Angatuyok (Angat for short, Eskimo, "Rough") is a Smili, which are created by Spotty.
Species: Pompeii Smili (Only... no Pompeii in my story)
Personality: Quiet, wary, depressed, introverted, pained, haunted by his past.
Likes: Isolation, obsidian shards, raw emeralds, the cold, memories of being loved
Dislikes: Crowds, bright-colored gems, heat, pain, loss, females of any species
Background: Angat is a quiet Smili. He’s been betrayed far too much to socialize with any more than one creature- the Seer, Dalin, with whom he shares his cove in the side of The Low Mountain. He chooses to shy away and turn his back on any female that seeks Dalin’s counsel, and refuses to join him as he goes to the births of every animal to read their future.
Angat was born in the middle of the night to a dark-colored Smili couple, in a small nest settled between the volcanoes of the Schattenland and the closest mountain, sheltered by any volcanic eruption by huge boulders, and a short distance away from the nearest village. His father disappeared off of the face of the map during a hunt a few days after he was born, though he never knew it. He is a Pompeii Smili, though he prefers solitude, especially in his later years.
As a cub, Angat was loved. No, more than that, he was beloved. His mother doted on him constantly, purring as she nuzzled and cleaned him with her warm, rough tongue. Even without his father, he was treated as a prince, and given most anything he could possibly want- a happy home, warmth, food, love….
And then his mother disappeared.
He heard her scream. It echoed through the mountain range, and the three nearby volcanoes, then ended slowly and the last seconds of sound her voice made reverberated back into his ears. An orphan, he was taken in by one of his mother’s friends, a mope of an older Smili who had lost her own cub to the cold. Life with his stepmother was alright; he had to wake her up before he started suckling, and her milk wasn’t as satisfying as his mother’s, but she didn’t hate him, at least. When she weaned him, she gave him tough, half-rotted rabbit meat that some other animal had killed, too depressed to trap or hunt on her own.
As he got sicker and sicker from his decaying meals, the worse and worse she got until she didn’t wake up one morning. Venomous glands in his mouth had formed and opened up while he was suckling, and he had accidentally cut her nipple and poisoned her. This time, though, Angat was old enough to take care of himself. He moved closer to the village, where he could get some better-quality food from communal kills, and slowly regained his health.
Then someone caught his eye.
The dark male was strong. His fur rippled over his muscles, shining in the light of the sun. His teeth were long, and his jaws were powerful, framed by the most striking mask Angat had ever seen. He could always be found by the river at sunrise, sleeping in the old sycamore in the middle of the commune grounds at midday, and sitting on the highest cliff at sundown.
For months, Angat watched him, trying to understand his feelings for this wonder of a male, as well as trying to gain attention from him. He did his best to get as close to him as possible, offering him a large piece of meat during the feeding rush, gnawing on the most finely shaped bone for him to wear, and letting him drink at the best spot on the river, where an untapped gem deposit made the water sparkle with every color imaginable… to no avail. When Angat finally worked up the courage to confess his feelings, the beautiful creature declared he was already smitten with a female, and had no use for a male mate, ever- especially one that could kill him on accident-, and turned his back.
Devastated, Angat left the village. The one other Smili that he felt he could actually love didn’t want him. Why bother going back?
He wandered as the seasons changed, tail dragging the ground in the summer and feet floundering and fumbling in the snows of winter. He ate when he couldn’t handle starvation anymore, killing rabbits and deer as they slept, and hauling the latter’s carcasses on his back when there were remains that he could eat the next day. But it got to the point where there were no deer. The rabbits were gone. And so Angat gave up, collapsing onto his chest with a delirious groan, and passing out from hunger.
He woke up to water on his face, four blue hooflike paws standing in front of him, and a dreamlike voice sounding somewhere far above his head. The strange thing had a long, sinuous neck topped off with a rather squared-off head, jaws dripping with water, and a single poofy feather stuck into the fur on its forehead. Tiny, translucent wings fluttered over the blue fur with its tan patches, and a long tail, also wet, swooshed behind it. A dead vole, patches of fur missing, rested on its side in front of him, apparently a gift from the odd creature.
With a bit of help from the… thing… who was apparently called Dalin, he was able to start off again. However, every step he took was shadowed by Dalin’s, the feather on his head bouncing jauntily. As the weeks passed, it became obvious that he wasn’t coincidentally going in the same direction. When inquired, Angat learned of Dalin’s area of expertise, and that he was fated to follow him.
With the prospect of not being able to shake the strange creature before him without flat-out killing him, Angat decided to settle near a valley that had plenty of food to offer, unhappily accepting the other’s presence in the emerald-veined cove that he discovered in the side of The Low Mountain, the southernmost member of the North’s mountain range.
During their first winter, Angat found a beautiful shard of obsidian that had fallen out of a travelling Smili’s collection, and jammed it into his ear, reveling in the initial pain that echoed the hurt from the male Smili’s rejection. But after that first stab, the throbbing in his ear upset him to the point of misery. Dalin did his best to help, offering snow to pile on top of the piercing to numb the pain.
As spring returned, the pain faded away and Dalin’s presence was finally accepted. As strange as he was, Angat was more than amused by him, especially when he was allowed to fondly play with his feather when he was having an otherwise bad day, the “toy” distracting him from the pain of killing his own adoptive mother.
A couple of years into this arrangement, a small herd of mismatched creatures followed Dalin into their shared cove, running from a group of hyenas that were led by a jet-black horse with a white mane. Brought into the plot by Dalin, Angat was unwittingly named assassin for the group to kill some animal named “Shiva”. Confused by the visitors’ babble, he went to sleep, only to wake up in a vine sling hanging between the two largest ones, carried off into lands unknown during his unconsciousness.
When the group came upon Wildstrike, Nyx’s son, Angat tackled him and took him as a hostage. Though the others were wary of the idea that the foal would keep them from being trampled by the death horse’s white hooves, they weren’t too keen on finding themselves on the receiving end of Angat’s poisoned canines. His idea saved them, though, when Nyx found them, and the Smili was able to bargain with the devil for their lives.
He continued to be a boon for the group, an intimidating figure in the movement for peace, with his fangs and claws, and bright freshly-spilled blood-colored mask. He was the symbol of progress, because the remainder of the rebel band, a bunch of herbivore equines and a few small wolves, dogs, and felines, could never challenge Shiva and his hyenas and survive. But with Angat’s natural weapons, they had a chance. Angat, by all means, wasn’t fond with the fanfare that followed him, and wished for the peace of his cove more than once. But Dalin’s voice whispered in his head that this was his purpose, so he reluctantly dealt with it.
Angat is the only one of the group to have faced the spirit of V’Arikor, who is hailed as the God of Death, Pain, and Suffering, and lived. It is this monster that has made Shiva and Nyx into evil puppets for the purpose of taking over and devastating the North, though only Dalin knows his true reasons. During this encounter, his body nearly gave up on him under the cruel gaze and power of the evil idol, as the dragon attempted to bend his mind into giving into him and turning his body into a useless mass that V’Arikor could then overshadow and make his own, thereby giving him the venom and power gifted to Angat. Despite all of the pain he had suffered, and all of the self-loathing he had, the Smili’s mind ended up clinging with a more powerful bond than the dragon could break. Angat spent the next several weeks resting in the hammock that hung between Aibu and Muta, the largest two equines that had carried him from his cove in the first place, as they and the rest continued marching on.
Angat eventually, unsurprisingly, found himself in the select group that was to pass the battle and kill Shiva himself. With doubt on his mind, he charged right behind the leader of the group, the largest quagga, as they stampeded up the side of Shiva’s smoking volcano, the sharp edges of hardened aa lava slicing into their legs and, for those that had them, paws.
In Shiva’s cave, all anyone could see was flashes of teeth, claws, hooves and blood- lots of blood- in the darkness that consumed the home. Angat, mouth agape, slammed his canines into the brimstone-scented body, felt the poison drip from his teeth into the wound, and was met with an earsplitting yelp of pain and several gasps for air as airways constricted and muscles slowly grew stiff and hardened. Dragging the body out of the fight, Shiva’s sightless eyes gazed over his defeated followers.
Angat did not like how easy the kill was. He felt that it had to be harder, there had to be some challenge that he did not meet. It might have been hard of the small army, but killing Shiva was far too simple. No, there had to have been some other force that was guiding Shiva, or perhaps he didn’t kill the alpha wolf at all, but a decoy. And the next summer, when the hyenas returned with a vengeance, burning and killing everything in sight, he realized just how right he was.
And so, the story continues.
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Angat is a Smili betrayed by his instincts and body. As a “Pompeii” (Volcanic) Smili, his instincts tell him to be as close to others as possible, in a place where he can find love, a family, and a safe place he can always call home. However, his venomous fangs have alienated him, separating him from others, and marking him as doomed to be alone. Secretly, he wishes to settle down with a handsome fellow male, and adopt a cub to spoil like he so wishes his own adoptive mother did. However, in the North Smili village, homosexuality is frowned upon, and, if he were to accidentally bite his mate, he would lose the one dream he has clung so desperately to. His desire for isolation stems from this fear, and shadows his yearning for such things.
Though he is a Volcanic Smili and therefore is used to heat, he prefers the cold because it assures him of his isolation, where the only one he can hurt is himself. He rejects the body heat of others, even Dalin; He doesn’t want to think about losing his sole companion, even if he’s very much on the odd side. Dalin has become a source of stability for him, satisfying his need for socializing in times where he could not get any lonelier. He also helps with Angat’s pain, physical or mental, by either helping to numb or patch his wounds or taking his mind off of his depression.
Angat finds the darker-colored stones and ores the most pleasing; the shinier the metal or stone, the more of a “bright mood” feel he gets from it. With his depression, he can’t stand such “cheery” accents and jewelry, preferring to gaze and be surrounded by obsidian, especially with the sharp edges of the volcanic glass. He also admires dark rubies, though they are extremely rare and impractical, with the tiny splinters the stones must be cut into in order to supply the demand.
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Angat collapsed in the snow after days and days of wandering pointlessly through the blizzard, blind to his destination. Not that it really mattered to him; he would happily walk into the gaping maw of death if it so chose to open up for him. He was destined to be alone, anyway, why not die alone? It wasn’t like his presence was truly needed; if he was supposed to save, love, or cure anyone, there was always the large chance he’d accidentally kill them with his godforsaken venom.
He lay there for several hours, his eyes slowly shutting as his body’s processes became less and less. He could feel his heart slow, his blood starting to freeze despite his coat in the bitter cold. He began breathing in melted snow, the water in his lungs starting to solidify as his body heat gave way to hypothermia. His limbs started shivering against his will, trying to make up for the heat loss, as he consciously started to control his breathing, hoping to give his last breath some dignity, rather than being some pathetic, shaky final gasp. His eyes shut, and he hoped to see no more.
He heard soft crunches in front of him. Whatever it was, paused, then went around to his side and started picking him up. Delirious and weak, Angat was in no condition to fight back as he was carried away, translucent wings supporting him on the dark blue and tan- furred body. He was oblivious to Dalin’s cheerful smile, elated that he had found the one with the destiny he was most interested in.
Memories (Fail by me. xD)
Below by Wibeke, Darkened Glory, and Artibennoda (<3):
