Rane Shani
Rane Shani
Rane was into the Head Mistwalker Family. As any child in the family, he had no siblings, and was named after a mythological figure (in has case, a woman who died to save her loved one, and was granted new life for her sacrifice.) All his life, he felt burdened by the expectation to essentially serve as the king of the Seers and to carry on the family legacy of trying to reunite the old system of magic that had once been fractured in the war. He once described himself as a stone being worn away by the tide--his own wants and needs did not matter, as long as he lived up to the demand of saving the world, a feat which no one in his family had yet been able to accomplish.
As his ancestors before him, Rane studied a secondary magical form, choosing to study among the Werewolves. Though he struggled at first with trying to force a physical change, he excelled under the tutelage of Judith. He found solace in hunting as a wolf, and like his teacher, would sometimes spend several days in his new form.
But duty always called back to him, and Rane knew he had to return to the Seer community to take on the role of Head Mistwalker and to bear and heir, though he had no desire to pass on his burden to someone else. Though there was no romantic love between them, Rane asked his teacher, Judith to marry him, hoping that their shared love of shifting would bring him some respite. Unfortunately, the marriage only made them both feel chained, and over time, their relationship deteriorated.
Judith became obsessed with the notion that Rane's family had the secret to the gate between the land of the dead and the land of the living, and hoped she could use this power to stop evil spirits, as all werewolves are tasked to do. This only became worse when she developed early onset dementia, and Rane was shaken when he found her stalking a young seer one night, clueless as to what she was doing. In a moment of lucidity, Judith agreed to death by assisted suicide, to ensure she would not hurt anyone in the future, and Rane sank further into despair, beliving he had failed his family, his community, and the world. His only hope was in his daughter, Florine. Though he had raised her to carry on the family's duty, he always had a secret hope that she might find a way to break the ancestral yolk he had been confined by. He had even given her a name unassociated with mythology--his own small act of rebellion--in the hope that she might find a way out when he could not.
Comments