#oc:sulum

My first drawing of him from 2020 :) chip 4 size

Haiii

This is Sulum (they/it)! It's the main character for two of my stories in my fantasy-verse and a soul thief. A soul thief is a creature born from the dead body of a sentient animal and a sapient soul, there a multiple sapient species in this realm, and the animal body will slowly morph into that of the soul's as much as it can, but Sulum is a field mouse with a human soul. Soul thieves are able to take and return life through their palms, each soul is stored as an amount of keratin in the horns, and the horns will shrink when a soul is given.

Despite Sulum being pretty young, it has a pretty large set of horns for any given thief. Almost since it was reborn, it's been owned by a religious cult who view it's ability as a blessing, as death through theft is instant and painless, therefore viewed as the ultimate humane killing. Thus, using this power is not sacrilege, and people of this group who are dubbed any sort of traitor are put to their palm.

Sulum slowly learns that it doesn't like this, as its taken expediting regularly growing up and is exposed to the world. It is during an expedition that it makes its escape, as its treated as an equal in their ranks, though still respected as youth, so it has some amount of freedom enough to roam.

Sulum eventually makes it to a farmhouse where it meets a rural living family, a set of parents and their kid Densun (he/him). Sulum is allowed to work for food and shelter, living it up for a while, happy to do genuine work. Unfortunately, soul thieves are not well liked by those who know them and the house is set ablaze by an unknown assailant, though Sulum would be in the barn and the family dies. Sulum manages to bring the corpses from the rubble, both parents are charred beyond repair, but Densun, while dead from his wounds, is still largely intact.

Sulum revives Densun, and after their shared grief, decide to find somewhere new to survive, or at least to evade whoever seeks them. There is eventually a corpse of a fur rabbit, one who escaped and was ravaged by wildlife. Densun pressures Sulum into reviving it, not knowing it wont just return to being a rabbit, and suddenly the two are now also left to raising a new creature. The rabbit thief refuses to settle on a name or pronouns! They accept the names Jess, Gus and Guess and go by random pronouns. Guess never grows horns because the fur padding on their feet and palms never go away, so they can't use their powers.

Sulum is eventually recaptured by its former captors, sacrificing itself for the other's escape from a bad situation. It's placed under heavy security and lives shackled up on anywhere that it can be shackled by, partly because Sulum learned to be aggressive, though. It grows up like this and is still used for its powers.

[Image ID: a 5 panel comic, in the first, 3 figures stand looking up at a large bird creature, which for the next 3 panels is zoomed in on till its revealed that its staring them down. 2 of the 3 hug each other & tremble while the 3rd walks away. the final panel is annotated "gets more afraid" end ID.]