Xani Family

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His large form is cloaked in muted tones of brown and tan. Each of his legs and the tip of his tail are dipped in the darker hue as well as both of his ears. The rest of his fur is a pale taupe that is just on the borderline of being a light gray. In the right light it could certainly be mistaken as such. The color pales slightly toward his stomach and each time his main body color meets with the darker brown hues it fades in a gradient, keeping any of the transitions in colors from being a solid line. A lighter tan is splattered on the front of his shoulder blades, the front part of the top of his thighs, as well as along the top curve of his haunches on either side of his tail. These splatters form a very distinctive set of markings, all of them irregular in shape and size. They are a mark of his lineage, but it isn't the only ones. His face is dominated by a pale mask of the same tan color as the splatters, the marking forming the distinctive mask of the Xanilov line. It covers the bridge of his nose and comes up between his eyes to end in a smooth curve. The color stretches out to curve around the top of his eyes while the darker brown reappears to form a line along the bottom of his eye, completing the mask. With one last pointed mark of brown on the bridge of his nose, his interesting pelt is complete. His eyes are almost the exact same shade as the taupe that covers most of his form with just enough flecks of a slightly lighter shade that they are able to catch the light and shine gorgeously like new pennies.

As for his build, he stands at a slightly above average thirty-eight inches and weighs a slightly under average one hundred and fifty pounds. His form tends to lean more toward the lean side, but he is not scrawny by any means. He has very little fat on his body, instead being made up of almost entirely hardened muscle. He has a slight limp in his gait from an injury to his right foreleg as a pup, but since he has grown up with the injury he hardly notices it and it very rarely hinders him at all, although that might change as he grows older. His right foreleg also shows several deep scars near his knee.

Quote:Time and hardships have been the things to shape Nikolai's personality. He is inherently loyal and hard working and those are a few of the traits he has held onto through the years. Once he has sworn his loyalty he will never sway from that path unless he is given fair reason to believe his loyalty has been misplaced. He will put forth every effort into his tasks and will never fail to throw one hundred percent of himself into whatever project he has dedicated himself to.

Once upon a time he might have been a more gentle creature, but with his traumatic first year of life he was molded into a harder, more unforgiving form of himself. He is not unkind, but it can be hard to delve deeper than the outside layer of his personality. He tends to shut others out if only because it is easier than trying to get to know them and decide if he can trust him. He walks a very fine line with this, battling between the loyal, family-focused half of himself and this colder side. When he is dealing with wolves who share his blood he tends to trust them more easily than others.

Quote: The overthrow of the Xanilov family happened just as Nikolai was only a month or two from crossing the threshold of his first year. Perhaps if he hadn't been in the thick of it all, if he had come back from working on his hunting even an hour later than he had maybe he would have been able to escape without harm. However, that wasn't the case. He had just arrived back at the den he still shared with most of his immediate family, his catch hanging in his jaws, when the sound of paws and strange scents caught his attention. They attacked before he could respond. Everything after that is a blur, but when he regained consciousness he had deep wounds on the back of his neck, near his throat, and his right foreleg was very nearly torn in two. There were more shallow bites and cuts all over his body. Somehow he had kept from bleeding out and managed to drag himself away from the bloody scene to find help. Limping and barely able to stay on his feet, he traveled for hours to find a lone healer that cared for his wounds and nursed him back to health. It was almost a week after that when he finally found out what had happened and that he no longer had a home to go back to.

Months passed and he slowly began to regain the use of his leg and began to train and hunt again. He remained in hiding with the healer that had taken him in and treated him like her son, hoping that he would eventually come across some of his family members who were in hiding like himself so they could reunite and decide on a plan of action. One day he had gone to hunt for himself and his friend when a wolf from the family who had overthrown his spotted him. He was clearly larger than the other wolf and perhaps even more skilled in fighting so the wolf followed Nikolai's scent back to the den, planning to wait for him there and ambush him. Of course, finding the healer there put a kink in his plans. The fea wasn't skilled enough to fight him off and ended up being killed by the would-be assassin, but she didn't go down without a fight. When Nikolai returned he found his friend dead and the killer close to death. Feeling sickened by the fact that he had indirectly caused this senseless death, he dragged the killer out into the open and finished him off before going back to bury the healer with all the respect he could muster. Without her he might not have survived and he most certainly would have lost the use of his leg.

After that he vowed to never return to these lands again and left to find somewhere that he wouldn't have to remain in hiding to keep from endangering himself and others. That search brought him to Alacritis.