[Dire] Baphomet

OOC
Name: Rogue
Years RPing: we are legion
Slot Used: Taking Valdis' slot & speciality modifier
How You Found Us: does this unit have a soul?

General
Name: Baphomet
Birthday: 13th October 2017
Gender: Male
Species: Dire

Physical
Height: 44 inches
Weight: 174 pounds
Coat Color: Black, grey, white
Eye Color: Red
Purchased Items: Unnatural eye colour, +3 inches, bat companion, small unnatural marking
Inherited Items: N/A
Litter: N/A
Health Issues: Insomnia, hallucinations, night terrors, sleepwalking, facial scarification
Other Information: N/A

Mental
Mental Stability: Insane
History: Before there were words, there were dreams. Before thoughts, visions. Baphomet knew the otherworldly presence of darkness before he even knew how to walk, hunt, love. It filled all the gaping fissures in his developing consciousness that ought to have been sealed by a parent’s love, and it oozed from his splintered and putrid heart before anyone could notice the boy’s affliction.

The obsidian brute was born to a pair of unwitting and insignificant wolves in the foothills of central Anikira alongside a brother, Beelzebub, on a russet-leaved autumn day. If his parents had counted days of the week, they would have known that their litter was born Friday the 13th of October, an unforgivingly cold day, a day that the mated Dire wolves would come to curse rather than celebrate.

As a pup, Baphomet was quiet and unassuming, distracted by the oneiric spectres that clouded his waking vision. Hordes of dark shapes crowded the corners of his sight, hellhounds followed him wherever he went. Baphomet was forged in fear. He knew the existential terror provoked by his nightmares before any other emotion, and learned early in life that there were very few things from which his parents could protect him. They were vapid, pathetic creatures who cooed and coddled. Baphomet had no interest in them, but his sharp indifference was nothing compared to his brother’s violence.

Six moons into their life, Beelzebub attacked their father. On a warm spring night, when the den was hot and close, Baphomet opened an eye to see his brother hovering silently over their father’s slumbering form. Unmoving and feigning sleep, his glinting red eye watched curiously. The attempt on his life was doomed to fail, but Baphomet had no interest in intervening. Sure enough, their father awoke when Beelzebub misstepped, and his rage was most terrible. The madness that unfurled did not touch Baphomet, who lay quite still at the edge of the den, fascinated by the bloodbath and by the events that led up to it.

As he’d lain there, Baphomet noticed the way that dark shapes seemed to coalesce around Beelzebub, circling around and through him: the true nature of his evil heart, visible, it seemed, only to his brother. As their father sunk his teeth in Beelzebub and their mother pleaded for his life, Baphomet watched the shapes in the darkness and felt content.

Months later, another night: Baphomet awakes to find his brother attempting to remove his own limb. Both eyes opened this time, like twin blood moons, and Baphomet observed his brother’s actions again. Sensing his consciousness, Beelzebub called to him, begged him to help him sever the limb, and seeing that his brother could not do it alone, Baphomet obliged. He did not ask why nor did he particularly care. In his brother, he saw an impulsive and reckless nature that he could not fathom. He saw, too, a boy who would be the author of his own demise, and Baphomet did not want him to die. Why, he could not say; all he could say for sure was that they were two halves of a whole and Baphomet would find nobody half as interesting to observe as Beelzebub.

When their mother awoke to the sight, she could not bear to look upon the demons she had spawned a second longer, and she fled their den, leaving them to their own devices. Baphomet did not miss her. On the morning after she left, Baphomet took his brother out into the light and asked him to carve lines into his face in the shape of a symbol that haunted him day and night. Make the cuts deep, Baphomet said. They must stay with me forever. Beelzebub did as his brother asked, and Baphomet sat as still as a statue throughout the process, blood dripping down his maw and staining the dusty dirt beneath them.

Baphomet could have attempted the pattern himself, but he recognised by now that his brother was the participator, and he the observer. Baphomet would never inflict his will upon the world as his brother would. Baphomet was the one who would bear witness. Baphomet was the one who would judge.

Soon after, before Baphomet's gruesome wounds had healed, Beezlebub wandered from the den on his own. When Baphomet next saw his brother, Beelzebub could not return his gaze. Beelzebub had blinded himself in a fit of madness and the blood poured from his gored eyes. It fell to Baphomet to tend to his wounds, and the brute did so wordlessly, and continued to do so wordlessly each day.

The two set off on their own, no longer bound to the den in which they were born, Beelzebub forging a blazing trail, Baphomet standing watch over his shoulder.

On a chilly autumn evening, a full twelve moons since their birth, a crawling, wretched, winged creature found its way into the brothers' den. Alone and defenceless, it only screeched at Baphomet, who watched it. It looked like something from one of his dreamscapes, a loathsome animal that looked to him for answers. The brute nursed it's broken wing as he had nursed his brother's injuries, and once it could speak, it announced that its name was Crowley and that it wished to stay and serve him.

Baphomet only nodded, and watched, and the brothers continued on their endless journey, blanketed by Crowley's long, dark shadow.

Personality: Baphomet is quiet and disquieting. The brute is one with the shadows to which his form often clings; dark and shifting and eerie. His wraithlike movement is matched by a phantasmic temperament and an acute perception. Baphomet is an observer of the world, a witness to the darkness that he can see quite literally swarming and pulsating from everything he encounters. Shadowy shapes and creatures haunt both his waking and sleeping moments, leaving him in a state of perpetual limbo. It’s rare for the brute to sleep, plagued as he is by evil visions, and he is prone to sleepwalking on the occasions he does manage to slip into a fitful slumber. The barrier between consciousness and unconsciousness is thinner for Baphomet than it is for most. All is a dream.

Baphomet speaks in statements, if at all. Wringing so much as a syllable from the enormous obsidian beast is difficult at the best of times. He is content to let Beelzebub speak on his behalf when accepting offers or starting fights, though it is almost always Baphomet who ends them. On occasion, the brute will bark a command to Crowley, who has wormed his way into Baphomet's service, but at his core, he is not particularly controlling. Baphomet acts as master because it is expected of him; because it is a role he has been forced to fill. He protects his brother for the same reason: because he must.

The brute is strong and capable, but has no chaotic impulse to rape and ravage his way across the continent as some do. There is undoubtedly a deep and dark violence in his heart, but it only rears its ugly head from time to time. Perhaps the thing that drives Baphomet, truly drives him, is the acrid, festering fear into which he was born and forced to endure. The brute knows fear better than he knows himself, knows the way it worms and burrows into the hearts of alpha and omega alike, knows it like a mirror. As such, he has an uncanny ability to sense it in others and a fascination with how it manifests. Dreams and nightmares hold a particular sway over his psyche, and he believes he can ordain meaning from them like no other creature on earth.

Image:

Source: Bine G.

Name: Crowley
Gender: Male
Species: Golden-capped fruit bat
Weight: 2.7 pounds
Wingspan: 62 inches

Image:

Source: Andrew Mercer