ACT I. : LIKE A PARASITE IN BLOOM.
⁽²⁾ I WILL BEND FOR NO MAN, NO WOMAN, NO CHILD. I AM NO ONE'S DEVIL, MARTYR, OR SUBORDINATE. I AM A GOD. AND A GOD, I WILL BE. : @INPYRNO
ACT II. : A FITTING FATE FOR A DEMIGOD'S DEBUT.
⁽3⁾ PRYOR ⁽4⁾ VERSES ⁽5⁾ PROSE. ⁽6⁾ MYTH.
TELEPLAY BY TERROR77
CREATED BY VENDETTAPSDS.
ACT III. : SETTING DAYLIGHT, CALLING MIDNIGHT.
FULL NAME, LAMIA HYACINTH
CURRENT ALIASES, SKIRK
AGE, PHYSICALLY 31, ACTUALLY 500+
GENDER, AGENDER TRANSNEUTRAL
PRONOUNS, ANY / SHE / IT
SEXUALITY, AROACE LESBIAN
NATIONALITY, ABYSSAL, FORMERLY KHAENRI'AHN
ETHNICITY, POLISH, GREEK, SLAVIC
VISION, NONE, USES ABYSSAL ENERGY
WEAPON, SWORD
LANGUAGES, KHAENRI'AHN (GREEK?) + COMMON
LIKES, being alone / not having to talk with others, training and ever bettering herself, the feeling of pain, looking at the stars - the stars in the abyss are brighter than anything she saw in teyvat.
DISLIKES, having to explain herself or her actions to others, dealing with those she considers weaker than her, sitting still and relaxing
FEARS, not being strong enough. for what - she asks herself, and she knows not the answer, but the image of being bound and dying slowly haunts her nonetheless. it also fears losing the last memories it has of being human. it sees its past self as weak and helpless, and thus worthless, but it can't help itself for longing to feel warmth once more.
AFFILIATIONS,
HER MASTER, SURTALOGI. FORMERLY THE ROYAL GUARD OF KHAENRI'AH AND THE TWILIGHT SWORD.
STATUS,
ALIVE (?) - if to be alive is to be human, then skirk died a long time ago. her body is a husk she resides in, rotting slowly to abyssal corruption. her mind is intact, though she is not the same person she once was.
HABITS, making prolonged and uncomfortable eye contact, speaking in a flat monotone, obsessively sharpening and wiping its blade, escaping from social situations she thinks are unnecessary / worthless with abyssal portals
POSITIVE TRAITS / STRENGTHS,
ANALYTICAL. though some may call her cold and calculating, she reads others around her extremely well, both with their behaviors and opinions of her, and how much of a threat they pose. if she considers something or someone a threat, she will study them both for weaknesses and how she can learn from them. she also yearns for truth, setting her sights on comsoligical mysteries of the abyss and celestia.
CONFIDENT. skirk knows what she wants, and she believes herself capable and deserving of getting it. her body language reflects this as well as her disregard of other's views of her. she is not afraid to face challenges head-on and can rely on herself, not fearing failure.
DEVOTED. a loyal person by nature, skirk will always follow through on what she sets her mind to. she is constantly on a mission to better herself into the most efficient weapon in teyvat, never settling for what seems like "enough" and being extremely driven. she is also loyal to her views, ideals, and morals, as well as her master, and refuses even the thought of betraying him.
NEGATIVE TRAITS / WEAKNESSES,
JUDGEMENTAL. because of her skill in reading others and her rigitiy and cold demeanor, she categorizes others into mental boxes they most likely will not leave. she is much more concerned with facts and truth than she is with other's feelings and for her, actions don't just speak louder than words, they are the only things that speak, she can and will hold a grudge for centuries. she is a perfectionist and anyone she sees as below that ideal is not worlth wasting her time over.
CRUEL. a side effect from having to survive for so long alone, hardening herself to persist. she sees the worst in others and has no problem pulling that out of them for her own gain, manipulating and urging out anger and violence from people around her. she is emotionless most of the time, and doesn't necessarily enjoy the suffering others, but she has no qualms against it, and will find some excitement at disasters. she enjoys the feeling of being feared as much as she enjoys respect, because they are one in the same to her. she will purposely push others to their breaking points to see how much use she can get out of them.
NEGATIVE / NEUTRAL TRAITS,
HYPERVIGILANT. her constant readiness for battle has proven her a formidable adversary and an efficient (and alive) warrior, but at times it can border into paranoia. skirk does not know the concept of peace anymore, unable to rest and always sleeping with one eye open. she sees the worst in situations and people.
STRICT. skirk's regimen is unforgiving and rigid, both to her disciple and to her herself. she does not beat herself up over failure for its own sake or to pity herself, she simply believes pain is the best motivator to learn. she's a cold and tough teacher, but extremely effective in her work, and in her environment, who knows if she could have survived otherwise?
INFLEXIBLE. skirk has an innate need for structure and routine, often repeating the same tasks at the same time every day, or at least what could be called a day in the abyss. she has a hard time sympathizing with others because she is so set in her ways, and struggles a lot with change. however, this means that failure and setbacks will not cause her to give up even if her goals are impossible. in her words, "it is impossible to fail forever."
GENERAL DEPICTIONS OF CHARACTER APPEARANCE,
(headcanon based.) skirk is a tall, intimidating woman with pale, ashy skin characteristic of living with no sun for what to her perception of time has been thousands of years. her face is hard and slim, with a straight nose and deep-set crimson eyes having no light reflecing off of them. the lines in her face are deep, though she appears to be in her 30s, the bags beneath her eyes speak to eons of torment. her arms and legs are clouded with a gradient of darkness, stars and constellations criscrossing them pairing with her scars and muscle. her fingers end in claws even when she is not wearing her armor, and the sigil of the hilichurls worn on their masks is emblazoned on her forearms. her white hair is often dirty and tangled, she stopped bothering to keep it short a long time ago and lets it hang beneath her helmet, making her seem like a ghostly apparition. her armor itself is a mixture of bone and steel, vertebrae intermingling with metal spikes, and a tattered cape flows behind her like a flag. she also has a large shark tail with translucent skin fading to the same gradient as her arms.
The abyss is not forgiving to the weak and cowardly. Those without the drive or strength to tear anything apart in their path, the will to keep running with no light to guide their path, those who fear their blade — their body — being so stained with gore it will never wash clean again… those are the many that perish. The few that prosper are the monsters and the people that let themselves become monsters.Skirk is a woman of an iron will, a ruthless blade, and a vindictive fist. All her life she has known bloodshed and death, her only choice being to harden herself to the world - if she cares for nothing, she can lose nothing. She believes that her humanity makes her weak, yet she is terrified to give up the one thing that remains that is truly hers: her mind. As much as she tries to bury her personhood behind emotionless executions and heartless manipulation, beneath her visage she is a masochist. She adores the rush and feeling of pain, because it reminds her that she can indeed feel something. She will deliberately throw herself into danger and pushes herself beyond what she knows are her limits because she longs for the ache of fatigue, a loss of breath, a broken bone, anything to shed a tear for despite the epicene reek brought with it. It rarely finds her. Her face has been stone for a long, long time.Skirk cares not for interpersonal relationships unless they benefit her in some way, but if she requires company, she gets along best with people she sees as strong. She refuses to speak to the weak, despising what she perceives as wasting her time. This means any person who wishes to be acquainted with her must prove themself somehow, either in a battle, or if their power is strong enough that she can smell it on them. Even passing this barrier, Skirk is a deeply distant and cold person, choosing to keep to herself whenever she can and seldom speaking, sometimes walking away mid-conversation if it disinterests her. She has no interest in manners or politeness; she knows how it is customary to act, but believes most undeserving of it from her. The only person - or more accurately, the only god she listens to is her master and others like him that he trusts.Her moral code is tricky to figure out, but she follows it to the letter and refuses change like an immovable wall. She believes in her survival above all things and violence to be a tool, not something evil or immoral. She will end a life in an instant if it stands in her way and feels no guilt over it. The things she worships are power and discipline. She has no home, not anymore, so she has nothing to protect except her own life, and though she cares for her disciple's well-being, if something bad were to happen to him she would blame him and not herself. Her defense mechanism has always been anger and avoidance, even before she was swallowed by the abyss.
ACT IV. : PART OF DOUBLE VISION, A PRISON.
FIGURE (1) : CANONVERSE note that this is ALL HEADCANONS and personal theories / interpretations.
She had heard once that the sky shone blue because it reflected the sapphire hue of the ocean into its vast expanse. She was sure then, that the red sky and crimson moon were mirrors of the ocean of blood she ran through as the Nail drove further into the ground.Skirk was born to the name Hyacinth under a full moon, to a commoner family in the depths of Khaenri’ah. It had always been a troublesome child, getting itself lost in the artificial scenery created by khemia or starting catfights with other children who dared get in its way, so sending it to be trained as a guard was a natural choice. It found an immediate connection to the work, swinging a sword becoming a second nature easily and both her dedication to her training and her natural propensity for combat earned her respect among the ranks of the guards under the watchful gaze of Dainslief, who eventually promoted her to his squadron. She found herself feeling like a part of a family at the time, a band of brothers protecting the home they held dear.
She was stationed by the fortress’s entrance that night when she heard the first rumbling of disaster. It prefers not to think about what happened; the countless lives that were ripped away from the people it was supposed to protect, how she stared with crimson eyes filled with indignant flame at the gods who wiped her home from the face of the earth. It never ran, never turned its back, and perhaps that was its mistake. It fell with the rubble, screaming out curses as it bled that fell upon deaf divine ears.
When she awoke — days later, she thinks, but she has no way of being sure, everything was dark. Her sword, bloodstained and festering with dark energy lay beside her, and she rose with it, staring back at the pairs of eyes staring back at her in the void. For four years, she survived on her own with only her blade to her name, her name — she had forgotten it. Pieces of herself had begun to fall away. Her hands now resembled claws, her canines had fallen out ages ago only to regrow with sharp fangs, and when she caught a glimpse of her ghastly form in a reflection, she could no longer recognize what looked back.
Surtalogi’s appearance was not a grand one. It saw them in a dream, or rather heard, as they were a disembodied voice and refused to show their face, if they even had one. You who hath bravest the gods’ fury. That was what they called it, before telling it a deal: they would stabilize its curse and give it some of their power, in exchange for eternal servitude. Skirk had always feared death, and as less and less of its memories remained of what it once desired to protect, survival instincts were its main push to keep fighting through hell, and it didn’t know how much longer it could hold out on its own. It pushed out the word from its fanged, bloodied lips with a raspy whisper — yes.
When she awoke, days later, though time has no meaning in the abyss, her body was covered in stars. Her claws remained beneath, but her head felt clear of madness, and her strength leeched into her blade, setting it aflame in a blaze of azure splendor. From one cage to another, she would keep fighting for whatever forever meant.THE FOUL LEGACY — a technique she crafted herself drawing from Surtalogi’s power, abyssal corruption, and her curse as a Khaenri’ahn. Her form is much larger than Childe’s with more limbs and an all devouring maw with multiple rows of sharp teeth similar to a shark.
FIGURE (2) : MORTEM AMARE biology major. she wants to know the absolute limits of the human body to push past them herself. a morbid curiosity runs through her. PHYS — 11. DEX — 6. FAITH — 13.altered age for au — 22. year 1.
WARNINGS FOR DEATH AND CHILD NEGLECT. dearest lamia, how did it feel to drown? skirk was born in a fishing village in norway, an only child who seemed to bring death to everyone around her. it started with her mother — a painful but quick end after she was born, leaving what was remaining of its family in shambles. after a few years, the sea began to seem devoid of life, with fishing boats coming back with less and less harvest each day. an angry, starving populace could only look to the lonely child who searched for bones in the woods, her shelves lined with homemade fishing lures from the birds that flew into her window glass. her father was protective of her at first, wanting to hold on to the last trace of her mother he had left, hiding angry notes left on his door. lamia had started to wonder herself if she was cursed. was this retribution for the sins of her ancestors? she had done nothing to fate except continue to exist, and perhaps that nauseated her.
the last of her sins, at 15, was to make a friend. he fell ill soon after, for companionship was a byproduct of her hubris — leaving her home with no choice but to destroy her, before the rest of them fell to the devouring hands of fate. the last sight of the village she had called her home was peeking over her shoulder at the faint glow of lamplight cutting through the snow as she was led away into the wilderness by her father, clutching her hand with a blank look plastered over his despair.
she doesn’t remember much of the next few months. after being left in the wilderness, she didn’t fight, she didn’t run back to her father for fear of hurting him too. it was a miracle she survived for as long as she did, somehow she brought desolation to everyone but herself. something within her desperately burned with the refusal to die, even if she would forever be alone, she would be forever. it was prayer, in the end, that held her together for as long as she lasted.
she was found months later by a park ranger seeing the smoke from her campfire, and upon the discovery of her malnourished, dirty body, hair matted and clothes torn, he immediately drove her to the nearest hospital. she didn’t see him again, maybe he had sensed the danger emanating from her wolflike form — whatever happened to him, she was surrendered to an orphanage when she was deemed healthy enough to leave bedrest. she had lost two fingers and the tip of her nose to frostbite, but was otherwise physically able to recover, but mentally, there was nothing left of the girl she once was.
she devoted herself to study and strength, sparing no time to develop interpersonal relationships believing them not only fated to end in disaster, but saw them as a waste of her time. she left the orphanage as quickly as she legally could, hopping from place to place to bury herself in work — solitude and faith are all she is left with. the delusion in the back of her skull echoes that Her love may be able to fix the broken pieces,
ACT V. : IT'S DOOMSDAY -- SO YOU SAY.
XXXX (1) : RP SAMPLE It smelled blood.There was nothing in the abyss that did not reek of viscera and slaughter, no land untouched by the corpses of twisted, profane forms laid out to rot under the sunless sky. Violence was no stranger to her — it had become a home, the familiarity she would always return to. But even surrounded by carcasses sliced apart by her blade, she would never catch a whiff of the iron in the blood that ran through her veins, and the sight of red was foreign. The creatures of the abyss did not bleed, because they were not alive in the sense that an animal would be. They lacked a soul, so their bodies ran dry, barren on the inside, the only thing keeping them animated being their hate. Skirk no longer bled either, after refining itself into a machine of destruction and ire. So when it saw the trail of crimson across the swirling vortex of dimming stars, something sparked in its inner workings that had not moved for a long time. Like a hound it followed the scent, the warmth of the body, until it found it.A child. It couldn’t have been more than a teen, and at first she was sure it was dead from the pool of blood surrounding its scrawny form, and she knew she wasn’t the only one that had caught the scent of something new. But its chest rose and fell - shallow - but moving all the same, and she caught the small twitch of a finger out of the corner of her good eye. His long auburn hair was spread out in a fan under him, caked with red, clothes tattered and stained with the darkness, before finally his freckled face stirred gently and he opened his eyes. She was still. They were empty. Then she smelled it, over the metallic sting of the iron. The narwhal. Her blade summoned to her side, she knelt down, hesitant to lay her clawed hand on his skin. She hadn’t touched anything without the intent to kill in… how long now? His pupils moved to gaze at her, and his eyes quickly widened in fear at the imposing form leaning over him. She held up her hand and shot a quick glance over her shoulder. Another pair of eyes glistened back in the night, reflective like an animal’s in a lantern flame. She shook his shoulder, her claw accidentally ripping his shirt.She gripped his small hand in her own. “There’s no time. You have to start running.”
ACT VI. : SEA OF TRAGIC BEASTS.
HEADCANON DESIGN drawn by me.NAME DETAILS lamia is a character from greek myth, a daughter of poseidon who was once a queen of mortals. she had an affair with zeus, which caused the wrath of hera to take away her children’s lives, and in her grief, she tore out her own eyes. to me, this parallels how skirk was once a high ranking guard, but her home was taken from her by the wrath of the gods, and she fell into darkness - the abyss. the end of the story is when zeus, pitying her, turns her into a shark monster, giving her a purpose to devour the children of others as revenge. this is similar to surtalogi giving skirk a new purpose and a way to survive, though leaving her with only the ability to kill. as for the children, i like to view ajax as her child, with a bit of nuance and layers to it.ABOUT AJAX skirk is an unforgiving, tough-love master, but she does genuinely care about childe. she doesn’t care at all if he knows that or how she came across to him, as long as he obeys her, because if he obeys her, he survives. it desperately wants to avoid him viewing it as a mother, because it believes that would be a weakness for him. the less he has an emotional bond to her, the less he will want to throw his life away for her. when he was still a child in the abyss, she was extremely hard on him and would push him to his human limits and past them, not having much of a sense of boundaries with him. a few days after she had taken him in, she grabbed him by the hair, which was long and down his back at that point, and hacked it off with her sword with one swift movement. when he had started to tear up holding his matted length of honeyed brown hair in his hands, skirk told him to keep moving. “don’t let the monsters have anything to grab onto,” she said. every time he fainted from exhaustion she would force him back up. she had discovered a while ago that uncooked meat from monsters caused no harm and she didn’t have to bother with attracting more with the light and smoke from a fire, but raw meat from a fresh carcass is disgusting for anyone, especially a 14 year old child. she didn’t delight in any of his suffering, but she refused to pity him either, as she equated pity with weakness. it was simply a fact that if they didn’t keep moving, he would die. if ajax didn’t have enough energy to run and fight, he would die.
even though at first her protection and teaching of him was only because he had awakened the narwhal, she found herself starting to find a bit of emotion in her heart.OTHER she has the appetite of a 400 pound viking warrior and eats like a barbarian, ripping and tearing flesh off bones like a wild animal. if she ever by some miracle decided to return to the surface world, she could never even touch a vegetable.
it and rhinedottir were childhood crushes, but skirk had a terrible time trying to navigate its emotions. it still has fond feelings for rhine, but nothing like the absolute infatuation it felt as a teen.
one of the only ‘useless’ things she enjoys is music, she finds it calming and eases the infinite corrosion in her soul. she listened to the whale song from the all-devouring narwhal sometimes, and now that it is quelled after the traveler’s visit to fontaine, she almost misses it.