Zerren Verre Birthday & Age: Born on the 45th day of winter, 507 AV Gender: Male Race: Kelvic Physical Description: Human Form: Zerren, when human, stands at about five feet nine inches tall. He keeps his wiry black short in order to keep it manageable and out of his eyes. His pupils are slits, like those of his feline form, and shine up when exposed to intense light. He has a scar on the inside of his right arm from a burn he received earlier in life. Panther Form: When in his feline form, Zerren is a black leopard, commonly referred to as a panther. His panther form is approximately three feet tall, bigger than most panthers, but still just as lithe. He is completely black in color except for a small white streak on the inside of his right foreleg. Character Concept: Relationships: :
Zerren has a catlike personality that exposes itself in his general thoughts about life. He doesn't form attachments with others easily, because he considers most people too uninteresting to make it worth it. But when he does form an attachment with someone, whether it is friendship or something more, he is loyal and protective of that person in true Kelvic fashion.
But unlike most Kelvics, who normally want to protect and serve someone, Zerren actively refuses to become tied to one person. It might be because of the independence his cat form insists upon, or it might be grief for his dead bond mate, but he simply does not want to feel dependent on one person for anything. He will pay back any gift with something of equal value in his eyes, and will refuse any gifts that he doesn’t think he deserves or will be able to pay back. Zerren doesn’t consciously acknowledge his feeling on the matter in that form though. Instead, he feels the conflict and attributes it to a warring between his cat self and his human self. A fight between a feline’s desire for solitude against a person’s desire for company. The Sea: :
Zerren is terrified of the ocean and all other large bodies of water. His fear stems directly from his time as a slave aboard the trading ship, where his owner constantly threatened throwing Zerren into the ocean (and on more than one occasion followed through with the threat).
When Zerren looks at a large body of water, he becomes stressed and his thoughts turn bleak and desperate. Similarly when Zerren is stressed or depressed, his thoughts drift to the ocean and the life he was once forced to live there. Zerren’s is fairly sure that his fear of the water is connected to a fear of being a slave, but he doesn’t particularly want to think about either subject. So he avoids the docks and tries to steer his thoughts clear of any thoughts of ships and the sea. The former is much more successful than the latter. Early History: Zerren was born a slave. As soon as he was old enough to work, Zerren's owner's sold him to a trading ship's cook for manual labor and some extra help with actual cooking. The cook wasn't a pleasant man, he would beat Zerren when he didn't work as fast as the cook wished or whenever the men complained about their meals, both of which occurred frequently. As the ship was almost constantly at sea, the cook never collared Zerren to prevent him from changing form except when they stopped at a port, the threat of being tossed overboard was threat enough to keep Zerren in his human form. Then one day, when Zerran was about two years old, the ship pulled into port at Zeltiva, and the cook forgot to collar Zerran in his rush to get off the ship and find supplies for the galley. Zerran shifted forms and fled the ship, seeking refuge in an old cottage at the edge of town. Zerran didn't venture out of the cottage for three days. He would have stayed longer, but thirst and hunger drove him from his shelter. As he slowly exited the closet which had been his home for three days, he walked directly into cottages owner, just returned from his own voyage. Zerran fell to his knees and begged the man not to return him to the ship, he would have rather been killed on the spot than endure another day of the terror that was life under the cook. The man, who was truly kind at heart, took pity on Zerran and gave him food and shelter in exchange for conversation. After around a year of this, Zerran began to see the man as a father figure, and referred to him as such whenever the two spoke. The man, as Zerran later learned, had become wealthy through trading and still dabbled in the business, traveling from time to time and leaving Zerran to watch the cottage and prevent anymore individuals from entering while the man was gone. During those times, Zerran would occasionally go out hunting in his animal form, learning more and more about the mountain forests around Zeltiva and where not to go if one didn't want to be eaten alive. Always though, the man who Zerran had chosen as the father he never had would return within a month of his leaving and would stay for a few months, telling fantastic tales of where he had been and what he had seen. Then, near the presumed end of one of the man's trips, the Great Djed Storm struck Mizarah. Zerren was out in the forest hunting when the storm hit and ran into a nearby cave, hiding there as he had once hidden in the cottage at the outskirts of town. When the storm finally passed, Zerren quickly returned to the cottage (which had recieved damage, but nothing that couldn't be repaired) to wait for his surrogate father. But the man never came back, his ship had been destroyed at see during the djed storm and there had been no survivors. Zerren kept hope for a short while that the man would eventually return, but was forced to surrender his hope when he found the man's hunting knife washed up on shore one day. Now Zerren keeps mostly to himself in the cottage, hunting for food as a panther when possible and honing his skills at surviving in the wilderness, hoping that one day he won't need to return to the place that reminds him every moment of the father that he found and then lost. |