Imathea

Imathea most often takes the form of a tall, fully anthropomorphic fox, upright and long through the line of her. She is built for balanced athleticism, steady across the shoulders and long through the limbs, and she carries it lightly. Standing still she reads as someone entirely at ease and entirely awake, a body ready to move that sees no reason to say so.

Her fur is dense and plush, deep gold across the whole of her, streaked through with white in irregular lines that take the light a moment before the gold does. Her ears, paws and muzzle darken toward the points, and that depth gives her outline its definition against all that warmth. The coat is thick enough to sink a hand into, and it holds heat the way banked embers do.

Her eyes are honey gold, and the pupils within them are pale silver, vertically slit in the way foxes carry them. In low light the effect is unmistakable — two narrow lines of silver held in warm amber, catching what little there is and giving it back. She can round them into an ordinary human pupil whenever she likes, and does it more often than most people realise; the change is small enough to pass for a trick of the light.

Her face is broad and soft through the muzzle, set on high cheekbones that lend the whole structure an elegance the softness alone would not suggest. Her resting expression is warm and genuinely open, and it gives remarkably little away. People who have known her for years still find they learn things about her sideways, dropped mid-sentence and in passing, as though the information had been common knowledge all along and they had simply not been keeping up.

Her ears are large, triangular and highly mobile, and they are quick — quicker than her face, and more honest with it. The tails are quicker still.

She carries six tails, full and plush, and they move as extensions of thought. At ease they spread loose behind her and drift with whatever she is doing. When she is guarding something they gather in close, low and deliberate, and the shift arrives well before she has said a word about it. Around people she loves they lose their discipline entirely — one will find its way across a lap or around a shoulder while she is mid-conversation and apparently unaware of it, which is the closest thing to an unguarded statement she makes.

She stands digitigrade and moves near-silently on it. Her hands are slender and dexterous, claws sheathed and kept that way, and she is deliberate with them: she reaches slowly, sets things down softly, and touches people as though asking first.

The whole of her native range is equally hers. Fox, human and every point between are all available and all comfortable, and which one she is wearing at any moment comes down to preference or to need, without ceremony either way. She shifts the way other people change how they are sitting.

Past the native range lies everything she has taken, and there is a great deal of it. She has lived a long time and the collection accumulated across the whole of it — willing gifts among them, and others taken from people she had already decided the world would be better without. She keeps all of it well clear of how she presents day to day; the shape she wears among friends is her own, and she has never had much interest in wearing anyone else’s around them. Ask her where a form came from and she will tell you, plainly and without decoration. It is part of the record of her life, and she treats it as exactly that.

What she feels reaches the tails first, the ears a beat later, and her eyes somewhere in the middle — the gold warms, and the silver narrows to something sharper when her attention genuinely lands. The clearest signal she gives is stillness. When Imathea stops moving altogether something has her, and everyone who knows her has learned to notice.

She moves quietly and precisely, light enough on her feet that she has a habit of arriving before anyone registers she was coming. A suddenness is available to her as well, and it runs the opposite way from most people’s: she goes from motion to complete stillness in the space of a breath, and the stop startles far more than the start ever did.

The atmosphere around her makes pretence difficult to sustain. People find themselves saying the true version of what they had planned to say, and finding it easier than the alternative would have been. Alongside that runs a steady sense of being seen and quietly kept — protection that is never announced and never in doubt. The only people who find her uncomfortable are the ones throwing their weight around, and they tend to work out why some while after they have stopped.

Close up she carries something faintly sweet, warm and hard to place, sitting beneath clean fur and the smell of open air. It registers at an embrace’s distance and lingers a little afterwards.

Imathea is a lantern left burning in a window, warmth put deliberately where someone travelling in the dark will see it. She is still water holding a reflection, giving back a truer picture of whoever looks into it than they were braced for. And she is frost giving way in morning sun — whatever has hardened around a person tends to loosen near her, slowly, and without anyone having decided that it should.