#riding a brain with a saddle on it into the nearest town and saloon | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

senatushq · 10 months ago

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NAME. Oakley & Ryder AGE & BIRTH DATE. 160 & 121 January / 9th / 1864 & February / 14th / 1903 GENDER & PRONOUNS. Cismalex2 & He/Himx2 SPECIES. Terror VARIANT. Doppleganger ( Former Human & Former Witch ) OCCUPATION. Park Ranger FACE CLAIM. Beau Mirchoff & Joshua Orpin

biography

( tw: death, murder, violence, occultists ) Oakley was born in the saddle; he and his older brother were raised alongside their father, steering longhorns alongside their father in the rural South along the Spanish borderlines. As children, the boys were prone to mischief; wherever Sawyer went, Oakley would follow close behind. Life on the constant road was difficult, but while many flocked to the West for gold, their father taught them to capitalize on the wild cattle that had roamed unclaimed following the Civil War. The work was dangerous; if the elements and natural world alone weren’t enough to claim a child, then the violent confrontations they landed in along the road would have been enough to see their lives ended. As a child, Oakley learned how to rope, handle cattle, ride for long hours in the saddle, navigate difficult terrain, and shoot. His dad often commented on how thick Oakley’s skull could be at times, how he’d be dead if he didn’t have Sawyer’s shoes to walk in, but the first time one of those tin cans went flying, Oakley heard the pride in his old man’s voice. They’d survive off of very little, and when things were truly desperate, they’d make do with what came off of the land until they got their herd to the nearest railroad town.

Oakley grew up, and ranchers began to settle; they’d fence off their land with barbed wire, and the need for herding cowboys dwindled. More and more, Oakley would watch as Sawyer dragged their old man from the end of a bar through the streets outside the saloon to douse the old drunk with whatever water they could find. When Oakley was a kid, he thought his father was the bravest man he’d ever met; in time, he grew up, though, as all children did. There was nothing special about him, and then one day, the old man was just gone, and the brothers were on their own, displaced and needing to find a way to fend for themselves. Cowboys could find work on ranches, but many more seasoned men were willing to work for even less than the boys asked.

Their life of crime started small; stealing was Sawyer’s idea: it was that or starved. Wherever his brother went, Oakley followed, so when things escalated, that just seemed like the natural course for things. Oakley had been shooting at people most of his life; in his childhood, that was more for self-defense as they tried to scare people off when they were confronted out on the road. When Oakley pointed his gun, it was because there was money to be made or because his brother had told him to; usually, those two things went hand in hand. He was good with it, too, a natural. The shooter made up for what he lacked in brains with a keen eye and steady hands. As sharp as Oakley was with a gun, that didn’t translate to anything between the ears. Uneducated, the man had never spent a single day in a classroom, and even if he had, it likely wouldn’t have helped him much. Sawyer was the brains of every operation, and Oakley was the faithful sidekick to his brother’s endeavors.

In time, the brothers met two others, outlaws like them, and together, the four formed a gang of robbers. Real money was on trains and the jobs were almost always so simple that even Oakley could pull them off. They’d board the trains like any other passenger and once they were far enough away from town, they’d slip their masks on and hold up the train. Anything of value would be stripped from passengers, those who resisted were either tossed out the side or put down on the spot. They’d decouple a train, or bring it to a halt completely as they worked over safes and anything else with a lock that needed to be busted open. For Oakley, this was the high life; one of their fellows would always be waiting at a meeting point, horses at the ready, and from there the outlaws made an easy getaway. No more begging for scraps, no more hoping to get hired for a measly wage, and no more hungry nights where dinner had been just a fantasy of what they would eat if they could afford it.

A decade in and this life came tumbling down. Things went south on one of their train robberies, and under the blistering sun of the breaking west, Oakley bled out after being shot and jumping over the side of the train. That should have been the end, but the outlaw, he’d always been hungry, wanted more, and while one world ended for him another began. When Oakley opened his eyes, he was back in the saddle, his brother and their two friends alongside them as they rode through the night. Products of campfire storytelling, the ghost riders would blow through urban legends for varying reasons: The Outlaw, The Ranger, The Marauder, and The Enforcer.

In time, they attracted the attention of hunters: humans and supernaturals vested in putting down violent, murderous, troublesome spirits that grew in power over the decades and acted entirely with autonomy. Old stories led Sawyer to hide their bones, so while the riders could be banished for a time, they could never truly be destroyed. A coven bound them in time, but a traitor among the witches was a secret follower of the Asphodel; with their necromantic magic, they resurrected the riders and Oakley took a living breath for the first time in over a century.

Ryder

Too young to be left alone, Ryder heralded from a coven of witches renowned for its secrecy and abilities with blood magic. Born into the Narcissus Coven, Ryder was two years Verna’s senior; power flowed freely through their family line. They were legacies of the witches who’d escaped the fires of the burnings in the Renaissance period. In those first, formative years, knowledge of blood and the power that came with it was something that was all but mandated. Their parents weren’t cruel or impractical; they wouldn’t put a knife in a child’s hand and expect them to channel a Greater Demon, but knowledge was the key to success with any form of magic. The Narcissus practiced the belief that the only aspects of magic that were truly dangerous were those that witches remained ignorant of.

As a child, Ryder studied rudimentary basics, basic runes for an alphabet, and the foundation for ancient languages in the form of a child’s word games. Diction so that Ryder could do so without issue when the time came to recite incantations. His steady hands meant the witch would someday grow up to have a physiological prerequisite for the unbroken lines of conjuration. Something about Ryder was always gentle, though; he’d find birds with broken wings and try to nurse them back to life in a shoe box. He hated the sight of any injury, and restoration was the first that came to mind when asked what school he’d be most interested in. Ryder was still a child then; what he could have been or might have been irrelevant to what fate had in store for him.

They framed the excursion as a camping trip where Ryder, alongside other initiates, was brought into the wilderness to endure the elements and understand the wilds around them. Led by an adept and a pair of acolytes, it would be on this trip that Ryder would not return; at six years old, Ryder was the youngest in the group, brought along because his parents had all but pushed him towards it. They pushed him to mirror their greatness that they would never see actualized. Instead, the troupe returned to the Coven two nights into the journey without Ryder. The Narcissus combed the expansive wilderness for a week in search of their lost initiate. His premature mark and his blood should have called out to them, but there was nothing, not even a body.

Found battered and broken at the bottom of a ravine by a survivalist who’d lived in the forest for decades, Ryder awoke several days after his fall with few to no memories of what had happened to him. There was a pain on his arm where his mark had been, and it was there that the man had applied a rudimentary combination of destruction and alteration to change the mark enough so that it couldn’t be traced. Here Ryder came to be raised, the formative skills of restoration came to be self-taught, while the man he thought of as his father taught the budding young witch the magic he’d inherited from the spirits of the forest over generations.

His father’s rage was never directed towards him but constantly simmered beneath the surface. Ryder grew up wondering why the man had rescued him that day and why he’d bothered to take him in when the people who crossed into the old man’s territory were never seen again. Stories had always circulated in the woods about trees that would seemingly swallow men whole, that there were places where the ground would open up, and hikers were never seen again. These tales were about the eyes of mysterious creatures that watched the people who came and went from the trees, monsters that crawled around at night and dragged those who walked alone away, never to be seen again. Ryder’s father was a murderer, a blood witch, but he didn’t seem to take any pleasure or delight in the task. Still, the brutality of it was ritualistic. He fed the spirits of the wilderness and praised the dark forces that had sheltered his family line for generations. Relentless in a way that it permeated the very core of the witch’s existence, Ryder was willing and complicit in a short time. He’d run the boundaries over, check the traps, reaffirm the enchantments, and deal with the outliers or the stragglers that broke free.

Ryder’s schooling was inevitable; to his fellows, he was the strange boy from the woods, but to those who knew him well enough to get close, they recognized that he was just a sheltered young man who was blatantly awkward. No one’s father lived forever. Ryder’s was no exception. Their relationship was a quiet one; there was a stillness to it that felt absolute, and the silence that followed the man’s death felt louder than any words he’d ever spoken prior. At nearly twenty years old, he could have gone anywhere; in the back of his mind, there were vague memories of a life outside the forest that felt foggy and broken. Watching over the park was a natural use of his skills; unlike most, he could hike into the wilderness with little means for navigation or survival and manage just fine. The Ranger was the title he earned, paid to live out in the wilds, he investigated disturbances and crimes that ultimately led nowhere. His father’s legacy and the old man’s handiwork was a lifestyle that Ryder carried forward because it was something that he could not just leave behind. Ryder had gotten older, and with that, he came to see what it was all for: people were disrespectful, and the forest had requirements. They mistreated the natural world around them and acted in ways that were profane and unnatural. Blood called for blood, so under the starry sky, he made offerings just as his father had done. The enchantments that kept the world at bay were formidable, but they required blood: blood to feed the restless souls and meat to feed the Otherworldly creatures that had long called this domain home.

Bested by one fated for the altar, Ryder was bludgeoned to death by a couple that he had planned to give to the spirits of the wilderness. There, under the cold light of the full moon, Ryder’s eyes closed, and the forest closed around his home; it shielded his corpse and his home from the outside world, and there he rotted until he was amidst the trees to stand as a wraith. Ryder became a ghost story and an urban legend, a butcher in the forest, a Satanist, a cultist, and a vengeful spirit all wrapped into one. In some stories, he was a ranger who’d been murdered and now hunted for trespassers in the dark. In other tales, he was a cantankerous old man who fed bones to the monsters in the shadows; in every legend, the story was the same: they always ended in death.

Oakley & Ryder

Resurrected in the heart of Rome; the ghost riders were conjured forth, dragged through the aether from the other side. Oakley’s spirit came in contact with Ryder’s along the way, and one absorbed the other entirely. Oakley consumed the ranger’s memories, thoughts, and feelings, and when he rode into the forest on horseback, he headed for the long-ruined cabin that was once his home. Through the dark, the infernal spirits had grown more robust, a monster from the Abyss: terror, they called him. Oakley or Ryder, that suited both of them just fine.

personality

Oakley + Patient, sharp, optimistic Ryder + Reserved, thoughtful, careful Oakley - Dim-witted, excitable, gullible Ryder- Apathetic, fanatical, murderous

played by shane. est. he/him

#takenc #takenm #takenterror #original character

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