Embertail – The Trickster Poet

In the skeletal ruins of cities where gods once broadcast their gospel in fluorescent lies, something moves—not quite silent, but smoother than suspicion, cleverer than hope. A flicker of color against soot-blacked walls, a flash of red fur like a wound that never heals. He moves like a rhyme born between breaths, wrapped in scraps of a thousand forgotten banners, and always just beyond the reach of consequence.

They call him Embertail, though that name is stitched together from rumors, graffiti, and the bitten-off curses of those he’s outwitted. Some say he was born beneath a collapsed amphitheater, where the bones of actors fed the roots of broken columns. Others say he was woven out of smoke and story by Birchwhisper, a roaming vixen with eyes like dusk and a laugh like snapping wires. Wherever truth ends and myth begins, he doesn't care. He likes the blur.

I like things better when they blur—lines, labels, faces in the smoke. Certainty’s just a prettier name for a cage, and I was never built to sit still.

— Embertail

He was a scavenger first, a mimic second, and only later—a poet. Words came to him not as art, but as survival: the way a shadow bends to avoid detection, the way a whisper navigates through walls. Words were weapons and smoke screens. They could jam a turret as surely as a wrench, topple a regime with rhythm. He learned this truth from empty bellies and full bellies alike—from rebels who sang beneath collapsed arches, from former engineers who soldered verse into circuitry.

Embertail is lean from running, crooked from an old wound that bites when it rains. His hearing fails him on the left side, a fact he hides with angled poses and constant motion. His scar on the right thigh itches before danger comes. There’s a notch in his ear and a blood-red paw print tattooed on his palm like a curse or a promise. When he thinks too long, his claws tap cadences against stone. When he’s nervous, he scratches behind his ear and hums in iambs, a broken lullaby.

Cities know him by aftermath. By the verse left scorched on walls. The ink that vanishes before the drones arrive. A coded couplet slipped into a propaganda script. A governor’s speech that crumbles under metaphors mid-delivery. Always gone before the alarm completes its first breath. Always the grin of an idea too late to stop.

To tyrants in towers of glass and shame—Each truth you bury will claw through your name.

— Embertail

He leaves scrolls, pawprints, and smoke. Sometimes all three in elegant choreography, the way a magician exits: not vanished, just remembered wrong.

The disillusioned call him hero. The hunted call him hope. Among the Animyst youth, he is revolution with rhythm. Among the Solstice Syndicate, he is an unclaimed miracle. His words pass between hands in back alleys, etched into teeth, burned into the underside of boots. They say reading his verse aloud can make cameras blink. They say he once recited a sonnet so pointed that a security drone apologized before shutting down.

We are the ink-stained ghosts of your control. We rhyme where orders rot, we sing your toll.

— Embertail

But Embertail is no saint. He showboats. He taunts. He’s been reckless with timing, once complimenting a tyrant by accident when his verse deployed three seconds early. For weeks, rival poets called him The Governor’s Pet. He answered with silence, followed by a coordinated "Scrawlstorm" in Port Rhessus—three hundred verses appearing overnight, each more damning than the last, each bearing his blood-red mark.

He treats gender like theater, a mask for moods and messages. He flirts like a fuse, kisses like a threat, loves in the shape of laughter and lingering questions. He is drawn to passion, intelligence, and danger—the three-headed hydra of any good disaster. Those who get too close often leave with a poem, a limp, or both.

His voice is velvety, almost rehearsed. The Driftland accent dulled by years of mimicry and stage performance. He can sound like a grieving widow, a bored bureaucrat, or a child in tears. He weaponizes tone as much as metaphor. When he speaks plainly—rarely—it’s like hearing thunder forget how to echo.

He carries a cane with a hollow haft, filled with scrolls and smoke pellets. A scarf woven with coded language that flutters like a flag. A compact writing kit with disappearing ink. A collar that loops audio samples of other voices: a soldier’s bark, a mother’s sigh. He calls these his “tools of distortion,” and they are dearer to him than weapons.

Once, they say, he freed an entire Animyst caravan from a privateer ambush using nothing but smokescreens, improvised rhyme, and a collapsing balcony. No bullets, no blood. Just breath and bravado. This, to Embertail, is true rebellion: when creativity rewrites inevitability.

His morality is a wildfire. He believes in dignity over obedience, in the holy theater of resistance. To him, rebellion is sacred, but not solemn. He doesn’t whisper his discontent—he rhymes it into song, paints it onto ceilings, hurls it through speakers. He believes that a well-timed pun can topple a law.

He does not write on commission. He does not plagiarize. He hates unjust silence more than screaming. He will never swim. He will always whistle.

He still dreams of being caught. Not by enemies, but by silence. By forgetting how to rhyme. By waking up one day and finding no rhythm left in the rubble. That’s the nightmare: not the jail, but the stillness.

People debate whether he exists at all. Some say he’s a collective—a dozen poets sharing one fox-shaped myth. Others say he’s long dead, and his verses are just ghosts in the machines. But then a new couplet appears—written in ash, humming with electricity—and they hush. Because if you say his name with the wrong inflection, the wind might rhyme back.

He raised a raven once, named Scrap. It repeated his worst lines just to mock him. He loved that bird.

Sometimes, in moments between missions, he collects failed propaganda posters. He folds them into origami nightmares, scrawls satire into their margins, leaves them tucked in military boots and executive pockets.

Because in a world ruled by walls and watchmen, laughter is resistance. And Embertail—scarred, soot-kissed, cane-clad—is the echo of every wall that thought itself eternal.

And so he walks: never resting, always writing. The ash may settle. The machines may hum. But somewhere, between pulse and punctuation, the Trickster Poet rhymes again.