Post by Samael Basmala on Feb 26, 2011 0:30:47 GMT -5
Character played by: Nir Lavi, Israeli model
Name: Samael (Basmala).
Title: None.
Age: 27 years.
Race: Half-D’angeline (L’Agnace), half-Akkadian
Height: 5’ 4”
Home Province: Born in Khebbel-im-Akkad, residing in L’Agnace.
Appearance: Samael has the best of both his bloodlines, hampered somewhat by the vaguely feral, and always angry scowl he tends to wear. Eyes green as spring grass, glossy black hair kept back in a ragged queue with stray curls around a handsome, sharply defined face, his mother’s rich mouth unfailingly pressed into a thin, tense line or curled into a smirk, a strong, lean body hardened to fights and privations, and sun-tanned skin that carries sometimes the scent of sweet apples, and sometimes only the scent of horses and sun-kissed leather. As his father isn’t known to him, Samael has no way of knowing why the scent of apples marks his emotions (he rather hates that it does, actually): his sire was by no stretch of the imagination a direct de Somerville unless you jump sideways a good number of relations and carry the zero, so that Anael’s mark on him is merely a genetic hiccup that he (and his mother!) could really have done without.
He wears very simple clothing that shows the hard wear he’s given them, scuffed leather boots, loose wrapped dark pants and a loose white cotton tunic belted with a long purple-and-black sash (gift of his ‘aunt’). He bought a cheap sailor’s cloak when he arrived in Marsilikos, but any and all real expenses go to taking care of Hamdani, his mare. Under the clothes, his body is covered in thin scars and bruises from a hard, harsh life, and whorls of blue tattoo-work inked into him by his ‘aunt’ whenever he did something that they both could afford to be proud of.
For someone with such a feral appearance, Samael is surprisingly well educated. He speaks Akkadian and D’Angeline, and understands a couple of other languages – well, he can curse in them, and know when he’s being cursed at. His pride is the size of the world, and he can explode into violence at the slightest provocation. Anael’s kindness might still lurk in there somewhere, but anyone looking for it is going to have to do a lot of digging. He’s exceptionally intelligent, trusts no one, likes no one, and would prefer a job tending to someone’s kennels or stables; in truth, he likes animals better than he likes people, they’re far more honest. When asked, he’s simply Samael. He feels exceptionally awkward claiming a surname, given he legally doesn’t have one… so if push comes to shove, he might growl out Basmala, the name of his ‘aunt’, as an excuse of one.
History: Samael is a… dishonorable accident. His mother was part of a vast seraglio, a one-day favorite that her lord acquired and forgot in more or less one motion. She was beautiful, of course, or she wouldn’t have been desired, but she had a sharp tongue and a wicked wit, rather than the sweet, demure nature her lord preferred. She did catch the eye, however, of one of the D’Angelines her lord hired to tutor his children, educate his servants and enliven his manor. Fascinated as he was with D’Angeline life, culture, beauty and (most of all) seemingly effortless wealth, he gave the men the run of his house, permission to use ‘all that he possessed’ as if it were theirs. They were words that would come back to bite him in the proverbial backside.
To his father’s luck (maybe Anael was looking out for his descendant after all!), Samael was conceived not too long before the D’Angelines left to return home, and once she realized what had happened, his mother was quick to entice her lord into her bed. As she was a petite woman, no one thought much when her pregnancy ended in an ‘early’ birth, and everyone thought it purely lucky that the babe was healthy. It got her slightly more attention from her lord, a few gifts, some occasional favor. It might have ended there, and no one the wiser, if not for the day one of the lord’s trusted men got a wild hair and decided to run around with some of the children through the gardens, discovering quickly that it was the boy, not the trees, that smelled like sweet apples.
His mother lost her head very quickly after that, and Samael might have followed her if not for the jilted husband’s fascination with all things D’Angeline and the pleas of the lord’s youngest sister, who had no children of her own. He was, however, removed from his siblings, struck from the records, erased from existence. His ‘aunt’ taught him what she’d learned, what the other children were learning; reading and writing, languages, history, geography. She taught him of his father’s people, descended from kind and bountiful gods. Surrounded as he was by the hordes of a seraglio, the boy forgot his mother, grew to accept his situation, and never has thought of it as unusual; it was merely the way things were.
Samael’s ‘uncles’, however, taught him very different things: to fight with dogs for scraps of food, to wrestle and fight bare-handed and with knives, to survive, hate and snarl. He grew hardened, divided, obedient, and angry. He killed his first man on command when he was thirteen so that the unfortunate victim's estate could be gobbled up by his ‘father’. He was not the only one doing such work, but he was a constant reminder of a wife’s infidelity, and so when the authorities came looking into someone else’s crimes, his ‘father’ and ‘uncles’ gathered together to consider tossing him under the axeman’s blade.
His ‘aunt’ could see the way things were turning, and calmly went to talk to the waiting authorities. She told them everything; every last little bit of dirt she had overheard, everything she knew, everything she didn’t know but had guessed at. She knew it meant the death of everyone in the household, and she didn’t care. She loved her ‘son’; she did not love any of her brothers. Things got decidedly hectic and violent and very, very bloody at that point, but still she managed to find Samael and draw him away to the stables. There were three things she could give him, the only things she could give him: instructions on how to get to Terre D’Ange and the name of the man he should seek; a small satchel with her jewelry, that he might exchange it for money, and her beautiful black mare, gift from her father, descended (or so she claimed) directly from one of the original mares that the gods had given unto man; as she put it, Samael by birthright had more right to her than any of her kin. Samael snuck out of the only home he’d ever known with strict instructions never to come back to Khebbel-im-Akkad, and much as he wanted to, he never looked back. In a life of anger and violence, his only grief is that he was not there to comfort his ‘aunt’ before her head was struck from her shoulders.
The trip to Terre d’Ange was, to put it mildly, vile. Everyone wanted his money or his mare. Fortunately, if there is one thing Samael can do very well indeed, is fight. He cannot flash and flourish a sword like a nobleman, but he’s viper-quick and gutter-dirty, an artist with a knife, a broken bottle or his fists. The road trip was slightly less ugly; at least he found fellow travelers foolish enough to wager in races against Hamdani, making money a little less hard to come by. Unfortunately, at the borders of L’Agnace, he found out his father, the man he’d hoped would help him find a new life, had died of old age years ago.
So now he’s stuck in Terre d’Ange’s largest city, exiled, with no friends, no one he even remotely knows, and all he can offer a prospective employer is a skill with horses or a skill at killing. Well, the gods surely have a sense of humor.