kienan
left: with scars hidden, center: feral form, right: fully exposed
left: mature kirin form, right: neotenous kirin form
overview
kienan is a young kirin, which in his universe can shapeshift into a small dragon, a deer, a unicorn, or a human, and any form in between. his body is a natural wellspring of healing magic, amplified when he experiences intense emotion. when he is happy and content his magic overflows into the world around him, growing plants in his wake, healing injuries, increasing stamina and strength. in a fully realized adult form he would be able to heal and purify whole lakes and forests and be naturally driven to settle himself as a guardian spirit of a chosen region, but prolonged trauma and repeated deaths have stunted his growth, keeping him in what seems to be a permanent neotenous state, unable to access his most advanced forms and limited in the scope of his powers.
personality
kienan is severely traumatized, the result of over a dozen lifetimes of prolonged torture, experimentation, and exploitation. its sense of self is severely underdeveloped, fragmented, and malleable, easily manipulated. kindness and gentleness alarm and frighten it, attempts to teach it how to be a person and allow it a normal childhood have backfired into panic attacks and even what mild aggression it is capable of exhibiting. it is so broken it wants to be used, exploited, and hurt, told what to do, how to act, what to be. it doesn't know how to exist any other way.
over time in their alpha's care, however, they have begun to develop and exhibit fragments of personality. they've discovered their natural connection to flora and fawna, something they were actively isolated from in their long, tortured past. they have begun to construct their own grove, a nesting instinct of their species, carefully tending and curating the plants there, feeding them with their magic and finding calm and security in their space.
they have discovered an insatiable love for sweets, a distaste for meat, a constant desire for physical contact, little preferences, hints of desire. perhaps, with time, they might develop into something resembling a person.
backstory
kienan is one of a pair of twin kirin fawns, born in the early 1930s. their mother, yeong-mi, was the guardian spirit worshiped by a small village in the mountains of south korea, a benevolent creature of good fortune. during the japanese occupation she was captured, one of many magical creatures who were trafficked out of korea and into captivity. she was used as a comfort woman for the upper eschelons of the japanese military for months until she became pregnant and was discovered by a western collector of magical entities, liam white, who purchased her and took her back to america, later cutting her offspring out of her womb when she perished in childbirth, passing her life force onto the twins.
the twins were separated at birth, placed into separate divisions of liam's cult and unaware of each other's existence. kienan, considered the "spare," was subjected to a litany of torturous experiments to test the limits of his magic, eventually culminating in his apparent death--except instead of dying, he regressed to the form of a seed that grew into a flower that produced a fruit from which he was reborn, a tiny infant with no memory of its past life.
liam was delighted; here was a creature that could never die, whose very existence overflowed with magic. kienan was branded with liam's personal magical seal, a mark that would absorb and store his magic in each incarnation, allowing liam to set him up as a sort of eternal sacrificial child for his cult. as his magic was found to surge in times of extreme emotion, he would be repeatedly subjected to various experiments to produce more magic, most often more torture, until he was "ripe" for harvesting and would be ritually sacrificed, regrown, rinse and repeat.
though his memory was lost with every reincarnation, over time it became apparent that a sort of shadow imprint of trauma was gradually built up into the very fabric of kienan's soul, such that the usual methods for eliciting strong emotion began to wane in their effectiveness. even incarnations where he was allowed peace and happiness were tainted by the soul memory of trauma.
liam grew bored with his toy, and curious what might happen if he were to make it dependent and then abandon it entirely, leaving only the connection of his brand on its forehead to keep track of it. to this end, he spent one last incarnation with the child, grooming and brainwashing it to love him exclusively, then drove it out into the woods far away from the cult and abandoned it in the woods.
kienan did not handle this well. all his many lives, he'd had no personhood, no agency, living only to serve and experience great pain. he had no idea how to fend for himself, scarcely even any survival instinct. he spent about two months wandering and starved, sustained only by his innate magic, until he stumbled into the territory of a local animal shifter pack and was attacked by the alpha, ailios.
ailios nearly killed the poor fawn, beginning to devour it alive before he realized that it was rapidly regenerating, a potential for an infinite source of particularly sweet, succulent meat, not to mention clearly some unusual fellow magical creature. he took kienan back to his pack, more or less adopting him and eventually bonding the child as his permanent mate.
ailios is not a kind man, but he has developed a sort of twisted love for the fawn, a dependent, fawning creature, utterly moldable, the only entity in the world he trusts to witness his few moments of weakness when he wakes from nightmares in the middle of the night. kienan, for his own part, does not desire kindness, wouldnt know how to deal with it anyways. ailios does not torture him needlessly, spoils him even at times, uses him for his own pleasure and feeds on him frequently, a painful existence, surely, but the only kind of existence he has ever known, and for the first time in his many lives, he's discovered a twisted sort of peace, content to be needed, allowed to be broken, very nearly secure in his place under his beloved alpha.
art
our work
for important days and rituals his handlers would sometimes braid his hair back from his face, looking clean and presentable to perform his role or to cater to the specific tastes of the faithful~
kienan's countless hours spent kneeling in devout, desperate prayer were often made more uncomfortable by a thin layer of dry rice scattered over the hard ground, tiny grains digging into his flesh and leaving painful impressions that lasted for hours afterwards...~
upon joining ailios' pack, tiarnane quickly becomes something of an older brother figure to kienan. they share a special bond, two traumatized boys abandoned by the abusers they still love despite everything...~
doodle~
when you've lived your whole life with nothing, you're grateful for everything~
adjusting to life outside liam's cult has been difficult and frightening, but discovering his connection to the nature has brought some small comfort...~
dozens of lifetimes of torture and gaslighting have left kienan a shadow of a person, crushed under the emotional trauma of experiences he can't even consciously remember...~
ailios gave him an old sweater practically as an afterthought, unaware of the full context and significance of this small act. the soft garment is kienan's very first and most precious possession, symbolic of the protection and comfort he finds in ailios' dubious care...~
if someone tells me that it is wrong to hope, i will tell them they are wrong, every time~
a fantasy idea, really, of a self that is good and strong and kind enough to help others. the outfit is certainly something ailios might commission for him; he loves spoiling his little pet with cute things~
ailios and kienan have a strange relationship, violence and tenderness intermingled until they are one and the same...~
an earlier version of ailios in werewolf form, and with a much less dramatic size difference~
kienan's usual shifted form~ with liam's seal on his forehead constantly draining magic from his body and his mental and emotional state frozen in childhood, his animal form defaults to a tiny, frail fawn, unable to access his more magical forms without significant strain~
a small sketch from a scrapped project of the main cast taking kienan to pride - unlikely but a fun idea~
almost every aspect of kienan's religious upbringing doubled as both a part of the relentless manipulation and gaslighting meant to break him down, as well as, well, an opportunity to take advantage of him~
some of kienan's lives under liam's rule allowed him a little softness in his earlier years, raised by acolytes of the cult in isolated but peaceful quiet, until it was time to be presented to his true master, innocent of the horrors to come... the different approaches allowed the capricious priest to break him down in a variety of ways, just to keep things interesting~
this design was especially important to me as a korean person. lolita fashion has established variants inspired by traditional japanese kimono (wa lolita) and chinese qipao (qi lolita), but lacks a similar concept for korean hanbok. imagining a korean variant for kienan was a comfort project i'd like to keep exploring; i call it han lolita~
kienan and his twin, dana, were cut from their dying mother's womb in their delicate fawn form, so tiny they likely would not have survived without the wild magic of their species sustaining them~
the twins could not be more different in personality. though they were both raised in liam's cult, kienan and dana were designated for wildly different upbringings. kienan was broken down into a timid, fragile creature, while dana was pampered and adored, her deaths clean and quick. despite their drastic differences and the distance maintained between them, they retain an instinctive closeness and trust in one another that becomes apparent whenever they are together~
the beginning: kienan has been a dear and central character in our headspace for as long as any of us can remember, through various redesigns, names, and incarnations. this most recent design represents my decision to stop being scared of other peoples' opinions and to share my truest self.
others' art
created with ai
created with ai
created with ai
created with ai
