Sirius Valardin
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| Sirius Valardin | |
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| Social Rank | 3 |
| Fealty | Valardin |
| House | Valardin |
| Gender | Male |
| Age | 25 |
| Religion | Pantheon |
| Vocation | Noble |
| Height | tall |
| Hair Color | Black |
| Eye Color | Gray Haze |
| Skintone | Caucasian |
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Description
Sirius' height is decent to say the least, with a slightly avianesque bone structure that seems to build up to a hawkishly long physique, more slender than wide, stealing some of his perceived size, it playing trade-off with an air of bookishness. He's threatening emaciation, but not quite; he's skinny, but of sturdy constitution, his genetical structure being at constant odds with his perchance for unintentional starvation that make the Sirius of today.
His eyes appear small and narrow beneath the ridge of his brow, gray and hazy to view that pair with a thick swatch of dark, bushy lashes. His jaw's line is sturdy and long- his nose's bridge long and high, defined sweepingly as if sculpted. His lips are thin, faded in pinkish color, and prone to raggedness product of both the heat and cold.
Personality
Honest, open, transparent - adjectives one could use to describe the Sirius of today, but that's all duress and education; that's what maturation and years of disciplined living instills in one, but isn't all that which Sirius represents.
Sirius, too, is bold. Ethically speaking--accountable to the boldness, decisive and communicative to his wants, he is. There's a drive to his person, a desire to reach out and grasp the intangible to make it tangible. It's reflected in his method of leadership--he understands the Compact is fair and beautiful because everyone finds their place. His is to lead.
Deeply principled in Oathlander ways: honor, chivalry, and loyalty are core tenets on which he acts in his still growing and fleshing set of morals. It's difficult for him to find humor in things, and the analytic method he chooses to tackle most of life's hardships oft makes him seem cold, stuffy. Detached.
In spite of this, he's rarely unempathetic to the plight of others and isn't shy of activism to see shared goals through to the end. Still, his soft-spoken ways belie a nostalgic, thinking boy with airs of melancholy just trying to find his way in a constantly shifting world he feels is leaving Oathlanders behind.
Background
Young Sirius came to the world a whining, petulant child since the moment his head peaked out of his mother's hindquarters, eyes as open as babes could have them. Born into a familial circle of economical means and connections, his begetter arranged for him ostentatious tutors in all sciences of man found worthy of the Oathlands; martial, physics, mathematics, theology, languages, geometry. History. Despite the wide selection, Sirius found himself the most attracted to the sword.
As he grew into early youth, issues became more apparent in his physique. His feet looked clubbed inwards, and he lacked the physical capacity to match the speed and dexterity of contemporaries, bringing out an ire and impatience in his father fattened only by the shame in the possibility of his boy being a cripple. And he was, in fact, crippled. It's what a particularly crude Sister of Lagoma informed him after witnessing him pushing the child too hard.
Sadly for her, Lord Alberich Valardin was a stubborn man. As singular, unsettling tales were suggested amongst his keep that his son wouldn't amount to knighthood, Alberich exhausted his resources in finding experts in matters of healing to exhume the vile crippledness from his boy. He soon had him wear all sorts of absurd apparatuses, from harnesses to wooden chassis around the ankles, ropes that'd pull away at every particularly bent toe to force his feet in place. It was a painful existence, but some of that stubbornness had been inherited by Sirius, who bent all efforts in pleasing his father.
Marked with the stigmata of disability, it was only reasonable that Sirius became retiring to the public eye. Sequestered to the dusty, and worn existence of his father's decaying library, he took it upon himself to be the bailiff that cared for every book, and while children played with swords and horses he, too, played with swords and horses. Only that his were whittled from wood, and placed on boards knapped from slate, where he borrowed scenarios of war and conflicts of the past to re-envision and reenact them within his capabilities once he derived them from books. Every soldier, every horse; every general, every officer, given a face and purpose. He was particular towards cavalry.
Eventually, time gave way to a young man healed of his physical impediments. As fate would have it, those ropes and pulleys that had kept his feet drastically in place had, in fact, healed his club-footed appendages, just not as quick as his father would've wanted. He had forgotten that knights wield swords and not pens; that they couch lances, and not books. So inadvertently, Alberich had let his son become a scholar of war, not a soldier that fights in one.
All his life, Sirius could feel an insistent gnawing in the back of his mind. A strange yearning, a thirst for more he could neither numb, nor sate, and it culminated with a self-effacing exodus to Arx. To visit the fabled Academy of War, and further his desire to understand conflict beyond the station of a soldier, or knight.
