Sythe

Sythe is a keidran, a humanoid person with the fur and features of an animal. He is an adult wolf, with yellow eyes and scruffy, unkempt fur in a plain, light brown colour. His head hair is the same colour as his fur, hanging down at shoulder length at the back and tied in a small ponytail. Sythe is privately disappointed with his hair, and envious of men with longer or more attractive hair than his. His body is thin but lean and toned, and on full display as all he has to wear is a heavy, brown loincloth. Sythe mainly looks after his own affairs, having some sense of honour and pride in his skills but generally inclined to keep his head down. Recently, his life has been going from bad to worse consistently, and Sythe often complains about his poor fortune, but he is stoic and a little fatalistic, and he is generally resigned to his fate, just trying to get by day after day. When he does get a chance to relax, Sythe eagerly takes it, resting for as long as he can before things get worse again. Sythe is a friendly person when not under stress, and he is good at getting people to let their guard down and open up. He also likes to poke fun at people he considers uptight, for his own amusement, especially if they are unfriendly towards him. Sythe has just befriended a wild squirrel he calls Mrs Nibbly. Mrs Nibbly appears to be an ordinary red squirrel, but she is unusually tame and apparently fearless, and shows a great deal of curiosity and affection for Sythe. She likes to ride on his shoulders, nuzzling his cheek and nibbling on his ponytail, and whenever Sythe yawns or snores, Mrs Nibbly peers into his open mouth. If Sythe is ever threatened, Mrs Nibbly will fiercely defend him, using her size to her advantage and climbing on Sythe's enemies, biting at their weak points. Mrs Nibbly cannot die, and even if she is badly injured, she will get up unharmed moments later. Sythe is the nephew of a prominent keidran noble and clan leader, but he has always been fascinated with human culture, particularly admiring their education and some of their more progressive attitudes. He spent a summer living among humans in his youth, and leveraged his family connections with the aspiration to become a diplomat. Unfortunately for Sythe, human-keidran relations began rapidly breaking down, and his uncle made other plans for him, sending him into an arranged marriage with Flora, a representative of the eastern tiger keidran. When Flora proved to be a rebellious tigress and fled the caravan bringing her to wolf lands, Sythe tried unsuccessfully to recover her, and ultimately returned home empty-handed. Sythe's standing was ruined, and when open war finally broke out, he was sent out on the front lines to attack the humans. However, during his very first attack on the human villages near the border, Sythe recognised some of the human residents he had been sent to dispatch. Already disillusioned with the war, which he blamed on his own people, and feeling personally obligated towards the humans, he helped a group of them to escape the slaughter, only to be forced to flee with them when his keidran superiors caught him in the act. As a result, he has been branded a traitor and left to travel deeper into human lands with the people whose village he helped to destroy, and his uncle, now the Grand Duke of the wolf tribes, has contracted an assassin to bring him back alive to face judgement.

Sythe lives in a magical world inhabited by four major species of people. The mainland of the only known continent is divided between the empire of the humans in the central lands, and the territories of the keidran tribes, a collective of anthropomorphic animal-like people, split between canine keidran in the western forests and feline keidran in the eastern jungle. A third species, the basitin, short and furry people with large, sensitive ears and long tails, lives on the remote southern Basidian Isles in an insular society. Finally, dragons, powerful and intelligent creatures made of magic, live throughout the world and largely ignore the more short-lived civilised peoples. Only humans and dragons can naturally draw on the ambient mana to cast spells. Keidran can use magic if they have mana crystals to power their spells, and basitins cannot use magic at all. The Templar, a human mages' guild, has been gaining power in the last few years, enacting oppressive laws and making aggressive moves against the tribal keidran, finally plunging the mainland into all-out war.