Toshala

Esha (Sister, NPC)

## Application Sheet

Toshala was a pale lavender-gray furred she-wolf with pale rust-colored markings, and dark greenish-gray eyes. Born in the traveling band of Mhor, she left the group before they settled in the Domain. Toshala herself lived in the Domain as a loner, entering in the midst of the Hive Wars. She vanished from the Domain, and hasn't been seen since. Toshala was designed by Tazihound, and created and RP'd by Koilada.

## Personality

* ***Even-Tempered.*** This young wolf aspires to keep herself calm and clear-headed on a frequent basis in hopes to keep up her opinions impartial, her decisions fair, and mind free of disturbance - it's easier to predict and resolve problems or danger prematurely that way. Unfortunately, her tendency to push herself past her limit and her emotional wounds can sometimes falter this trait.
* ***Temperate-Appearing.*** Often donning a placid or neutral expression, Shala likes to appear unemotional and unaffected by the hardships in her life. This is mostly to avert the worries of her family, friends, and packmates. This also includes bottling up her emotions to an unhealthy degree, although a stony-face and ineffectual and immovable appearance does come a handy depending on the situation.
* ***Workaholic.*** Toshala also puts everything she has into keeping herself in peak condition and her skill in battle fine-tuned; in fact, she may be a little compulsive about it. This is spurred by her desire to keep her family or pack, in particular those close to her, safe and guarded, determined to not lose anyone else again. Often, she works herself to the bone, but resolves to push past it even if it does come at a detriment to her mental health. Overall, Toshala is a very dedicated wolf who likes being useful and dislikes being sedentary.
* ***Tactician.*** Her objective mind coupled with her guard-like training via her father has blessed Toshala with a strategic mindset. This is especially evident when it comes to battle plans, but she can easily adapt her mindset to most other situations she faces as well. An intelligent wolf in general, she also finds joy in discussing hypotheticals with anyone who will indulge her, especially those of a similar mind, and likes to keep a keen mind - brawn without brain are more a meat shield than a trustworthy protector.
* ***Objective.*** Her (on good days) clear-headed temperance in matters outside of her own being is a trait that has lead to an objective mind and a worldly wisdom beyond her two years. She's a great fountain for advice and often, in the past, played judge to minor disputes when it was requested of her, and can easily step back to see all sides of a situation before making a decision; an aspect of her that she credits to the values of her upbringing. She is, however, a rather staunch example of: "I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it" when it comes to her own emotional and physical needs - woe be the workaholic.
* ***Affable and Empathetic.*** Toshala has a pleasant disposition, and while she's all work when it comes to her tasks, she will never refuse a friendly talk or multitask a chit-chat while on the job. She is good-natured and loyal, always willing to be a paw or shoulder in a time of need, and generally finds a way to get along well with almost anyone, bar those who are so diametrically opposed to her morality. Her big heart feels for others, especially when they're in pain or troubled, and despite her apparent workaholic-ness, she will pause what she's doing without question if she feels someone needs emotional support. This leads to her being rather adoring, especially as a family-oriented wolf that she is; when Toshala loves, she loves deeply - a bit *too* deeply, perhaps. Despite her calm, unfazed facade, she tends to be all smiles, touches, and affection-bestowing around those she loves and lays her heart out raw, leaving it open for the wounding.
* ***Overprotective and Overbearing.*** Due to her love for, and fear of losing, those close to her, Toshala has become overbearingly protective, unaware that this tactic to keep them near to her may end up driving them away. It tends to be worse when she's feeling particularly insecure, anxious, or stressed, however, as her panicking breakdown piles her fears on double.
* ***Stressed and Unsettled.*** As calm and apathetic as she appears to be on the outside, Toshala's current mental state is, in actuality, quite fragile. Her tendency to carry the world on her back, her workaholic attitude, and drive to keep everyone safe provides constant emotional stress on her mind, as does her bad habit of withholding her emotions - when she bursts, she *bursts*, tumbling heavily down the slippery slope of hysteria and mental breakdowns.
* ***Has Abandonment Issues.*** The losses Toshala has suffered in her short life has left her emotionally-wounded with a deep-seated fear of abandonment. She's terrified at the thought of losing another family member or friend to death, or simply just walking out of her life and leaving her alone. The majority of her irrationality is triggered by this, and being faced with the prospect can send her into a full-blown anxiety meltdown with varying depressive or aggressive reactions depending on the situation.

## Pre-Group History

After years of miscarriage upon stillbirth, Toshala and her sister, Esha, were born to a pair of nervous and worried yet also giddy parents. Her early life was relatively typical - as typical as it could be within a traveling pack of loners anyway - although as could be expected, Mowan and Indira fretted over and coddled their daughters more than would be normal, but the siblings adored their mother and father nonetheless, no matter how overprotective they got. Close to her parents as she may be, however, the centre of Toshala's universe was her littermate.

Shala and Esha were practically glued to each other's sides every second of their lives; where Esha ran Toshala followed, and whatever Shala did her sister did too. Even more amazing was their apparent ability to tell what the other was thinking with great accuracy, as well as seemingly being able to communicate with only looks. Their inseparability stunned even their parents, who thought it strange that two wolves, even as littermates, could be so in-tune with one another.

Their opinions on the matter was the first fracture in the shattering of their family.

Indira believed it was a force of mysticism that bound their children so closely together; she, born to parents who had splintered from Mhor upon a dream in her youth, thought her litter was a gift given by a mystical plane of ancestors and that they would hold profound spiritual importance to their family one day. Her mate, an outsider who had joined the travelers out of love for Indira, disagreed. In Mowan's mind, their obsessive need to keep a tight vigil over their daughters left them little interaction with others outside of themselves, and thus they spent an inordinate amount of time together, enough to learn every tick the other had off by heart.

Worried at the prospect, Indira, naturally being much closer to the rest of their small pack than he, managed to convince her fretting mate to allow their daughters to play with the pups of her most trusted sister under the supervision of all four parents. So it would be that, for a few hours at least, the girls were allowed daily playdates. Thus Toshala made her first friends, and with her puppy heart also charmed by her kind and noble relations, the seeds were being sown for a long-lived loyalty to her family and their ideals.

If her parents weren’t such stark opposites, perhaps that would’ve been the recipe for a perfect upbringing.

When the siblings were five months old, their parents finally relented their obsessive watch over their children, allowing Esha and Toshala more freedom to go off on their own and forge their own, smaller paths. Their closest cousin, Teilo, was never far behind the two.

One day, the three decided to sneak out and explore beyond the confines of their current, mountainous camp, where a simple game came to a fatal conclusion. They had come across a large rock overhang where Esha had elected a play-pretend of "leader." Each pup took turns pretending to be the fabled “Archqueen” of their grandparents’ tales, standing atop the rock and announcing their orders to the valley below until it was Esha's turn once more.

It happened too fast for the pups to process.

A simple slip, forepaws too close to the edge.

A tumble.

A fall.

A thump.

...

Silence.

Toshala and her Teilo raced to the edge of the overhang, but the lump of mangled fur and wrong-twisted limbs only made the little male eject his last meal, and the devastated sister to stumble back, body numb, mind frozen.

It was a few minutes more before her cousin recovered enough to race back for help. Toshala still couldn't move, not even when Indira gathered her in her paws, nor when Mowan lifted her by the scruff and dragged her home.

Esha's loss almost broke her.

At first, she didn't understand what happened. Being so young, the concept of death was near foreign to her. When it became clear, she refused to believe it. The grief-stricken pup curled around her littermate's body and would not move, not even to eat or sleep, refusing to let anyone take her away for days. When Mowan finally managed to pry Esha's corpse from her sister's paws, she wailed for what seemed like endless hours, then stopped eating altogether. The few friends she had frequently came to visit, but were always met with nothing more than an unresponsive lump that would not so much as turn her head to look at them.

Indira tried to reassure her daughter that Esha was in the Summerlands now, and may well be returned to her someday, but it did not help; even with what little she was aware of to grasp, Toshala did not want someone who “might” be her sister, she wanted Esha herself.

Occasionally, among rare moments of lucidity, she vaguely noticed her parents fighting over this assurance - Mowan didn’t want his mate to make nonsense promises she couldn’t keep and fill her head with hope, while Indira argued that it was the truth and that she would find peace in it. The two very different views tugged her comfort in very different ways - Indira softly assuring the spiritual while Mowan pulled the other direction, do deal with it in the, in his mind, “realistic” fashion.

Among their private, intensifying arguments there was one thing they agreed upon; that the unbreakable bond the sisters once shared was cause for fear. Her parents were terrified that it would bring the death of their only remaining pup as well. Spurred by this fear, Toshala was moved under the constant care of her grandmother, an experienced healer versed in the medicine of her old pack, where she was force-fed to ward off starvation and given herbs to help her recover mentally.

It was another two months before Toshala was able to set foot back outside, but when she did, she found that, as she’d only minutely grasped in her depressed haze, her sister's tragic loss had only driven another wedge between her parents.

Though she continued to carry the wounds brought by Esha's loss, Toshala had managed to slip back into a regular schedule of life by the time she’d reached her first year. Ready to find a place for herself within the family unit, she decided to train under her father, a skilled warrior and the small group’s strongest shield, whose strength she idolized more than anything. Her reasoning that it would be the best way to achieve her will; there was many a danger to a dwindling pack of travelers, of course, and without a densite or territory to shield them, they were at a strategic disadvantage - so she was to be the densite wall that would safeguard her last remaining family. She never wanted to lose anyone like she did Esha ever again; this was her greatest wish, and she would work as hard as she could to make sure of it, every ounce of her physical and mental energy was dedicated to her progress. Her cousins made playful comments about it, but not to be bothered by such silliness, Shala would just-as-playfully rebuke that they could stand to work harder too.

Spending so much time with her father, however, led to the bleeding of his views and ideals into her mind and whipped up an uncomfortable spiral of conflict, ones that combatted the things her mother and Mhor had taught her. Like her father, she kept this confusion to herself and her parents. Her mother gently insisted she join her in a sleep-spell the next moon, offering that it may quell her confusion. Trusting her mother, Shala agreed.

Beyond those troubles of the mind, things seemed to be returning to some form of normalcy…

…Until a harsh winter began to sweep the land, one longer and more taxing than the previous, according to her father. One by-one those too weak to survive the freeze began to drop, and her heart wept for each and every one… They were her family, and even if not especially close to her, those individuals were somebody else’s “Esha.”

These further losses tore her parents even farther apart; having experienced this before Mowan’s anger, simmering silently since the first fracture in their mateship, eventually boiled over upon a snowstorm, with the deaths of his two closest friends. Mowan decried their journeying, telling his mate that they had no idea what they were doing and where they were going, proclaiming that it was nonsense to follow the will of dreams! Her parents had led them to their deaths! Indira fought back, defending her parents and her mother’s visions, which, in turn, led to her mate lashing out and insulting the beliefs that had been lovingly passed through their family since birth. Calling them all mad, he declared to his daughter that once the storm let up, they would be leaving. Toshala was torn, panic ebbing at her centre; her last remaining family were ripping themselves in two, and she didn’t want to be split from either of them - she couldn’t lose anyone else.

Her mother must’ve seen the look in her eyes, because Indira relented and agreed to follow after, renouncing her beloved pack for the sake of her daughter; a guilt which Shala knew would follow her to the grave.

They had not yet left when Toshala returned from scouting to a mass of snow, rock, and tree sat at the bottom of a hill, a faint, familiar scent seeping from the pile. Though it was not needed to identify what had happened, as unmistakable limbs and tails were sticking haphazardly from their icy tomb. Toshala stood, frozen once more, as the sight slowly processed within the stricken cogs of her mind, before another, smaller collapse smashed into the ground beside them with a deafening rumble, snapping her back to reality faster than the previous time this had occurred.

Toshala before she tentatively and stiffly, numb from all physical feeling, approached the mess of snow and wolf. She pressed a shaking paw upon her father's, and it took all she had to not break down right then and there. She wanted to scream and cry, cling to them as she did Esha but...

She couldn’t break, not yet… She had to dig them out, bury them somewhere safe because she couldn’t bear the thought of scavengers picking at them. Toshala was no old-Mhorian healer like her grandmother, but she performed the burial rite as best as she could for her mother and her family, hoping she was in the Summerlands as she knew she would have wanted.

She then wandered aimlessly, mind once again in a numb-filled haze (although this time she kept herself fed. Death just… Didn’t seem like the answer for some reason.) until the snow finally melted and a stranger warned against traveling alone in these times and offered their companionship, which she accepted.

Soon she learnt of Mhor’s settling…Shala was curious to be sure; this was the pack her grandparents had left, whose stories she had been raised upon since she was aware enough to hear them, but she wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it. Still, curiosity was something among the feelings of lostness in her purposeless wandering, so with her gaze set on the horizon, Toshala took off for the west.

## Group History

Toshala struggled as a loner in the midst of the Hive Wars. Often hungry because of the Hive's savaging of prey numbers, she would have to resort to eating carrion. It was a difficult, bitter way of life, but there was no other option.

Before the Queen was defeated, before she even had a chance to live in the Domain and spread her wings, Toshala vanished from the Domain and hasn't been seen since.

## Trivia

* Shala is conflicted in her thoughts on Mhor's spiritualism and religion; on the one hand, she isn't entirely sure she believes in it, but on the other, everything that she's been raised upon and known since childhood pokes at her.

## External Links

* Official Application Sheet
* Koilada's deviantART Gallery