Tejyar
A testrian who will tease you all evening and be standing in front of you before you have looked up.
- Gender
- Male
- Pronouns
- he/him
- Species
Name
Tej comes from the Sanskrit tejas — fiery energy, brilliance, vigour. It names the heat that lives in a person rather than the heat in a hearth: spirit, temper, the flare that comes up in someone when they are roused. That makes it the right fire for him, because it is his own rather than anything he calls on.
Yar comes from the Persian yār — friend, companion and beloved, all held in one word. It is the element in Shahryār, and it reaches further than the English friend does. A yār is the one who stays.
Fiery friend is the plain reading. The heat and the loyalty are the same thing in him, which is why the name sets them side by side.
Temperament
Tejyar arrives talking. He teases inside the first minute and he aims it — the emotion affinity hands him the state of a room before he has crossed it, and what he does with that is pick out whoever most needs taking down a peg or drawing out. Very little of it costs anyone anything, whatever it sounds like on the way past. People who have been on the receiving end describe the same thing: being laughed at by Tejyar feels a great deal like being let in.
He is feisty, and it comes up fast. He argues, he flares, he takes a position and holds it well past the point where holding it is convenient. The heat drops as quickly as it rose, and he is generally the first one back afterwards — sideways, with a joke instead of an apology, which everyone who knows him has learned to accept as the apology.
His affection travels in disguise. He will insult somebody he loves with real invention and then rearrange his entire day around them, and the insult and the rearranging are one gesture. Ask him directly whether he cares and you get a flat denial delivered with his antennae standing straight up, which he is aware of, and which has never once stopped him trying it.
The loyalty is where the lightness stops. He is loyal to a fault and the fault is a real one: he will back somebody he loves past the point of good sense, put himself between them and things he has no business standing in front of, and go on doing it after being told to stop. He knows this about himself. He has shown no interest whatsoever in fixing it.
The slime does the practical work. He heals with it — a hand laid over a wound, the slime running firm and cool, and a running commentary the whole time about how the injury was avoidable, which it usually was. The commentary is how he carries being frightened for somebody, and nobody has ever mistaken it for anything else.
His thought-contact opens to the people closest to him, and once it is open it stays open. It arrives warm and loud and entirely his, turning up at odd hours with something that could easily have waited until morning. Being on that list is the most direct thing he does. He would never put it that way, and he has never needed to — everyone on it worked it out a long time ago.
Physical description
Tejyar arrives at speed, and the room reorganises around it. He is bright and quick and entirely forward, seven feet of long limbs and momentum, and he takes up as much room as he likes while making it perfectly clear the room is yours as well. The first thing anyone meets is the edge — fast, sharp, aimed — and the warmth underneath it comes through in the same sentence. He knows exactly how good he looks. He will tell you so, and then he will tell you something about yourself that you were not expecting to hear out loud.
He is built long and lean and wired for speed, with real muscle through the arms and back and the weight of him carried low. His legs and his broad gastropod feet are the heaviest things on him, and everything above them runs light. His reach is considerable and he uses all of it — an arm thrown across a doorway, a hand landing on a shoulder from further away than seemed likely.
His skin is dusky purple, deep and soft-toned, with streaks of red running through it like heat held just under the surface. The colour sits darkest through the chest and brightens as it travels outward, so his hands, his feet and the tips of his antennae carry the most light in him. The species’ smoothness is all there — thick, yielding, warm to the hand.
The shell is the same dusky purple, with black striking through it where his skin runs red, and radial stripes crossing the whorls in bands that cut clean across the spiral. How tightly it coils is a matter of how far he has opened it. Held close it sits tight against his back and armours him. Opened out it goes wide and sweeping, big enough to disappear into entirely, and he uses the whole of that range in the course of an ordinary day. Folded away, it leaves the line of his back clean and nothing else behind.
The slime is visible on him, a clear wet layer over the whole of him, and it usually runs a deeper shade of his own purple. Left to itself it is thick and warm. It is rarely left to itself. He puts it to work constantly and the colour moves as he does — a palm going tacky against a wall, a hand cooling and firming where somebody is hurt — and it shifts on its own the moment he feels something, thickening, brightening, running cool without any decision from him at all. Anyone who touches him regularly has learned to read it.
His face is broad and open above a short muzzle, and it is the most expressive thing in any room he is standing in. Everything he thinks arrives there first and stays visible for exactly as long as it takes him to decide what to do about it.
His eyes are a vivid green, bright against all that purple, and the pupils move between slit and round as the light asks. They also go round when he is genuinely pleased, which happens considerably more often than he would like, and gives him away every time. He has never found a way to stop it.
The antennae are thick at the base and taper fine, held high and forward, and they never stop moving — reading the air, the room, whoever has just come through the door. They are the most honest thing on his body. Whatever he happens to be saying, the antennae have already reported what he actually feels, and the people who know him watch those instead of listening.
His hands are heavy with muscle and completely dextrous with it, and the claws retract away entirely. His feet are broad, with thick pads beneath. He touches everything — a wall in passing, the back of a chair, the shoulder of whoever he is talking to — and the contact is constant and unthinking. The adhesion answers to him, so a trail from him is a decision. He leaves one when he wants somebody to know he was there, and he takes real pleasure in the timing of it.
He moves quick and darting, changing direction the moment something else catches him, and underneath the darting is the smooth continuous glide of the foot doing the work. All of it looks easy. When it matters he is across a room before anyone has finished the sentence that started him moving.
He reads a room before he has crossed it. The emotion affinity tells him what is in the air, and what he does with it is aim — the teasing lands exactly where it will do the most good, and it is very rarely wrong about which person in the room needed it. His thought-contact opens to the people he loves and stays open, a mental voice arriving warm and loud and unmistakably his. It has never once opened uninvited.
What he feels shows in three places: the antennae first, then the slime, then the way he is standing. Between them there is very little guesswork left to do. He will deny a feeling cheerfully while all three of them are busy contradicting him.
Being near Tejyar is invigorating. He is the life of whatever is happening and he lifts the level of everyone around him, and being teased by him is exasperating in the best way there is — the kind that has people laughing at themselves an hour later, and going back for more.
He smells of warm wood and fresh moss, the air beside a campfire late into the night.
Tejyar is a campfire burning well into a full-mooned night. He is bright, he is loud, he is warm at the centre of everything, and he is still going long after everyone assumed he would have burned down. Stand near him and you will be teased, and you will be defended, and the second of those will happen before you know anything is coming.