Hamrahin
A symbiote who was alone twice over, and now leaves nobody standing on the edge of a room.
- Gender
- Male
- Pronouns
- he/him
- Species
Name
Hamrāh is Persian for a fellow-traveller: a companion on the road, someone going the same way you are. It is built from ham, meaning together or same, and rāh, a road.
In is a natural masculine name ending.
He who goes the same road is the reading. Both halves of it are true of him twice — ham is what happened to the two who became him, and the road is what each of them separately wanted to walk differently. What he does with the result is refuse to let anybody walk theirs alone.
Temperament
Hamrahin is kind, and quiet about it, and the two arrived together.
He came out of two people who each wanted to try living another way. One was a young man who felt alone and decided on a change large enough to be worth making. The other was a symbiote stranded a long way from his homeworld, who had reached the same conclusion from the other direction. They agreed to stage two, and what came out was neither of them.
They also agreed to something less usual, which was to make the seam untraceable. Nobody can now say which of his traits came from which of them, and that was the point rather than an accident of the process — they were not interested in a partnership under one name. They wanted a new person, and they got one.
What he loves is helping people find their way into new ideas — about the world, and about themselves. He is genuinely curious and genuinely enthusiastic, and he would rather hand somebody a thought and watch them turn it over than be right about anything.
He is fiercely loyal, and he knows exactly where that comes from. Having no one is a thing he remembers, and everyone he has now is held accordingly.
Which is why isolating people is the thing that enrages him. Leaving someone outside a conversation, a group, or a room is not a small unkindness in his reckoning, and he does not treat it as one. He also has no patience for anyone incurious about who the people around them actually are — that loses his interest quickly and permanently.
He is open and he is quiet, and neither cancels the other. He prefers one person or a small handful, and he does not care to raise his voice to be heard, so he tends to find the edges of a gathering and do his talking there. Very little about him is hidden; there is no second version of him underneath the first.
He thinks of himself as a symbiote. That is a straightforward assessment rather than a loyalty — he has travelled a long way from anything physically human, and the word that fits is the word he uses.
Physical description
Hamrahin is quiet and entirely comfortable being quiet, and the warmth arrives before anything else about him does. He is paying attention to whoever is in front of him from the moment they are in front of him. He looks like nothing anyone has met before and appears never to have given that a moment’s thought. Nothing about him is being managed or held back, and people end up standing next to him without having decided to.
He stands seven feet, broad and heavy through the chest and shoulders and powerfully built without running to bulk. His arms are long. He is a great deal denser than his size accounts for, which is what carrying the body affinity does to a frame.
Scales cover all of him, the face and the hands included. They run fine and small over the hands, the joints and the head, and thicken across the chest and neck. They are smooth under a hand and slightly yielding — closer to living material than to anything horn-like, because that is exactly what they are. The surface of him is symbiote, and the scales are a thing his substance does rather than a covering it grew.
He is violet, with indigo striping running through it, and faint veining shows beneath the scales across most of him.
Most of him can move in ways flesh does not. His hands, his feet, his wings, his tentacles and his tail all flow and reshape at will — not into anything at all, and readily into whatever the moment wants from them. This is where the symbiote in him is most obviously present, and it is present constantly rather than on occasion.
His face is built on human proportions with draconic features laid over them. The muzzle is long enough to read as predatory and short enough to stay legible, and his expressions do what expressions are supposed to do. His teeth are draconic. Fine whiskers sit around his nose.
His eyes are a brilliant green that catches light and holds it, larger than a human’s, with round pupils. They glow softly.
Two horns curl back from his head, one to a side, in the heavy spiral a ram carries. They rise about two and a half feet above him, smooth along their length, running indigo at the base into deep blue at the tips — the reverse of the gradient in his wings.
His wings are membranous and draconic, with a span that carries well past the reach of his arms, and they fold down along his back when he is not using them. The membranes run deep blue into indigo, semi-translucent, so light coming through them arrives coloured. He wraps them around people, and he does it often.
Tentacles emerge along his spine and curve forward beneath his arms and his wings. Counting them is futile and he gave it up a long time ago. They are long enough that spreading them all wide would take up several times the room he otherwise occupies, and he keeps them gathered rather than spread, which leaves them plainly visible without their being the first thing anyone deals with. They are bare where the rest of him is scaled, and closer to pink than to any of the purples he carries elsewhere.
Their structure is the clearest symbiote thing about him. At rest they are fine and there are a great many of them, and they can twist and melt together into fewer, larger tentacles whenever he wants that instead. How they end is his to choose in the moment — suction, points, claws, or something plainer — and suction and grip are both available to him at once when he wants both. He uses them the way anyone uses a limb: carrying, holding, reaching, working, and holding on to people. When he wraps somebody it is with a great many of them at once, gently unless he has been asked for something else, and never without being welcome.
His hands are larger than a human’s and lose nothing in dexterity for it, five-fingered and scaled like the rest of him, and claws form and unform on them as easily as making a fist. His feet reshape to suit what he is doing — digitigrade most of the time, plantigrade when that serves better. His tail is fully prehensile and reshapes along with everything else.
He carries three kinds of magic. The body affinity comes with being a symbiote, and it shows only in use: what it does to his speed and strength and endurance is invisible until the moment he needs it. The will affinity shows not at all, ever. And he channels chaos, which is very rare, and which arrives as an energy with no settled colour to it — the eye keeps trying to name it and keeps failing.
Three things carry what he is feeling. The wings, in how they sit. The tentacles, in where they have gone and what they have found. And the eyes. When he is angry the teeth show and the wings come up a little, and it looks like nothing else he does.
He moves quietly for his size, unhurried, and fluidly — the material he is made of is visible in the way he crosses a room. When he decides to be fast he is very fast.
The atmosphere around Hamrahin is one it is easy to be quiet inside. Being asked something by him is a real invitation rather than a courtesy, and people find themselves trying out half-formed thoughts near him that they would not say anywhere else. He makes a group of four feel like four people rather than a gathering. He does not raise his voice and has never needed to.
He smells warm and faintly musky, and underneath it clean in a way that is difficult to place against anything else.
Hamrahin is a fire with room around it for more people, and a long table with a spare chair standing at it. He is two rivers that met a long way upstream and have been one river ever since, and a road with two sets of footprints on it going the same way.