; a disease of the mind ; IT CAN CONTROL YOU.

[Roxie !]

[unfinished]

Name: Delirium

Age: 35 moons.

Gender: Female.

Clan: The Others. [dundundun]

Position: ...Warrior...ish?

Description: Delirium is like a shadow; a fleeting, flickering shadow that inevitably fades into darkness. Her small, dark form seems frail and young--in fact, she's been mistaken for an apprentice several times. Her runty physique is mostly due to how downright skinny she is. If she ate half as much as she should, she'd most likely be a normal-sized cat. But as it is, Delirium is all scrawn and rough angles, with long spider-like limbs and shoulders that jutt out sharply from her scruff.

She was actually once very beautiful, but years of terror, distress, and madness have washed over her beauty until all that remained were mere ghostly traces of her former good looks. Her sleek black fur is oftentimes ruffled and unkempt, and the inky depth of its ebony color is comparable to the shadows of an abyss. In texture, Delirium's fur is light and feathery--it never really seems to thicken, even in the winter, and as a result even the slightest autumn breeze will prove capable of sending shivers down the she-cat's spine.

Her face is boxy and inquisitive, with angled cheeks and slightly sunken in eyes. Delirium's long black muzzle is tipped with a tiny ebony nose, a sharp contrast to the bright pink of her tongue and the gleaming white of her teeth. Her whiskers are unusually long, but despite this there always seems to be something a little off-balance in Delirium's step. The warrior's ears are very large, and her hearing is perhaps the most keen of her five senses. Identically triangular in shape, they both point sharply with small, lynx-like tufts of fur at the tips of each. Her ebony ears are lightly lighter on the insides, the dark of her fur mingling with the pale pink-white of her skin. In one ear--her right, to be exact--Delirium has a nick near the tip that cuts about a third of the way in.

Delirium's eyes are by far her most striking feature, for more reasons than one. Firstly, because of their color: they are a deep, brilliant blue, and they contrast brightly against her dark pelt. Starting with their outer rims, they are a lighter color as pale as the sky, but travelling inward towards her pupils, they deepen into a darker sapphire. Another reason her eyes set her apart is because of the effect they tend to have on others. Delirium's gaze is positively haunting; shadowed by intensity and yet alight with nothing less than pure insanity. Her gaze is both terrifying and strangely hypnotic.



picture.
Personality:

Crush: A DER DER DER. no.

History: Delirium was, in fact, born to a Clan. That's not to say that she was once a normal, well-meaning cat who was driven into darkness by the tragedies of her past...no, Delirium was never normal by any means.

She was born in ShadowClan, to a pair of proud parents who had become mates the previous season and were absolutely ecstatic to become parents. The name given to her at birth was Pantherkit, and she had one brother called Stormkit. Stormkit was very popular in the ShadowClan nursery; the kits from other litters adored him, the queens spoiled him, even the visiting warrors seemed to find him amusing. Pantherkit, on the otherhand, was shy and withdrawn. She was never much good at nursery games or making friends, so most of the time she stuck to her mother's side like a shadow.

Pantherkit was born in the summer, in a time when ShadowClan was experiencing a serious drought. What moss that could be found was too dry and shriveled to hold water, and so the queens took turns leaving the nursery to travel to the nearest scarce water source. It was on a day when most of the other queens had gone for a drink, leaving Pantherkit's mother, Fawndapple, as the only queen in the nursery, that the trouble really began. It was a hot, lazy summer day, and her had dosed off just for a moment. While Stormkit played outside in the clearing, Pantherkit was sulking alone as she usually did. And then she heard it: a loud crash, and then the vicious snarling of fighting cats. They were being raided by an enemy Clan! Pantherkit shrank back towards the protection of he mother, but Fawndapple wouldn't wake! Didn't she hear the ear-splitting battle cries of the warriors outside?

Suddenly a massive, battle-scarred enemy warrior crashed into the nursery, his eyes alight with flame and his fangs gleaming as he lunged for Fawndapple's sleeping form.

"Mother! Look out!" Pantherkit wailed, but her mother still did not move. Without thinking, Pantherkit leaped at the murderous tom in Fawndapple's defense. This was a battle that she, a tiny, untrained kit, could not hope to win--but she would die trying. Her eyes shut tight, she felt herself collide with a solid body of fur and warmth, felt them both barreling into the nursery wall, landing hard on a stone jutting out from the ground. And then she heard the snapping of breaking bones that were not her own.

The air was silent. The yowls from outside had faded away into ominous quiet, and it made Pantherkit's blood run cold. There was a moment when everything stood still, as she slowly turned to look at the form beside her. The enemy warrior was gone, and instead Stormkit's broken body was slumped at her paws.

She was too young at the time to understand anything but trauma. The incident was nearly too much for Fawndapple to bear; her hysterical mother nearly died as well that day. But for Fawndapple, the only thing worse than losing one of her kits was to lose both of them. So she protected Pantherkit, making her swear never to mention what had happened to anyone, and made out Stormkit's death to be a tragic accident.

Never the less, Fawndapple was never the same after the loss of her son's life. She distanced herself from everyone around her, including Pantherkit, who was left alone in more ways than one. The psychological effect it had on her-- accidently murdering her own brother, and then being all but abandoned by her mother--did nothing to improve Pantherkit's mental condition. By the time she was made an apprentice and accordingly renamed Pantherpaw, she was hardly in any shape to begin her training.

Her mentor, a tom called Dusklight, initially wrote her off as shy and fearful. He was very kind to Pantherpaw, and he always seemed to be willing to listen to what she had to tell him about whatever happened to be bothering her. But Dusklight took his job as a mentor very seriously, and pushed her hard during their training sessions. One day, the pressure because too much, and for the second time, something in Pantherpaw snapped. Overtaken by distress, succumbed to another hallucination: wild dogs were closing in on her, their jaws opened wide as they reached for her...

The fearsome image was the last thing that the young apprentice remembered before she later awoke in the medicine cat's den. It seemed that she had had some sort of panic attack before fainting in the training hollow. Pantherpaw was ordered to spend the night in the medicine den, before being cleared to leave the next morning. She wanted nothing more than forget the incident altogether and resume her training, but would soon find that she'd have no such luck. For it wasn't long before an extremely concerned Dusklight confronted her. Quite frankly, his apprentice's behavior had terrified him, and he was determined to find out what really happened to her. Pantherpaw refused to respond, even when he led her out into the forest under the guise of a hunting mission.

"Pantherpaw," Dusklight desperately pleaded with her. "I have to know what happened to you. Please tell me."

Pantherpaw stared at the ground, all but choking on the lump in her throat.

"...I can't."