Featherstone
Fleet-fingered Father of Falcons
About MeHeya! The name is Featherstone—or, if you're the more familiar sort, Feather or Fea (he/him). I'm an rper of many years, and I'm hoping to find someone who's interested in writing some good old-fashioned modern fantasy with monster hunters and criminal underworlds and all sorts of needless drama. But! Before I get into that, allow me to introduce myself properly. Outside of the rp world, I'm an ornithology enthusiast and biology undergrad who works with raptors (I really like birds). I've got a dog, a couple rats, and a bird at home, and I occupy the time I'm not spending studying or training critters with hiking, hunting, and writing. Below, you can skim through my introductory bullet points about what you can expect from my end in an rp!
The Bulletpoint Introduction: i.e., What You Can Expect From Me, In So Many Words
◆ Very active; typically daily replies, love rapid-fire. I do have health issues and there will be periods where I spoof, but I will be back!
◆ Lazy literate/advanced literate, depending on my muse and energy level that day
◆ I prefer to keep rp's on-site but have a strong preference for doing OOC on Discord
◆ Prefer PM's or private threads, but am flexible. I've done Discord or Google Docs as well.
◆ Looking for something long-term and collaborative
◆ Flexible post lengths! Big into quality > quantity. I average around 500 words, but can go below 200 or above 5k. It's all contextual!
◆ Love OOC and collaboration
◆ Worldbuilding
◆ LGBTQ+ and platonic pairings
◆ Pacific timezone
◆ Am over 21
My Do's
✓ Dark themes
✓ Fade-to-black / site rules
✓ OOC & collaboration
✓ Discord OOC
✓ LGBTQ+
✓ Platonic or romantic
✓ Rapid fire
✓ Slow burn. Very. Slow. Burn.
✓ PM's or private (workshop) threads
✓ WORLDBUILDING.
✓ Side characters
✓ Dark/mature themes (not NSFW)
My Don't's
✗ Anything against site rules
✗ Anything non-consensual between PC's, even off screen
✗ Pointless/glorified violence/gore/torture
✗ Lack of OOC discussion
✗ Being heckled for posts
✗ Doubling (I do love a large cast of side characters, though!)
✗ Assigned power dynamics
Sunset over Zenith was a brilliant, blazing thing, cast off windows of urban expanse like a half-million shards of a shattered mirror. It painted a field of monotonous grey-and-gunmetal blinding shades of blood-red and carnelian and flaxen gold, then descended into muted lavender, silver, grey, blue. The night sky that rose was clouded by city lights—and in an instant, the half-hour magic that came once in the morning and once in the evening was banished.
It was comforting to imagine, enclosed in darkness as Antiope was now. The air was stagnant and permeated with a stale particulate miasma. It clung to the inside of her chest in a thin, abrasive coat she felt when she breathed. Cave walls comprised of rocky, jagged edges loomed from every angle, and the floor was scattered with uneven rubble that lay like caltrops in the dark. What had once been an exit—a narrow, claustrophobic exit rife with switchbacks and lethal precipices, but an exit nonetheless—was now little more than a sunken, impenetrable wall of boulders and gravel.
She lay still, breathing blindly into the black. It was a matter of minutes, of hours, of moments inconceivably minute against the eons of geologic time that surrounded her. Her body froze at first, succumbing to instinctual paralysis for fear that any motion might dislodge the cavern’s delicate structural balance. Then her expiration trembled, coursing down through her chest, her hands, heart still resounding in her ears and echoing into the sacrosanct silence of the underground. She closed her eyes. She recalled, in fragments, how her body was her own. How the heartbeat kicking arrhythmically against her sternum belonged to this mind. Her mind. How the familiar exoskeleton of her mechsuit meant she was unharmed, and that when she opened her eyes, she could make out a dim, orange dot which meant that her display was on. That her eyes were working. That they, too, were her own.
That she was alive.
She reached above herself to find the ceiling, ahead to find a wall, and touched only air. Found her feet. She felt her visor when she pushed it up, and was still as blind as she had been before—it took her repeating the motion twice more before she believed herself that she had done anything at all, and a third because she was the sort to make certain.
Her display noted, in the dot-dash shorthand typical of the Solêsian military, that she still had most of her battery capacity, and her armor had escaped mostly unharmed. She could feel resistance in the joints of its right side—her shoulder, her lower leg—but insofar as she could decipher, there was no lethal danger. Not yet. The air, according to what she hoped wasn’t a malfunctioning spectrophotometer, was breathable. The temperature was warm and tolerable. She was connected to the network, albeit only barely. Her rations would last her weeks, albeit uncomfortably, and hypothetically the rest of the path was structurally sound. So unless something else went wrong—horribly wrong—she would survive long enough to reach Nadir. If the path forward was traversable.
She activated the lights of her primary helmet and her subterranean prison came into dim, blurry focus. The patterns of clouded, arching shadows-and-light were obfuscated by an oppressive blanket of dust. Her fingertips disappeared when fully extended before her. So, slowly, carefully, she began to pick her way across the space, following the wall at her right. The chamber widened first, then became tighter, narrower, lower.
The bowels of the earth twisted in labyrinthine, near-unnavigable corridors. Queer markings decorated intersections here or there—shapes and patterns carved into the rock by skilled hands. She had no doubt the foreign array of geometric signs indicated directions and dangers to those who could read them, but these were so far removed from their Solêsian origins that Antiope herself could not begin to discern their true meaning. Somewhere, where the atmosphere was pregnant with millions of mildew-scented spores, a blue light began to flash from one of her peripheral monitors.
A series of flickers was followed by darkness. Then, slowly, an orange glow waxed and high-pitched click sounded near her ear. The network was lost. No one above would find her, now. They could not see through her mechsuit’s eyes to discern her specific location, nor use the Mark’s tracking capabilities. They were subject to complete, certain, indomitable blindness.
On the edge of a chasm of indefinite depth and wider than she was shoulder-to-shoulder, she stopped. Stared into the abyss behind her to behold the dancing flames her brother so frequently spoke of. She saw nothing, just shades of tar and pitch, and the dust that drifted like candle-ash around her.
Antiope was alone. Unseen. Unheard. Her voice was good as silence, her intentions irrelevant but for their meaning to herself, her actions invisible to anything but her own memory. In the midst of the encroaching fear, building from controlled trepidation to conscious terror, she released a breath she had been holding for fifteen years.
Behind her, there was nothing. No Cassian. No Agamemnon. Not Idalia’s ghost, not Akira’s silent pleas, not the risk of impending damnation or another day of staying her own execution at a betrayer’s hand. No savior. No sun.
The sound of laughter began low in her chest. A tense chuckle that cracked when it began to crescendo, mirthful and mournful and relieved and reveling. It rang eerily from the cavern walls. It echoed back to her in a discordant chorus sung off of soulless stone. It rose, and fell, and descended once more into the serene embrace of yawning oblivion.
Shaking her head, chest still bubbling with stifled sound, she stepped over the chasm to descend deeper into the black.
Words weren't exchanged where they were unnecessary. Thus, it was in silence that the first leg of their shared exodus began, punctuated by the rhythmic thudding of hooves and songbirds' distant cries.
Summer heat hung heavily over the ocean of grass, at first a veil and then a wall of arid, smokeless, atmospheric scorching. The dust and the warmth coated one's throat and made skin weep. No matter how little time passed, it was too much between one drying stream and the next, where the horses had to be held back from drinking too quickly. T remained consistently upstream of his inhuman companion and, except for a few words denoting when breaks would be, he respected their unspoken covenant of quietude.
They broke camp underneath a blue evening twilight. Two canvas tents stuck out of waist- and shoulder-high golden blades, surrounding a modest campfire over which he set a tin of beans and a few chunks of canned meat. Dante—T's half-wild, blond dog—lay next to his feet whilst warily eyeing their nonhuman companion. T's thoughts were difficult to decipher, if only because he was out of practice communicating anything to another almost-person with his face, so accustomed to traveling with Dante as his only company.
Duval. Duval, Duval, Duval. Was Asher worth it? He'd exhausted every other lead, except this one. Hunted down every stray member and former member he could find, only to realize someone else had gotten there first. He'd asked every contact. Paid every informant. And they all lead back here: a djinn worth only a fraction of all this trouble in gold, who almost certainly bided his time until driving a knife in that sensitive spot between the jaw and the throat. He'd wanted Blackmane for decades, now. Been foiled, thrown off, beaten, damned at every turn.
Yes; Asher was worth it. Asher winning this bizarre, dangerous little dance was worth it, if it meant a shot at Blackmane, Blackmane who T fully intended on killing last. He'd know the feel of fire in his fur, first, the acrid burn of seared flesh and the piercing, chest-rending screams of everyone he ran with, raised, protected, loved. He'd muzzle him, tie him down with chains of silver, pull out each tooth one at a time, first his fangs and then moving back. He'd let him think he'd be able to escape his torment by choking on his own blood, only to save him, to listen to him beg—beg—for mercy for himself, for his comrades. He wanted there to be tears in that wolf's eyes before he gouged them out. He wanted him to have every inch of his body sparking with agony as he peeled away the beast's skin, finally lapsing in pain so extraordinary, so acute, he could no longer thrash nor scream. But his body, whole, regenerative, would not let him die so easily.
That ranch had been an execution. Swift, brutal, efficient. Duval would get no such consideration.
"How many of them was there when you ran with 'em?" T asked, stirring the pot with one hand.
Here's a sample lore doc for a world I've been working on and here's a character sheet for the same world.
