The stallion's aeolian traits do not stop there. His wings are muscular and powerful, easily able to allow him to soar amid the clouds. His feathers are a deep chocolate brown with golden edges, but the muscles underneath the feathers are powerfully built and sinewy - they are beautiful as well as strong. Noitcerru is not only capable of flight but agility, too; he is dangerously lithe in the air, nimble enough to fly through the narrowest of crannies and navigate the worst storms. There are few aerial environments that he cannot steer through: each of his seven years of life have been lived up in the sky and it shows. This stallion can perform many an act if he chooses, capable of acrobatics of both grace and beauty.

These beautiful wings are to the direct detriment of his limbs; the earth has betrayed him. His skewbald body, draped in browns and whites and covered by a delicate golden sheen is slim, perhaps dangerously so. His legs are gangly, brittle and more weak than a newborn’s, barely able to keep his weight off the ground when earthbound. Noitcerru was a weakling at birth and years of being on the wing have allowed the muscle to atrophy and decay, leaving little but spindly thin columns - they are useless and too fragile for use. He cannot walk far without help and certainly cannot run. The cost of such a lifestyle is evident; if he were ever to land, he might not be able to get himself up into the air again, or even up on all four legs. Consequently, Noitcerru rarely comes down to earth.

He does not need to. He can sleep on the wing; he can skim over grass; he can feed off what grows on the rocky edges of the coast. The stallion can easily fly with the strength of his wings alone. But he can also take advantage of the air currents, gliding to conserve his strength and to ensure he does not waste too much energy whilst travelling long distances. Indeed, Noitcerru has managed to survive on flight and flight alone, resourceful and inventive enough to maintain his odd lifestyle. His keen eyesight lets him peer down at the ground and identify friends and foes from above with little effort, enough to both stay out of trouble and to see potential feeding grounds below. Although this world of currents and breeze and wind could be hard to live in, he has found refuge within its dizzy heights and the upper echelons with its star studded nights and balmy days.

Above he is master of his environment, an eagle amongst horses; below he is nothing but a cripple in a land that is not his own. The divisions in his life are clear, the boundaries drawn out in the sand; he knows where not to go, and knows, too, to claim the great blue vault above.

Noitcerru is a traveller. He’s seen it all - he has drifted over foreign lands too many times to count. He’s a mix, a blend of lots of different places and people and individuals whose mannerisms, ways of speaking and cultural tics he’s picked up and somehow absorbed into himself. It’s hard to place him, hard to pin him down. His accents mix and change sometimes in the same sentence, always harmonising and emulsifying and absorbing in a fashion that can only be described as vital and fluid, like water becoming the shape of any container it chooses. He is adaptable, changable - as spontaneous as the winds he glides on.

Noitcerru himself is a pusher of boundaries, a risk-taker, clever and throwing riddles whenever he chooses. Why wouldn’t he be? No one can catch him up in the air - apart from another pegasus. This stallion can be a trickster or an angel…depending whether he likes you. He lives in the moment. He is ultimately out for fun - brimming with vitality, he believes in actions, not words. He’s an artistic soul at heart and, as a maverick, can be unpredictable. Noitcerru is a jack of all trades - although his wings pigeonhole him into one of the air, in personality this stallion tends to lean towards everything and anything, trying his hand at anything that goes by. He lives a fast existence, one that intensifies with every beat of his wings, and he thinks rarely of any long term plans.

He is scattered and impulsive by nature. Noitcerru inherited his mother’s innate, natural fury. The anger has developed into being partially directed at himself, at his differences that define him and keep him away from solid ground. When angry Noitcerru has a vicious temper when his emotions run high. He can be overwhelmed by his emotions and doesn’t always deal well with criticism. Being up high does little to shelter him from raw, earthy feeling - if anything his powerful wings only allow him to put his anger into violence more quickly, letting him dive down onto his aggressor without a pause for thought.

The landlocked, as he calls them, have no need to look into his business but he has every business looking into theirs. After all, he can see all effortlessly from his own lofty heights. Noitcerru can’t help it, cannot stifle the urge to get involved. He’s an explorer, an adventurer - he’s curious and passionate about the unknown and he watches the landlocked more than he would care to admit, fascinated with the way they move, how they run in a way he never could. Their lives were so different to his own and he can find it hard to relate to these horses. He can be kind and a good friend in his way but needs to get close enough to forge a relationship in the first instance - which can be hard. He doesn’t see friends wherever he goes but he certainly doesn’t spurn the chance of an alliance, either. This stallion is fiercely independent - but treacherous though he may be to handle, Noitcerru is not isolated from what goes on Below.

The air defines him - his good qualities as well as his bad. He has a vulnerable underbelly of fluctuating self esteem along with sharp, wild wariness. Noitcerru has spent his life alert and with his upbringing he has never truly felt safe. As long as he goes fast enough, as long as he flies higher than anyone else, he won’t be caught - but whether that insensible urgency is a hallmark of his childhood or part of his personality it’s hard to tell. Noitcerru lives as though he’s on the run. Noitcerru can be considered compulsive in the way he acts and talks. He tends to run away from his own problems and overplay his strengths. This stallion is more vigilant than most, always aware of the hidden undercurrents of communication, the rivulets of intrigue and the wind changes of treachery. Noitcerru is usually distrusting of herds and large groups of horses. However much he feels different from other horses, up in the sky is where he is safe and he would do anything to remain so. His morals are based on doing what he has to to survive, and to retain his own freedom. This and his frequent isolation due to the nature of his disability can make Noitcerru quite egotistical.

Down Below, on the other hand….Noitcerru is no fool. He has an unshakeable fear of what will happen if he were ever to topple to the ground. He knows his strengths - but he also knows his weaknesses all too well. If he gets too close to the ground he could fall just like Icarus - and with the same consequences.

The first thing Noitcerru ever saw was a huge, hulking head. A head with big blue eyes, staring into his own with a fierce, angry declaration of love. The eyes could look into his very soul unblinkingly with intelligence and fury and wrath. But he had born into a world of confusion and haste. The head had begun to speak - but to order, to demand. Up, now! He could barely stumble upright when she was moving him, almost trampling him underfoot with hooves bigger than his head. He arched his head up at her to see the loose mane, clogged with mud and dirt, tumbling down muscles rippling under her coat. But Mother barrelled into his tiny, staggering body and bit at his wings harshly, still sticky from birth, to get them up, up, up - faster and faster now - beat the wings - again - and again - and again -

It was only as he turned around wide eyed at the land he had just left that the foal saw shadows down below, full of stamping hooves and snorts and wild bellows in the dark.

Beyond that, the world Noitcerru was born in was a small one. There was his mother and himself - no one else. There were no additional cast, no further characters, and he did not know any other way of living bar the one lived by Mother. Mother did not talk about herself but from an early age he knew her to be a Glider, a solitary pegasus who lived alone in a cave on the seafront. It was hardly surprising, given she had wind x water magic herself. But sometimes she didn't seem to have a place to live at all. Most of the time she was on the wing, and Noitcerru was expected to follow her. Some days would be like the first day of his life, the frenzied beating of wings and the leap of faith into the open air; others were full of staying by the cave, and other caves like it - so many it was hard to differentiate one from the other. Noitcerru didn’t know what day he would face every morning, and he didn’t know if Mother did, either.

He didn’t ask. Mother didn’t appreciate questions, and parented him kindly but firmly. Yes: there were more horses like them. No: Noitcerru could not meet them. Why? Don’t ask questions, but I love you. They had many days like that in the caves, and other days when he would get so tired from flying that he would rest across her back and she would fly the distance, her graceful wings extending in all directions with a steady rhythm of beats into the night. Because what was obvious from Noitcerru’s first day was that he was weak. He was a runt, his legs small and spindly. But he could fly, and if anything Mother’s punishing pace enabled his wings to grow strong and powerful. He soon didn’t tail behind her but fly alongside her, and she encouraged nothing less. He was trained to fly for long distances, to overcome his physical difficulty by developing his wings and to stay strong. Mother tended to fly at everything with steely-eyed determination - she kind with him but refused to let him stop for a moment, never taking his physical weakness is an excuse.

Time passed and Noitcerru’s legs never did get better. Mother didn’t want to spend time on the ground for a reason that the little foal could never quite fathom, her eyes crisscrossing the sky or pacing around him as he took step after shaky step. The sky was becoming more at home to him than the ground ever could. Noitcerru was reaching a year old when he saw a family down below. He was able to identify them from above, assign the roles he had learnt from Mother. A foal, like himself. A mother, like Mother. And someone else, someone male like him but bigger and stronger. He was a father, Mother said. A stallion with a child. But before she was able to stop him her son was diving down to see this stallion - someone so much like him but so, so different. But even as he had swooped down the adult horses had attacked. The tiny foal the yearling had spotted was now hiding behind her parents with big brown eyes as her mother and father lashed out with sharp hooves towards him, ready to drag him down. It was only Mother’s quick thinking that let Noitcerru get away with his life - but not before the stallion had given Mother a wide eyed stare.

Far away in another cave, he had questions. And Mother, for the first time ever, told him the full story.

Mother had once been the lover of the leader of the herd, the stallion Noitcerru had just seen. A mistress, but a warrior in her own right - a mercenary, a mare who travelled from place to place and gained employment through her skills at war. What had been a territory infringement on Mother’s part had led to a wild and tempestuous affair. But it had been short lived. The herd had found out, and the leader, by both his mate and the herd’s decision, was told to kill his mistress: only then, by the herd’s opinion, would the leader once again be pure of heart and ready to lead. But Mother had escaped, heavily pregnant and alone, and had only been caught up when she had paused in her flight to give birth to her foal - and her only son. She had fled with Noitcerru in tow that first day of his life and had never looked back.

He had no place to go but stay with his mother. And even as he grew he did not leave her side. Where would he go? What would he do? The only herd in the area was the one that was baying for Mother’s blood and his own, too. His father was still down there on the ground with his mate and his daughters and he could never see his son. And so life continued, albeit with the mystery solved. Month after month passed but as Noitcerru became stronger Mother began to sicken. It was a curious thing; as he began to reach the prime of his life she was beginning to wilt from a disease Noitcerru could only begin to understand. One day, after soaring high in the heat of the summer and wheeling over the deep blue of the ocean, she had suddenly deteriorated. Her wings began to fail, her head began to loll and despite Noitcerru’s best attempts she plunged into the sea amid flailing feathers and wings, unable to be saved or to save herself before her head went under and she disappeared from view.

The grief was hard to handle and her son’s first inclination was to go to the herd of his father. Half brimming with anger and half begging to be let in, his garbled message to the first horse he found (slash divebombed in his urgency) only intrigued and ruffled the feathers of the herd, causing such agitation to the point of which his father had no choice but to attend the sudden commotion and find out what was happening at the edge of his own borders. It was his son from four years ago, the son that he never thought he had.

A tribunal was announced. As such, Noitcerru’s father’s mate had not produced an heir - only daughters, the half siblings to Noitcerru. They would never be seen as fit to rule the herd. On the other hand, he was a bastard - a weakling, a cast off from the mare who had betrayed the herd by having an affair with its leader. The tribunal made a decision and he was legitimised...barely. His father’s mate, bitter about the decision, made every effort to make life in the herd hard and difficult - which it already was to the stallion who had never lived in a herd before.

Noitcerru could immediately see why Mother had not joined the herd. It was different - different from everything he had known of both her and life in general. He found it hard to adapt to the group’s rhythms, but adapt he did - as well as he could from the sky, naturally. It quickly became obvious that he could not go back to the ground even if he wanted to. His mother had taught him to develop his wings when she saw his weakness in his legs, and that had given him powerful wings but limbs that could never truly support him. He would have to be a part of the herd from the air.

Not that his father’s mate made it easy for him. When possible she got the herd to stay in caves where the feathers could rip under the rocks and there was little room for him to fly. If Noitcerru had thought about it perhaps his stepmother’s ire would have been justified; he was new blood, a savage to the civilised herd. But beyond that he threatened the line of succession - and his stepmother’s daughters’ lives. But to the winged stallion all he saw was anger that had no cause, and a rivalry was struck between stepson and stepmother since they met. Noitcerru’s father, meanwhile, was busy with the herd, and despite his acceptance of his newfound son found it hard to be in his company. Whenever his son tried to approach him he would always say he was busy - too busy to look upon the reminder of his affair, anyway, was the general consensus. Was life worth all of this? One day Noitcerru went out during a storm - the one time no one would be watching - and flew out into the tempest, confident enough his skills would let him escape from this life without anyone trying to stop him. He had had enough of herd life.

Over time Noitcerru lived a solitary existence like his mother. He could travel for long distances and did so frequently, soon roaming far away from what he knew and into the great unknown across Loorien. He could never land wherever he went but he could get down low enough to speak to the horses there, and soon learnt of their cultures and their lifestyles that were sometimes vastly different than his own. He became an amalgam of all of these people he met and the places he went to, constantly changing and shifting and becoming more and less than what he was. His mother had always demanded a certain amount of decorum but he always threw that to the wind - why would he not, when there’s ultimately more to explore and nothing holding him down?