Tania

Laugh | Fight | Love

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Hatched to Ridgeback parents near the Pillar of the World, Tania's youth was spent in Dragonhome. Despite her species-typical aversion to water, both her water-born mother and Snowstripe - the patriarch of her clan - instilled in her an appreciation for the Tidelord from an early age. As a curious and adventuresome adolescent, she left her birth clan and joined up with the dragons of clan BOULDERSMASHER. It was there that Tania honed her battle skills and became known as the Drill sergeant extraordinaire.


As the seasons passed, curious things began to happen within the underground warrens of her adoptive clan. Perhaps it was inevitable that one day Tania would end up traveling to the Sea of Thousand Currents. It was there her clan fled, and on the waters found a new life that made great use of Tania's natural… borrowing tendencies.


Despite a Ridgeback's natural inclination to self-sufficiency, particularly in battle, Tania found herself making allies with members of her Sea-searching clan. She found she enjoyed the company of the odd couple HellaYella and Auxentios. What was more - she began to value the help of a healer in battle thanks to her sometime-companion Blackwood of the Windswept Plateau.


Still, Tania found that living ever on the open water of the Tidelord's domain grew wearing. She began to dream of a new life, somewhere on on solid land where she could hunt and battle away from the threat of drowning. It was this restlessness that must have been detected by one of the seers of the clan at the Crossroads. She was approached by the messenger Iansa with an invitation from de facto leader Trivia to join the Shadowland clan, as they were looking for a warrior brave enough to venture on raids to the Golem Workshop.


Tania agreed and made her way to the clan which, at that time, was nested thick within the Tangled Wood's brambles. Self-sufficient as always, it took her some time to begin to learn of her new clan-mates. Really, her alliance with Yumni of the Zephyr Steppes began early on during early hunts joined to find food and materials for the clan. Perhaps that was part of it - a desire to be something other than a spikey, hard-to-know Ridgeback. Mostly, it was the offer to address the Gembond affliction which she'd been saddled with all her life.


She was warned by the scholars that there was no guarantee that the magics to change her would act as expected. She accepted that risk, and submitted herself to the influence of the mad sorceress Rillduen. When the strange little fae was done, Tania was a very different creature indeed. Her hide was spotted instead of striped, her wings grown even more delicately beautiful, and the gembond curse was gone - the accreted mass seemingly transformed to a smaller ridge of spines along her body. For that was the greatest change of all - Tania was no longer a Ridgeback, but had taken the form of a Wild Claw.


It was an easier adjustment than she could have imagined, in those first days. It helped to talk to Zoeya, the well-respected Earth elder who had also undergone intentional transformation upon joining the Shadowland clan. Soon Tania grew not only comfortable, but exultant in her new skin. She liked the agile competence of her new claws in battle, and she enjoyed how it brought her a little closer to those that she came to know as friends.


Tania is still prone to those traits that have always been with her. Despite her fascination with much that comes from the Tidelord's domain, she still has an aversion to submersion. She still has a tendency to "borrow", and she enjoys rooting in the dark soils of the Tangled Woods though her burrowing isn't so very loud as to disturb her clanmates. And she still has a strong streak of self-sufficiency, enjoying her own company and opportunities to put her physical skills to the test.


Perhaps her new form has allowed her the freedom to explore some of the more neglected sides of her personality, however. Slowly, her eye for fine things is shaping into a desire to keep a more aesthetic lair for herself - an impulse made possible as the clan has recently moved to reclaim a found ruin that seems to be a waypoint between the Forum of the Obscured Crescent and The Hewn City of Light's domain.

And perhaps, now more than ever, she is less alone - though she remains very selective in her company. There is Zoeya, child of the Earthshaker, whom she looks up to. There is Yumni, the often-ridiculous and yet always-loyal spiral whom she has come to rely on in the seriousness of battle and who makes her laugh in those freer moments of friendship. And while she seems unlikely to ever develop a Wild Claw's urges for a large family tree, she perhaps has found her soulmate - the Imperial --- who is her counterpoint in so many ways and has become the quiet joy of her heart.

Of the other Imperials, perhaps it is unsurprising that it's the late-arrived Rowan who most holds her interest - though she also finds things in common with both scrappy Ydrasil and peaceful Selva. However, it is Tania who has claimed the greatest part of her affection.