Kartal Lucero Shiftweather

Kartal was born Kartal Lucero, the son of Agate Lucero and a djinn of Qadiran origin named Zossua, and grandson of Kartal Lucero, for whom he is named. As an adult, he took his adoptive father’s name, Shiftweather, but often goes by the alias Weathers; he finds fake names exciting and doesn’t think strangers are entitled to information about him. (Kartal is the youngest child in his birth family and the eldest in his adopted family. As of the time of *The Sickness of Demor Lant,* his birth siblings, in order of age, are Tiller, 40; Cotter, 38; Freda, 35; and Layla, 33.**)**

Kartal was a colicky child who never seemed to gain enough weight and had the inconvenient habit of levitating. He was constantly looking for trouble and adventure in the streets of Galdaras, and spent as little time as possible with his indifferent parents, surviving through panhandling and petty theft. He disliked his siblings and half-siblings, with the exception of his brother Tiller, who looked after Kartal before disappearing.

When he was about eleven, Kartal aided the Lieutenant of the Guard in preventing a cataclysmic invasion; she made him a ward of the city, so that upon her death his guardianship transferred to Rune Shiftweather—a change Kartal welcomed after years alone. His life with Rune was largely itinerant, unmoored by a home base. He gained three younger sisters in the space of seven years: Sadie Jamel, a half-orc; Felicity, a dwarf; and Minnow, a tiefling.

While in the process of adopting Sadie and Felicity—who were together in the same orphanage—Rune met Theo Cynired, who worked in the local government and helped facilitate the adoption, as well as Minnow’s later on. Rune and Theo married, and Theo moved the whole crowd into her house in the Thocrairi Moors, giving birth to a son named Eamon a couple of years later. Rune stayed with the children while Theo was at work, taking them on hunting expeditions through the nearby woods, showing them important druidic sites, and telling them endless stories.

(Theo was an assistant in the offices of the diplomatic envoy between Praidi and De Noornie when Queen Fenn aer Jaize was a teenager. She became a friend of Fenn’s, and various members of the Cynired-Shiftweather family had friendly encounters with the young queen, including Kartal.)

With his family settled, Kartal soon left to seek his own adventures and hone his skills. His propensity for thieving had never been discouraged so long as it only hurt those who could afford it, and he now began working feverishly at its improvement, hopping from town to town and ship to ship, earning money or stealing it as the hunger struck him. At one point he made it back to Galdaras, where he spent a few months with his biological family and visited the site of Rune’s druidic binding. He would return to Theo’s house in the Thocrairi Moors for a few visits a year—each time bearing new tattoos.

It was during this time that Rune began to spend more and more time in beast form to avoid the ailments of his own deteriorating body, until finally he was too weak to cast spells. Theo had sensed his decline years ago, but this final illness still felt sudden and unfair. His last days were tender and filled with sunlight. Kartal was thirty when Rune died; Theo was forty-nine, Sadie was twenty-three, Felicity twenty-one, Minnow sixteen, Eamon eleven.

Some time after the funeral, while emotions and pain were still high, Sadie picked a fight with Kartal over housework. Kartal, outraged, shouted his sister down, and she responded with accusations she didn’t believe: Kartal didn’t need *this* family when he had his *own* family alive in Galdaras; Kartal wasn’t worthy of the extra time he’d had with Rune before the others came along; Kartal had abandoned them just when Rune was slipping away. Kartal told his family he loved them and headed out again in the direction of his own life, wandering for some years.

At one point, Kartal got himself detained in Larkspur for petty theft, and was dragged before Fenn aer Jaize an older, grieving, and disenchanted man. Fenn, shocked to find Theo Cynired’s good-natured son in the custody of her guards, offered him clemency if he would act as her courier for a while. He showed such relentless dedication that he eventually progressed to the role of a spy for Fenn, working with her to destabilize the human trafficking systems on the Thocrairi Moors.

Fenn and Kartal developed a prickly mutual affection, and had a one-night stand sometime during Weaver Morrigan’s courtship of Fenn. The encounter showed them both that they would be better off not forming a romantic relationship, but Fenn learned she was pregnant not long after. She initially concealed the truth from Kartal, but he quickly figured it out, and assured her with all speed that he had no desire to muscle in on Fenn’s family line or lay claim to her child. They came to an arrangement which suited them both; Kartal went on like nothing had happened, while Fenn made plans to marry Weaver—plans which were dashed when Weaver betrayed her.

Fenn is untrusting of others and has every intention of insulating herself from any personal attachments save her daughter. Kartal is proudly shiftless and unanchored to the world, and has trained himself out of the kind of real sentiment that would nail him to a person or place. Nevertheless, they remain friendly and protective of each other; there is a lot of unspoken feeling between them, which Kartal cannot voice without risking his peace or his freedom, and which Fenn refuses to voice for the sake of her people.

Kartal would only do so if he had nothing left to lose - which is how he came to tell Hesperus about it the first night he was aboard the *Manticore,* following his interrogation at the hands of Imdarai.

Kartal’s goal in life is to be the best at what he does, with no obstacles to getting where he needs to go and stealing what he wants to steal. He has a terrifying metabolism and is constantly running, scrambling, flying; his body is skinny with slight cushioning in his torso and a touch of scoliosis, which doesn’t currently bother him. He has South Asian features, gangly legs and arms, and long bony hands; his hair, which is dramatically lighter than his deep bronze skin, grows quickly and tends to look good no matter how he wears it. His double-lidded blue eyes are deep-set and twinkly. He hates losing people and feels a need to be in the action—whether that means proving himself the best at what he does, or screwing up as royally as he can. Finding himself transplanted into a social world where he has no interpersonal attachments, no one to hold him accountable, and every opportunity to throw himself into danger without heed to how it may hurt those around him, is very exciting for him**.** Naturally, he has a desperate need for human connection, a need he is currently ignoring and abusing.

The worst thing that ever happened to Kartal was his brother Tiller vanishing when Kartal was about nine. The two boys were running from something, and in a decision founded on years of similar behavior—*I need to survive, I need to escape—*Kartal left Tiller behind. Kartal never had much interest in being held accountable for things he did, and at the time all he had to understand was that he was alone and needed to fend for himself; but he moved forward knowing that he might have prevented what happened to Tiller, had he not run. Tiller’s vanishing is a dark pit that Kartal has spent two decades struggling to accept and treat with compassion; he misses Tiller profoundly, and still holds out hope that his brother is alive somewhere just out of reach. He didn’t tell Rune about Tiller or any of his birth siblings until he was eighteen or nineteen. He regrets leaving his birth family without saying goodbye, and is proud of himself for eventually reconnecting with them.

Kartal’s father Rune died at age 51, twenty years after adopting Kartal. Rune has now been dead a year, and Kartal would like to believe that he has successfully laid him to rest, but a secret part of him is angry with Rune for dying. He had always known his birth parents were people he couldn’t rely on; Rune, on the other hand, had tried to be there for Kartal, and Kartal had come to expect he would be there always. When Rune died, 90 percent of Kartal’s mindset was grief and sorrow and love; the other 10 percent was, “Well, fuck you too.”

Kartal’s self-image is very poor. He has a lot of shame he won’t admit, and has become used to seeing himself as a not-good person who has done a lot of not-good things. Taking responsibility for that person would require him to extend a compassion and a care to himself that he doesn’t have. He thinks of himself as the only person he can trust to see to his own ends, but he also despises himself, and lives in fear of discovering his own emptiness.

Beneath his irreverent outlook, Kartal is cold, myopic, and extremely dangerous. He possesses a nifty delayed-shock response, which allows him to assess and act quickly in emergent situations. He is defensive of lives and souls, but unsentimental about bodies, and can be terrifyingly pragmatic when needed. He is currently disconnected from his fellow creatures and at risk of bulldozing everyone around him due to a conflux of mishandled grief, self-loathing, and recklessness; how this will affect him and those caught in his periphery remains to be seen.