Travesty, black & white

Okay. Prepare for a long one. *grins ruefully* Almost as long as it took me to draw this effin' picture. Now I know why I don't do backgrounds! Grraaaah! It takes too damn long and is a hellacious amount of work. To those who regularly put backgrounds much more complex than this in their pics, I bow down and worship. Anyhow. This picture was an experiment again in terms of angle and pose, the fact that the character is nekkid, and for once, *gasp* does have breasts outside of pregnancy and weaning. The reason there being that the shapeshifting is a learned skill, and the ones that teach have a human form, so females are taught to skift into a shape with breasts. This is a character in a plot of my own devising, one of the few I've ever tried. She is a battle-bred unicorn - a sub-species whose job it is to protect the whitelings (or the classical small, white unicorns of European myth - think The Last Unicorn) from predation by man, beast, and other races who might wish to kill them for the prize of their horn or otherwise. The battle-bred are not a creation of Gaia, as the other unicorns and species of them (Karkadann, kirin, etc) are, (keep in mind, this is my own storyline for a roleplay, and not the actual histories of those creatures) but were created by the whitelings themselves with Her permission. They are huge, built along draft horse lines, and standing between 17-20 hands high. They always have feathering on their lower legs, and come in a range of colors and combinations, but never totally white. As a result, they are weaker magically, and unlike those other unicorns, need a purpose to live, otherwise they fade away, quite literally, ceasing to exist. Battle-bred and whitelings cannot crossbreed, and though whitelings have enough shapeshifting ability to take on humanlike forms, the battle-bred can only go halfway, into a sort of anthro form, and that only with much practice, it taking skill to form clothing or weaponry. Their horns are also different, scimitar-curved, instead of straight, with a tighter spiral, and a more earthy beige tint to the horn, which nevertheless still holds impressive magical energies. They also possess fangs, and are omnivorious. They must hunt like any predator, but when they've caught their prey, they must ask it for permission to kill and eat it. As guardians, most of the time, the animal in question, grants it. If not, though, there is always grass to eat. Travesty, the battle-bred in this picture, is a rogue, rebelling against the duty of her kind, and indeed, the reason for their existance. The partnership between battle-bred and whiteling has instead become a tyranny, with the battle-bred having slipped into a slave class to the whitelings, much mistreated despite their physical strength. Travesty, who shed her name and took the present one, has turned her heart and soul into one purpose, freeing her kind, no matter the consequences which would mean her entire race fading, by killing every single whiteling there is. Young, old, foal and ancient as well as the strong and prime, all are her targets. She knows she will likely be killed, and by a battle-bred sent to do the job no less, but she is determined. Decried by both her kind and the whitelings, she will do what she sees she must, taking whiteling horns from the corpses. Sometimes though... she has to grieve at the fate of her kind, and occasionally, someone says something to her to make her, for a few moments, doubt...