Jackal: 
Sleek black fur overall, though the tips of sharply pointed ears are fringed in tawny-gold, as is the tip of her tail. Delicately small paws are made for climbing and traversing unstable terrain, a narrow snout and angular bone structure quickly differentiating this canid from your average wolf, or even a domesticated dog of similar stature.
Human:
Smooth caramel skin eases over delicate bones, unblemished save for a tiny, nearly-imperceptible scar no wider than a sewing needle's point, roughly half an inch long, beneath her right eye. A teenager's face, still sharpening towards maturity, off-set by the clarion cutthroat looking out from behind silver eyes pale enough to seem an iridescent white in sunlight. Closer inspection reveals only the faintest tint of color about the irises. Hair in shades of sable so dark that hints of cobalt riddle their lengths, often plaited neatly back from her face, but further interrogation by daylight reveals a wisp, here and there, of spun gold within that twisting darkness. She is petite, even by human standards, just the slip of a girl craft of shadow and sand.
[under construction.]
The true origins of Cyrah Anubis remain something of a mystery, locked tightly away in her memory and unshared. Who her parents might have been, where her mother threw her, and how she came tumbling over the dunes and into Ahnatep – these are the things she keeps close, keeps hidden, as surely as she hides her face from interested eyes. Few have ever seen the girl hidden inside the Jackal – and fewer yet have lived to describe her.
All that is precisely known comes on a shift of whispers, occasionally caught on a fetid desert wind, the hissed conjecture that one of Dira's jackals stalks the alleyways and deepening shadows of Ahnatep in the evening, killing her sons and daughters to maintain balance. In actuality, Cyrah kills them for money.
Her services come at a high price, but being both scavenger and dual-natured, her work is exquisitely precise. Nary a drop of blood or scab of flesh is ever left behind, and those that know enough to wonder often rightly presume that it's because she prefers to lick her plate.
She holds no allegiances and picks no sides, finds the noble houses of Ahnatep to be rife enough with scheming and bad blood to keep her purse heavy and her belly full. Those that have made use of her services know only to ask for Anubis, and they never see her human face. Might pass her on the streets of the city and think her beautiful for all their ignorance.
They do say, though, that she picks her contracts very carefully, and never accepts a target that might upset the delicate construction of her personal morality. She is as devoted to Dira's balance as one might expect, and carefully manages her work so that her personal life-ledger remains undisturbed. Perhaps she truly is an incarnation of one of Dira's harbinger jackals – or perhaps she simply longs to be. |
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