THE RECLUSE â™± LYCAN â™± KIERSEY CLEMONS â™± 127
There are very few safe havens for someone of your species, though in your life you have done your best to stay out of trouble and keep to the corners of the globe where fighting is scarce. The war with the vampires was nothing but a distant rumor and that was how you were going to keep it if you had any say in the matter. Except now you don’t have any say at all. You have been dragged kicking and screaming into this fight, but you are wise enough to know there is safety in numbers, and sticking with a group is your best chance for survival.
Before you were born, your mother convinced your father to move the family from Poland to New York City. Thus they shoved everything they could into their small duffel bags and left for the England with plans to find a boat to take them to New York. Three months into their stay in England, in the disease-ridden boarding houses, your mother discovered that she was pregnant. Knowing your father would insist they turn back and return to Poland at the news, she waited until they had been on the ship to New York for a week before telling him. They spent a month on the ship and your father and eldest brother took on various jobs on the ship so your and two other brother’s could at least stay in a cabin, rather than risk the spread of infection in the lower deck. Once they arrived in New York, they rented a small apartment in a tenement building.
You were not born in a hospital, the cost much too expensive for your parents, rather you were born in the tenement building you would know for the majority of your mortal life. For most of your life, you and your family lived well below the poverty line and each of your siblings worked rather than get an education in order to gain a meager earning for your family. At thirteen, you joined them and got your first job in a cramped shirtwaist factory, where you learned not to complain and made memories that you hoped to never relive. Given the choice between the convent and a life of sweatshops, the choice was easy.
Every Sunday, your mother took you and your brothers to church. It was small and the only languages spoken inside the building were Polish and Latin. Sometimes, the children would giggle and run, yelling words in English simply to anger the Polish priest who barely spoke a word of English. Despite the small size of your parish, the parish was awarded a nun around the time you turned sixteen. Never had religion interested as much as it did when you could hear her speak in perfect English about the intricacies of the story of the Good Samaritan, and you never cared much for teaching until she asked you to teach her the basics on the language you knew since you could speak. Latin prayers became ballads when they left her lips. She became half the reasoning you chose to become a nun. At times, you can still envision her smile when you told her you wanted to become a sister like her.
Once you turned eighteen, you started the process of becoming a sister. Nothing quite compared to time at the convent and later at the school you would spent a year at. The vow of poverty you took awarded you the same quality of life you had when you worked for nearly the entire day in horrid conditions. Joining the convent was surely the best decision you made. It also led to the worst decision you ever made. One night, the last you spent feeling as if you belonged in the convent, you found a man covered in blood but with no injuries unconscious and brought him into the convent. There, you did your best to nurse him to health until his eyes opened and his features morphed into something less human. He attacked and that’s all you remember before passing out, only to wake hours later for the creature to have disappeared and the worst pain you ever felt attacking each of your cells.
It didn’t take long for you to figure what had happened to you. Suddenly, it did not real right for you to walk the hallowed halls you have called home for three years. No longer were you in God’s image, rather a twisted parody. Then, you left without even sending word back to your family. You didn’t think to go back to them, not when you were one of the monsters they prayed stayed surrounded by hellfire. Rather you attempted to travel. As you traveled, you met THE COLLECTOR and you weren’t quite sure why they were drawn to you, however, you were glad to have some that could explain the intricacies of your new species. Yet, they didn’t bother to explain the war to you until they sent you to pick up art for them and you ended up in the hands of vampires. You were sent back to them sans the painting and some of your sanity, clothes stained with your own blood. After that, you left again, learning to keep to yourself, except only making friends with someone who made you feel safe and like you had power again for the first time in decades. Until they left you before you had a chance to leave them.
The next decades were spent on your own, sticking to edges of small towns and sometimes the edges of civilization. You moved every few years and while you stayed in one place, you never made any lasting connections. Until the supernatural world was shoved into the light, you never imagined stay in a place for long, but you were forced to now. With news of the laws against vampires and lycans, you fled to the nation of the religion you tossed aside decades prior. Even then, you leapt on the opportunity to leave when you heard news of Tuscany.
THE COLLECTOR: The life of a hermit isn’t one you ever imagined yourself living. You used to be as much a part of the world as the humans who thought it theirs. You were young and naive and couldn’t possibly predict the consequences of befriending another of your own kind. They never intended for you to get hurt by bringing you along on their adventures, but some things are just out of anyone’s hands. You know they still blame themself. A small part of you blames them too.
THE CORRUPTER: It’s funny to think of a world that existed without fear. A world where there was no war, one where you could be powerful. They showed you everything that life could be for a lycan- made you feel important for once in your life. And just as quickly as they opened your eyes to the new world, they took it away; leaving you in the dark once more with nothing but wounded pride and a bitter taste of what could have been.
