Prince Ashenn Uvvalla
Ashenn has always been like his mother, maybe too much like his mother. He is somewhat disliked by his father who sees him as too much like his wife, impractical and emotional, not cut out for the life of the royal family.
Ashenn is kind and compassionate. I good elite soldier, but suffers from crippling anxiety. He tends to assume the best in strangers and sees himself in most people. He's good with a knife and even better at making friends. He struggles to find an unkind word for even the worst of people. He is extremely stealthy, and will always choose to incapacitate an enemy rather than kill them. He has a tendency to hand leadership roles and decision-making over to others, even if they are less qualified and he thinks they might be wrong. He usually assumes maybe they know something he doesn't.
Ashenn is none confrontational and avoids conflict at all costs. This sometimes leads to him holding grudges due to unresolved conflicts. He will walk away from an argument and stew on it for days. Ashenn will only argue with the people he loves most.
He does not care for his father the king and couldn't care less about royal life.
...
Ashenn was skinny as a boy, too skinny. Quick, light footedness, and grace made up for this growing up. Ashenn, being born of the second moon, has an extraordinary affinity for verbal magic. Ashenn was born with vertically slitted pupils, formally known as being born nocturnal. Traditionally he would be sent to a nocturnal school, but his mother wanted him to train in the same school as she did, have all the same opportunities, and not be isolated to night school. To keep up with his Nocturnal Unit training, she hired the best Nocturnal Soldier money could buy to privately train him.
When the time came, he decided to study illusion magic. It seemed to be the least violent and most illusive and strange.
A difficult magic to learn, and he spent a lot of his time studying it.
His private nocturnal teacher definitely had quite a bit of internalized self-religious loathing for snakes. He often made Ash feel lesser than others, ugly and evil. His tutor had a very bleak outlook on the world and was sure to emphasize all the very worst the world had to offer him as a snake. He would point out the nasty looks, the cutting words, and then tell him even those kind to him secretly despise him.
He had a hard time making friends as other nocturnals saw him as a snob who wouldn't come to their school and the kids at his school were often polite to the young prince, he was well-liked but made no effort to be his friend. Sometimes in conversations, kids would turn the conversation to his eyes and his experience as a snake rather than continuing the conversation he joined.
Outside of school, he hung out with his sister Avvailynn and their friend Jackle, who was everything Ash wasn't and treated him like anyone else.
At 16 Ash went through the second moon breaking. He hadn't known what it would be. All he knew was his mother sent him to a lot of swim lessons. At 14 he pieced together that the swim lessons and the breaking were related and began to have nightmares surrounding the breaking and swimming. He became thalassophobic. (the persistent fear of vast, deep, and often dark bodies of water).
This fear was solidified in the breaking. He has a PTSD-type reaction to seeing large bodies of water. He feels ill, Nausish, and becomes light-headed. He is now scared of swimming.
After he passed the breaking, he began field missions. Where he met people through Jackle. People outside his kingdom, who treated him with kindness and respect, and people in his kingdom who did the same. He became extremely compassionate for those who feel different or left out. He hates the tutor who tried to make him hate himself. On some levels, he can still feel those feelings of ugliness and inferiority. He tries to push them away and ignores it when people treat him badly.
He's not here to save the world or fight for a cause. He's just a guy trying to get by and enjoy his close friends along the way.
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