Profile
A bird-fancier, a shapeshifter, and a storyteller. Very old, but still youthful.
Over eight feet tall. He has a mane of hair along his spine and back, and five horse-style tails of hair. Feathers grow on his head alongside hair. His feet are disproportionately huge compared to the rest of his body, and he tends to wear metallic augmentations on his otherwise plain fingers. He's hairy, but...selectively.
Are those stripes new, or natural markings? Who knows. I certainly don't.
Xamney wasn't born with those wings. Or the talons, or the tails, or the marks on his face, and he's pretty sure his hair used to be black and he wasn't always so selectively hairless. He is extensively Lightcrept, and only gets odder the more he drinks.
Oh! Well, alright, I suppose I do have time for a story.
Some time ago...quite some time ago, now that I think about it, and yet somehow it still feels so recent...I was a simple eyan who kept birds and told stories, and granted I still do both, but I am no longer a simple eyan.
One day, I followed a pair of rather unusual cliff-dwellers up, up, up a mountain. I meant to find their nest, study them, maybe take an egg or two. Instead, I became utterly distracted by this entrancing light far below. Against my better judgement, I followed it, half-scrambling half-falling down the other side of the mountain and slipping with a cacophanous, echoing splash into a bay below. It was huge and almost perfectly circular, a tiny puddle of ocean almost completely closed off by a crescent of high, rocky ridges. They opened up into a cave, a great glowing green maw. The colours shifted hue and danced like fire.
I couldn't help myself. I swam into the cave, where I found an enormous green pool of water. There was light below the surface, somewhere deep, for the pool ran very deep indeed. Definitely too deep for me to dive into. I hefted myself up onto a rock but it was too late. I'd disturbed the water.
At the time, I looked on with a mixed sensation of terror and wonder as the glowing green water rose up into the air, twisting and solidfying as it did so. A dark mask formed with two pools of light peering out of it like eyes. Fluid oozed from behind it, liquid dripping and solidfying into flowing, cracked shapes. It took on the vague form of a wolf, going so far as to create a lower jaw for itself. Some of its joints bent the wrong way, and its limbs and body flowed down too long.
It introduced itself to me, at length. It has many names, it told me, but is known best by its oldest: The Creeping Light.
I almost miss the fear I felt at the time. I know the Creeping Light like an old friend now, and while I still marvel at what it can do, my fear and awe are long gone, replaced by a comfortable familarity.
The living liquid promised that it could give me not just what I desire, but what I need. In exchange, I would promise to watch over it - not as guardian but as passive observer, chronicler, and story-teller - for so long as it lived in that very cave I found it in.
That was....I'm not sure how long ago. My sense of time has grown stretched, warped, and watered-down by its own passing.
As has my body.
The Creeping Light encouraged me to drink of the pool of greenish water it had risen from. I'd been hesitant, but I drank.
Every time I visit, I drink a little more, and over time, I change more.
What you see now is the result of countless years of subtle gifts from the Light. These wings? I certainly wasn't born with them. Nor this mane along my back, nor my five tails - which started as one, and not so long. The feathers on my head? Those are relatively new. I'm not sure what they will become. They're more visible in my lupine form, less hidden by the great shock of hair that otherwise adorns my head. But, the wings began similarly to those feathers, as did the mane and tails and the scales on my hands and feet.
They certainly make it easier to visit an old friend who lives in a sea-cave accessible only by clifftop. Though I'm very large and heavy, I can follow my birds more closely now; and they seem to have a new affinity for me. An understanding of me, now that I have wings and feathers as they do.
