#more background stuff

❝ Andre Carrivick ❞

Former heir to the Carrivick estates. The Carrivick family was known to be quite the tycoons of leatherwork and smithing. When the trains started becoming more prominent, the Carrivick family took advantage and broke into the steel business. With hands in several major areas, they became very prominent.

Rumor has it that the eldest son, Andre Carrivick, met a young outlaw man from the West, and would abandon station with him. Despite many efforts and pleas from the Carrivick family, Andre was never destined to return home.

❝ Evelyn Lockartt ❞

A promising young woman of the Lockartt family, said to have met a few rogue outlaws within a town she was temporarily occupying.

At the time, Madame Lockartt was known for her strict hand in the saloon and a fierce nature that even the most prominent of men respected.

Although much of the records of Evelyn Lockartt remain missing, it is rumored that a particular charming outlaw had caught her eye before his abrupt leaving through the town that night.

Some former associates said that Madame Lockartt was so smitten with the unruly outlaw that she packed up and disappeared onto the next town in the direction the outlaw had fled in.

Sorin’s hands clench into fists as he grits his teeth, staring sightlessly at the trees in front of him.  He’s never taken well to people making light of his fear of fire, but this- this is completely different from that.  He’d been so angry in the moment that he’d barely had the words to answer the miqo’te male he’d been sitting with, and he’s quite certain that what he did manage to choke out hadn’t made much sense.

What angers him the most, however, is the doubt that’s set in- and he lashes out, striking the tree in front of him as hard as he can.  The blow sends a shockwave of pain up his arm and he slowly draws back, relaxing his fist and slowly opening it, making sure he hasn’t broken anything… although he can’t honestly be certain he cares one way or the other.

In two quick motions he tears the gloves from his hands and throws them as far as he can, though fabric isn’t wont to do much more than flutter, and his ire shifts to the haplessly falling gloves for a heartbeat before turning back to the conversation they’d had.  He spreads his fingers and looks down at his hands, jaw clenched so hard that he’s starting to get a headache.  The healers who’d seen to his wounds after the fact hadn’t been at all certain that he’d get the full use of them back, and he hadn’t- but they work well enough.  They look horrific, and he tells himself that he wears his gloves to hide the sight of his fire-ravaged skin from the world, but deep down, he knows he wears them to hide the sight from himself.

He does not fear fire because he cannot control it.  He fears fire because, in something so meaninglessly symbolic as the gloves he always wears, it controls him.  He fears fire because every time he sees it, he’s reminded of his village burning.  The sight of dancing flames seems to make everyone happy, they take comfort from it, but he sees his family burning… he sees his beloved burning.  He has nightmares nearly every night that he doesn’t work himself into an exhausted stupor, and he knows they have not gone unnoticed.  Even the sight of a fire in a hearth makes his stomach clench, sends waves of nausea and anxiety through him and nearly chokes off his breath until he’s able to calm himself.

The fear has become something living, something that’s burrowed so far down inside of him that he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to remove it without spilling so much blood that he dies of it.  Fear of fire… fear of attachments- fear of loss.

He hits the tree trunk again, weakly this time, and rests his forehead against the bark, eyes squeezed tightly closed.  It’s a good thing, he thinks sardonically, that he prefers the healing arts over the summoning- he’s lost control of Ifrit-egi so many times that he’s simply stopped calling on it altogether, and an incomplete summoner is a useless summoner.  As he’d said before, the fire is a symptom of a far greater evil… but that evil isn’t the Ixal.