SA| Esin| She/Her/They/Them| Mullah

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[ G E N E R A L ]

 ✦ name ||  Esin, Essie to friends!

 ✦ age ||  18

 ✦ gender ||  Genderfluid, nonbinary female

 ✦ height ||  15.4 hands

 ✦ breed resemblance ||  Arabian/Akhal-Teke cross, inherited her mother’s Marwari ears.

 ✦ blessings || Teleportation (born blessed) 

 ✦ drive ||  seeking knowledge, and spreading Alya’s love.

 ✦ alignment ||  lawful good

 ✦ patron god || ALYA, will tolerate Cascade and Kaia, suspicious of Argus, outright detests Ignacio. Has fortunately heard nothing of Digend… yet. 

 ✦ zodiac || The Qotoki, sign of piety 

[ F A M I L Y ]

 ✦ orientation ||  questioning, possibly pan, she’s not sure! Definite serial crusher. Everyone is pretty??

 ✦ partner ||  N/A

 ✦ children ||  SHE’S EIGHTEEN

 ✦ father ||  Long gone. 

 ✦ mother || Alya is the only mother she needs. 

 ✦ siblings || None.

 ✦ friends  || Bellona, Danae, Tumble, Nero, Virgil, Fable, Acuna, Bermuda, - feel free to ask!

[ A F F I L I A T I O N S ]

 ✦ herd ||  Serora

 ✦ rank || Mullah

 ✦ location ||  Wandering Sedo, most often found by various Alya shrines. Can usually be found by the lake of Oasis or exploring Alhaj!

  ✦ Familiar|| Umbra, a melanistic barn owl/borneo clouded leopard zesla found by Esin's new shrine. She believes him to be a gift from Alya. He has only encouraged this idea. His eyes are a shifting shade of blue, completely blind, but he is uncannily able to find his way around, though Esin has noticed on occasion his mirages can be colorless. He outwits Esin on the regular, having her wrapped around one claw, and he likes it that way. His favorite things include stealing and hoarding Bellona's feathers, and has a habit of chewing on Esin's scarf. Tends to knock over everything on her shrine. Daily. Esin calls him Sunspot sometimes, much to his chagrin. 

[ P E R S O N A L I T Y ]

gentle | judgmental | pious | intolerant | dishonest | naive | optimistic | empathetic | loving  | jealous

Devoted wholly to her god and to her people, Esin is caring to a fault. Eager to please and even more eager to help, she’s desperate to prove herself as a mullah and serve the nation she loves so dearly. She battles constantly with her own youth, lack of experience, and her want to embrace the freedom Alya prizes, to become a travelling mullah to spread knowledge and Alya’s word throughout Sedo, and to gather stories from her people.

Her own fear nags her at every step, try as she might to push it down and pretend it isn’t there. She has built up a life of walls around herself in what she calls piety, claiming she only needs Alya, but her own fear of being rejected and abandoned keeps her from forming meaningful connections. She’s desperate for friends and relationships with others, but doesn’t know where to even begin. She knows she must be seen as a socially adept equine, one who can read others well and respond in kind, and has thrust herself into learning through experience. She is kind and skilled at reading the moods and needs of her people, but the response is where she sometimes falters, terrified of doing the wrong thing, something to push them away. The result is sometimes she can come across as complacent or wishy-washy, as some have called her. In striking out on her own as a mullah for the first time, she hopes to fully develop and hone her own confidence and skill in social situations.    

She is passionate about what she believes but borderline intolerant to what she doesn’t, but will often lie about this to preserve peace. A mullah is meant to be a teacher, and she prides herself on her knowledge, though she has much left to learn.

[ H I S T O R Y ]

 ✦ before birth ||  

    

My history begins with my parents. They were… pious, I suppose, when they felt it would serve them. Both common horses belonging to a nomadic group, they scraped a living off the desert, much to their own chagrin. They were hardened by the land, and grew cold inside as Alya’s sands and winds buffeted them, wearing them down like stones. They longed for a life more then what they had. While I slept, unborn, and both unaware of my presence they begged Alya for deliverance. Perhaps in a show of humor, she bestowed the gift of teleportation onto me.   

 ✦ birth & childhood ||  

   

I was born early, and small. Perhaps I was eager to see the world, but my parents often remarked that I was an inconvenience from the beginning. From the moment I pushed myself up onto my hooves, I was urged to keep up with the herd. I followed diligently, though I struggled to keep up at first, weak body unused to running, too soft and frail. The first time I believed my parents were to leave me behind, I cried out and found myself suddenly beside them. After the shock had faded, they realized my gift, and that was the first time I remember my parents being proud of me. I was drunk on the feeling after one taste, and it would shape me for years to come.

I grew up on the run. I revelled in it, on never sleeping in the same place twice, in new territory to explore, new faces to see. And always, always under Alya’s sky, bright and vast above me. I had no other foals to play with or befriend, and my parents kept mostly to themselves, and so at night I sought out someone else’s company. I would stand beneath the stars and speak to the wind, imagining the twinkle of stars as kindly eyes, imagining I could hear the beat of many wings as they leaned down to embrace me. I felt her with me, always, guiding my hooves as I raced on and on with my family, and it was her steady presence that reassured me when my parents began to attempt to lead me astray.  

My gift, to me, was holy. It was a blessing from the sky mother herself, marking me as her own, like the great eye in the center of my forehead, gold and blue like her sands and sky, always turned upwards to behold her glory. My parents coveted my gift, and began to persuade me to use it for their purposes. I struggled to control it at the best of times, and they would ask me to teleport into the tents of others, into the homes of strangers when we passed through cities. Could I just pop in, for a moment? See if anyone was around? What sort of things were in the room? They didn’t listen to my explanations that I couldn’t control it. They simply told me to try harder.

I could not control how I moved, but I focused as best I could on appearing in the places they asked me to, and sometimes I managed to succeed. Their constant pressure to use my gift pushed my young body to its limits, and I now believe the stress at the time was what caused me to teleport at all, leading to my parents believing I was more in control of my gift then I was. I was so terrified of disappointing them that my own body would twist in on itself to pass through time and space, to appear in a stranger's home. I never had much time, frantically counting the things I could see, to see if anyone was around, before I would blip away somewhere else entirely. Sometimes I would have to hide when I heard someone coming, and wait in terror until Alya whisked me away again. Other times I was less lucky and appeared before someone, and would have to flee. We called it our “game”. My parents told me to never tell anyone about our game, it was our secret, and so I could only run away or hide, begging Alya for protection. I was hurt often during these reckless, stressful times, but at the time it was all worth it for how proud my parents were of me. I revelled in the joy of feeling needed, even as I felt stretched paper thin, my body flickering, teleportations random and frequent. I would sometimes “pop” all over a room with no control, and could only hang on until it was finally over.  

It ended when I popped into a building without any warning. I hadn’t tried to enter this one, hadn’t thought of it at all, and simply found myself in an open room with a very surprised equine, and crashed into a table I would later learn was an altar. I was startled and frightened, with no idea where I was, and I simply burst into tears. The strange horse consoled me as I cried and tried to explain the “game” to them, that I didn’t want to play anymore, all while they bandaged my injuries and soothed me until my sobs and trembling eased. They promised to help me find my parents, but by then it had been hours, and I had never been away from them this long. We went outside together, and I led them to our camp and found the site empty, not even a hoofprint left in the sand.

We searched until well past nightfall, but they were simply gone. Perhaps they had always meant to abandon me there and Alya whisked me into the presence of someone who would care for me. When I appeared I didn’t recognize the structure, but when I looked at it from outside I realized it was a shrine to Alya, and I knew at once that she had brought me here intentionally. The kindly horse took me back into the shrine with them, and I found they had living quarters there. That night, for the first time in my life, someone asked if I would like to pray together with them. We went outside and together we spoke to the wind, heads lifted to the stars and despite the crushing hole in my chest, I felt like I had come home.

 ✦ teenage years ||  

The horse revealed themselves to be a mullah, and I had only heard of them in passing. I was enraptured almost instantly, and before long my caretaker taught me how to read and write. I devoured every book they had in their home and was eager for more, and began to accompany them on their missions, travelling to shrines and to other settlements to speak and listen. I absorbed every story, revelling in the lore and knowledge I was receiving, and watched in awe as my caretaker guided and cared for others, leading them into Alya’s embrace. As I grew into a lanky teenager I begged them to teach me, and they happily obliged.

As I grew they introduced me to other mullahs, some passing through on their way to other shrines and happy to take me along, others dwelling in settlements or taking care of their own shrines, all kind and willing to listen to my countless questions and requests for stories. I fell madly in love with the idea of becoming a mullah, and when my rising wind ceremony finally came I was all too proud to announce my chosen path.

 ✦ adulthood ||  

Several years of travel and study later, I was finally declared a fully fledged mullah. I tattooed myself with wings to celebrate, and to thank Alya for her guidance, and I set off to travel. I longed to see as much of the land as possible, and hope to leave my hoofprints in the sand of every inch of Sedo. War has left scorch marks here during my training, and I believe I finished my apprenticeship just in time to serve my homeland and help them heal. 

[ A D D I T I O N A L   I N F O R M A T I O N ]

 ✦ Items: 

• Beads (Free herd item)
  

• Wing tattoo/dark tattoos 

• Scarf (Fabric)

• Cloak (mullah rank reward)

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