Editing Blake Thorburn (section)

==Appearance==

Blake has wavy dark blonde hair, and watercolor tattoos of birds sitting in branches on his arms.<ref>Small birds perched on tree branches, in pale grays, whites and yellows, against a backdrop of reds, in watercolor hues.  - [[Bonds 1.4]]</ref> It is mentioned that he has sustained some scars, but with the application of glamour ink has erased some of the most obvious ones.

The first time Blake was overusing his personal power/blood, his hair and skin would become paler, with the tattoos brighter.<ref>It took me a second to realize what she was talking about.  I was so used to them, my attention didn’t tend to linger on them.  The tattoos.

The birds and the background colors were more vivid and distinct than they’d been the day they’d been finished.  Which was worse?  Rose being right when she had said I was fading in color, with the tattoos being that much more colorful by contrast?  Or the tattoos being infused with color by some outside means? - [https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/category/story/arc-3-breach/3-01/ excerpt] from Breach 3.1
</ref> Another occasion he expended a lot of power, he became paler but the tattoos weren't any more vivid.<ref>I’d tended to my wounds, and I’d seen the tattoos.  I’d given a lot of blood, and I’d suffered for it.  I was paler.  but the tattoos <em>weren’t</em> more vivid. - [https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/collateral-4-12/ excerpt] from [[Collateral 4.12]]</ref> When he drained himself almost completely, the birds in the tattoos first became pale,<ref>I pushed up my sleeves and looked at my tattoos, instead.

Still pale, with a vivid background.  No sign of anything suspicious affecting me or the tattoos. - [https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/category/story/arc-5-conviction/5-02/ excerpt] from [[Conviction 5.2]]
</ref> then maimed and beheaded, with real feathers occasionally falling off them.<ref>Feathers rose into the air, touched with blood.

I looked down for the source of the feathers, and I saw my tattoos.  Three of the birds were beheaded or partially beheaded, the cuts intersecting their faces and necks, the other parts of their bodies already gone.  The blood that still bled out from the wound was thicker around the stumps, and the matted blood where I’d pressed my arms against the mattress to staunch the flow was caked around their bodies more than anywhere else. - [https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/category/story/arc-5-conviction/5-03/ excerpt] from [[Conviction 5.3]] 
</ref> When he was affected by [[Pauz]]' "radiation", the birds became more feral and unkempt-looking.<ref>The birds that were perched on the branches on my forearm were… a little worse for wear.  Feathers sticking up, dirtier, the glint in their eyes was <em>glintier</em>.  The background had more red to it than it should have.

[...] I was getting more of a sense of what was going on with my tattoos, though.  They were a barometer of sorts, a kind of representation of what was affecting me on a mystical level.

I wasn’t sure if that <em>went</em> anywhere, if they could keep going down that road, or if there was more to it, but there was no way that the tattoos and Pauz’s effect weren’t related on some level.

Rose had told me that I was pale, before, that I’d been <em>diminished</em>, when my personal power was drained, my defenses low, at the same time my tattoos were brighter and more intense.  My defenses hadn’t yet recovered, so Pauz had been able to affect me all the more.  Had I changed here as well?  How would I change, under a demon’s influence? - [https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/category/story/arc-4-collateral/4-06/ excerpt] from [[Collateral 4.6]]
</ref>

Once he fell into Limbo the wounds returned and his tattoos changed to great thorny branches, grown mature with no birds, but innumerable feathers, and one bird’s skull with a branch growing through the eyehole. He became blind in one eye and one of his hands is almost split into two.

After completing the trial of the past the branches spread further along his body, creaking as he moved, and the birds lost most of their colors and changed position, revealing that they were the spirits and ghosts that filled into the cracks made when he bled himself dry, giving him aspects of a [[Wraith]]. His scent reeks of rotted branches and birds, and the ''[[Limbo|abyss]]'' according to a [[satyr]].

Except for some markings around his blind eye where Ur had torn the eyelid, his face is pale, with a dark circle under one eye, and some branches and darkness around the blind one. Amid those branches, three birds are clustered together in the corner where the tear happened, beady black eyes standing out from his flesh in three dimensions – one bird in profile, the others looking out straight on. Three eyes visible in total, matching the general curvature of his eye socket.

He the places himself in a wooden body that matched his appearance but over the course of the story he gets further damaged, later adding wings and a replacement leg. Once he becomes rooted and damaged to far to leave Limbo, Rose carves out his heart, spirit-stuff, and allows him to possess her in order to escape, leaving him as a fragment of a [[spirit]]. By the end of the Judgement Arc, Blake gives up the remainder of his humanity to Rose and became a shape-shifting mass of wood that could act as wings or a gauntlet for her.

In the epilogue, Blake has turned into a sparrow that had feathers sticking up here and there, and it was a little <em>dirtier</em>. A small bit of branch was stuck in the plumage at his front, making him look like a sparrow that a cat had hacked up and left on the forest floor.