PERSONAL

Gender: Male

Kit: Transformation

Location: Wandering

AFFILIATION

Alignment: Hero

Team: Solo Hero

VITAL STATS

Strength: standard (rank 1)

Agility: standard (rank 1)

Mind: standard (rank 1)

Body: standard (rank 1)

Spirit: standard (rank 1)

Charisma: standard (rank 1)

RECORD

Fame Points: 25

Personal Wins: 1

Personal Losses: 0

Team Wins: 0

Team Losses: 0

Tourney Wins: 0

Tourney Losses: 0

STATUS

Status: Active

RoyalBlood

A wise man once said that “I do not often believe in Angels,” and I would be inclined to agree with his conclusion. Although they do say that salvation can come in many forms and in ways you least expect it to. It’s a rare thing to find a way out, and it had happened to me so many times yet I do not remember a single moment of the sweet release they would bring. 

You will probably want some context, I suspect you will want to know why I am telling you these things. My name is not important, neither is why I was involved. The latter question has an answer that eludes me still, and the former will simply detract from what I am trying to tell you, I am the child of a mechanic and a secretary. No more. 

So it turns out that my own, personal salvation came in the form of a simple letter, bound with dulled, brown string that could barely flex in one direction or the other, and sealed with  an equally tarnished droplet of grey wax, imprinted with the outline of a feather. I had seen it time and time again through forgotten dreams and hazy half-memories, but it’s meaning was lost on me if I ever knew. 

I unwrapped the binding as carefully as my hands would allow as to not in some way harm the contents. The words within were simple enough and they held no godly power as to lift me from my life and place me elsewhere among equally minded individuals. The mundanity was almost unbearable, for it was a simple message with simple intent; an apology, a eulogy, a valediction. A farewell. A goodbye.

I knew it must have been from him. He changed our lives and risked so much for reasons that I will never quite understand. He walked to hell and back for our sakes. I never saw him don a set of spandex tights or a flowing cape, he never wore anything not suited to his person apart from a look of dissatisfaction despite everything he had done for us. Who would have known that in a world such as ours -where the audacious and the pretentious claim nobility and valor with overt supernature and control of the things we do not yet understand, a world full of those quick to claim themselves heroes- he would be the one who came through for us. Who would have known that it was he who was to save us despite all we did to push him away and despite all we put him through, he was the one who saved us.

I was not lying when I said that I concur with the idle ramblings of a wise man who once said that “I do not often believe in Angels,” but in this case, the feather on the seal of the letter that harbored the words which I absorbed made me think that maybe, just maybe, that feather was the first of many he must have made while he was among us.     

I swallowed past the lump that had been gathering in my throat and read on, my eyes skimming the cursive letters that had so lovingly and elegantly been crafted into words. I learned to write in cursive font from his letters over the years, none of which I read with my own two eyes. The things he sent me where always so far apart. It’s hard to explain how spaced the contact with him was. He seemed to originate from my dreams, from my imaginings and the sort; everything I could find on the subject of this man was phantasmagorical at best. How did I know him? Why was this the first of his artifacts that I had seen with my own eyes? I stopped regularly from my reading to consider the empty words, to question if there was a deeper, more cryptic meaning to the things he had sent; and if there was, then my meager brain was too frail to comprehend.

I set aside the crisp parched paper for a moment and replaced it with an old photograph of my Grandparents, framed, of when they first met. I don’t know much about that day... or them, I am shamed to say. My kitchen table was littered with similar images, all from different times and places. Some from my family heritage, some were completely unrelated to my family or I. The only thing that linked them was the feather. It was present in all of the photographs whether they were recent or not; there it was: floating gracefully down towards my grandmother’s left shoulder, laying peacefully on the ground at the child’s feet, pinned on the soldier’s army coat while he stood with pride at his exploits. Every time, the same feather. I did not know what linked those images and the letter I had received.

My best guess was that the man had touched the lives of many people. He must have lived longer than I, or anybody I would have known. There was his feather, scattered across time and the memories of unlinked people, wayward as the wind, drifting like down on the winds of change.

My Gift To You

     Reality Warping: ultimate (rank 4)

Why were we so blessed? These few that had been marked by a feather without their knowing? I had hurried to push aside the swathes of unnamed faces that demonstrated stories and lives untold to find the one of myself, bright eyed and full of wonder in my childhood years, clutching the red firetruck I was never seen without. I’d circled the feather in that photo, using a thick red marker pen.

I couldn’t know if they had all received the letter that I held in my offhand, but there was something that told me they all experienced the man’s influence much the same as I had. I had never seen him, nor met him; I held no ties to his existence save for the quaint letter and yet he found a way to reach through possibility just to guide me and protect me, to guide and protect others. He was not a direct man from what I could tell, and his methods subtle beyond telling. To hide oneself in the past of a thousand different people with the simple goal of of bettering the lives of total strangers... now that was a feat worthy of praise.

He could have only been a man. Only men have such a drive to bring light to the lives of others. Nothing else maintains such spirit and love for it’s fellow kind. From what little I know of him, he was merely there in the back, unnoticed and unappreciated, but that did not phase him. He could take the neglect and continue his pursuit of grace; he never judged us for being human, he took us in shielded us from all those wishing to do harm upon us. Only by his hand are we all still standing in this world he helped to forge - this world he helps to guard, eternal, like the aegis, he watches. I know he does.

Who else would?

From Humble Beginnings

     Power Negation: supreme (rank 3)

I said that he wears a face of disappointment and broken promise, and I stand by that conviction. The day a man can save us all, and do everything right is the day he is no longer a man. he would have nothing left to better if he himself was perfect. Without the letter, there is nothing. No contact, no love.

I suppose I can speculate on the things that drive him: maybe he feels regret that some of us still feel the need to sin, despite all he did to free us from the clutches of despair and the pits of agony. From what I have seen of men who do not live in the indiscernible like he does, you cannot break what is already broken.

Until The End Of Time

     Time Manipulation: supreme (rank 3)

Had our unseen time together come to an end? I can’t say how long it has been, maybe seconds, maybe years. Time becomes whimsical when dealing with the past, when delving into the recesses of what is and what may be, for the sake of finding the man who reached to me through a wave of hopes and dreams, shattered lives and loves lost and found. His letter was a goodbye, that much was certain, though the words were never spoken. Was it a farewell from him or to me? Was I leaving him, or was he leaving me? I sat, speaking to myself like a half-crazed monk, asking the questions I was afraid to ask: had any of these people ever met the man of feathers? Maybe if I had the pleasure of catching glimpses in surreal sleepless dreams and unplaced visions, then perhaps they would have done the same with their eyes and not their minds. Sometimes I dreamt I was my Grandfather, holding the feather loose in my palm while writing love poems in flowing hand on old paper to a wife whose time was limited. Other times I was the soldier, and I could feel his pride as I wrote home one last time before I went over the top - my writing was steady, calm and beautiful for a man promised an early grave.

Each time, these goodbyes were familiar.

I am the child of a Mechanic and a Secretary, and the words of the man who had been with me my entire life became so blindingly clear.

“From Humble Beginnings, until the end of time. I am always with you.”

I signed my name with all the others that were scrawled at the bottom of the sheet that were there to show their thanks to an unnamed man for being there when nobody else was. I folded the paper, and pushed down on the wax seal, heating it when the flame of a lighter, being careful not to set fire to the paper itself. It did not take long to set, which I finalized with the imprinting of an engraving of a feather, set into my ring. Lifting my hand, it was sealed once more. I could never have known him directly; he existed beyond my reach - beyond all of our reaches. Grace amazes me, this man taught me the meaning of such. With a sigh, I bound the letter with the crumbling string and sent it on it’s way.