incensed application

[eaglebow]

IC
Name: "The Hunter".
Canon: The Pathless
Canon Point: Endgame
Age: Unknown. Guesstimating somewhere in her twenties.

History/Personality: This is a bit difficult since the wiki is awfully bare bones, but there's a lore video that explains the general world building prior to the Hunter's introduction. (It's kinda long tho so fair warning)
Otherwise the TVTropes entry's great to skim through I guess???? man the pain of apping from a smol canon is eternal pls save me

Alrighty. LETS GET STARTED.

So. The Hunter herself is an enigma as far as what her life was like prior to the events of the game. What we do know is that she's the last of her kind after all other Hunters were killed trying to lift the Godslayer's curse upon all the world, presumably since coming in contact with the virulent miasma would wither crops, poison water, and turn people against each other in a blind, animalistic rage. The Hunter's attempt to cleanse the corruption would be the last gasp of a world on the brink of extinction.

Her arrival to the island occurs long after the native people there had been slaughtered by the Godslayer cult or the fiery monstrosities that once protected the land. Worse, the wise and gentle Eagle Mother has likewise been cursed by the Godslayer and forced to reincarnate into a smaller, mortal shape to survive. Thus diminished, the Eagle accompanies the Hunter on her quest as her only companion.
The trek up the various plateaus to the floating island is a long and dangerous journey, each step fraught with wild weather from torrential rain to soul-killing cold and constant dogged pursuit by curse-twisted nature gods; the landscape itself peppered with crumbling ruins of a long dead age and the skeletal remains of monks, farmers, merchants, etc... as well as the fallen warriors that fought for and against the Godslayer's bloody rise to power. It's a lonely, exhausting journey, and only gets harder with each success - the complete destruction of the island's inhabitants and the eerie solitude a constant reminder of what will happen to the lands beyond if the curse is not swiftly addressed.

Along the way, the Hunter encounters great swathes of ancient battlefields - the skeletons of defenders so thoroughly entangled with the bones of cultists such that only the colour and style of their armour tells them apart. With the last thoughts of the dead acting as clues, the story of what tragedy befell the First Island slowly comes together as the Hunter ascends each plateau.

It all started with a prison, and the one man that started it all.

This prisoner, called "the Pathfinder" for his charisma and magnetism, preached the way of the One True Path: a philosophy of finding a single answer to the meaning of life, to give everyone a smooth road to the ultimate truth and enlightenment. Unfortunately establishing this One True Path came with a terrible price - bloody civil wars with a horrific death toll, the perversion of the natural cycle of life, and the destruction of what had been a peaceful and harmonious culture built on the wisdom of celestial entities as old as the land itself, called the "Tall Ones". It's implied that at one point the Pathfinder had been driven mad by using the frightfully powerful Mask of Ancients to see reality as the Tall Ones did... only to be confronted with a bleak truth that ultimately broke his sanity under the weight of despair.

There was no such thing as a "One True Path".

To see reality as the gods did would be to accept life as nothing more than lackadaisical wandering in a sea of chaos and uncertainty, where every question spiralled into a hundred more questions, over and over without beginning or end. To try to plot a course through the tangled threads of fate and causality would be doomed to failure.
The deaths of his acolytes, the murder of so many innocents, the razing of the plateaus... all for nothing.
And yet.
The only option to fulfill his promises to his followers would be to destroy the gods and everything they created to make room for a new world where The One True Path could become reality. Unmake it all, in the name of the Path.
Thus the Pathfinder took on a new moniker: The Godslayer.

The Hunter understands the lack of purpose that so terrifies the Godslayer as simply another facet of the natural order. The final exchange between the Godslayer and the Hunter goes:

"With no clear path to follow, [the people] will never find salvation."
"To follow another's path to salvation is to never truly know it. Each person must find their own way... the truth is a pathless land."

The final scene strikes stark contrast between the Hunter and the Godslayer; whereas the Godslayer used the bodies of his followers to brute force his way through traps (causing the needless deaths of many of his disciples, as acknowledged in the lore) and the spilling of their blood to fuel his ascension to a quasi-godlike form, the Hunter's choice to sacrifice herself to lift the curse from the Eagle is giving up the only thing that's truly hers to bargain - a single life in exchange for the rebirth of the Eagle Mother would ensure a future for the few survivors left, even if she would never see tomorrow with her own eyes.

TL;DR A violent criminal's existential crisis leads to global disaster, fed up lady with bow and birb has to fix it.

Would you consider your character to be heroic? Why or why not?: Yes, in her own practical way. It's less conscious choice so much as being realistic, and she certainly wouldn't presume to call herself a hero for clout. At her point in canon, there's not much point trying to posture oneself as a heroic figure since, y'know, everyone's kind of busy being dead and all. Ain't gonna have no spooky skelly fanclub any time soon.

Powers/Abilities:

• Archery - The Hunter is a master marksman with her bow, able to fire pinpoint shots mid-leap or while sprinting just as easily as she can from a standstill. This includes ricochet shots through multiple points to solve puzzles or light torches from a distance. For some mysterious reason the Hunter seemingly never runs out of arrows despite not wearing a quiver. Magic? Who knows.

• Agile - With the island's many sprawling plateaus, being able to cross large distances quickly is essential. The Hunter's bounding gazelle stride allows her to get from point to point without needing to pause for long, though eventually she'll need to stop and catch her breath after flat out sprints. Landing shots while moving allows the Hunter to maintain travelling at top speed (extending her leaps to impressive distances) as long as she has targets to shoot at, both regenerating stamina and giving her a small speed boost.

• The Eagle - The Hunter's trusty feathered pal. A Golden Eagle that was once a creation goddess before being cursed by the Godslayer. The Eagle is exceptionally strong for her size, able to catch the Hunter's arm mid-jump in her talons to act like a living glider or to temporarily lift them both higher by flapping her wings.

• The Spirit Mask - A sister relic to the one the Godslayer wears that allows her to "see the cracks in the world, to find paths where there would be none", or otherwise highlights objects of interest/hidden secrets. It also permits her to hear the last thoughts of the dead should she stumble across a corpse in her travels. Wearing the mask prevents the Hunter from sprinting or using her bow.

Inventory: Bow, clothing, the Spirit Mask, and the Eagle.

Coterie: Eagle (of course)

Samples:
ONE
TWO