Auxanthea

Auxanthea is a formidable mantheryn, big and solid and impossible to overlook, and she fills a space the way an old tree fills a clearing. Her presence is protective to its roots; she is someone to have on your side, and she plainly intends to be. The surface of her is gruff, a little sharp at the edges, and beneath it, clear to anyone who looks for more than a moment, lives something deeply gentle. Her pride in the people around her is one of the most open things about her. When someone she cares for grows, she stands a little taller for it, and she makes no effort at all to hide how much it pleases her.

She stands around eight feet tall, on the larger side for her species, with a deep chest and broad shoulders that carry real power. Her frame is solid and heavy, her arms and legs thick with strength, and all of it is athletic and ready to move. She wears her size loosely and comfortably, settling her weight wherever she likes with the ease of someone who has never once found her own bulk an inconvenience.

Her skin is a deep forest green, thick and slightly elastic, with a faint, rough, rubbery texture that is pleasant beneath the hand. Over her more sensitive areas lies a patina of lizard-like scales in the same deep green, sharing that texture and adding a layer of protection to a frame already built to endure.

Her fur is black as midnight, and golden shading runs through it in stripes and swirls, as though someone had traced sunlight across the night by hand. The gold catches every scrap of light and seems to glow with it. Her mantle hangs from her shoulders in two layers: light, moth-like fluff of gold on top, and thick fox-like fur of black beneath, all of it so densely woven together that it falls around her like a cloak of dark velvet shot through with gold.

That mantle is heavy and full, and she uses it for whatever she pleases. She wraps friends in it, draws it close for warmth, and puts it to work as an extra limb, gripping, carrying and shaping it into whatever the moment needs. She is gruff about all of this on the surface and entirely free with it underneath, and the grumbling rarely lasts as long as the embrace.

Her wings are moth-like and scaled to her great frame, the same deep forest green as her skin, patterned in the gold stripes and swirls of her fur. They are velvety to the touch, soft as the dust on a moth’s wing. When folded they lie flat against her back, resting either over her mantle or beneath it as she prefers.

Her face is long and fine through the fox muzzle, elegant in its length, and alongside it sit large, powerful mandibles that lend her features a far fiercer frame. Four insectoid eyes look forward from her face, set in two pairs, one above the other. Her fox ears rise from her head, and between and around them stand her horns: large, prominent and dark green, rising on either side of her head and curving through intricate patterns before coming at last to a point. Her antennae are highly sensitive, and they curve around and along those patterns, carrying the black and gold of her fur in their markings.

Her eyes are a deep green, with swirls of chocolate brown moving slowly through them, turning and drifting as though stirred by some current of their own. All four glow a luminous green, and that glow brightens as her feelings rise.

Behind her trail twelve tails, long and heavy, each fully prehensile and carrying the power of a fox’s tail with the flexibility of a gecko’s. Their fur matches her mantle, and it can roll back in the same way to bare the smooth green skin beneath. The golden shading runs differently along every one of them, so no two tails carry quite the same pattern. She uses them constantly, and she often lets them fan out behind her in a great, glowing spread of black and gold.

Her hands are large and powerful, green like the rest of her skin across their backs, palms and fingers, with dark gripping pads in the manner of a gecko’s. Each hand and each foot carries ten digits, standing plantigrade, and her claws are gold, retracting away as neatly as a fox’s.

Her cocoon is the same dark forest green as her skin, patterned throughout with shading in many hues of green, and large enough to hold her, as it must be. Whether it stays at home or travels folded with her depends on where she is going and why.

Her light magic appears as a green light, the same luminous green that glows in her eyes. When she crosses open space on the magic in her wings, they shimmer, gold and green catching the light of distant stars.

Her feelings show in many places at once. Her antennae lift, sweep and settle. Her mandibles shift and flex. The mantle draws in or loosens, her twelve tails move with her mood, and her wings stir against her back. Her pride shows more openly than any of it: when someone she has pushed finally succeeds, every part of her says so at once, gruff edges and all.

For all her size she is surprisingly quick. She climbs with ease, her gripping pads carrying her up stone and bark and sheer cave walls as readily as level ground, and she takes to the air whenever she chooses, her great green wings lifting her with steady, powerful strokes.

Being near Auxanthea feels like solid ground underfoot. She pushes, and the push comes with the certainty that she believes you can do what she is asking of you. She is a little gruff at first, and warmer the longer anyone stays. Her company carries the feeling of growth itself, like standing in a greenhouse full of living things or deep in a forest where everything is reaching for the light.

She smells of a forest after rain, warm fur, crushed green leaves, and underneath it all, the sweet, drifting scent of flowers that bloom only at night.

Auxanthea is golden light falling through a dark forest canopy, a great moth drawn to the glow of a lantern, and a whole green forest seen from the silence of space. She is strength that exists so that other things may grow, and there is nothing she loves more than watching them bloom.