Perception Profiles [2008-2010]

1. Chi Lung

Eyes flare with the darklight of flame seen through an apache's tear stone; intense gaze, piercing to the truth beneath the surface; his eyes hold old wisdom, dragon-knowing. He moves with easy confidence, a subtle arrogance visible in the tilt of the head and the surety of his stride. It is easy to picture flowing whiskers in place of the crinkled brownblack beard, simple to envision long, refined fingers as gleaming talons. He is aristocratic in build, bone structure, and behavior, with a keen grasp of law and protocol. Words of convincing eloquence are his tools; he'd be at ease in the forms of the celestial bureacracy. He is lung, eastern dragon, of earth and heaven.

2. Jungle Calm

He is quiet intensity, a strange mix of satin and iron. Surgical healing, a scalpel's aid. Gentle is the surface but there's a dormant predator beneath the calm. Yes -- calm is a good descriptor. Ocean calm. No... jungle calm.

And by that I mean growth and shadow, nature's balance; the deep jungle is vivid life and there's a peace to nightgreen things growing and wood creaking and shadows deepening, a coiled quiet in the loam and thick carpet of moss and ferns and wet--

He is deep-tropics undergrowth and caves behind a sheeting shallow waterfall, and he is velvet liquid fur over sheathed claws and barely visible jaws/teeth/steel and eyes that gleam, hunger, dissect.

Patience and silence and the healer's knife and the predator's fangs. There is a certain magnetism here, softness-over-steel that draws one to touch, to lean against the fluid solidity that seems like potential support/aid/strength/protection even while the scent of potential danger/death/dread smokes velvet/shadow/subtle in still undertones.

I guess it's the same appeal found in leopards and katanas.

3. Labrador Girl

She bounds and pounces, all autumn leaves and sable fur. She smiles and dances, bends and prances, and trips on oversized paws.

There is innocence here, but it is not the innocence of naivete; not child-innocence. She knows, and she experiences, and sometimes she flinches away with ducked head and tucked tail and hurt in liquid eyes... yet there is innocence still. It is the innocence evident in the large-heartedness of labradors, of wriggling hounds with glossy fur and eager-to-please snufflings.

Warmth bubbles from her; moods lift to sunlight as she dances the dog-dance of "play, pet, run!", complete exhuberance in life. She is playfulness and comfort; she is irresistable optimism, and cynicism melts in her glow.

This is not to say that she is happiness through-and-through. Even the cheeriest of labradors become sad: the eyes grow shadow-liquid, the tail droops, the ears twitch back and limp. Each emotion is fully consuming in a twice-sized heart. Happiness wriggles the body all over and barks joyful into air, infectious, bright; sadness melts her to a huddled keening, and what is more painful to see than a bundle of summer reduced to such deep sorrow?

4. Deep River

This one is a river, deep and slow and strong. Not the clear hard rivers of New England, with their rocks and shallow swiftness, their sharp turns and hissing rapids - but a river of the old South, the wide gentle rivers that support sloping stretches of fertile greenness for miles on either side, brown rivers of earth and water both.

In such rivers, strong currents run deep, and so it is with her. She is changeable on the surface, even passionate; now there are tears, now there is a glowing sun-smile, now there is anger as a harsh wind whips water to white foam.

Surface problems affect her in a storm of emotion and white-capped floods, but they soon pass, and she is unchanged at the core. A deep river is not easily altered; it settles in its course and resists redirection. Over time she changes, but it is gradual and steady. The rare swift change is painful, and fiercely contested; it takes a dam, the digging of a new channel, floodgates, massive stone.

The depths of the river are steady and purposeful, with the power to pull a swimmer to the dark of the bottom, to smother or thrive as they will. Some suffocate and drown when they touch the river's core and cannot escape; others strive to flee when they realize they are drowning; most remain on the banks, thriving in the endless comfort and rich fertility of water and earth, farming the green slopes, content to be affectionate companions and no more. Much more than that is dangerous; it means risking the undertow.

Yet there are some, those rare few, who have gills and can breathe water; there are those who can navigate the currents and delight in doing so. For them, there is no better place than the closeness of the deep river...

5. Of Flame

She is a child of flame.

At times she is a candle, lantern-fire, dancing bright in the dark. A flirting smile, a gleam of dark eyes, and others like moths are entranced. She is the center of white-winged flocking, and she moves with the twisting quickness of a flame touched by wind.

Yet the moths forget that fire burns. She is a child of passion, and she is fierce in anger. It shows in the glint of firelight on shining stone; her eyes are obsidian and flame. It is not loud anger; there is no volcanic roar, nothing louder than the occasional snap of wood. But it is hot, and flares quickly when sparked; it is as blinding-bright as ignited magnesium, though it rarely lasts long.

There are other colors to passion, though, and they burn within as well. Grief is powerful, and pain; happiness is bright as desert sunlight. When conflicting emotions flare simultaneously, equally strong, it's a firestorm of confusion. Live hard, love strong, experience; what is life without feeling?

She is fiercely proud. Maybe that's what leads her to shield vulnerabilities; reactions and emotions of any sort are too often expressed as anger, or hidden as she withdraws. She carries herself with straight spine, ready grin, direct gaze; it all speaks of confidence.

She is sun-warmed sand, summer fire, solar flare; within her, too, are the flame-shadows dancing on cave walls, the grit of red ochre, a certain raw primality beneath the surface. She is a child of flame, and fire leaps beneath her skin.

6. Wind and Water, Silk and Steel

He is wind and silvered water, the intense razor calm of a hurricane's eye. He is the wet velvet moss in the greenblack shadows of deep elder forests. A storm's chaos whirls about him, threatening consumption of self or of others, yet there is silent order within.

He is silk and steel and blue-white coldfire. He moves with the grace and tension of a kata, with all the warmth of such a sword-dance. Mirrors reflecting shadows, the calculating brightness of a raven's eye, inky feathers sharp as words and knives at one angle but soft as fog at others.

Tension. Opposing forces held in a precarious balance. Trickster-ridden storm-crow, seeking, cataloging, weighing. His scent is fresh-turned earth after a cold rain, lingering mist coating moss and pine, a cave's entrance with its cool dank air.

Storm-rider, sleek-feathered, shadow-draped: these are part of his name in my senses. Wanderer, seeker, migrating scavenger of words/thought/memory. Cold bright eyes in a dark cowl, gleam of silvered glass, toothed ripples beneath the death-silent surface of a pool. Hidden edges, stilting bird-grace, ferality kept in tight check with a shining veneer of utmost decorum.

7. Primordial Earth

She is a moving, breathing, flaming mountain. Magma in motion, the most primal of earth with a dark jagged edge, emerald shadow of the mountain.

There is no disguising her feral nature. It burns deep and dark with a garnet hue beneath the dried-blood intensity of her gaze, and with the smiling that is often close to snarling. She moves with a reptilian suddenness, a strange staccato grace with a predator's sharp focus. The earth grinds beneath her skin like shifting tectonic plates.

There is no subtlety here. The directness, the raw motion, is almost refreshing. Animal stalks so close to the surface that humanity sometimes drowns in the memory of deep jungle and sky-ownership, metallic taste of blood so hot on the tongue, the hunt, ripping flesh, knife's-edge danger in survival. So it is strange when the scales are peeled back to unfamiliar vulnerability; her first reaction seems to be to hiss and withdraw with slanted slitted eyes.

Fierce passion, proud instincts; she is heated blood and bunching muscle, fang and fire and earth and claw.

8. Wolf in Winter

Gentle supple strength, wolf's eyes, the deceptive fragility of a willow tree. There is moonshadow at the edges of her gaze, slowly losing the pain it once had, softening from jagged sharpness to the quiet shadow silence of snow beneath the half moon.

There is much of winter within her: frost clinging to a wolf's thick fur, snow blanketing a den full of curling body warmth, evergreen scent heavy and cold on the wind. Dark greens, amber, dappled twilight.

I have seen winter's breath drive harder within her, blowing hail against her spirit till she winces, curls deeper in her den with its velvet darkness and its bits of jagged rock that hold their own sharp comfort. Rarely, she is bared teeth and lifting hackles, more often protective over that-which-she-claims than her own self.

Moonsilver, star-shadow, frost and fir and snow, a wolf in winter.

9. Flame in Stone

She is not the sunlight creature that one might expect from muscles shifting beneath loose dark-tawny fur, from amber staring and twitching tail. Here is instead wary seeking, shadow prowling through the thick rustling of ferns beneath the sun-shield of tree canopies.

She is potential. The potential of force, the steel-springs under pressure sort of potential, of claws just sheathed, of sated felinity lounging. Potential at rest, coiled, waiting. Waiting and wary, wary and watching. Looking before the leap, the bite, the creeping-forward stalk with nervous tail-agitation.

There are no edges to her, all liquid muscle beneath fur-velvet, whisker-twitch. There is force, power, but it is a crushing force, not a slashing one--not saber, not rapier, not blade-edge. She is bottled fire in an earthen vessel, fire-in-earth, tiger's eye or apache's tear, the jungle flame living in a stone.

She is warmth, burning like embers and hearth-fire. Not raging bonfire, not leaping wildfire, not sunwarmth--but the fire that burns low and hot and deceptively quiet. There is no coldness to her, only that beneath-the-surface heat.

10. Lines and Water

Lines. Fracture-lines in darkened scrying mirrors. Strong thick spiderweb lines wrapping around the self, reaching to the surroundings, connecting, enfolding, entrapping. Jagged lines, curving lines, spiraling, a network of lines.

Compartmentalizing, and connecting, and walling off. The lines are cords and links--and they are walls within and without--and they hinder, and they protect, and they do nothing at all. They obscure and they outline, and she is covered in lines, made of lines, radiating them, entrapped by them.

Some are connected to others, and she pulls them. Some are connected to her, and she is pulled by them. Some once connected elsewhere and are now snapped, broken, frayed. Some are knotted. Some are slowly repairing, slowly growing.

She is all lines and often monochrome but there are flashes of color, some strange textures, red ocher and azure, golden, opalescent. In places she is held rigid and in places she is as shifting-shimmering as water.

There is much of water here. Rainfall, storm-crash, new-moistened earth. And sometimes stagnant pools, murky, choked with moss and pondweed. She is a bark-skinned liquid chimera with half-wings and fur and mismatched gaze, feet in four worlds. She is at once soft and spiked, staticky, roiling chaos with the wind that stirs the water or whips it into frenzy.

Water in lines, a net in the murky depths, tight-constrained and breaking free a tie at a time

11. Gatekeeper

I have seen the gateways of his mind before, and it is unsettling. Sentient shadows watching from within, waiting. Autumn leaves, crackling and rustling across iron and stone at the sky-entrance of a tower.

He is autumn, and twilight. The dusky in-between time/place. The threshold and the gatekeeper at once.

The void in him is not so deep as in some. There is inky solidity in his darkness, grounded control in his foundation. And his walls of ivy-strewn stone and his gates of worked iron are equally as protecting as they are forbidding.

12. Wire and Crystal

She is a work of wire and crystal. Fragility with a core of resilience, flexible response. Receptivity becomes hypersensitivity--tumbling, folding, reeling--but the wind whips through the wires and rattles the faceted glass and she returns to standing, willow-like, reed-like.

Currents flow through her and around her and within her. She is hollow, needing to be filled, yet copper conducts electricity too well and her wire frame coils and attaches and drains away the charge.

Copper and brass and aluminum, quartz and crystal and glass; the wires are smooth and winding, but some of the crystal is sharp shards, and there's a core of dark matter deep within that hungers, needs, wants; devours the incoming currents and watches for more with an ice-glass gaze.

Brightness reflecting and refracting through faceted prisms and glass, gleaming off wire. Yet that reflection keeps the core from light, keeps the current controlled, from short-circuits deep within. Attraction and defense, form and function.

13. Dark Water

He is dark water - the slow dripping of mineral-rich moisture forming stalactites deep within the earth; the currents far from the ocean's surface where light never touches; the silent pools of stillness just outside the river's current, where fish sleep and light only just filters in, dimmed by depth and silt.

There are reflective stretches of water, glacier-blue, in the highest furthest pockets of the mountains, natural mirrors for the moon to preen in. There are hidden places in the cradle of tree-roots surrounded by rock and moss that fill with cool rainwater, places that the sun illuminates green and gold mottled with inky shadow through the canopy of forest leaves. These are the sort of waters I see in him.

He angers, but it is a cold rage, wind whipping up the lakes and oceans, a piece of a glacier falling into the sea, the glittering icy rage of fae. Mostly, he watches, and chooses to let others make of him as they will. His magnetism is that of the blackness of a forest pool that tempts you to dive, though it may have no end to its depths, and trying to reach the bottom may swallow you whole. His hunger is the gnawing mouth of a cave that stretches cold and deep and houses nothing but the dripping formation of stalactites.

14. Half-Feral

Thick soft fur. A hint of teeth. Vibrations rumbling through her like a purr. A flash of claws. Dilating pupils. Flickering ears, up-back-down-forward with conflicting moods.

When a domestic animal like a cat or dog grows a little wild, unused to human interaction, skittering on the edges of civilization ... it's become feral. Watching passersby with wide glowing eyes. Daring a suburban porch for a bowl of food, left out to coax it near. Bolting a safe distance away at any hint of approach, then stopping, staring, caught between wanting and fear.

She is like this: half-feral, craving contact and closeness, wary of those who might provide it. Earn her trust through slow patient waiting, quiet soft voice, no sudden movements, and she's a pouncing wriggling purring creature. But the claws are still there, and the edge of wildness, and she can flee back into the urban jungle if she needs it.

15. Anatomy

Her bones are steel - not the steel that comes only in rigid unyielding, but flexible, bending arcs of ordeal-forged metal. Her heart is passion-fire, sometimes consuming her from the inside out, sometimes fading to low embers from lack of fuel, and sometimes the ideal warmth of hearth-flame.

The easy analogy for this woman would be silk and steel, that core of refined steel with the outer softness of silk - but silk is an orderly thing, spun in crystalline moments by hungry patient spiders, and she is not so controlled. Her skin is not silk - it is living hide, dark and supple, warmed by the heat of her heart and her passion. A raw, primal creature dressed in civilization's veneer, jewels on a wild thing, a sensual softness overlaying fire and steel and the hint of sharp teeth.

16. Harpstrings

She is cord and fur and caution, texture like a harp resting on furs, movement like a whistle-lean half-wild thing in the shadows of trees where the forest meets the city. Part in shadow, part in fog, yearning for the dappled sunlight through the pines.

Torn between skittish instinct and the aching need for contact. Torn between obligation and desire. Stretched, like a harp's strings, between dreams, duties, loves. At the edge of things, spanning the gulf of things, tied to so many places and people and destinations.

Yet this is what makes music, this tension, these cords strung taut across distance. Too slack, and there is no sound. Without the stress of the winding pull of each pin from harmonic curve to soundboard, from oceans to mountains to deep southern hills, there would be only silence.

Vibrating harpstrings, heartstrings, thrumming/humming, a soft song at the woodland edge. Reds and greens in the fog, fur-musk and pine-scent, wild-shy.

17. Faerie Circle

Velvet opulence, the richest of sable and velvet draping over bed and chair and mahogany wood in a candle-lit fire-warmed openness, stretching in to starry night.

Poetry and passion, water contained in silver. There is little wilderness, here; only wild as the most civilized of fae can be wild, in a haunting graceful way with no hint of fangs. It is easy to drown in such decadence, a poetry that rambles for the sake of its own flowing music with no direction in sight, content to spiral and descent, circle and cycle.

Beauty for beauty's sake. But there are stories of faerie-glens for a reason: caution-tales of people becoming trapped within the glamourie, a fae-place that stretches on in endless timeless music and never ends, never moves, trap of honey for short-lived flies.