"To cut properly, you must continually self-annihilate when cutting. Your hand must become a hand that is cutting, your body a body that is cutting, your mind a mind that is cutting. You must instantaneously destroy your fake pre-present self. It is a useless hanger-on." — Meti's Sword Manual
Mask
Six feet tall, rangy, muscular, and Latin@: Teagan's skin is tawny, their black hair cut shaggy. Their shoulders are broader than one might expect from a woman but narrower than one might expect from a man. Androgyny on-point. What's in Teagan's pants? Wrath.
Mien
Most of the time, Teagan is tall -- about six feet tall -- with smooth, liquidly opalescent black skin and short, shaggy-cut black hair. Their long black coat is new, made of some sort of rich, well-worked leather, and has a tough hood. They usually wear beat up black boots and jeans along with one of any number of random raggedy t-shirts. His arms are covered with tattoos, barely visible on his shimmering dark skin. Their eyes aren't actually eyes, but their eyepits are laid in with mosaics of broken mirrors, which reflect back strange fragments of whatever they're looking at. He always wears a silver wire bracelet with a chunk of rock in it on his left wrist and a silver pendant with a deer antler carved into it on a thong around his neck.
Mantle
Roiling blast-furnace heat, the scent of sun-baked asphalt cooling after sundown, and a distant crackling sound of milspec radios; the radios seem to forever be calling for help.
"safe is a territory we fight our pasts for, sometimes we gain ground and sometimes we lose it" - Teagan, in texts with Jack Martingale
Kiddo - I owed them better than they got from me, and I'll spend the rest of my life trying to be better than I was before. - Brandi Carlisle - Mama Werewolf
Other People
The corpse. - He thinks he knows how afraid to be. Cute.
"If it weren't for Teagan, I'd have left Philly behind in the dust and fucked off back to Nacogdoches - but they pulled me back, took a fuckin' crowbar to my shell, and they didn't recoil from what they found. They've seen me at my worst, my wit's end, my angriest, and my most vulnerable - and they still give a shit. Good and bad. As is. They know more about me than any living person. They're my home, I love them, and I would do anything they asked me to." - Sturm
"I haven't figured out if this chemistry is unexpected or not. But holy shit, there's a lot of it. I'm glad it took more than a shared Keeper to get us here." - Jack
And you took
Your machete
And you sliced through the vines that wrapped around me
And you said
"I don't know what I'm doing
So I'll just keep on cutting
It's worth a little blood to get your arms free"
I have never liked the box of knives
You said was a paradox because you're kind
But withstood a childhood that robbed you blind
Of love that was safe and so you learned to fight
