall ill in bad weather meant working the fields was a terrible idea, and indoor work had long since been flooded by the widows of men lost at Stony Brook Bridge. He was shunted from place to place, occasionally running messages or helping with what he could, but there wasn’t much he was any good at. Being an urchin in a poor hold was terrible, and he began desperately looking for a way out.

The way ended up being dragons. Unfair though it was to pull children away from a Hold whose population was still struggling turns after the civil war had ended, Searchriders needed quarry for the clutches, and though they didn’t come as frequently as they had before the war, they came. Seytev presented himself starting only a few short months after his mother’s death, but he was too small and too frail to catch the eye of any rider. It took a full turn of showing up whenever the dragons arrived to get noticed – and even then, he caught a rider’s eye by accident. A young man, probably twice Seytev’s size, had seen an opportunity in the lineup of potential Candidates and taken advantage of the distracted attention to pick pockets, and Seytev jumped him.

The Searchriders ultimately pried them apart, and though Seytev was bloodied, he was proud to explain why he had attacked someone in line. One of the riders was impressed with his spirit, and after a cursory glance-over by his green, Seytev was deemed appropriate Search fodder. If anyone was worried about the fate of a scrawny twelve-turn-old in boot camp, they didn’t say a word. Realistically, they should have. Seytev might have been the appropriate age for Candidacy, but he was absolutely not the appropriate size or health for boot camp. He struggled in both combat lessons and literacy, and though he picked up the latter quickly enough, he struggled with the former just by dint of size. There was nothing Seytev could do to make himself bigger, and that made him look useless. Which made him a shoo-in for washing out.

He was aware from the beginning that he was one of the new recruits everyone expected to wash out immediately, but that only served to redouble his efforts. He was small, yes, but it didn’t mean he was useless. The betting itself made him surly and resentful, and when a group of older Candidates decided they were going to get their jollies mocking the little boy who thought he’d be a dragonrider, Seytev let his fists think for him. The boys were larger than him and significantly better at fighting, but Seytev was a little guy – which meant he fought not to win but to survive. It took the older boys by surprise, and he managed to hold his own until another boy his age showed up and took his side. By the time the Candidatemaster separated them, Seytev’s nose was bloodied and the other boy had a black eye, but they hadn’t lost. Not technically.

The other boy’s name was Bakarn, and he took Seytev under his wing almost immediately. Sey resented it a little, at first, but it was helpful to have a weyrbrat on his side, helping him out. Bakarn helped him with combat training, and in return, Seytev tried to catch him up on the less-exciting lessons, where the other boy had a tendency to completely stop listening as soon as he started getting bored. Before long they were thick as thieves, but Bakarn was sent to a squiremaster only a few months later, and Seytev was alone again. But the time had helped, and he had a reputation as a dirty fighter that mostly kept bullies at bay, so it could have been worse. Nonetheless, when most of the Candidates who had been Searched at the same time as him were graduating to Squiremasters, Seytev was held back in the hopes that he’d grow a bit more before he was sent out into the field.

It wasn’t until he was fourteen that he finally started getting it – and that was because it was roughly the time of his first proper growth-spurt. Over the course of only a month or so, he went from a head shorter than most boys his age to a few inches taller than almost half of them. And he didn’t stop growing. It meant he finally started getting what he had been taught: the theory and the training he had picked up in boot camp, good though it had been, had been completely useless to someone as undersized as Seytev had been. But when he started gaining height, he also gained confidence – and enough muscle mass that he could actually swing a sword without dropping it or otherwise embarrassing himself. He didn’t stop growing, either, and a season after that first major growth-spurt, he got the nod from the Candidatemaster.

Since then he has done the best he can to prove himself, growing up both mentally and physically in the process. Now he's tall, though not exactly big, and though he's fallen somewhat behind in his reading and arithmetic in favor of picking up all those combat skills he didn't learn as well as he could have during basic training.

[[Details to be filled in later once I get him an IC squiremaster.]]