
Username:iBrevity
Name: Abrax
[ae]-[braax]
Name Meaning:a Greek name meaning "shining one", Abrax was so named for his light coat and
glittering silver eyes. His mother often called him Helios in joking, saying her
little son was as bright and fierce as the sun god himself.
Gender:male
Story:When Abrax was young his mother told him stories to lull him to sleep. She would gesture for him to settle in beside her and then bring to life great sweeping tales of quests and warriors and heroes, villains and magic and history. She told him that which she had learned from humans, of the enormity of the old Greek civilizations and the things they believed and the things they accomplished. She told him of adventure.
As he got older he naturally struck away from his mother. He needed something bigger than their small den and tribe, something wilder. He walked alone across continents, through woods and deserts and jungles; he saw more animals than even his mother had described to him and took careful observations of their behaviors and colors for her. He crossed into Greece ignorant of the importance of this new land and stumbled, quite literally, into the cavernous belly of a dilapidated palace. The fall knocked him breathless but once he had stumbled back to his feet he realized where he was and it was in this ruin he spent the next month, searching the hallways and rooms for treasures and stories. He had no real personal interest in it apart from wanting to find something suitable to return home with to show his mother and so he ventured farther and farther into the palace, winding through hallways bulging under the strain of the earth and into rooms that held secrets far beyond his imaginings.
In fact it was an accident that he saw the helmet at all. He'd gone into a part of the palace he'd yet to explore and got lost in the labyrinthine blueprint, wandering between musty rooms and leaving a trail in the dirt and muck on the floor with the end of his tail. He had paused in a room to allow his eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness, having left the veritable safety of the glass rooms where sunlight trickled down through the dirt in weak streams, and saw the helmet by its meager glint of gold. His mother had always liked shiny things and had named him for it, calling him Abrax after an old Greek word for 'shining one', and so he approached without trepidation. This would be something she would
adore.
He eventually found his way back, helmet in tow, and polished it with his fur until it gleamed. He put it carefully to the side and continued his explorations and it wasn't until nearly a week later, when he lay beside it on the tile floor of the main lobby, that he saw its shape and thought to try it on. He'd assumed it was some sort of decorative piece for a statue, perhaps for a leopard or the like, and it fit snugly on his head and made him feel like one of the adventurers his mother had always praised. He began wearing it simply for amusement and got used to the feeling of the cool metal against his cheeks and snout. It was heavy but not woefully so and it fit comfortably on the planes of his face and so, in light of that, it quickly became his favorite thing. He cleaned it and polished it and kept it close at all times. It was the treasure he had always imagined finding.
Abrax continued his mapping of the ruins until he had progressed so much that he could find no ways to continue forward. The remaining unexplored hallways had collapsed, having given way to the weight of the earth perhaps decades ago, and there were a scattering of rooms filled with soil from cave-ins that he could not forge a path through. He returned to the lobby to consider this dilemma, knowing that he had spent nearly three months in the ruin and comforting himself with that in itself being a job well done. As he settled himself on the tile, rolling the idea of returning home like a marble between his paws, there was a great thundering noise above him.
Abrax sat up, curling his tail about his haunches. He peered into the hole in the lobby's roof but could make out nothing except a cookie cut-out of the sky. It was near noon so the sun was half-blinding and as he lowered his head to blink back his eyesight the noise returned. This time it was directly at the mouth of the cavern where there was a great snuffling shadow, who prowled along the very edges of the hole. Abrax recognized the creature a moment later, a brown bear, a rather large predator that, up until this moment, he had had the good fortune of never seeing in person.
He watched with trepidation but assumed the bear would not vault down here only to sniff at him so he resettled his weight and rubbed one paw against his helmet for comfort. He sat like that for some time, until the edge of adrenaline burnt off and he was only sitting there waiting, nearly bored, watching idly as the bear pawed at the loose soil and sent scattering storms of it raining down on him. When the bear did eventually leap into the lobby it was in such a singular fluid movement that Abrax scarcely had time to roll out of the way; the bear landed on all four paws with a heavy enough bounce to rattle the tile-work loose. Abrax scrambled to his feet only a short distance away, that adrenaline flooding back into his system with a heady rush.
But Abrax was not a warrior. He had always prized himself on his intelligence and his luck and his charisma, not his ability to fight, and apart from ducking from the bear's swipes he wasn't making much headway on an exit. He knew there was a trick to climbing the ravine back out to the top soil by using short foot-holds on the wall but it was not something he could accomplish with a bear at his heels. He needed to distract it and then he could--the blow across his face caught him unawares, knocking him back a few feet. His helmet bore the brunt of the wound and he felt the screech the bear's claws made as it caught and tore at the metal and when he sat up his helmet had been ripped free from his face. It lay glistening in the shadows a foot away from him, and a good foot closer to the bear.
Abrax's head throbbed. He had smacked the side of his head against the wall in his ungraceful landing and from the ache that was spreading down his neck and shoulders he had hurt something there too. He came to his feet just in time to wobble away from the bear's next attack, though the one following that one hit him straight-on. The hurt of getting scratched across his snout barely registered after his collision with the wall and so he stood at one end of the room panting, licking blood from his nose, watching the bear as it circled closer. He needed an escape. He needed a distraction.
The hallway behind him went straight to another that had collapsed, Abrax knew that. He knew that there was a path to take from a room twenty feet down that ended in a dead-end. He knew that there was a missing segment of floor in what he referred to as the south-wing hallway, where a cavern had opened yawning the dark. He knew this. The bear didn't.
Abrax went racing into the dark, the bear only a few steps behind. He led him on a fruitless chase through the palace and the distance between them grew and grew and grew with each trick room or empty hall. Fifteen minutes later Abrax skid back into the lobby with the roars of the bears echoing down the chamber behind him, but some great distance away. He eyed the climb out of the ravine he had made only once or twice and then ran flat across the tile, scooping up the helmet on the way and replacing it on his head. It slid a bit in the blood from the cut across his nose but he did not intend to leave it behind, not with only the company of this horrible bear to look forward to.
He leapt for the first foot-hold, nearly slipped backwards, then somehow made it to the next. The climb was long and arduous, given how tired his legs were, but when he made it back up top he laid out in the grass with the most relief he had ever felt in his life. When he had recovered enough to move, he walked away from the ruins without a backward look. The bear could have the palace now; Abrax had his adventure and his helmet, and that was quite enough.
-----
But Abrax discovered shortly thereafter that home was much farther away than he had figured. Much as he was loathe to admit it, he had the directional skills of an ox. He could not follow the stars or the slant of the sun; he was hopeless when it came to geography and map-making. He traveled for a great long time, ranging across valleys and mountains, through a hundred different weather patterns and woods and a few months after he had escaped the bear he found a Viscet sleeping on a riverbank. Well, more precisely, he
tripped over a Viscet sleeping on a riverbank.
They came awake with a short screech of sound, enough to make Abrax roll to his paws and lift his hackles defensively. "Sorry, sorry," he said quickly, but they seemed far more taken aback at facing a mask than the impressiveness of his bristled fur.
They lifted a paw and tapped the nose of his helmet, grinned when they felt it reverberate against his skull, and he smiled tentatively back. He had not interacted with another Viscet for quite a long time, and his social skills felt rusty and his voice weak.
He cleared his throat and said, "Are you alone here?"
The other laughed. "Of course not," they said, shaking the forest debris that clung to their galactic fur. "My name is
Mnemosyne. Who are you?"
"Abrax," he said, lowering his head in a more official greeting. They laughed again, a bright, loud sound and gestured for him to follow them into the brush.
"Come eat with us then, Abrax," they said, glancing back at him over their shoulder. "You look as if you have been quite a ways."
Abrax hesitated with a slight frown. "I have nothing to offer in return, I'm afraid."
Nemo smirked. "Have you any stories?" They asked, gesturing with their chin to the glistening shine of his helmet. "I am quite partial to stories."

