by Ilona Andrews
Age: 26
Gender: female
Height: 5’7″
Build: lean, muscular
Hair: dark brown, long
Eyes: dark brown, almond shaped, slightly elongated
Skin: 16 on von Luschan’s scale
Distinguishing marks: Tattoo on left shoulder, Raven holding a bloody sword with words Dar Vorona (Raven’s Gift.)
Order of Merciful Aid, agent
Mercenary Guild, member
Killing things, with much bloodshed. Talking trash, infuriating authority. Driving Beast Lord crazy.
Age: 31
Gender: male.
Height: 5’11
Build: Muscular, defined, gives off a sense of coiled strength about to explode.
Hair: Blond, typically cut short except during the flare when it grows into a mane within a few days.
Eyes: Grey, luminescent with gold when excited or angry. Curran’s gaze is extremely difficult to hold.
Skin: naturally pale, but he tends to bake himself in the sun every chance he gets.
Distinguishing marks: broken nose that didn’t quite heal right, very unusual for shapeshifter.
Beast form: an enormous grey lion, striped with darker grey, like smoke blown against grey velvet.
Grows teeth the size of dinner forks and bites people’s heads off. Roars after.
Pack. Curran is the Beast Lord. Tremble.
While Curran’s physical power is overwhelming, he rarely has to use to it. He’s observant and shrewd and tends to use diplomacy and intimidation, breaking into violence only as last resort. He moves extremely quietly and enjoys sneaking up on Kate.
The Neo Cults worship pagan gods, some ancient and some new. Some are benevolent, like the Druids, and some are malevolent, like Children of Mephisto. The cults have no central authority. They are not actually a faction, but just a convenient way to classify practitioners of religious magic.
Greek, Celtic, and Scandinavian pantheons command the largest number of followers among the neo-cultists, with Native American and Hindu gods being a close second.
Cults exclude the following major religions and denominations: Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Taoism.
Cults can be loosely classified by their beliefs:
Greek and Roman Pagans, worshipping one or more deity or creature from the classical mythology.
Scandinavian (Viking) Pagans, Druids, Volkvi (Russian Druids), Japanese Pagans, Chinese Pagans, etc.
Odd offshoots of major religions, rejecting the doctrine of the majority, such as Satanists and Order of Broken Cross.
Cults based on an entirely new belief system, such as presence of extreterrestrial beings.
Divine: a deity or possibly a demigod.
Appearance of a true god is extremely rare.
Human Divine: someone who derives his power from faith.
Monks, priests, diviners, prophets.
Human: someone using purely human magic.
Elemental mages, psychics, telekinetics, empaths, etc.
Were-animals: shapeshifters, who derive their ability to change forms from Lyc-V.
Werewolves, werejaguars, bouda, etc.
Animal-weres: animals, who derive their ability to change forms from Lyc-V.
Occasionally shamans and druids will also register this color.
Animals.
The m-scanner registers their magic as very faint and often it does not show up at all.
The color of undeath. It’s rare to find pure red without addition of some other color into it. Usually only undead animals register as pure red and only because animal magic is too weak to significantly impact the color.
Human undead.
Vampires, reanimated corpses, ghasts, etc. The older is the undead, the weaker is the human influence and the darker and redder is its signature.