#this is a mixture of .. what's currently there and what is no longer there altho

[heartate-aa]

regarding ahri’s early life and life shortly after.    //   part one of . . . probably two.  maybe three.

as ahri’s life began,  it was not at all how people,  even she,  pictured it.  her origins are dated to be earlier,  though likely not drastically,  than 816 AN,  but she doesn’t recall a childhood,  not truly.  her earliest memories consist of living amongst a pack of ice foxes in ionia who took her in as one of their own,  though ionia’s animals and plants and their spirits likely sensed that she was no mere fox,  either,  that she was of vastayan blood.

as such,  because she was raised by foxes since she was a little kit,  there was quite a good amount of time that ahri spent in the form of an ice fox for the sake of convenience and comfort amongst her little family.  for all of her life,  she had no contact with any human beings or other vastayans,  not of her own ilk nor other vastayan tribes.

ahri doesn’t know where she came from,  or who she belonged to,  but even from her earliest years,  it had been starkly clear that she wasn’t one of them,  that she was different  —  the spirits of nature told her as much,  she could see as much,  and she could feel it.  the power that ran through her veins,  her hunger was something more that wasn’t satiated by the flesh of their kills alone,  her innate ability to charm their prey into their clutches,  to soothe the skittish ones to lull them into her maw,  and most of all,  her ability to shape shift and take the form of a human.  or,  something rather close to one.  she asked and she pleaded,  but none of the ice foxes were able to do any of what she could.  they were simply foxes,  albeit ones with an intimate relationship with the earth of ionia and its magic.  everything is different in ionia.  nature is wilder with its own special gifts,  a power in its core unlike the other lands of runeterra.

to say the least,  having never been in contact with other people like herself,  she knew little of their cultures,  or of her own tribe’s vastayan culture.  despite being alone,  surrounded only by the foxes who had taken her in as one of her own,  raised her,  fed her,  taught her to hunt and helped hone her own powers in the hunts,  she never felt as if she belonged.  she possessed other instincts,  among the innate powers that she wielded,  the wild magic that runs through her blood.  while no one could teach her to use her magic,  other than for her to figure it out on her own terms,  she at least learned to hunt,  and there eventually and finally came a time for ahri to part ways with her pack.

there were the rare moments in time where,  during their hunts or travels,  that ahri had come close enough to human camps or civilizations and was overcome and overwhelmed with a flood of insatiable curiosity to draw closer,  to mingle amongst them and their kind.  it was a strange compulsion,  one she knew at her core that she should fight.  for all of her life with the ice foxes,  she had learned to avoid their kind,  that they were dangerous,  that they would have easily and so willingly taken her life without a second thought,  along with the lives of the foxes.  even knowing that she was not truly one of them,  that she often took the appearance of a being who looked so similar to that of a human,  albeit still otherworldly and that of a beast with the ears atop her head and the magnificent and elegant nine tails that she so proudly possessed,  they still protected her as if she was one of their own.

so when the band of huntsmen camped nearby her home with the foxes,  she watched them curiously,  and from this fateful night,  her life and her perspective upon her own life changed.  she felt the dying spirit drawing out from a hunter’s body,  and out of instinct,  she consumed his essence.  he was the first human she had ever feasted upon,  and the power that that began to run through her veins and coil between her bones was unlike anything she had ever felt before.  every previous hunt was for survival alone and nothing more,  and it had been just enough to fuel her powers in her core,  but it became evident that her powers had been dampened,  not intentionally however,  and that she had not yet fully blossomed into fruition.  the essence of a human life,  some of whom who possessed wonderful magics of their own to fuel her,  were so much more fulfilling to consume.  a being without much of a moral compass and acted solely on the instincts of a hunter,  a beast who sought only her own survival and the survival of her pack.

she drank his essence,  feasting upon the story of his life as his memories flooded into her mind.  she lived his life as he died in her arms,  and she willed his pain to dissipate,  for the agony to be no more,  for him to feel a blanket of peace covering him as he passed,  for him to no longer feel the sorrow or the worry that plagued him in those final moments.  in this moment,  she felt closer to humans than ever before.  drinking the hunter’s life essence awakened a part of her that was buried deep within her,  left forgotten and unknown to the tides of time.  his essence,  his human essence,  awakened the human part within her,  and human words she had never known the meanings to before,  she could now understand with ease.  she felt emotions she had never felt before,  and she didn’t quite understand them,  not fully and not intimately,  but she equated them to similar feelings based on survival whenever she acted in ways that were meant to protect the members of her pack.  now,  she could put words to the emotions,  but she didn’t feel them quite so deeply,  not quite on a human scale.  she never knew what it was that occurred in their minds,  but the hunter offered her an introspective lesson in his final moments,  a valuable one that she would never forget.

it was in this that she decided it was time to leave the foxes behind,  to travel the world,  to learn more of humans,  because for the first time in a long time,  ahri felt something.  she felt excited,  exhilarated  !  it was a rush unlike any other and she wanted to feel it again.  now that she knew the worth of human lives and what they gave to her,  what they had in store to offer her,  simply feeding on animals alone was not enough for her.  the more and more she drank and ate,  the more she learned.  ahri learned quite a bit just traveling as she took in the sights and spoke to the people in the world and observed their lives first hand,  but she learned even more as she killed them and devoured their memories and emotions.  still,  there were some that she did not kill  —  she chanced upon the weak and the sickly in villages and offered them a final outing,  a more peaceful death than the one they were fated to endure.  she soothed them as she drank their essence,  instilling them with a sense of calm and a life without pain that they hadn’t experienced in so long.  ahri found that she preferred the battle  -  worn humans,  the mages,  the ones powerfully skilled with axes and blades.  their power and strength bled into her the most and was greater than any ordinary or frail person was.  she ate and she ate,  and as her emotions grew,  as did her empathy and a battle with her own morality.

with all of the memories that ahri consumes,  she remains lucid throughout it all,  and thereafter.  she can draw the line between her own reality and someone else’s reality and know that it is not her own,  that they were not her experiences,  but the happiness or the anguish that she feels afterwards is still overwhelming.  she feels their joy,  and her own day brightens.  she feels their sorrow,  their pain,  and she weeps.  the pain lingers,  and she feels an anguish for lives she did not live,  memories she was not there to witness.  she learned of other vastaya,  that there were other tribes,  and she wondered if there were others like her,  other fox vastaya.  she had to have come from somewhere,  and she wondered,  how did she end up with the ice foxes  ?  she wondered if something happened to them,  if they were hunted down like animals,  if they were collected for their tails or their magic,  or if she was just simply . . . abandoned.  as powerful as ahri is,  it was hard for her to reconcile with the idea that other vastaya like herself would have been unable to fend for themselves.

ahri traveled endlessly and almost aimlessly,  but kept one goal in mind  —  she was going to find her tribe,  and if she couldn’t,  at least traces of her tribe so that she no longer dwelled in the darkness of the unknown.

she met a countless number of people.  some were kind to her and aided her,  but it helped that her natural charisma and charm made it easy to trust her,  to feel soothed and calm in her presence,  even without her going out of her way to utilize her magic to allow that aura to permeate into the atmosphere.  there were times where she did have to do so in order to get what information she wanted,  but most of the time,  it was a power used in self defense or in her hunts.

i will conclude this post here and continue a discussion of ahri’s weaponization of her charm and beauty,  as well as her concept of beauty,  in a follow up post.  this already got too long.  oops.